unmediated

Digium - The Asterisk Telephony Company

Ok, this is a big deal. The next version of Asterisk supports GoogleTalk!

From the Press Release:
Asterisk 1.4 is the first major release of Asterisk since the release of Asterisk 1.2 in November 2005. With over 20 new functionality additions including IPFAX compatibility, unified messaging capabilities and Jabber/Jingle/GoogleTalk protocol compatibilities, Asterisk 1.4 features overall quality and performance improvements, as well as increased scalability and interoperability.

Sony has announced at IBC the new HVR-V1E camcorder. The V1E utilizes three true progressive scan CMOS chips to deliver either 1080/50i or 1080/25p HDV video onto MiniDV tape. Let me say that again...that's 25p at the full 1920x1080 resolution. This is a very interesting development, I don't think anyone saw this one coming.

"The HVR-V1E has newly incorporated the "3 (three) ClearVid CMOS Sensor" imaging technology. Coupled with Sony's Enhanced Imaging Processor™ (EIP), these sensors provide high sensitivity, low noise and a wide dynamic range to achieve high-quality images. The ClearVid CMOS Sensor also eradicates picture smear and has 4 times high speed scanning capability enabling "Smooth Slow Rec" function.

The Carl Zeiss Vario-Sonnar T* Lens features Extra-low Dispersion (ED) Glass and a 20x optical zoom lens with F2.8 at the tele-photo end for greater light sensitivity and long-range image acquisition for maximum shooting flexibility. A Digital Extender feature also enables the tele-photo focal length to be extended by around 1.5 times to a maximum of 1100mm at 35mm conversion.

The HVR-V1E has a range of advanced professional features, including:
*A timecode preset function
*A TC Link to synchronize time codes between multiple cameras
*Two XLR microphone inputs for independent sound recording
*A Camera Profile feature to adjust the camera settings of multiple cameras for multi-camera operations."

(Via DVXuser)

Open source (BSD licensed) Mac OS X administration app and web service inspector for Amazon's S3 remote storage service, by Olivier Gutknecht.

Open Source Flash Server:
" Red5 is a server that not only streams content to the Flash plugin, but it can push calls and information to the Flash client! It can also receive video/audio/data from a flash client and either save or rebroadcast that content."

Christian Westbrook of the Electric Sheep Company (sponsors of this blog) has made what sounds like a cool text-to-speech translator that works within the virtual world of Second Life. Each participant in a converation chooses a voice and a language that they’d like their chat translated into, and the device speaks the translation in real time. Listen to a sample on Christian’s blog, linked above. I haven’t been able to rendezvous with Christian to check this out, so I’m not sure whether the voice component works behind SL or streams in-world, but it’s a nice idea. Who knows, perhaps soon you’ll be able to listen to 3pointD while you go about your virtual business.

Second Life, Technology, voice

Open Source - QuickTime for Java software and more.

Combining the ease and fun of unix package management with the ubiquity of OS X!

The Elmo SUV-Cam Micro Video Camera System is a tiny camera that captures MPEG-4 at 704x480 resolution to a SD card and is water proof to around 12ft deep. Will set you back around $750 bones. Nifty. The extreme sports applications alone are virtually endless.

(Via DVGuru)

Motion DSP is creating a simple web based interface that will significantly enhance low resolution camera phone video into surprisingly high quality stuff. It started off in 1998 as a U.S. military funded project at UC Santa Cruz. In January 2005, Professor Peyman Milanfar, the primary researcher behind the technology, co-founded Motion DSP.

The company compares multiple frames in a video to find and replace lost pixels in a given frame, significantly enhancing the experience with little increase in overall file size after compression. The service works best when a video is not moving rapidly or in a jerking fashion, but tends to improve just about any low quality video. To see a demonstration, check out this page on the site that contains three different before and after video shots.

The service will go into consumer beta sometime this year, CEO and co-founder Sean Varah told us. The service will be free and will allow users to upload a video and download an enhanced version. But he also stressed that the focus will be on getting deals done with the large online video sites, such as YouTube, to enhance user-uploaded videos.

Motion DSP is headquartered in San Mateo, California and outsource large parts of software development to Serbia. They’ve raised a $500,000 angel round and are currently pitching a Series A round of financing.

Tags: military, video, youtube, techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0

ZDNet.com writes:

The service creates a dedicated retail environment that anyone can use to sell stuff in the Amazon catalog.
...
Everyone has something they want to recommend to others, and a lot of folks want to find ways to display their Amazon Wish List without looking too much like they are addicted to the idea of maintaining a permanent wedding registry—it's so unseemly to always be telling people what you want from them. The system was easy to understand and the product, a multi-page store with a front door consisting of feature products to which I was able to add my own descriptions, much more inviting than the typical list of Amazon links a blogger or Web site might display.

Using TubeSock you can now download Videos from YouTube, and save them directly into iTunes in a iPod video compatible format.

Originally from digg / Technology, ReBlogged by Paddy Johnson on Aug 30, 2006 at 06:29 PM

About as sexy as an eye exam, but damn, this technology is difficult to get right. So yesterday Google announced the open sourcing of Tesseract OCR, character/text-recognition software it developed back in the 80’s that it claims is better than most of the open source alternatives (I’d believe that) but not quite as good as some of the commercially available technologies (I’d buy that too).

But hmm, isn’t there a lot that could be done with this? Personally, can’t wait until we see this make it’s way into OpenOffice among other places.

Dave Winer has come up with a way to make mobile news feeds easy to access and read on portable media devices. He calls it "NewsRiver" and uses the device's browser instead of an RSS aggregator. He's using OPML technology to create a web page that's readable in his River of News style (scrolling through text instead of clicking on headlines).

While this has been available for several months, it has moved to the front burner with Dave, because he recently purchased a Blackberry and is discovering what he likes and doesn't like about the device.

A lot of people are going to say, "Big deal. We can already read news on a PDA." But let's all remember that this is Dave Winer, and when Dave gets excited about something, it's time to stop what you're doing and pay attention.

I wouldn't be blogging if it wasn't for Dave, and I think that's true for most. I wouldn't have an RSS feed if it wasn't for Dave. Podcasting wouldn't exist today if Dave hadn't given his mind to it.

He has a unique way of getting downstream, having an "a-ha" moment, and bringing it back to the rest of us. We look at it and think he's nuts, but that only lasts for a moment.

This discovery has pretty profound ramifications for local media companies, especially those who are currently paying outsider providers to do something similar for them. These companies will likely see their business model disrupted by this simple application.

I love Dave Winer.

We saw wireless MIDI and mouse control via the Sony PSP, the creation of media artist and hacker Rob King. Now Rob writes to say he’s finished the first release of his software for controlling Ableton Live directly from PSP, and it’s available as a free download.

PLAYLIVE IS HERE [Rob King’s E-mu.org]

The Ableton Live interface is neatly recreated in miniature right on the PSP screen. Features:

1. Wireless control — MIDI sans wires
2. 8 tracks
3. 12 clips per track for clip triggering
4. 4 X/Y pads for joystick-style control (though for touch-X/Y, it’s still all about the Nintendo DS)

ulation is under discussion, but then you wouldn’t be able to use the clip triggers to send MIDI notes. Currently available as a free Windows download, with a Mac version on the way. But even in its current form, this should demonstrate to the folks at Ableton the real breadth of possibilities for controlling their software. Sure, you could have another generic plastic controller and slap an Ableton logo on it, but — Live users can’t be underestimated in their devotion to unique and personal solutions.

Now, we just need wireless MIDI for Nintendo DS. That or else I should take this as a sign that I can justify buying a PSP. Thanks, Rob!

Anyone got a PSP who wants to write up a review of this, let me know!

Ableton Live, alternative controllers, free, gaming, homebrew, MIDI, mobile, PSP, software, Sony

p://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/createdigitalmusic?a=w4fTwf">

Use JavaScript to crawl the DOM looking for links with the :visited pseudo-element. It wouldn't be hard to add hidden links to the page to test whether your visitors have visited your competition's site.

Yaws is a HTTP high perfomance 1.1 webserver particularly well suited for dynamic-content webapplications.

Web service for creating and sharing screen scrapers. Now you can let someone else do the heavy lifting and pretend sites without web services have them

Interactive Tele-Journalism
So.. I have finally released ITJ on SourceForge.net.

With support from Konscious and Manhattan Neighborhood Network we have packaged and uploaded the latest version and it can be downloaded at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/itv-ism/.

Neon v2 can display up to 10 effects blended each other with different modes: additive, subtractive, multiply, mask, etc. Each of them can also have its own filter plus a special layer to apply a filter to all FX at once.

Anagrammar is a text presentation tool for Mac OS X, like Powerpoint or Keynote. but it listens to the sound input source, and starts to jumble up the letters of the current slide.

Downloads and transcodes YouTube videos for your iPod

Concepts related to events, objects, locations, people, and programs have been selected following a multi-step process involving input solicitation, expert critiquing, comparison with related ontologies, and performance evaluation.

"The Platial API provides a set of methods for accessing and updating annotated geographical data. The API design is biased towards doing simple things simply, while providing a path for extension to complex cases via the RDF infrastructure. The initial focus is on annotation rather than representation of complex geography."

"Today, I was thinking how dirty and full of stuff my desk was. So I decided to relocate my graphic LCD to another person's desk but still have control over it. To do this, I figured I could simply use the ACODE-300 wireless bluetooth modules."

If you have the right type of cell phone (one that runs on Palm OS, Windows Mobile 5 or Symbian Series 60) you can download a mobile client to post to any TypePad Blog that you have access to, according to Sixapart.

You can also download the application directly to your mobile device at http://get.typepad.com/.

The problem is, many of us don't have the right type of mobile phone (mine is a SideKick III which is not one of the supported mobile phones). Many useful applications such as Google Maps with live transit data and now TypePad mobile client exist, but only for certain cell phones; hopefully, in the near future Google Maps and TypePad Mobile will run on most mobile phones.

Links: Sixapart, Techmeme

Samsung announced today that it has developed the first three-inch LCD panel with VGA (640 x 480 pixels) resolution for digital cameras.

No need to watch the whole thing. Cut’n’Tag the scenes you like or Watch What others already Cut’n’Tagged.

This site is your source for information about using Python with Yahoo! Web Services APIs.

No comment, except to point out the digg-formula headline.

Sony is launching its first WiFi broadband communication and entertainment device. The new Mylo personal communicator is capable of operating in any open 802.11b wireless network, in public spaces and within private homes.

The name mylo stands for “my life online”. Sony's device provides instant messaging, browse the Internet, listen to music, send emails and view photos concurrently.

Small enough for a pocket or purse, the slim, oblong-shaped device features a 2.4 inch color LCD (measured diagonally) with a slide out QWERTY keyboard for comfortable and quick thumb typing. With 1GB of the flash memory, the mylo supports the playback of MP3, ATRAC or WMA (secure and unsecure) files.

It features a built-in speaker and can view MPEG-4 personal videos by transferring files via USB cable or with Memory Stick Duo media. You can also store JPEG pictures from the Internet or your digital camera.

The device comes embedded with popular instant messaging services: the Google Talk instant messaging service, Skype and Yahoo! Messenger. These services are free and the product does not require initial computer setup or a monthly service contract.

The product includes JiWire’s hotspot directory listing more than 20,000 WiFi networks in the United States. The mylo personal communicator boots up in seconds and can scan for available wireless networks right away.

The “What’s Up” screen serves as the hub, storing up to 90 of your friends’ avatars so you can quickly see who’s online. You can store up to nine online identities per person which allows you to first choose who you want to chat with then easily initiate conversations using your preferred application.

The embedded HTML browser lets you quickly connect to full Web pages on the Internet. You can also send and receive text emails with web mail services like Yahoo! Mail and the Gmail web mail service.

Providing networking possibilities without a wireless network, the mylo personal communicator detects when it comes into the presence of other mylo units. With the ad-hoc application, you can share play lists and stream music between mylo communicators one at a time.

The mylo device uses a lithium-ion battery that offers up to 45 hours of music playback, around seven hours of chatting and web surfing and more than three hours of continuous Skype talk time. It comes with a microphone, stereo headphones, a USB cable and a neoprene case.

The mylo personal communicator will be available in September for about $350 online at sonystyle.com, at Sony Style retail stores and authorized dealers nationwide.

Perhaps it will be useful for uploading 7 Megapixel stills or 640x480 videos shot from Sony's H-5 ($500). GigOm and Engadget have more.

(thx for the heads up, JB! -kc.)

CableLabs has issued a series of specifications for DOCSIS 3.0. It will enable cable operators to offer significantly higher speeds with downstream data rates of 160 Mbps and upstream data rates of 120 Mbps.

The Data-Over-Cable Service Interface Specifications (DOCSIS) 3.0, are available at CableLabs. DOCSIS 3.0 features "channel bonding", which enables multiple downstream and upstream channels to be used together at the same time by a single subscriber.

To achieve these higher data rates DOCSIS 3.0 describes a methodology for channel bonding in both the upstream and downstream directions. DOCSIS 3.0 also incorporates support for the Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) and greatly expands the number of Internet addresses that cable operators may use.

Generally speaking, each 6 MHz channel set aside for data can support an additional 40 Mbps down and 30 Mbps up. The new specs will also support "partial feature compliance" to DOCSIS 3.0.

That option, DOCSIS 2.0b, will be available for DOCSIS 1.1 or 2.0 cable modem equipment and cable modem termination systems (CMTSs) that support downstream channel bonding. This test option also is designed to ensure that the equipment is compatible with forthcoming DOCSIS 3.0 equipment.

In the U.S., cable operators are facing pockets of Fiber To The Premises (FTTP) competition, primarily from Verizon, but whether DOCSIS 2.0 is enough for now, or if downstream channel bonding techniques should be applied before DOCSIS 3.0 becomes commercially available is still uncertain.

There is only so much bandwidth available on coax. Usually it's 750-860 Mhz. Bonding channels could take out some analog (or digital) cable television tiers. That might require a digital cable box for consumers.

CableLabs will begin to conduct interops, certifications and qualification testing against DOCSIS 3.0 products "whenever suppliers are ready, as is our normal position," said CableLabs VP of Broadband Access Michelle Kuska, in a statement.

Big Band is a proponent of switched video. Rather than direct all programs to all areas at all times, a switched broadcast system only provides those programs requested by STBs in each node, freeing dramatic bandwidth to expand programming and other service offerings.

A single head-end computer can monitor and manage all switched broadcast sessions in a cable system. The only significant new hardware requirement is deployment of switches capable of receiving abundant programs over existing high-capacity optical networks, and directing each program towards the appropriate node.

A cable or phone provider can virtually remove capacity limits with switched broadcast. IPTV can support scheduled programming, video on demand and a practically unlimited number of TV channels and video content. IP-TV also enables a range of interactive features, allowing viewers to purchase products shown in a TV program by using Web-browsing functions built into the TV programming itself.

U.S. cable operators have over 73 million TV subscribers, generating revenues of nearly $60 billion per annum," says Analysys, a research firm. DirecTV, the nation's largest satellite broadcaster, has more than 15 million customers while EchoStar serves more than 11.71 million satellite TV customers through its DISH Network.

SBC and Verizon plan an End Game, cherry picking FTTH subs and spending big on infrastructure (until the money runs out).

DTV is another area of potential growth. There will be 11.8 million holdout over-the-air TV households at year-end 2008 who will need DTV converters. The Senate Commerce Committee bill sets aside $3 billion while a separate House of Representatives bill allotted $990 million, or $830 million after administrative expenses for subsidizing DTV settops. The cost of the converters was pegged at $60/each with the subsidies covering only $40. Kagan reviews The State of HDTV.

C/Net, Cable Digital News, Om Malik, EE Times, Business Week, Infoworld, E-Week and Telephony have more.

Executives at the TechNet Innovation Summit in San Jose say this whole Internet thing is still just beginning. Faster access means more industry growth. Says Netflix CEO Reed Hastings: "Web 2.0 is broadband. Web 3.0 is 10 gigabits a second."

Wonder where your cable dollars go?

Last week Time Warner and Comcast wrote a big check for the assets of bankrupt Adelphia Communications, the sixth-largest cable operator in the country. Adelphia, in turn, paid $56.7 million in salaries, bonuses and special awards to its top five managers since they joined in 2003 and drove it into the ground.

Filed under: Desktops

We came for the Mac Pro, but we're staying for Leopard, Apple's long awaited followup to OS X 10.4, released April of last year. Apple is promising a spring '07 release, and with all of those playground-style put downs of Vista they've been throwing around at WWDC, we don't think a targeted similarity in launch times is out of the question.

Leopard will feature the new and/or improved:

• 64-bit Cocoa and Carbon application support, right beside 32-bit apps, all native.
• Time Machine - Automatically backs up every version of your files to a hard drive or server. Includes snazzy 3D Time Machine view (pictured) to browse through older versions of folders.
• Boot Camp - "Even better." Ships with Leopard.
• Photo Booth - With expanded camera support.
• Spaces - Apple's term for virtual desktops. Allows you to group different applications together in their own environment for different tasks, and allows movement of windows between "spaces."
• Spotlight - Can search other machines over a network. Boolean operations, application launching, and recent items will also be added to the search tool.
• Core Animation - Developer architecture to create moving eye candy with little code.
• Universal Access - VoiceOver enhancements, Braille support, closed captioning and improved navigation.
• Mail - Stationary (templates), Notes (specially highlighted self-sent emails) and To-Do lists all built in.
• Dashboard - New Dashcode tool allows visual template-based Widget development. There's also a new Web Clip app that takes any part of a web page and turns it into a Widget.
• iChat - Allows multiple logins, invisible mode, animated buddy icons, video recording and tabbed chats (hooray.) There's also photo booth effects, iChat Theater (slideshows, Keynote presentations and videos displayed over video chat), and photo/video backdrops.
  
• Enhanced Parental Controls
• Xcode 3

Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

(Check out dem iChat features. -kc.)

YouTube - Broadcast Yourself.

Hmmn.. This could be very interesting..!

"YouTube is excited to offer APIs to the developer community. Using our APIs, you can easily integrate online videos from YouTube's rapidly growing repository of videos into your application. The APIs currently allow read-only access to key parts of the YouTube video respository and user community."

Thanks Steven.

Hmm. The problem with this guy is he assumes everyone's seen eye-trackers before and that we won't think he's just controlling the game from under the table.

Where's his other hand? Ahahh!

OK: I jest. I am prepared to believe that eye-trackers exist, and I suppose now that this sort of computer voodoo will probably be mainstream by, like, tomorrow, and that I've just not been keeping up with the latest in awesome hardware developments. Sigh.

Question though: how the hell do you aim?

Super cool eyetracking Quake controls.

(Thanks Adam B!)

Sony is introducing a new GPS device that will let you easily add geolocative information to digital photo files and browse your snaps via a Google Maps app using Sony’s Picture Motion Browser. According to a press release, the two-ounce GPS-CS1 GPS device ($150 when it goes on sale on SonyStyle.com in September) is about three and a half inches long and simply clips onto your belt loop or keychain and records your location over time, as near as I can figure. You then import the GPS information, and some Sony image-tracking software matches locations to photos based on timestamps.

Once synchronized, your photos can become virtual push pins on an online map by activating the Picture Motion Browser software bundled with the latest Sony cameras and camcorders released after July. You can easily add new photos and coordinates to the mapping web site, courtesy of Google Maps, and showcase years of globe-trotting.

Neat. Would love to hear more about this, if anyone has any links.

art, GPS, mapping, Sony

OptiTrack is your complete optical tracking solution. From the camera to the software interface, it is everything you need to develop your own tracking applications

Zen Mix lets you position and blend a web video over a picture.

Easy-peasy microformts parser builder

Princeton propose in Japan a nifty little UHF Gadget which will in fact help you to display whatever video you may have on your iPOD Video or on a portable DVD player on your Car TV/GPS Solution, and this thanks to their PCK-UAV Video-Audio FM Transmitter.

"The Digg API (at the time this article was written) has not yet been released. This API allows developers to tap into the core power of Digg.com and integrate their own services with it."

a pretty slick new servide allowing u to imbed text and hyperlinks in a vlog post... interface a bit geeky, but nice features...works efficiently.

web 2 p2p service allwoing you to keep your files on your desktop...no uploading, no ftp, etc...

Pheeder



"Pheeder is a whole new way of using your cellphone: it lets you communicate with all of your friends simultaneously, with a single phone call. To use it, you just call Pheeder, leave a message and hang up. Seconds later all of your friends, or anyone you want, receives the message at the very same instant. And if they want, they can send a reply to your message."

Canon has released their first line up of HDV camcorders, the XH G1 and XH A1 and many feel that Canon took its own sweet time on this. Well as they say, better late than never! The imaging system of the these new camcorders is similar to the Canon' XL H1 and has the same three 1/3-inch 16:9 CCDs. The new camcorders have the ability to record 1080i video in both 60 interlaced and 24 frame rate modes. However unlike the XL-H1, the new camcorders are cheaper and sleeker.

The new HDV camcorders are almost identical and the only thing that sets the camcorders apart is the I/O ports and $3000 price difference! These entry level prosumer camcorders will appeal to the independent film makers who couldn’t afford the exorbitant XL H1 and Canon hopes to capture this growing demographic. The new XH G1 and XH A1 do not support interchangeable lenses and the three 1/3-inch CCD sensors offer native 16:9 with a resolution of 1440 x 1080. The camcorders feature 24 fields per second shooting mode and the frame rates are available in either 2:3 or 2:3:3:2 pull-down apart from the standard scan rates of 30f and 60i.

(Continued at MobileWhack)

Harmonic Inc. extended its family of market-leading digital video compression solutions with the new DiviCom® Electra™ 7000 high definition (HD) MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) encoder. The world's first multi-channel, multi-service HD H.264 encoder, the Electra 7000 supports up to four full resolution HD channels and can simultaneously create low resolution services for picture-in-picture (PiP) or multi-channel mosaic applications. An ideal solution for satellite, telco/IPTV and cable operators, the Electra 7000 sets a radically improved benchmark for HD H.264 compression performance and video quality. Customers have confirmed bit-rates 20 to 30 percent lower than any currently deployed HD H.264 encoder, and the system has already been selected by five satellite and telco operators in North America and Europe to power their forthcoming HD services.

---

[This feed contains only short descriptions of the articles. To read the full article, please click through.]

US-based IC design house Alereon, which specializes in Wireless USB and WiMedia Ultra Wideband (UWB) chipsets for portable devices, on July 25 introduced a Wireless USB device tool suite designed to help speed the creation of applications and products using Wireless USB chipset technology from the company. The key component of the developers kit is a CompactFlash (CF) evaluation board based on Certified Wireless USB.

For anyone hesitant to download the unsupported release that made its way on to digg, Skype officially launched Skype 1.5. Make Skype Video calls to any other Skype user for free. Mac users note that this version of Skype with Video is indeed a preview release so do expect a few bumps a long the way.

On a personal note, I have yet to overcome the video shyness hurdle when it comes to online communications. Anyone else still hesitant?

HelloDS is a simple VoIP application for Nintendo DS, created by Alias-Zero It makes use of Stephen Stair's Wifi Lib

/facet is a generic browser for heterogeneous semantic web repositories.

The Sony HDR-SR1 represents a huge shift in the camcorder industry, drawing on not one but two of the most important and emerging trends of the last several years: high definition and hard disk drive storage. The HDR-SR1 utilizes the new AVCHD standard, a derivative of MPEG-4 H.264 codec, jointly developed by Panasonic and Sony. No longer confined to tape-based media, Sony quickly put this HD format to use after releasing its first hard disk drive camcorder only seven months ago. We had a chance to handle the camcorder at a premiere event in New York. Our early findings: with 30GB storage and prosumer features like a mic input, headphone jack, and remote control input, the HDR-SR1 is one of the most refreshing and exciting developments we've seen in the industry in a long time.

WiFi Planet reports that Freescale Semiconductor and Wavesat today announced a joint reference design for WiMax-enabled CPEs targeted at both residential customers and small to medium sized businesses.

Fawzi Behman, director of Strategic Marketing at Freescale, says the aim is to enable service providers to extend their portfolio of services. Instead of reinventing the wheel to do so, Behman says, it made sense to partner with a company like Wavesat.

The Residential Gateway includes a Freescale MPC8323E PowerQUICC II Pro processor, a DSP for VoIP capabilities, and interfaces including a four-port Ethernet switch and two Mini PCI slots – one for a Wi-Fi LAN and the other for WAN over WiMax.

The board ships with Linux 2.6.x with Samba on Flash. The mini-ITX form factor makes it easy to design compact WiMAX CPE systems. Combined with Wavesat's Mini-PCI card and MAC software, it is said to enable a cost-effective, compact solution for WiMAX-enabled residential gateways.

The reference design adds wireless, voice and video to a media server and allows a service provider to consolidate all their services into one solution. “This enables both wired and wireless solutions for residential gateways,” Behman says.

Recently, Wavesat announced it is developing a 5.8 GHz Mini-PCI module and reference design with Texas Instruments that will be commercially available by Q4 of 2006 from Wavesat.

A $200 WiFi gateway providing both voice and WiFi for $40-$50/month could be a killer product. A licensed 2.5 GHz backbone from Clearwire or Sprint might be one option but a 5.8GHz unlicensed solution could keep the duopolies in check. Satellite tv optional.

Perhaps $5,000, 5.8 GHz WiMAX basestations will take root on the rooftops of community centers.

According to In-Stat, the number of fixed WiMAX subscribers is projected to reach 16 million by 2010, while mobile WiMAX subscribers will range from 15 million to 25 million.

After I blogged the location-tracker hacked up for use in Second Life by Linden Lab CTO Cory Ondrejka the other day, Cory sent along a link to a similar service, SLStats [Cory also blogged it, I now see], that was started recently by SL resident Mark Barrett. I’ve also been meaning to look into the new blogHUD built by SL resident Koz Farina, which is currently in alpha. The cool thing about that is that it can be used as a kind of location-tracking device as well.

SLStats comes in the form of a wristwatch, available in Hill Valley Square [< -- SL link] in the Huin sim. Once you register with the service in-world, the watch "watches" where you go, tracking your location as you move around the world, as well as which other avatars you come into contact with. The information is used on the SLStats site to rank most popular regions (among SLStats users, of course), and to track how much time you've spent in-world, which you can view at a link like this one, which tracks Glitchy: http://slstats.com/users/view/Glitchy+Gumshoe.

nately, the service doesn’t let you extract a list of sims you’ve been to and who much time you spent in each (as Cory’s does), but I imagine that information is easily gotten and just a matter of building in the feature. What would be extra cool is if you could overlay lines on the SL Webmap API so you could see your path around the world. There are all kinds of other cool things that could be done with this information as well, I imagine, and I get the impression Mark is planning more in the near future. He wasn’t in-world when I was this morning, but Jerry spoke with him recently and at least found out that he’s a SecondCast fan. (Go us!)

SLStats is also associated with SLBuzz, which seems to be yet another MySpace-like social networking site for SL residents where you can add friends, blug stuff, etc. I love to see people adding functionality to Second Life, but I have to say, I’m sick to death of filling out online profiles, so I doubt I’ll be using this much. The explosion of social networking and Web 2.0 sites in general in recent months is creating a lot of work for very little return, as far as I can tell, and there’s going to have to be some kind of convergence or implosion fairly soon.

But back to our topic. The blogHUD is an unobtrusive heads-up display that lets you post a blog entry to the blogHUD site via either the chat line or a notecard. At the moment, you can browse recent entries, or see entries by a particular person on the “recent blogHUDers” list or from a place in the “recent places” list. A future version will let you browse blog entries by person, by place, or by person in place, and grab RSS feeds for most of those slices, or so I understand. (Remember, this is still in alpha.)

What I like about the blogHUD is the SLurlPane-like SL Webmap that shows up when you click on a blog entry. (That’s a SLurlPane at the top of the right-hand column here.) As you can see in the pic above, you end up with a close-up shot of the location from which the entry was posted, as was as an SL link that will launch you right there, should you find the entry intriguing enough.

Between this kind of stuff, Cory’s hack, SLurlMarkers and various other things that are in development for SL and the Web, we should see some pretty powerful location-based social software popping out of this primordial virtual ooze. Definitely looking forward to it.

blogging, design, mapping, MySpace, Second Life, Social software, virtual worlds, Web 2.0

Sony Vegas is great, but if you make movies witha small digital camera like the Canon Powershots, the videos are in avi format with a codec that Vegas doesn’t have. The result is that, when you add a video to the timeline, only the audio shows up.

A lot of places try to sell you codecs for like 20$.

It took my a while to find, but the first link on this page (morgan-multimedia) is free and works great and fixed the problem:

www.jetdv.com :: View topic - How do I open AVI files create by still cameras?

A couple of days ago I got FFMPEG working to automatically generate FLV video files for OpenVlog. Today I finally got thumbnails generating correctly. Here are the commands:

This creates a JPEG:
ffmpeg -i inputfile -t 0.001 -ss 1 -vframes 1 -f mjpeg -s 320x240 outputfile.jpg

This creates a QT Movie that I am using as a reference movie (just one frame of video):
ffmpeg -i inputfile -t 0.001 -ss 1 -vframes 1 -vcodec mpeg4 -an outputfile.mov

I got this working with lots of help from the following pages:
Converting Video Formats with FFmpeg
Extracting JPG Frames Using FFmpeg and mjpeg Parameter

Samsung's rugged sports camcorder, the SC-X210L, is a rugged compact model that records video on SD cards. The original remote lens connected to a helmet or headband via a USB cable. It is now going wireless.

The new SC-X210WL ($599) feature an external lens with a wireless connection.

The new Samsung Sportcams, like the SC-X205WL and SC-X210WL, feature higher resolution and a wireless connection although whether it uses Bluetooth, WiFi, or something else, was not specified.

The camera uses MPEG4 ASP compression, Samsung's electronic image stabilizer, a 680K CCD with 10x optical/100x digital zoom.

With no cords on the camera, you don't have to worry about it snagging on anything. The SC-X210L also doubles as an MP3 player, voice recorder and data storage device. The unit also includes a carrying case and webcam module.

The SC-X205L, SC-X210L are currently available, the SC-X205WL provides 720p resolution, and the wireless version, the SC-X210WL, due in September 2006 at $479.99, $579.99, $579.99 and $679.99, respectively.

Semiconductor circuits are pretty versatile, but you can't bend the ones in your computer without having to place an expensive parts order with your favourite tech supplier afterwards. Chips are set to become far more flexible in future, however, in both senses of the word - a team of engineers have discovered a way to remove the circuitry from a rigid substrate and place it on a pliable material. Flexible computing could revolutionise a number of technology spheres, medical apps and solar cells for instance.

coComment now shows comments from people who don't use the service, making it about a million times more useful in tracking blog conversations

lots of open source flashiness, finally

The first open-source, carrier-grade telephony switch will be introduced next month at the ClueCon conference in Chicago, reports Networking Pipeline. Dubbed the FreeSwitch, the open source project is highly scalable, can run on AMD, Intel, and PowerPC, uses the SIP, H.323, Asterisk's IAX2 and XMPP/Jingle protocols, and costs just $4-$5k per server. Carrier grade gear can frequently cost in excess of tens of thousands of dollars. More detail is available at the project website.

Memory Spot is a tiny radio chip that can contain small videos, audio and text files and then affixed to any object:

"A radio chip the size of a grain of rice that holds up to half a megabyte of video has been developed at Hewlett Packard’s research labs in the UK.

The chip, called a Memory Spot, is small enough to be attached to a postcard or a photograph and could be used to append video, audio or hundreds of pages of text to all sorts of everyday objects. In hospitals, for example, the chips could allow doctors to add detailed medical records to a patient’s plastic wristband…

Plans for the technology were hatched two years ago when HP was searching for a way to add audio data to photographs, Robson says. HP sees a future in which its colour printers will be able to add video, audio and text to a chip already embedded in a printed document."

from New Scientist Tech

Looks like this was posted on most of the tech gadget blogs but missed it. Could be useful for mobile entertainment apps.

The Zypad™ WL 1000 is a wrist-wearable wireless computer flexibly designed to give the user instant access to computing capabilities while carrying out non-computer tasks in the field. Featuring hands-free operation, robust wireless capabilities, and built-in GPS tracking, this versatile wearable computer serves as an ideal tool for Emergency Search and Rescue, Healthcare, Homeland Security, Maintenance, Law Enforcement, Logistics, Transportation, and Defense applications.

Parvus Corporation

XPath4AS and XPath4AS2 are implementations of XPath for ActionScript

The XPathAPI class allows you to do simple XPath searches within Flash.

VoIPowering Your Office with Asterisk: Soothing the Savages with Hold Music
Some good little command line snippets for conversion to GSM..

like rfid, but more processing power and memory. Hard to imagine how these will be adopted when rfid is still struggling, but interesting

In a major announcement today in New York, Sony launched the first ever camcorders to utilize the new AVCHD format for recording video to DVD and non-tape media. The new HDR-UX1 is a DVD camcorder that will hit stores in September, and retail for about $1400. The HDR-SR1, also announced today, is the first hard disk drive camcorder to record high definition video. The HDR-SR1 will be available in October with an initial retail price of approximately $1500.

Just received a patch to the YouTube greasemonkey script I posted a long time ago.

This one should work with the updates YouTube has made to its website.

Right-click to install User Script

Downloaded files must be renamed with a .flv file extension and played back in a Flash Video capable media player.

"Port of Python 2.4.3 to the Nintendo DS, specifically, a port of the Stackless version of Python."

"WiFiMe is a special program sent to the DS using Wireless Multi Boot to trick the Nintendo DS into running unsigned code. This hack allows homebrew software to be run from a GBA flash cartridge. WiFiMe only works on DS versions 3 or below. It can also be used to install FlashMe."

I see more and more work being done with screen scrapers, are people starting to treat HTML as a web service with a crappy API?

web app for capturing movies of user interaction.

You can also download this as a PDF.

Links:
http://reader.kaywa.com
http://qrcode.kaywa.com

My ID: http://id.kaywa.com/roger

The ID is very basic for now, but it has already one pay off. If you have a Kaywa or a moblog.ch (free), you just have to add your normal URL. If you scan your personal QR Code, you get then automagically the link to the mobile version of your blog.

Update: And most importantly, you get your own personal QR Code with it. We will soon provide a PDF solution, so that you can also print the code. Usage scenarios: business cards, personal stamps, etc.

"Amazon Simple Queue Service (Beta) offers a reliable, highly scalable hosted queue for buffering messages between distributed application components. Using the Simple Queue Service (SQS), developers can decouple components of their application so that they run independently. SQS provides the message management between the independent components. Any component of a distributed application can store any type of data in a reliable queue at Amazon.com. Another component or application can retrieve the data using queue semantics."

AntennaSearch offers detailed information on over 1.9 million towers and antennas in the US. Includes maps, ownership details, contact information... You can pinpoint existing and future towers and even small hidden antennas. digg

a manual!!

Super useful, totally easy (and completely free) application for Windows 2000/XP or Mac OS X that lets you send massive video files via email without compressing or transcoding them.

ITP Research >> Video Comments WordPress Plugin Version 1.2 Released

Here are some new features you can expect:

1: A GUI interface inside the WP administrative screens for posting.

2: Revised comment display on the main post page. Now the timecode is hyperlinked and will bring up the plugin and seek the appropriate place in the video.

3: The ability to put a thumbnail or your own text in the post for launching the player.

4: A couple of random bug fixes.. GREAT!

Narrator - Handy Mac app for reading out stories or scripts. Can give each script character a different voice, and leave a gap for you to say your lines.

from the coder of iSquint: VisualHub allows you to convert video files to one of 9 formats in as little as three steps.

At the center of all great Live Web software will be one’s digital identity. Each end-user will control who has access to their personal data, who can use it and how.

Oh, decisions, decisions. What belt shall I wear tonight to set off my new outfit? Hmm, the traditional leather? The one with the clamp fastener or the metal buckle? I guess I'll just settle on the one with the 3" video display where I can insert an SD card and play movies just below my belly button. Perfect. This bizarre new product from Egokast is just that, a 3" screen mounted in a stainless steel case that can be attached to a belt or armband to display either full motion video or a slideshow of photos. You can insert an SD card of up to 2GB in size and put an entire movie on there if you so desire. You certainly won't have to worry about getting noticed when you're out clubbing, but you will have to worry about your video selection. My choice? Footloose.

Limited to an initial run of 100, the Egokast One (without memory card or belt) goes for $279.

The Zypad WL 1000, a new wrist-worn PC has been demonstrated to the military forces. This device, which can run Linux or Windows CE, is a hands-free computer which handles wireless networking and GPS tracking. It should be available in July for about $2,500 and could be used by healthcare or law enforcement personnel.

Links: Primidi, ZDNet

Use Pipdipchip writes: "Early this year, Linksys stopping using Linux on its popular WRT54G models. Users were unable to upgrade to third-party firmware, one of the best points for buying a WRT54G. A way was found to get Linux in a WRT54G but it required adding a JTAG interface which was too difficult for most users. However, now a way has been found that only requires upgrading your bootloader via TFTP. A huge upgrade for those with a WRT54G version 5." This is also being discussed in our Linksys forum.

Xiph QuickTime Components (XiphQT) is, in short, the solution for Mac and Windows users who want to use Xiph formats in any QuickTime-based application, e.g. playing Ogg Vorbis in iTunes.

Glitchy sends along a link to an interesting technology I hadn’t heard of before: 3D shape search. Apparently, a company called UGS Corp. has just bought a 3D shape search technology from German IT services firm software design & managment. UGS’s new Geolus Search product (formerly geolus SHAPE) “allows manufacturers to quickly locate 3D models of digitally defined parts from large heterogeneous data sources on the basis of geometric similarity,” according to a press release.

The technology, which seems to have current application in the manufacture of machine and automobile parts, could serve to enhance content creation through existing 3D model markets like Google’s SketchUp Warehouse, the third-party SketchUp models marketplace, and things like TurboSquid — open markets for 3D models of various kinds. It’s hard to envision the situations in which people will actually need to search for something based on its 3D geometry rather than some metadata, but I’m sure those situations will emerge. Interesting, in any case, to see the emergence of a new 3pointD technology like shape search.

3D Web, architecture, design, Google, Search

DALSA announced today that it has successfully fabricated and delivered the world’s highest resolution image sensor chip.

The new ITU-T Recommendation T.851 offers better (and faster) compression by introducing a new (backward incompatible) alternative Q15 arithmetic coding. Color precision is increased to maximum 16 bits per color component.

The change is only in the final lossless entropy coding stage. Thus current JPEGs can be losslessly encoded to use new algorithm and the lossiness of this new variant (the blockiness etc…) will be same as that of existing JPEGs.

Work on the new compression algorithm was started in 2004 by ITU-T Study Group 16. An alpha open source implementation is available.

Official results claim around 10% improvement in ratio over old JPEG. StuffIt’s JPEG recompression technology deserves a mention here, they claim a 30% better ratio by taking a similar approach. Thomas Ritcher posted some comparison results with both JPEG and JPEG2000.

ion solo (experimental) is one of the most exciting developments in videoblogging. It’s an open source java app that plays rss feeds with videos in a beautiful, full screen UI. Check it out!

The Google AdSense team would like to invite you to test a feature that provides you with a new way to earn revenue from your website by hosting ads that are compensated based on a Cost-Per-Action [CPA] basis.

Creative Commons has announced the release of an add-in to Microsoft Office that allows the easy addition of a CC license to files created with Word, PowerPoint, or Excel.

webscraper for Proce55ing.

"VisualHub bridges the gap between numerous complicated video formatting standards, and people that just want to get the job done - just what you would expect from the Mac."

(AP) -- Microsoft Corp.'s latest instant messaging program is ready for prime time, the company said Monday. Windows Live Messenger, which had been available in test form, will officially launch Tuesday.

We are proud to release TextMachine 3D Version 6.

With Text Machine 3D you can render on Screen Words and Phrases from customizable Dictionaries using all Fonts you have installed on your PC.

Text Machine 3D Includes the functionality to Render Random Counters and Alphanumeric Strings. Combined with a Barcode Font you can get very cool effects

Images and Video Loops can be loaded and live color filtered.

Every Parameter can be controlled via MIDI - up to 3 MIDI Devices can be used simultaneously

Work Live with Text Machine 3D or Record your output to numbered Files.

Subsonic is a free, web-based media streamer, providing access to your entire music collection wherever you are.

DirectShow Java Wrapper: humatic - dsj

Very Nice..
From the site:
Need to play Windows Media files and streams, DivX video or DVDs in java? Access WDM capture devices? Control a firewire DVCam? Then maybe this can help you. dsj is an ongoing project to provide a java wrapper around Microsoft's DirectShow API. It offers a set of high level classes that give java easy access to functionality widely missed by java programmers and also lets you dive deeper into the interiors of Windows' core api for 2D media. On the java side dsj tries to keep things open as possible - you may use it standalone or let it feed data into JMF or other APIs.

They also point to a bunch of Open Source projects that are of interest:
Related projects (dsj does not use OpenSource, GPL or LGPL licensed code, but - as you are here - these projects may be of interest, too) :

JMDS - DirectShow Capture api Java wrapper: jmds.dev.java.net - fobs4jmf - ffmpeg c++ & java bindings: http://fobs.sourceforge.net

java VLC - VideoLan java bindings: http://jvlc.ihack.it - DXInput - DirectInput Java wrapper: www.hardcode.de

jARToolkit - ARToolkit java bindings: http://sourceforge.net/projects/jartoolkit/ - jFFmpeg - JMF codec pack: http://jffmpeg.sourceforge.net/

TechCrunch >> Blog Archive >> Click.tv Moves Video Ideas Forward
Had an interesting experience at Vloggercon this past weekend. Although Josh pointed this out to me in the past, I was surprised to find a company pitching similar video commenting concepts that we have been working on.

So.. Perhaps my focus should now shift to getting start-up funding ;-) Any takers?

Nokia 770 Linux tablet firmware update beta draws praise, fire
I am particularly impressed by the "Good" list:
VoIP capabilities
IM and Google Talk messaging client
Integrated addressbook with presence information
Better performance, as well as a control-panel option for setting up a swap partition on the rs-mmc card
Better memory recovery when applications are closed
Google search bar available in home screen
Browser URL input field has partial matching
Home screen items now can be rearranged
Thumb keyboard is "input method of choice"
Package manager handles package feeds, and allows custom menu placement

In-side Video Comments
Josh Paul demonstrated his Video Comments system at Vloggercon right after I demonstrated ITP's. His is a system for stringing together videos that are direct responses to the original.

Pretty interesting.. The vloggers love the idea!

If you take a look at some of the comment threads that have taken place on this blog, you’re bound to find some posts by readers talking about “open source” software. For example, Tom Hoffmann recently posted comments on the need for an education-friendly, open source blogging tool. But what exactly is open source, and why should you care about it? This week, I’ll be exploring the issue in two blog posts, with a little assistance from edtech guru David Thornburg, who’s just published a book on the subject. Today’s post will focus on the basics of free and open source software (FOSS).

ITP Research >> Video Comments, a WordPress Plugin

Keeping the conversation alive in media blogs

Video Blogging, Vlogging or what ever you want to call it was born into a tradition of self publishing on the internet and benefits greatly from the infrastructure developed for blogging. The tools to create media and now to distribute media online are accessible and affordable. Furthermore, video blogging is often considered participatory and socially interactive. Much of this is due to what blogs have done, enabled true two-way conversation through comments and loose networking through trackbacks.

Unfortunately, while video blogging benefits from these, it doesn't really do much to improve or enhance this capability with video.

At ITP Research, myself and a couple of others have been working to change this or at least push commenting and trackbacks a bit further. We have created a Video Commenting plugin for WordPress that allows people to leave comments in-time with a video. This, we believe is one of the first steps to allowing conversation to happen around video and furthermore enable richer conversation with video.

Check it out, download it, modify it, use it... Video Comments, WordPress Plugin

From the site:
It’s really exciting to see the number of blogs that exist today, thousands of voices are talking about every possible topic. Blog syndication and commenting allows readers to subscribe, discuss and carry the conversation further, however, with the different forms of media becoming a normal part of many blogs there’s a need to keep this open communication open. Audio and video blogs are forming communities and to encourage conversation the viewers must be able to respond, so we developed a plug-in for WordPress called Video Comments.

(Don't sleep on this one. This is one of those tools videobloggers have been asking for for years. Nice work, ITP -kc.)

Geelix Desktop GX enables you to record in-game action and upload it to share with your friends and other gamers.

Ourmedia is proud to announce the unveiling of the Personal Media Learning Center as well as the Open Media Directory.

The Learning Center is an ongoing project with a simple aim: to help people engage in the participatory media movement by showing them how to create videoblogs, podcasts, screencasts, digital stories and other emerging media forms.

There are sections on Video, Audio, Multimedia, Images and Text. In addition, we have what will undoubtedly become a deep Topics section. We're starting out with the subjects of Personal media - Getting started, Citizen journalism, and Copyright & the law.

We have a lot of needs in fillng out these sections, so if you'd like to write a tutorial, share an article, or create a screencast, video or podcast that would be helpful to people, see our guidelines and contact me. This is media training of the people by the people.

The Open Media Directory is a clearinghouse of dozens of different sites where you can find legal, podsafe music, audio and video clips. For anyone who wants to add a music soundtrack to their online video or add music to a podcast, the Open Media Directory is a treasure. Thanks to the UK's David Holmes, the directory's editor, for pulling it together for us.

These projects represent a significant step forward for Ourmedia. We've been promised new servers this month, so look for more improvements in the site in the weeks ahead.

For many of you this is old news, but I just wanted to make sure everything's seen it…

The week before last, we at Technorati launched an experimental Microformats Search tool in our "kitchen" (where you can taste the products before they're fully "baked").

This is an early stage release, but we wanted to get it out in the world for you to try.

In addition to the search tool, we’ve also started Pingerati.net, a ping system for microformated pages. We're treating this as a community project, too, in which others can recieve the stream of pings for indexing. If you’d like to start recieving pings, just let us know!

Steve writes in about the Sparkfun GPS data loggers, he built a waterproof version - "That unit from SFE is excellent! I packaged one in a waterproof case and use it for recording kayak and boat jaunts... I just nestled the hardware into a carved foam insert inside a SealLine Electronic Case. The wee antenna is lost in the glare; below that is the board, which carries the Lassen iQ GPS, an LPC2138 ARM processor, and a socket on the back with a 256 megabyte SD card. The software strips the NMEA sentences to just the basics, and stuffs them into the card... which has enough space for 440 hours of logging! I haven't checked the power drain yet, but the four 2300 mAH AA NiMH cells should keep it going for quite a while... Photo and the track from a sailboat sea trial are" - Link.

Previous:
GPS data loggers, projects and more - Link.

[Read this article] [Comment on this article]

Google Browser Sync for Firefox is an extension that continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers.

What is jQuery?

I consider it the Swiss Army knife of javascript - it's small, versatile, and has almost zero learning curve.

Why should I care?

If your project calls for AJAX or DOM scripting and you need it done quickly, with minimal fuss, and you believe in keeping things simple, then jQuery might be perfect for you. And what's "15 Days of jQuery" got for me?

Fantastic tutorials and example code that takes you from zero to hero in no time flat. If you're not a black belt in advanced javascript code by the end of these tutorials then you get 110% of your money back.

The quality of projectors gets better and better as they shrink, and the Casio XJ-S35 DLP projector is a prime example of that. This 1024x768 hotshot has 2000 lumens of brightness and a contrast ratio of 1800:1, and although it's not exactly pocketable, it's nice and small at just 10 inches wide by 8 inches long. Looks like it would fit into just about any briefcase, no matter how overstuffed.

Another of its conveniences is its ability to directly play back MPEG-4 video and JPEG graphics via USB, allowing you to put a series of JPEG stills on the thumb drive and play back your presentation even if you don't have a PC handy. Pricing or availability wasn't announced. – Charlie White

Casio pocket video projecteur, the XJ-S35 [Akihabara News]

 
Comment on this post
Related: MSI Unveils Two Small MP3 Players
Related: Focal Aquatune Waterproof iPod Speaker Dock
Related: Delux DLA-660 Dual Core Portable Media Player

Hey, let's get a bunch of these for the ZML:

Jack PC from Jade Integration - a computer in your wall!

The Jack PC is a revolutionary new 'thin client' computer made by Chip PC Technologies. Thin clients are effectively desktop computers designed to connect to a 'terminal server' or Citrix based environment where processing is handled by servers instead of PCs. Thin clients have been getting smaller and smaller over the years however this is the world's first Windows-based thin client small enough to fit in a network wall port. The benefits to business are massive since there's no longer a need for desktop PCs at all - your monitor, keyboard and mouse just plug into the wall!

via adlab

Gaming environments like Quake and Unreal have become easy interactive 3D development environments. Modify the game maps and objects, and you can make the visual realm in these games whatever you want. But for digital musicians imagining a 3D environment for creating music and sound, they’re limited.

Enter the latest project from fijuu2 creator Julian Oliver, together with Steven Pickles. They wanted powerful synthesis capabilities, which is something you’re unlikely ever to get in a game like Quake III. So, they found a way to send network data from Quake into the free software Pd, using Pd’s netsend object to send UDP packets containing control data from the game. In other words, instead of using a MIDI controller, you can make the game your control instrument. netsend is in Max/MSP, too, so this should work for Max, as well.

You’ll need two machines for this to work right, but the objects are freely available from Julian and Steven; follow the download link on the project page:

q3apd

I’ve been following progress on Julian’s blog; it’s a good read. For more on the work, here’s our friend Chris at Pixelsumo:

q3apd (Quake-Pure Data)

. . . and to see it in action, Julian posts a video:

q3apd in gorgeous OGG video glory

For Pd fans, Steven has a goodie of his own: an abstraction that fakes poly~ from Max/MSP inside Pd, plus some other objects.

Given the ready availability of map editors and such (at least if you have access to Windows), I expect you’ll see more projects like this. We’ve seen work before, certainly, that creates art inside the game engines, but by linking to real synthesis libraries you can do more than just mix pre-rendered sound sources. Speaking of which, any other readers experimenting with game engines? Let us know. And feel free to share in our gaming forum.

3D, design, gaming, interactive, max msp, network, Pd, software

A new breed of screens for cell phones, now in development, is getting back to nature. News.com reports.

"Qualcomm and others are promoting new screen technology for handhelds and mobile devices that can stay on all day without sapping battery life, thanks to the sun or liquids. As a result, a cell phone equipped with such a screen could continually broadcast stock quotes, news stories or show a music video to go along with a built-in MP3 player. Currently, phone screens stay dark--mostly by necessity.

The difference is that the new screens don't need to be backlit, as do current screens. Instead, they are primarily illuminated by light from the sun or the movement by liquids inside the screen."

QUALCOMM today announced it has successfully demonstrated the full mobility of Internet protocol (VoIP) calls over 1xEV-DO Rev. A networks, including mobile, pedestrian and fixed. EVDO (Wikipedia), is a wireless radio broadband data standard adopted by many CDMA mobile phone service providers

The increased upstream capability of Rev A for EV-DO networks (used by Sprint and Verizon) enables them to migrate voice services to Internet protocol (IP)-based platforms for a common service platform.

Previously, an evolutionary strategy to EV-DV (Data + Voice) architecture was planned, but when EV-DO (Rev. A) was announced, Verizon and Sprint dropped their EV-DV technology plans. Now EV-DO Rev. A is the way Verizon and Sprint are expected to move forward.

Field tests involved 62 simultaneous calls in one sector within a single 1.25 MHz channel - in a fully mobile configuration. The test network demonstrated capacity gains approximately 30 times greater than mobile analog voice. Results from a fully loaded commercial network could be somewhat lower.

QUALCOMM says these field tests validate the quality and capacity of full mobility VoIP over EV-DO Rev. A and pave the way to large scale commercial trials by network operators.

“Operators globally have committed to the rapid deployment of CDMA2000 EV-DO Rev. A. These tests prove EV-DO Rev. A's capability for delivering high-capacity, high-quality VoIP over 3G mobile broadband networks,” said Dr. Roberto Padovani, chief technology officer of QUALCOMM.

VoIP over EV-DO Rev. A leverages session initiation protocol, commonly referred to as SIP, in combination with a number of advanced techniques to achieve quality of service comparable to traditional landline voice.

QUALCOMM also helps bring IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) strategies to fruition. Operators will be able to efficiently merge their wireless and wireline networks based on IMS. By basing all communications services on an IP network, operators are able to use their network capacity in a much more flexible manner, through the dynamic allocation of capacity to an ever-increasing array of 3G services, such as:

• Push to talk, which is VoIP offered as walkie-talkie-like service;
• Packet-based video telephony, which combines realtime video with VoIP; and
• Simultaneous VoIP calls and data sessions.

While the downlink speed increases from 2.4Mb/s (in Rev. 0) to 3.1 Mb/s (in Rev. A), most of the improvement is in the uplink (reverse link) data rate, increasing dramatically from .15 Mb/s to 1.8 Mb/s in EV-DO Rev A. Low latency is also improved at 50ms compared to approximately 150ms for Rev. 0.

EVDOinfo.com, EVDOforums and 3G News have more.

Related DailyWireless stories include; Mobile WiMAX: The Attack Plan, Verizon Tests Rev A, Qualcomm Buys Flarion, T-Mobile's HSDPA Move, CDMA vs OFDM, Sprint Rolls Out EV-DO, 3G: HSDPA or Not?, HSDPA Tests, Sprint Commits to EV-DO and Cellular At The Races.

Network comp/analysis/viz softwares in use at Columbia

Click.TV is a new user interface for web video that lets users click to discover what's inside a video instantly, and even share their thoughts about the action. It does this by enabling video producers and users to add comments to points inside a video.

TurnHere reports on VidMirror:

A new service launched this week, VidMirror, lets users upload the same video to as many 13 Web video host sites. Users can then embed multiple videos in a single player on their blog or Web site, so they won't have a blank space if a host sites deletes their video (or their account).

I guess some people might want to do something like this to get greater exposure, but what happens if you need to make a change on a video? Delete 13 videos then upload 13 revisions?

With this site you still have to upload your video 13 times. It would be nice if you could upload one version to the site and have the site then do the 13 uploads for you. That's assuming that you'd want to distribute your videos this way.

I might play around with posting my videos to some video sharing sites, but I still prefer having my videos live at home with me on my vlog where people can come visit and see my videos where they live and have a conversation with me.

If I started posting my videos to 13 other sites I'm not sure how I'd keep track of the conversations, and quite possibly my conversations and my videos would then be owned by someone else, ending up on the hottest DVD of the year, funniest video blogs. Buy now!

Where.com - WHERE Mobile 2.0 API
From the site:
The WHERE Mobile 2.0 API allows developers to add mobile pictures and mobile video clips to web sites with a few simple steps

Very similar to what I have been planning on doing with my Video and Image Moblogging with a (video enabled) Camera Phone Scripts

-Thanks Jenny!

It looks like government control of the airwaves is about to become a much harder prospect. The Universal Software Radio Peripheral, or USRP, is an open-source device that can do virtually anything that involves the reception and transmission of radio signals - which means not just radio like you have in the kitchen over breakfast, but all kinds of TV, cell-phone signal, radar...pretty much any broadcast technology at all. All thanks to the magic of general purpose computing and some hardware trickery.

NTT DoCoMo yesterday announced that they developed the acoustic OFDM (Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing) technology, which can be used to embed URLs and text data in broadcast music/audio. Consumers' mobile phones "listen" to the music/audio and extract the embedded URLs/data. About 100 characters can be transmitted in a second. (To deploy this technology, broadcast stations will need to install a dedicated encoder. Mobile phones need to be enhanced with a decoder mechanism as well.)

DoCoMo thinks this technology can also be used at shopping malls and supermarkets. Then, the sound from in-store speakers would probably be delivering information about specials, ads, discount coupons, etc. ITmedia describes this technology as "Sound QR Code" or "Sound Toruka" (Toruka allows wallet phones to receive information from RFID readers.)

A similar technology exists for ultrasonic sound, however, DoCoMo's technology uses audible sound that can be transmitted through regular speakers. Also, it sounds like the data transmission speed (1kbps) is pretty good.

via ITmedia

NodeBox allows you to create visual output with programming code.

Port of Apache and mod_python to Symbian, able to provide a webserver on a mobile phone with a global URL than can be accessed from any browser.

Hadoop is a collection of code libraries and programs useful for creating very large distributed systems.

Homegirl Sasha discovered a $150 USD Windows-based app "CrazyTalk" which normally would be too creepy to talk about when used on a real life picture. But it works like a charm for making SL avatars come to life, one of the biggest limitations for machinima filmmakers.

Watch her first lip-synch'd machinima test she did while videoblogging (videoslogging? heh) about the latest machinima classes put on by Alt-Zoom studios.

I'm sure Tao Takashi, the Steve Garfield of the metaverse, will be going nuts with his Ace Frehley Simpson-lookin self. ;-)

Glossary: Machinima is a genre of filmmaking using video game engines, (think Red vs. Blue for example)

Jave ME Device Table
Sun has updated their Java ME (Jave ?) device listings.. Finally!

J2Me would be the key word here..

A story out of Hong Kong talks about a new technology that allows users to stream video direct from their camcorder - even as they move around. The m-View system has two parts - one that sits on top of the camcorder and a receiver that gets the wireless signal and feeds it to a web-connected laptop. The product is from Momentum Technologies, but it's unclear if it will be available in the U.S.

All of the tools you need to poke, prod, and monitor your JavaScript, CSS, HTML and Ajax are brought together into one seamless experience, including a debugger, error console, command line, and a variety of fun inspectors.

From the microkernel to the upper layers NetKernel uses a generalization of REST, the basis for the successful operation of the World Wide Web, and applies it to the finest granularity of resource oriented software composition.

1060 NetKernel is a resource oriented microkernel and RESTful application server created from the convergence and unification of the powerful fundamental concepts found in the World Wide Web and Unix.

NKSE includes extensive functionality including transports (HTTP, SOAP 1.1 / 1.2, REST Web-Services, JMS, Cron, etc.) services (XML and image pipeline processing, RDBMS access, SMTP/POP client, etc), tools (debugger, unit testing, etc.) and a rich set of supported programming languages (Java, Python, JavaScript, Groovy, Beanshell, XRL, DPML, etc.).

NetKernel has been used to build a wide range of applications, from innovative, RESTful games (such as the bundled Ping Pong application), web sites, corporate information integration systems, digital libraries, and high-performance AJAX based systems.

As Andre, Mike, and of course Mena have already said more eloquently than I can, Vox is out and it's fantastic.

Without sounding overly grandiose, Vox is the natural progression of the Internet as a social platform. The friends and family features are perfect - you only share what you want with who you want to. And just as Livejournal and Flickr augment your Internet life instead of trying to replace it, Vox plays nice with other open publishing platforms and blogging services.

I don't want to venture too into the world of the negative, but it's not secret that today the majority of web projects and applications are shamelessly mediocre. Too often social websites just become a series of chores and obstacles. List your friends, check for comments, don't miss that "important" piece of news - it's basically furniture dusting. Vox is the exact opposite - of course it rewards you for participation and sharing but it also doesn't punish you if you're simply too busy to spend time blogging - it's always fun.

I can't wait to see what it's like when more of my family and friends (and enemies!) are on Vox - my only frustration to date has been wanting to shout from the mountaintops about how great it is. Now that frustration is gone. Vox rocks!

Multifunctional Picture viewer and Video control script for Second Life.

Microsoft have unveiled a completely new image file format, called Windows Media Photo (.wmp files), at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference, which will apparently be of better quality at half the size of a comparable JPEG image.

Google Cleans Ajax for Java
Very interesting.. Will have to give it a shot..
From the article:
The Google Web Toolkit (GWT) released this week is a framework that converts a standard Java application into Ajax that will work in all browsers.

FMJ - Freedom for Media in Java
From the site:
FMJ is an open-source project with the goal of providing a replacement/alternative to Java Media Framework (JMF).

JMF is still dead in the water, despite some folks from Sun making a little bit of noise a couple of months back. Let's hope this effort keeps it going.

qp: Command Line QuickTime Player

QTCoffee

qt_tools

Here's an overdue product -- a USB WiFi client with an antenna connector. WIFI-Link's USB adapter (WL-USB-RSMAP) has a female reverse polarity (RP) SMA connector so you can choose from a huge variety of WiFi antennas (in addition to the one that comes with it).

The MSRP of $49.50 is reasonable. In quantities of 100, it's only $29/each. Coupled with a 16db Vagi ($35, left) it may be just the ticket for residential penetration of WiFi city clouds. It's compatible with Windows 98se/ME/2000/XP and offers up to 256-bit WEP and WPA2 protection.

USB clients are a snap to install. USB cords are cheap and available at any store. USB clients also eliminate expensive, easily broken PC card connectors, RF cable losses and power cords.

The key to "city cloud" residential penetration is a strong signal with a low ($30-$60) CPE price. This may be the proverbial "it".

Miller Puckette, the original creator of Max and an ongoing presence in developing its open source cousin, Pure Data (Pd), recently told the Pd mailing list he had compiled Pd for Intel Macs. You can download the Intel-native version on his Website:

Software by Miller Puckette

(Curiously, he calls them “iMacs”, but unless he’s modified the UI to look nice on white computers, I think that means Intel Macs!) This is the first step on what should soon bring the full-fledged Pd platform to Intel Macs. In the meantime, I would honestly suggest booting into one of the excellent Intel Linux distributions on this machine, since Pd runs very well on Linux. But it’s good news, nonetheless.

I keep hearing wonderful things about Pd, even from Max/MSP users who use it as to complement Max on various projects. We’ve got a good thread going on the CDM forums about how to learn Pd, alongside a previous thread on open source sound tools, and I just looked through various Pd tutorials on a site called Streaming Suitcase. If you’ve ever got Pd patches you’d like to share, let us know.

learning, Mac, Mactel, open source, Pd, software

p://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/createdigitalmusic?a=vDSDjr">

Here's a rather special Media Recorder, not really the kind that you will see in everybody's home. The Samsung SVR-1650 is a media recorder and more specifically a standalone DVR for security purposes, it's capable of receiving data from 16 video sources, then encode all that into Mpeg4 at 480fps in 720x480 and store it onto its 250GB HDD (2TB optional) and burn it onto DVD... Cooool!

Want a truly powerful device for interfacing with motors, sensors, lights, and more? CDM’s assistant editor and Web ninja Jaymis Loveday and I are both excited about the upcoming MAKE Controller Kit, built by MakingThings (of Teleo fame). MAKE has started taking preorders, and shipping should start in a few weeks. You might want to preorder early; this run could sell out given the rapid growth of MAKE Magazine. (If you’re not reading and you’re into DIY, run and get a subscription.)

MAKE Controller Kit

Why is it cool?

It’s 32-bit and much faster than even more-expensive competitors, it’s surprisingly cheap for its capabilities ($150), it’s open source, you can count on lots of documentation and examples from MAKE (well, certainly from me, if you bug me enough), and software for interfacing with Processing, Flash, Max/MSP/Jitter, Pd, and C/C++ is all included. That makes it both an incredible bargain and unusually versatile. And it’s great to see MakingThings, which had previously made proprietary hardware, go open source and publish their firmware, even if you never touch it.

The only real problem I can see with the Controller Kit is that it’s overkill for some jobs, larger because of its expanded I/O, and not likely the kind of thing you’d build yourself. There will still be a place for simple USB and MIDI sensor boards (hence we’re covering those today).

The current issue of Make Magazine has a great story on how the board came to be, the process of designing it, and the design goals.

DIY, Electronics, hardware, homebrew, physical computing, Sensors

Powered by three LEDS rather than the traditional lamp, Mitisubishi's PK10, they claim, is the world's smallest projector. The Japanese electronics giant showed just what the PK10 PocketProjector can do when it was installed in a concept car of theirs. Whilst mounted, the projector was used to display various data on a transparent screen on the dashboard.

The PK10 PocketProjector features your everyday RCA inputs on the back, allowing users to connect any number of electronic devices to the projector for some wholesome projector fun.

Mitubishi hails the projector's low cost as a major coup, yet doesn't bother to release price or availability information, if it's coming out for consumers at all.

Mitsubishi PK10 PocketProjector - Worlds Smallest Projector Tried Out In A Mitsubishi Concept CT Care [Mobile Whack via Ubergizmo]

 
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If you're eager to converse without Uncle Sam listening in, PGP creator Philip Zimmermann has released a new free beta of software that will encrypt VoIP calls. Dubbed Zfone, the software uses Diffie-Hellman to generate a per-session key for VoIP calls using the new ZRTP protocol Zimmermann proclaims is better than alternatives.

"better than the other approaches to secure VoIP, because it achieves security without reliance on a PKI, key certification, trust models, certificate authorities, or key management complexity that bedevils the email encryption world. It also does not rely on SIP signaling for the key management, and in fact does not rely on any servers at all. It performs its key agreements and key management in a purely peer-to-peer manner over the RTP packet stream. It interoperates with any standard SIP phone, but naturally only encrypts the call if you are calling another ZRTP client."

The software is free, and available for Mac OS-X, Linux, and Windows XP. Of course it won't work with Skype and other popular solutions, so you'll have to run a softphone like X-Lite, Gizmo, or SJphone as per the FAQ.

Symella, a Gnutella client for Symbian Smartphones
Listening to a presentation about this now. Pretty interesting but will have to wait to get back to NYC before I can try it (data isn't working in Europe for me).
From the site:
Symella is a Gnutella client for Symbian smartphones. Gnutella is a Peer-to-Peer file sharing network system with many clients (and servers) available on various desktop operating systems (for desktop Gnutella clients check out this site).
It is used for exchanging files, especially music, MP3 files. Because mobile phones have limited bandwidth and small memory cards, this client focuses only for downloading, not sharing. It is available on Series 60 and Series 80.

The blip.tv guys are some of the most clued in video technology guys around. Sure, blip.tv is no youTube, but thank god for that. They have a much brighter future. They did it again today, and launched a “very unofficial” Windows Movie Maker plugin.

It worked perfectly for me, here’s the movie.

Super easy!

Windows Movie Maker comes pre-installed on every Windows XP computer (it’s in the accessories folder in your programs), and for simple movies it’s actually quite nice. The plugin is a download and it installs in about 12 seconds (yes, I timed it). I don’t know how they did it, but the site mentions “Blip.tv support in Windows Movie Maker is not endorsed in any way by Microsoft”.

This will make me from a lazyvlogger (who doesn’t post often) perhaps into an active vlogger. It’s really cool. Add blip’s cross-post to your blog functionality, and you got a 1-click winner.

Here’s a screenshot:

Laurus has an Instructable and video of a DIY Bicycle mounted steady cam project - "I wanted to shoot some video while riding my road bike, but didn't want to deal with a helmet mounted camera and of course I didn't want to hold the camera in my hand. An initial attempt at mounting the DV camera was totally unsatisfactory, so my next step was to build a camera mount that would absorb some of the shock providing a better quality video." - Link.

[Read this article] [Comment on this article]

We offer the freedom to create, play, and learn from technology without always being "tethered" to a PC or videogame console.

Yep, finally. There are two files. First, the cards:
Download GameGame_cards_Release1.0_printouts.pdf (64.1K)

I hope they print out okay, I did some tweaking to the colors so that they would work better in B/W as well. I suggest they should be glued onto cardboard for better endurance.

Second, there is a rule manual, with some additional info about the concept and its premises:
Download GameGame-RuleManual.pdf (2751.8K)

Without doubt, there are rule omissions, typos, and such. Please comment on those here for version 1.1.

I would be very grateful to hear about any experiences with the game. Please use the comment function so that anyone visiting can see. You can also e-mail me directly.My thanks to everyone who goes into the trouble of setting the game up!

Checking the comments on my post to slashdot about streaming myth to your phone, theres one from a MythWeb developer (MythWeb being a standard MythTV plugin) which mentions they are actively working to add a flash app that gives you web video access to your tv recordings in the spirit of "google video/youtube". That's quite awesome. Are there phones which do flash?

Asymptote is a powerful descriptive vector graphics language that provides a natural coordinate-based framework for technical drawing

Daniel Shiffman >> MovieMaker Processing Library
Dan put up a movie export library for Processing.. Cool!

Sun blesses Java phone
With a nice set of libraries.. Might have to get me one of these :-)

People With Ideas ion 1.0 RC3 and iondb.com
Just had a short opportunity to try out the new ion and iondb. Haven't had a chance to get some heavy usage but right off the bat the webstart is great! The db is fantastic as well, sharing what you are watching with others is one of the first steps to making video on the internet more social and community orientated. Keep going!

One of these days I will contribute a bit back to this project.

VScratch allows a visual transcription of every elements used for scratch composition. It transposes all sound nuances made by the rotation of the record: the variations of speed, audio spectrum and volume.

Narrator - Handy Mac app for reading out stories or scripts. Can give each script character a different voice, and leave a gap for you to say your lines.

projects on ionized air... not holographic

camNet is a P2P Network to exchange Webcam images and videos. Therefore the P2P Network is aware of the location of it's participants and efficient location-based search is possible.

Filed under: Digital Cameras, GPS, Handhelds, Home Entertainment, Portable Audio, Portable Video

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Java app automatically downloads TV shows that you add to a subscriber list (like a pirate TiVo).

Electrical tape wearing thin holding together my old cell phone (Samsung i500), I decided it was time to give in and upgrade to a new phone. I drank the kool-aid on a 2 year Sprint contract given the discounts both on the phone and in my monthly service, and in the end settled on the Samsung a920. It's an EVDO enabled phone with Sprint's $15 unlimited monthly data service. Playing around with the mobile TV functionality (that's an extra $10/month but I was enjoying the first month free), I had one of those lightning bolt moments.

Why not stream my own video to the phone? Better yet, why not just automate my MythTV to convert my recorded programs and automatically have them ready to be streamed whenever I care to watch them on the phone?

A bit of research later, I discovered SlingBox can stream your tv to your phone, but it needs to be a Windows mobile phone and then there's the monthly service fees and the box to buy. I also found random mythtv devotees with similar ideas at least as far back as January 2005, but couldn't otherwise find a concise guide or more information. Inspired by ZooVision, I knew it was possible for users to stream their own content to their phone, it was just a matter of putting the pieces all together. A couple hours of tinkering later, and I've got a working solution... my "tivo" on my cell phone wherever there's sprint evdo access. So here are the steps:

1. Get MythTV up and running. I won't go into that, but it's worth the hassle even if I couldn't stream it to my cell phone.
2. Follow these directions which will get you an updated version of ffmpeg (named ffmpeg3gp) and a myth3gp script which, in combination, allow you to take Myth recorded video and convert it to 3gp, a mobile video format standard that most multimedia phones support. However, instead of using the myth3gp script from there, you'll likely want to use this myth3gp script as I've included a couple of necessary changes. Save that txt file as /usr/local/bin/myth3gp on your Myth box.
3. Create a directory to hold your 3gp videos on your Myth system. Open up the myth3gp script from the previous step and change the line that says:

   out="/mnt/drive2/myth3gp"

   to:

   out="/directory/for/saving/your/3gp/videos"

4. Install gpac. Once you've compiled and installed gpac, it will provide you with an executable called MP4Box which is used to convert the 3gp file from step two into a 3gp file that is streaming enabled. The myth3gp script calls MP4Box to take care of this for us.
5. Find an internet connected server which can house your 3gp videos and be available to stream them at will to your phone. On said server you'll need to install Apple's Darwin Streaming Server. Installing it can be a bit of pain, but just be sure to have port 554 open so that it can handle the rtsp streaming protocol. For me, getting Darwin to work took the most effort. If your MythTV box has a static IP and is internet accessible, that should work fine, but in my case I'm uploading the videos to another server.
6. We're in the homestretch. We've got programs to convert Myth recorded video to a phone friendly format, and we've got a server that can stream them to our phone. We just now need an automated process to convert the video and upload it to the server running Darwin and we'll be in phone tv nirvana. Myth can do this automation for us. You'll need to exit out of Myth and run:

   mythtv-setup

   From there, choose the "General" menu item and hit enter until you get to the "Job Queue" screen. Put a checkmark in "Allow User Job #1 jobs and continue to the next screen until you get the page with label "User Job #1 description". Give it a description like "Myth 3GP" and for the command, use (note the quotes):

   /usr/local/bin/myth3gp %DIR%/%FILE% 
   
   "%STARTTIME%~~~%TITLE~~~%SUBTITLE%"

   Save your changes, exit, restart the mythbackend and restart Myth.
7. With Myth restarted, go into Utilities / Setup -> Setup -> TV Settings -> General and click through until you get the "General (Jobs)" page. On this page, put a check in the checkbox next "Run User Job #1 On New Recordings". This will ensure that our process gets run after each new recording. Important Note: For all existing recurring recordings that you had prior to setting up Myth3GP, you'll need to manually edit the recording options and in "Post Recording Processing", you'll need to switch its setting so that it says "Run 'Myth3GP'".
8. If your using your local Myth system for Darwin streaming, just be sure that Darwin knows where to find the 3gp files on your system. Otherwise, edit the myth3gp script from step number two and set the darwin_username, darwin_hostname and darwin_dir as appropriate for your external server. At the bottom of the script, it uses scp to transfer the file from your Myth system to your Darwin server. Though, for everything to be automated, you'll need to set up scp to not require a password. Directions for password free ssh/scp are short and sweet. Once you can transfer files between systems sans password, you are good to go.
9. The final step. On your Darwin machine, make sure you have a web server running (apache), php installed and place this php script somewhere in a web accessible folder. It's job is to scan your 3gp movie folder for movies and generate a webpage with rtsp:// links so that you can access your recordings from your phone. Edit the php script and change $directory to the directory path for your 3gp videos and set $hostname to your hostname. With that installed, you're done. You can manually convert your old recordings by starting the "Myth3GP" job on them and any new recording will automatically get the mobile treatment. Fire up the URL for the mythmobile php script and start streaming.

mph. Indeed some beautiful uses of fair use. Fair use to record the tv program to my hard drive... Fair use to convert the video format to one viewable by my cell phone... Fair use to stream it to my cell phone for my own personal enjoyment. Now imagine trying to do any of this with the broadcast flag in place.

Atmel and Wavesat said Tuesday they were working together in California to design a deployable WiMax Customer Premise Equipment that will cost under $100.

The script can detect the Flash plug-in in all major web browsers (on Mac and PC) and is designed to make embedding Flash movies as easy as possible.

There is now a perl XSPF module on CPAN. This is written by Dan Sully from Slim Devices for use on their Squeezebox device. What this means is that you can enter the URL of a playlist in the Squeezebox controller and listen to it on your living room speakers.

The suit is modeled on the human skeletal form using rotational sensors placed on the joints. The GypsyMIDI simply plugs into a MIDI interface and arm movements are converted into a real-time stream of MIDI data. The mapping interface eXo-software allows the user to define how the movements are translated into MIDI control, including the ability to trigger notes, generate continuous control commands or even play scales.

In what has clearly been a busy day for Panasonic, the company today announced that it has begun developing technology to record HD video onto Secure Digital (SD) cards using the AVCHD format. This format, which was also announced today, will be implemented in the DVD camcorder, as well.

"Panasonic's efforts to develop the technology to record HD images onto SD Memory Cards and construct a new playback and editing environment, in addition to its establishing the AVCHD standard for 8 cm DVDs, will serve to further stimulate development of products that take advantage of the characteristics of both media," said Mr. Akihiro Nakatani, Director of Video Camera Business Unit, Panasonic AVC Networks Company.

The manufacturer has already put one SD-based camcorder on the market, the standard definition SDR-S100, which was released in September of last year. Panasonic did not specify any specific models, either DVD or SD-based, that will utilize the AVCHD format. Burt Desmond, Vice President of the Optical Group in Charge Product and Marketing, was able to confirm, however, that the public could expect to see products delivered "in late 2006 or early 2007, depending on the market."

Vaguely PAK like file format supporting compression and read/write operation (as zipfiles are not that well suited to read/write).

Today at comp.compression, Brendan G Bohannon announced a vaguely PAK like file format supporting compression and read/write operation (as zipfiles are not that well suited to read/write). The format will assume no fragmentation of smaller files, rather a file is to be moved if it expands beyond the space available to it.

Current default file extension will be “zpk” and will use deflate with a 64kB window. The CRC algo will be the same algo used in ZIP and PNG for example.

You can checkout the code and format specs.

We've been working hard on ccPublisher 2 lately, and I'm pleased to announce that the third beta is available for download. You can find release notes and downloads for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux here. This release is stable enough for regular use. If you've tried ccPublisher in the past and want to upload a work to the Internet Archive, I encourage you to try this release. We're still working on ironing out the last few wrinkles, but overall this release is more stable and flexible than previous ones.

ccPublisher 2 doesn't add lots of new features to the original ccPublisher feature set, instead opting to focus on the infrastructure of the application. I think it's a strategy that's paying off, and will make the addition of new features far easier in the future. We're already seeing results, as bugs and major improvements to the code base are far easier than they were with ccPublisher 1.

If you have any suggestions, ideas, or bug reports, we'd love to hear them. You can file bugs in the ccPublisher tracker, or join the cc-devel mailing list to communicate with the developers.

Still cameras that record HDTV may require solid state memory to keep them compact. That means MPEG-4 AVC encoding will be required to lower bandwidth.

Panasonic and Sony took a step in that direction today when they jointly announced a new MPEG-4 digital-video-camera/recorder format.

The new "AVCHD" format, which will allow recording and playback of high-definition 1080i and 720p video onto 8-cm DVD media, far smaller than today's conventional 120-cm DVD discs, or even the 12-cm miniature DVDs currently used for recording.

Separately, Panasonic said it would use the AVCHD standard to allow consumers to record HD video to standard SD memory cards.

Neither Panasonic nor Sony said when products using the technology would be sold. At the high end, the AVHCD format will allow recording at 1080i at 60 frames per second (1080/60i), 1080/50i, and 1080/24p; while midrange 720/60p, 720/50p, and 720/24p formats will be complemented by a 480/60i format at the low end. In HD, a bit rate around 18Mbps is used.

The AVHCD format will use the AC-3 audio codec to acheive between 64 to 640 Kbits/s of audio data over 5.1 channels, or 1.5-Mbits/s of PCM audio over two speakers.

Panasonic believes the SD Memory Card is the recording media best suited for video cameras, and has already released a professional-use HD video camera that uses SD memory card technology. SANYO's $799 Xacti HD1 can record both 720p high-definition video and 5.1 megapixel digital still images to a standard SD flash memory card. It can record over 21 minutes of 720p HD video on a 1-Gigabyte SD card and 42 minutes on a 2-Gigabyte card.

A cost/effective MPEG-4 AVC encoder might be the tricky bit. Maybe Panasonic will add an audio input jack on their still cameras, too. One can hope.

A good movie overview of what's new in Drupal:

4.7-whats-new.mov (video/quicktime Object)

Kowon (not to be mistaken for Cowon) presented these rather cool TV-glasses at the COMM Korea 2006 fair. They can be connected to your TV and provide a superior quality of viweing broadcasts. The manufacturer claims that the experience is similar to watching a 32" LCD Tv at a distance of 2 metres. The image is displayed on a 4.8mm by 4.2mm micro LCD screen, and personally, I would really like to test these... wait & see...

By CutKillAvince

"More than 100 page layouts with a single CSS file at just 1.82KB"

Three computer geeks at the U of T are renowned developers of anti-censorship software, including a program out this month that could allow people to outwit the world's most repressive regimes

The diffractive planar optics is combined with a microdisplay source, such as micro LCD, LCOS or OLED, to provide the users with a color video image equivalent to a 40-in. screen viewed from a distance of 7 feet.

Make magazine today features SylphIRC, an IRC client for the Nintendo DS.

Also, Nintendo announced the DS Lite's release date and pricing in the states- (which everyone reading this probably already knows now): June 11th, for $129.99, just in white (we're assuming they will roll out additional colors later).

A pattern is emerging. JVC puts a product out on the market, one that everyone wants. The hot new thing. Then Sony, seizing on the opportunity, leapfrogs over JVC with a slightly better version, and takes home the spoils. It happened with high definition, and it's happening again now. Two years ago JVC unveiled their hard disk drive (HDD) Everio series. This January Sony introduced the DCR-SR100. And we have give them credit; this is a solid camcorder, and unquestionably better than the JVC competitors.

(Continued at CamcorderInfo)

Sites for generating RSS feeds for feedless sites

"NetworkX (NX) is a Python package for the creation, manipulation, and study of the structure, dynamics, and functions of complex networks."

Rockbox is an open source replacement firmware for mp3 players. It runs on a number of different models.

Render any content that runs in Firefox as a texture on some geometry in OpenGL.

Samsung has developed what it calls the first amorphous silicon (a-Si) single chip TFT-LCD panel that can actually reproduce colors in high resolution. What this means for mere mortals is that Samsung can make mobile devices even tinier and thinner, where one chip can do the work of numerous chips that came before it.

We're thinking that this 7-inch WGA (854x480) panel might be perfect for some sort of mobile video device, perhaps one with a touchscreen. We're also hoping that the quality of its video is somewhere near that of the picture above.

Samsung Electronics Develops 7-inch WVGA, Single-Chip LCD [AVing.net]

 
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Colorspace has updated their website, post-NAB.

"We know most of you would like more than a few short sentences about our products, and it's not that we want to keep you in the dark.. but we firmly believe in under-promising and over-delivering. At the moment, we're knee deep in engineering development and working with beta-testers to ensure that when our retail products do become available, they will work correctly 100% of the time, and we can stand by the specs that we claim."

The info that they DO share is pretty scant, but it's at least something:

TRUE35 camera
35mm-sized CMOS imager (24mm x 18mm, bayer)
Raw 2K 2048 x 1556 output

TRUE16 camera
Super16-sized CMOS imager (bayer)
Raw 1K 1280 x 960 output

Both digital cinema cameras are said to be built around a flexible and modular architecture. They also mention (again, in passing) their TRUERECORDER line of solid-state and disk-based recorders. Looks like RED without the 4K...

Their first product will be a 1GB SD card with built in Wifi. For about the same price as a 1 GB flash card sells for today - $100.

Metadata editor for the iPod, make podcasts show up under the podcast menu, TV shows under that menu, etc. Plenty of GUI front-ends available

We already spoke about Croquet in this blog ; but until a few days ago, only a prerelease, "alpha" version, named Jasmine was available on the net. Last week, the first beta version of croquet (full of bugs, but existing) can be downloaded at www.opencroquet.org. Among the creators of Croquet, one may find Alan Kay, one of the greatest pioneers of computer science, former member of the Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research center) where the modern computer was invented in the 70’s.

What is croquet ? it might be the future of computing. As its creators say: "…a new open source software platform for creating deeply collaborative multi-user online applications. It features a network architecture that supports communication, collaboration, resource sharing, and synchronous computation among multiple users. Using Croquet, software developers can create powerful and highly collaborative multi-user 2D and 3D applications and simulations."

documentation they add:

"There are no boundaries in the system. We are creating an environment where anything can be created; everything can be modified, all in the 3D world. There is no separate development environment, no user environment. It is all the same thing. We can even change and author the worlds in collaboration with others inside them while they are operating."

"The existing operating systems are like the castles that were owned by their respective Lords in the Middle Ages. They were the centers of power, a way tocontrol the population and threaten the competition. Sometimes, a particular Lord would become overpowering, and he would declare himself as King. Thiswas great for the King. And not too bad for the rest of the nobles, but in the end – technology progressed and people started blowing holes in the sides ofthe castles. The castles were abandoned. Technology enables this."

Media Player Test

This script is designed to find all media links on a page and give them an inline (embedded) player. This script requires no special code in the html, all you have to do is include a link to your video (or audio) file. This script is designed to work even for videobloggers who dont know anything about DIV tags, IDs, classes, Javascript, or onClicks ... and who don't or can't worry about crafting specially coded links with onClicks in their posts. The script will do that for them.

Anybody know of other, similar, things?

Earlier this month, Yahoo purchased much of Meedio and everyone speculated that it would bear fruit in the form of a future DVR software package from Yahoo. Well that happened much sooner than I thought with the launch of the free Yahoo Go for TV software.

Dave Zatz and Eirik Solheim have detailed reviews featuring screenshots and experiences with the install and use of the package. Sounds like it integrates much of Yahoo's properties (like Yahoo Photos and Launchcast for Music) as well as act as a DVR.

This is a turn-up for the books…ComVu "has announced the "world’s first" demonstration of live video broadcasts from a 3G camera-phone using DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcasting - Handheld) protocols". That’s right — from a cameraphone. The service is called PocketCaster…from the demo video it works by setting up a VPN (virtual private network) to ComVu's servers, which is then broadcast over the web or to mobile phones, apparently using DVB-H technology. To be clear, it’s not using DVB-H technology to get the video from the handset to the servers, but from the servers to all the viewers. ComVu is working closely with Modeo, the main company rolling out DVB-H services in the US, and expects to roll out its services in 30 major US cities throughout 2007.

JVC Professional Products Company expanded its ProHD line with the introduction of the GY-HD200U and GY-HD250U HDV camcorders. The GY-HD200U is targeted at independent filmmakers and stringers, while the GY-HD250U is intended for studio use as well as electronic news gathering.

(Continued at CamcorderInfo/)

This is a seriously cool product from Bella. It's a $300 device that piggybacks with any old iPod or external hard drive and allows you to record DV/HDV footage from camcorders via firewire.

"Catapult is the world's first device to allow capture of video footage from DV or HDV video cameras directly to iPods or virtually any USB drive, and begin editing immediately. A battery powered device not much larger than a Blackberry, the Catapult eliminates the time consuming and tedious task of digitizing video footage."

Time-lapse, remote switch, and motion detection recording will be supported. And pre-record/post-record intervals are configurable, so you can choose to automatically capture the seconds preceding you hitting the record button, and a preset time after you stop it. Very nice.

The device works with both Windows and Mac systems, and will be available "the second half of 2006".

Casio has developed RFID'd rubber wristbands for fitness clubs. The training facilities would have to fit each piece of their training equipment with a a PDA that reads the wristband tags. The PDA would recognize who's using the equipment and display a personalized training session. It also records and displays personal health-related data.

The RFID-tagged wristbands can also do the usual stuff: manage check-in/out, track members' activities, monitor kids' attendance to a fitness program, call fitness club staff in an emergency situation, and serve for cashless payment.

Casio hopes to sell the system to gyms, hot springs, swimming schools, and public bathhouses as well.
Whatever! As long as that bracelet doesn't start to beep loudly when I'm cheating on the treadmill, I'm all for it.

Via RFID in Japan.

Robert Price has the skinny on Nokia's three new NSeries phones, the N72, the N73 and the N93. Nokia has a demo, specs and description.

• The N72 (pdf) has a 2 megapixel camera, integrated digital music player, integrated browser, FM radio and Visual Radio. It runs on the S60 2nd Edition Operating System.

• The N73 (pdf) has a 3.2 megapixel camera, auto focus, FM radio, integrated stereo speakers with 3D sound. It runs on the S60 3rd Edition Operating System.

• The N93 (pdf) has a 3.2 megapixel camera with 3x optical zoom, video capture, TV connection, integrated WiFi (b/g) and FM Radio. It runs on the S60 3rd Edition Operating System and features internal memory of up to 50 MB, which can be further expanded with a hot swap miniSD card of up to 2 GB, allowing users to capture up to 90 minutes of MPEG-4 VGA at 30 fps. It's expected to be available in July 2006 with an unsubsidized price of 550 euros.

The new devices support direct uploading of photos to Flickr from the phone. The Flickr uploader can also be repointed to other services like Typepad. If it runs on the 2nd edition S60 platform (i.e. the N72), it may be back portable to the current 2nd edition phones out there. Time to keep an eye on the Nokia download sites incase it sneaks out there.

Nokia seems to be the only company that makes a decent camera phone. I understand that a tiny CCD/CMOS chip can't compete with larger chips in digital cameras, but those lenses -- gosh, what are they thinking?

Nokia's Carl Zeiss lens make a big difference, enabling camphones (with MPEG-4 video) to be competitive with dedicated cameras. Another plus is the WiFi connection. It's perfect for moblogging. Shoot and upload.

Nokia teamed with Six Apart so you can upload posts to your TypePad blog account. TypePad's SplashBlog runs on a wide variety of camera phones and their Widgets provide flexibility. Nokia's Lifeblog 2.0 comes in two parts; software that is loaded onto phones plus compatible software for PCs.

Nokia and Yahoo! announced a deal today to make it easy for mobile photographers to upload and add comments to Flickr. Consumers can connect to their online Flickr accounts without the need to download or install any additional applications. The Nokia N93, Nokia N73 and Nokia N72 are the first Nokia Nseries devices to support Flickr.

You can upload full size photos to Flickr directly from the camera or their image Gallery application. Once uploaded to Flickr, photos can be sent to your blog, as well as edited, organized, tagged and shared. SocialCanvas has a different approach. It enables multiple people to simultaneously zoom in and move around. Extremely high resolution photos are stored on-line, but they're displayed fast in screen resolution.

Of course, WiFi enabled cameras are not standing still.

Kodak is upgrading their Wi-Fi camera this summer to work directly with hotspots and ISPs. The new 6 megapixel model will cost $299 with a $99 Wi-Fi card as an option. Their original 4 megapixel WiFi camera is now $399. Kodak also announced a dual lens BLUETOOTH camera ($449) with 6 megapixels and a 10X optical zoom (right). It shoots MPEG-4 videos at 640 x 480 and 320 x 240 @ 30fps.

EyeFilm combines storage and Wi-Fi into a single SD card and should cost around $99 for a 1 gig version. Whether it can effectively convert a non wireless camera into a wireless one remains to be seen.

You Tube and Google Video may soon allow similar mobile posting. Poynter explains; with a cellphone, you're a journalist.

Want regime change? Talk to the Fins. They are instigating an open revolution.

A web-based rich media aggregator and player. Manage both text and rich media RSS feeds through your browser. With the proprietary player/viewer, you can view and listen to video blogs, podcasts, streaming video, audio, text blogs and news.

Shrook is a next-generation news reader that is not only easy to use, but offers advanced features not available to Mac users anywhere else. It supports all versions of RSS and Atom. Oh, and it's free.

Article describing how to implement automatic spelling correction for the Lucene search framework.

Elgato, the creators of various software and hardware PVR solutions for the Mac market today released the EyeTV 250.

It only does analog cable/antenna recording, but it does so in a package about the size of an iPod, which is pretty impressive and goes well with the sleek, uncluttered look of most Apple systems. It's $199 and I could see this being a great way to record and load up shows for a video iPod (EyeTV 2 software does this automatically). If I still took a subway to work every day, I'd buy this in a heartbeat to load up The Daily Show and the Colbert Report for my commute each day.

enikos provides the first set of tools that allow users to browse, create and customise digital items compliant with the MPEG-21 standard.

"This adds a new option to the right click menu in Firefox which will send URLS to XBMC (Xbox Media Center) for onscreen playback."

HubLog: VLC, XSPF, Dapper and Tango

I've added a plain XSPF button to Playr, which produces a playlist that can be opened with the external VLC application.

The indirect cause was XSPF support (still buggy) in the latest version of the VLC media player:

The newest version of VLC (OS X version on MacUpdate here), which will eventually be 0.8.5, now supports XSPF playlists. This means that you can make a simple XML playlist filled with URLs to audio (MP3, MP4, WMA, Real Audio, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, etc) and video (a similar list of open and closed formats) and have them all play one after the other, possibly for the first time ever.

Visual representation of the amount of data your USB flash drive is holding. The more data you have, the bigger this thing gets [2GB cap]. The balloon like quality is powered by a minco pump from within the device itself. Load it full of data depending on how much of a ergh pant bulge you want.

Ripple is a monetary system based on trust that already exists between people in real-world social networks. By cutting out the institutional middlemen, Ripple is both more community-oriented and more efficient as a means of exchange.

Mighty Seek - Web Application Security Podcast and Blog PodPress
Looks like a nice and fully featured WP plugin..

Features

Full featured and automatic feed generation (RSS2, iTunes and ATOM)
Auto Generation of enclosure tag
Preview of what your Podcast will look like on iTunes
Podcast Download stats
Support for Premium Content (Pay Only)
Makes adding a Podcast to a Post very simple
View MP3 Files ID3 tags when your Posting
Control over where the player will display within your post.
Support for various formats, including Video Podcasting
Supports unlimited number of media files.
Automatic Media player for MP3, MP4, MOV, FLV, ASF, WMV, AVI, and more, with inline and Popup Window support.
Preview image for videos
Easy way to link to your podcast within iTunes

As of OGLE 0.3b, it is possible to capture texture coordinates (UV) for vertices that have them. This is enabled by the CaptureTextureCoords flag. Coupled with the fact that GLIntercept writes out to disk images for all the texture maps, this allows you to re-texture your capture in Maya with a little menial labor, eg:

This has tested to work accurately on some applications (World Of Warcraft) but on others it seems to misbehave, so it is disabled by default. I am working with Damian Trebilco, author of GLIntercept, to give OGLE the power to do this image-texture-assigning work automatically. Give it time...

Originally from OGLE: OpenGLExtractor by Eyebeam R&D blogs, ReBlogged by fruminator on Mar 31, 2006 at 02:58 PM

Daversy is a source control tool for relational databases.

That means that it can help you do the following things :

• Keep a history of changes to your database.
• Instantly create a database for any version of your software.
• Automatically generate upgrade scripts to update your deployed servers.
• Merge changes made by different developers on separate database and deploy them to an integration server.

open the top of the can, speak, close, shake...oh yeah... the hackers are so damn brilliant...sampling and mixing taken to a whole new level...

EuclidVision should be able to reduce the current MPEG-4 attainable 700 MB file size for 2-hour long videos down to 50MB – finally making feature length movies as “swappable” as MP3s.

Diva is a project to build an easy to use, scalable, open-source video editing software for the Gnome desktop.

movie matrix stuff

The Movie Toolbox makes extensive use of transformation matrices to define graphical operations that are performed on movies when they are displayed. A transformation matrix defines how to map points from one coordinate space into another coordinate space. By modifying the contents of a transformation matrix, you can perform several standard graphical display operations, including translation, rotation, and scaling. The Movie Toolbox provides a set of functions that make it easy for you to manipulate translation matrices. Those functions are discussed in QuickTime Movie Internals Guide. The remainder of this section provides an introduction to matrix operations in a graphical environment.

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) has announced an evolution path to over 100Mbps by adopting WiMedia Alliance's version of ultra-wideband (UWB). WiMedia's UWB, also called "wireless USB", is supported by Intel, Microsoft, Sony and Nokia among others.

The UltraWideBand spec split into two incompatible camps,  WiMedia's UWB is not compatible with the UWB Forum standard, promoted by Motorola and Freescale, also called "cable-free" USB.

The Bluetooth SIG will work together with WiMedia to optimize the use of UWB in Bluetooth and to obtain needed worldwide regulatory clearances - something they expect to achieve early in 2007.

The final spec and prototype chipsets are expected to be available around Q3 of 2007. Bluetooth+UWB devices should hit the market early in 2008.

Simple devices such as mono headsets for use with phones will likely remain with the current 2.4GHz Bluetooth technology in order to keep costs down. Initial UWB chipsets are likely to add an extra US$10 to US$15 in cost to devices, though they should quickly fall in line with current Bluetooth chipsets that cost a third as much.

The UWB portion of future Bluetooth devices will run on frequencies above 6GHz, unlike the traditional 2.4GHz band used by Bluetooth and WiFi devices today. Future devices will negotiate with each other to determine whether traditional 2.4GHz Bluetooth or the new UWB connections should be used for a given task based on bandwidth needs. The Bluetooth SIG is hopeful that the UWB system will be as energy efficient as current Bluetooth devices when used within a similar 10m range.

Related DailyWireless articles include; UWB Overview, UWB in the Chips, MultiBand UWB Chip Gets FCC Approval, Wireless USB 1.0, UWB Range Doubles, UWB Organizations Merging?, Alereon Gets UWB Recognition, UWB RF-ID, Wireless USB Comes Home, and Microsoft Joins UWB Battle.

Ruby library for parsing all sorts of syndication feeds, with preference given to ActiveRecord for caching

I have a robot bunny. He arrived today. He has wifi connectivity, and an API. There are Ning apps, and a Perl module.

Naturally, it’s love.

Originally from Ben Hammersley's Dangerous Precedent, ReBlogged by Yury Gitman on Mar 28, 2006 at 07:09 PM

CyTV is a streaming solution for elgato's EyeTV family of TV tuners. It allows you to watch TV and recorded programs over a local network (wired or wireless) or the internet. You can pause and resume live TV on the client ("timeshift"), and you can also change channels remotely.

Free one-click conversion of video files to the specific MPEG format required to copy video onto your TiVo. No messing around with demuxers or codecs required. They also have one that converts to iPod Video format.

Javascript being pulled from the server

"For developers wanting to create multi-player games, we provide a multi-player ActionScript API and hosted infrastructure at no cost."

Open source game graphics engine, with Python scripting

Samsung announced their 32GB Flash memory HDD for notebooks yesterday. The big advantages of this technology are the speed and the shock resistance, so no way of killing a HDD because of vibrations. Noise will be drastically reduced too, and less heat will be generated, so soon we'll be able to say goodbye to those genital BBQ's!


Samsung Launches NAND Flash-based Solid State Disk
for Mobile PCs

Taipei, Taiwan – March 21, 2006: Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., the leader in advanced semiconductor technology, announced at the Mobile Solution Forum that it has begun offering a 32-Gigabyte (GB) NAND flash-based solid state disk (SSD) -- marking the first time that NAND flash has moved into mobile computing applications.
The 32GB Flash-SSD, which serves the same purpose as a hard disk drive, is a sophisticated data storage medium for notebooks and other mobile computers. It uses instantly-accessible, non-moving NAND flash memory instead of the rotating discs found in hard drives; therefore can upload and download data quickly and quietly with minimal power consumption.
The Flash-SSD weighs only half as much as a comparably-sized hard drive, but reads data three times faster and writes data 1.5 times faster. The SSD uses just five percent of the electricity needed to power a hard disc drive and is noiseless. Its design is free of any motor or other mechanical parts.
The commercialization of Samsung’s 32GB Flash-SSD is a historic milestone for storage devices as it marks the initial entry of NAND flash memory in the mass mobile PC market.
Samsung sees the overall global SSD market surging from US$540 million in 2006 to US$4.5 billion by 2010.

WordPress Multiuser
From the site:
WordPress MU is multi-user version of the famous WordPress blogging application. It is ideal for people wanting to offer a hosted version of WordPress.

This is what I should get up and running for MobVCasting.

I have been waiting for one of these for years. A network PTZ camera that does true standards based streaming. Most of the others from Linksys, DLink and so on seem like they fit the bill but their flavor of "MPEG-4" is only codec deep (if even that) and requires playback to be handled with their proprietary ActiveX or Java players.

Not so with the Axis 214 which not only serves true MPEG-4 content but it is playable with QuickTime and any other player that can handle a standard RTSP MPEG-4 stream. This also means that the streams can be reflected by QuickTime/Darwin Streaming Server to allow for a much larger audience than the camera itself can handle.

Unfortunately, getting it to work with the QuickTime Streaming Server but in the end it was well worth it.

In the interest of saving the rest of the world some time I am posting an email message from Kyle Robertson from Apple's Streaming Server User's Listserv that was immensely helpful.

Mobile WiMAX chip specialist picoChip will start sampling its third generation picoArray processors by mid year. The multi-core processors, dubbed PC202, PC203 and PC205, integrate around 200 individual processors on to each die and deliver over 100GIPs and 25GMACs.

The processors are fully backward compatible with picoChip’s 101 and 102 family of processors that are already designed into products from companies such as Intel, Airspan, Nortel, Fujitsu and Ericsson.

Two of the devices, the PC202 and PC205 integrate an ARM 926EJ-S 280MHz core for control and MAC functionality, the result of a partnership revealed last September. picoChip and Wintegra earlier announced a development platform for mobile WiMAX that integrates picoChip's PC102 picoArray DSP running its IEEE 802.16e PHY with the Wintegra WinMax access processor programmed with 16e MAC software for transport and backhaul.

According to Rupert Baines, vice president of marketing at picoChip, the multi-core processors are “the most competitively prices parts of its type, and are amongst the first to get near the $1/GMAC metric when ordered in volume”.

Reference designs are being readied for both 16d and 16e version WiMAX and W-CDMA cellular systems, including versions for HSDPA that will be software upgradeable to HSUPA.

The entry point PC202 is targeted at access points and client side CPE systems, but Baines stressed, “we will not go down to the handsets side of the business. And we have no wish to go head to head with potential customers such as Intel in for instance the lap-tops business.”

The PC203, with 248 processors, is firmly positioned for basestations and support for algorithms such as MIMO and beamforming. This is meant to be used with external control or network processors. The PC205, which also integrates 248 processors and is suitable for high signal processing needs of, for instance, software defined radios.

Airspan Demonstrated Its Low-Cost, "Pay-as-You-Grow" WiMAX Base Station at CeBIT 2006, and plans to begin shipments of its 3.5 GHz system in April 2006. Their MicroMAX-SOC, is based on the high-performance SQN2010 WiMAX Certified base station design of Sequans. Later in the second quarter, Airspan will introduce support for the 5.8 GHz TDD and 3.3-3.4 GHz TDD bands, followed by a range of other 3.X GHz and 5.X GHz products in second half of 2006.

Airspan's other car, their MacroMAX basestation, uses picoChip components to handle the added funtionality of beamforming and scaleable COFDM found in Mobile WiMAX.

The picoArray chip is said to improve price / performance by combining the price and programmability of a traditional DSP with the performance of a FPGA / ASIC.

Related DailyWireless articles include; PicoChip: Livin' Large, picoChip & ArrayComm, PicoChip Upgrades, Intel WiMax Basestation, Airspan Submits, Airspan/Sequans Declare WiMax Interoperability and Mobile WiMax: It's Done.

With this design, its design is more similar to a steadicam in that it is not a "pogostick" that is vulnerable to moving due to a change in speed.

theres a new kid in town... MediaCoder is a free universal audio/video batch transcoder, putting together lots of excellent audio/video codecs and tools from the open source community into an all-in-one solution, capable of transcoding among different audio/video formats with many extra features.

Web-based operating system with rich text editor, chat, email, RSS, file management, stickies, Flickr RSS, and more

it tracks where it goes, and it remembers where it's been. That's pretty much it. The Track Stick records its own location, time, date, speed, heading and altitude at preset intervals.

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that... gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites.

NADA affords both the technical novice and expert an unified platform for prototyping physical interfaces and digital content - from handheld product concepts to reactive environments that can be connected across the Internet.

hot. gotta imbed these in my site

Technology and market research company BigChampagne is introducing a measurement tool called BCDash to let media companies quickly track how people -- legally or illegally -- use their products online.

The big API news today is that the web as platform now has a new world-class storage system designed specifically for developers: Amazon S3, their Simple Storage Service. Amazon has basically taken the online storage infrastructure behind their core online services and provided a public, fee-based interface to it. There’s now a viable “storage cloud” out there for you to use.

Storage isn’t sexy, but as anyone in IT can tell you: almost nothing’s more important than a reliable storage infrastructure. So it’s good news for web platform developers to have this class of storage service available for whatever they need it for. Here is a key part of your virtual data center.

Yesterday I spoke with Adam Selipsky, Amazon’s Web Services VP of Product Management, and Dave Barth, the Product Manager for Amazon S3. They emphasized that that API was designed to a focus on a core set of functions and do them well.

A couple of examples cited in Amazon’s announcement may trigger ideas on what it might be used for:

• University of California Berkeley “Stardust@Home” Team: Saved money by using Amazon S3 to store and deliver the 60,000 images that represent the data collected from their dust particle aerogel experiment. These images will be delivered to 100,000 volunteers around the world who scan the images looking for dust particles from comet Wild2. Since this phase of the project needs the storage for just a few months they were able to ramp up and back down with less investment.
• CastingWords: This small startup offering podcast transcription services were able to save effort and time by using S3 to store and retrieve the original audio files and the transcribed texts.
• BitTorrent: Oh yes, and there is even a section in the online documentation on how to use S3 for BitTorrent files. For publishers of large, popular files the amount of data actually supplied by S3 can be substantially lower than what it would have been serving the same clients via client/server download. Less data transferred means lower costs for the publisher of the object.

Note also what this isn’t: it’s not an online storage service in the same vein as what you’d get from box.net or their competitors. It is a service for developers and not end users. Here, not only there is no friendly user interface, there is no UI at all. For now you can only get to it via code. It is completely and solely for developers to build tools and applications on top of. Thus eventually there will be pretty tools, OS desktop integration, and so on. Amazon pioneered a bit of this API-only model with their unique Mechanical Turk API.

Nor is it like hacks people have built on top of GMail, those are just handy hacks for some power users (speaking of which, it could be that the often rumored GDrive will provide a comparable API but that remains to be seen and Amazon’s API is live now). And while Amazon is first out of the gate in this league there will certainly be some serious competition from the usual suspects.

What does it cost? It’s $0.15 per gigabyte of storage per month and $0.20 per gigabyte of data transferred. This model is nice because you only pay for what you use, no more, no less, with no setup fees or monthly minimums.

Technical details? It supports both REST and SOAP, but both score high on simplicity. No fancy extras, just core file services: store, retrieve, delete. No nonessential services. The REST API maps these functions directly to the core HTTP RFC 2616 requests: GET, PUT and DELETE. Everything is an Object which is opaque to Amazon. For more details see their site or the Amazon S3 entry here at ProgrammableWeb.

How reliable is the service and is there an SLA? Amazon says this is a four-nines service with 99.99% uptime and that you can trust it because it’s the same platform they run amazon.com on. There is no written SLA in the same form you would get from your ISP. For some this might be an issue, although certainly many SLAs have no teeth anyway. Given the issues that Salesforce.com has encountered, reliability is a key success factor for Amazon. It would be nice someday if they have some form of a service status dashboard similar to the Salesforce.com’s status.salesforce.com/.

The idea that secure, reliable storage for any given application will just “be there up in the cloud” is powerful and this is a big step in that direction.

Sony introduced its MSVR-A10, a digital video recorder that records video from a TV or DVD player via composite or S-video and analog audio inputs, recording the signal directly onto a Memory Stick Pro Duo for playback on the Playstation Portable (PSP). That gives you two to four hours of video on a 2GB Pro Duo memory stick. Available in mid-April, it will sell for $215.

Sony MSVR-A10 Memory Stick video recorder [newlaunches]

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Related: Belkin Developing iPod FM Transmitter, Car Charger
Related: Upgraded PSP for Christmas?
Related: CeBIT '06: Brainic VW-500 Vibrating MP3 Player

This paper will describe the design methodology and the results of using a single 300MHz software configurable processor to achieve H.264 encoding of Standard Definition (SD) video at 30 fps.

QuickTime Embedding WordPress Plugin
I got tired of my XML-RPC posts with QuickTime movies messing up the design of my blog. WordPress automatically would add end param tags and paragraph breaks and all of that inside my Embed and Object tags.
Check it out

2-Way RSS uses HTTP [RFC2616] and XML [XML 1.0] to publish and edit Web resources.

scratch is a new programmable toolkit that enables kids to create their own games, animated stories, and interactive art -- and share their creations with one another over the Net

vadePD is an example PD patch and cocoa application that work together as a test video/3D OS X native application. The Paradiddle framework allows a Cocoa app to commuicate via udp to Pure Data and send/receieve variables.

Jot is a program that lets designers, artists and animators directly annotate 3D computer graphics models (and animation) for stylized (NPR) rendering.

How to build a large, removable, disposable bluescreen for under US$30. Size: 24′ x 8′ | 7m x 2m. [Stormforce Pictures] [digg / movies]

The other big API news to start the week comes from MapQuest with their announcement of the MapQuest OpenAPI. They’re an established player in online mapping but a latecomer to the open API party. It looks like they’re going try and play off their strengths which include high-quality maps and good routing. Here’s the first new MapQuest mashup: mapzierge.

The API itself is a JavaScript-based API that provides:

• Routing - Integrate MapQuest’s ultra-accurate driving directions to show your users exactly how to get there.
• Mapping - Plot multiple locations on a single map. Choose one of our map styles to create a truly integrated look-and-feel with your website.
• Active Point Markers - Add up to 100 active point markers to a single map. You can also add events, like a pop-up box with key information displayed when users click on or roll over the marker.

The limits? Free of charge for non-commercial use within the stated transaction levels of 50,000 combined maps and geocodes and 5,000 routes per day.

MapQuest’s Anthony Pegg is presenting a session on this tomorrow by at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.

And lastly, to go along with the launch of these APIs, they’ve announced a Developers Challenge:

The winning entry will push the mashup genre beyond merely plotting locations on a map, demonstrate some real usefulness to a broader, non commercial community and leverage the full set of tools available in OpenAPI with an emphasis on routing.

March 31st. This has now been added to the ProgrammableWeb /contests page.

OmniFocus enables an "instant focus" function for mobile camera phones in full resolution at 15 frames per second at 3.2 megapixels... hot damn!

Thank you God. Thank you.

The no-framework PHP MVC framework

An intelligent way to build a scalable PHP app. All this stuff I’ve had to figure out for myself, and some of it I got wrong.

I do prefer 1 thing different though. I use a simple template engine. I have NO PHP in my HTML, ONLY html. I edit my HTML pages in Dreamweaver, and often move stuff around and redesign, so this works for me.

This year is all about more bandwidth for audio production, and one of the buzzwords you're likely to hear a lot more of is PCI Express (PCIe). We're only just now seeing cards that use the cutting-edge bus, but over the coming months they should become more commonplace. Granted, if you're like me and focused on at-home music making, you probably spend most of your time using six or eight channels at a time, or, let's face it, often just two! But for those who need 24 or 48 channels, even at high-resolution, more PCI performance is very good news. (Yes, this requires a breakout box, as pictured here -- unless you had REALLY tiny audio jacks on the PCI card. Not really practical.).

Form for getting the download links from a lot of video sharing sites

interesting new online photo editing app lets u import pics from flickr or any url and crop etc...in your browser, and exprot in any format. Why u would want to , i dont know...but hey

It seems the Google Video Getter Greasemonkey script I wrote a while back has become very popular. It was on Digg.com, and since then I've gotten tons of inquiries and comments about it. The Google Video service is still in beta and changes regularly. As such I've had to update the script a few times to keep it functional with their changes.

Here's the latest...

Google Video now uses javascript to load the Flash Player. This kind of breaks the method used previously by my Greasemonkey script because it essentially tries to hide the HTML that the script was searching for. Not to worry though, it was a pretty easy fix. I also tightened up the code to a mere 3 lines!

Click here to install the new Google Video Getter 2

So why do you need this script? Doesn't Google offer downloads for their free videos?
... yes and no.

If you go to any free video offering on Google Video and click the Download button for "Mac and Windows" it forces you to download a Google Video Player application to playback Google's own .gvp video format. These videos do not play in other applications. I checked out the .gvp file, and its really just a text file with a pointer to a video file on the web... I copied the code and manually downloaded the video referenced and discovered it was a .avi (presumably DivX), but it would not play in Windows Media Player because it uses a DRM scheme for file protection.

There are alternative download options for the free videos though. These include videos formatted for the Video iPod and Sony PSP. I haven't really tried these, but I assume they don't have the same DRM protection since they need to be able to play on those devices.

So really, you don't need this script at all. You can download the videos formatted for iPod and PSP from Google Video. But for some reason, people often write me and leave comments asking for this script and how to make it work again.

Take a Lassen iQ, an SD memory card, a LPC2138 ARM processor, mix in some FAT16 firmware and you get the new GPS logger from Spark Fun Electronics.

TextOrgan was developed for use in conjunction with a DJ at musical events. By collaborating beforehand, the DJ and the TextOrganist can choose a selection of texts and discuss what sort of mood or themes they want develop in the set.

ECLIPSE/MpowerPlayer
Looks like suitable instructions for getting J2ME MIDP 2.0 development going on the Mac with Eclipse using the Mpowerplayer SDK.
This has been a long time in coming.. Let's hope it works..

This hack will guide you through the steps necessary to use your video enabled camera phone to post directly to your vlog.

Akihabara News had the chance of being invited to Sanyo's press conference where the first pocket HD camcorder was presented... and here were are, a few weeks later, with the device in our hands, to provide you with a quick review of the product. Before attacking this review that might not be that positive overall, here's a little overview of the kit.

The review with HDTV and Flash video over here!

SlashLinks is a tool developed by Eyebeam R&D for automatically mirroring links from the popular social-bookmarking service del.icio.us to your personal or institutional website. Posting, tagging, and management still occur within the del.icio.us interface, but design and layout can now be fully customized on your mirrored site. The tool also adds blog-like year/month/day archives (similar to Kottke.org's remaindered links) to the typical del.icio.us or flickr style tag browsing.

The Project Pad Quicktime Tool lets you attach annotations to time segments of Quicktime video and audio streams. The tool can be used by instructors and / or student teams to critique student-produced video and audio or to provide a way for students to analyze scientific, historic, or artistic recordings.

ZoneTag can automatically tag your photos with the location they were taken at.

I finally installed XBox Media Center this weekend and I'm thoroughly geeked. It plays just about anything, and I wasn't expecting the picture quality to be so damn good. I realize I'm a little late to the game, but so be it.

I followed ProductWiki's guide to soft-modding and was able to get through it with minimal teeth gnashing. The main reason I hadn't modded before was the pain it is to figure out which mod chip you have to buy, install it, etc. so this soft mod guide was exactly what I needed.

So now that I've caught up with what the Makers were doing 4 years ago, does anyone have any recommendations for cool add-ons for XBMC?

Tags: xbox modding xboxmediacenter

A brand new blogging engine with a 'keep it simple' philosophy. Designed from the ground-up to be fully buzzword compliant (AJAX, RSS, Web 2.0 - it's all there), logahead lets you effortlessly do what blogs were invented for

Anvil is a free video annotation tool, used at research institutes world-wide (see the Anvil User Web). It offers frame-accurate, hierarchical multi-layered annotation driven by user-defined annotation schemes. The intuitive annotation board shows color-coded elements on multiple tracks in time-alignment. Special features are cross-level links, non-temporal objects and a project tool for managing multiple annotations. Originally developed for Gesture Research, Anvil has also proved suitable for research in Human-Computer Interaction, Linguistics, Ethology, Anthropology, Psychotherapy, Embodied Agents, Computer Animation and many other fields.

Okay, imagine the simplest possible multitrack audio tool. Drag and drop audio files from an integrated browser, and add envelopes. Now imagine this tool free and open-source:

Gungirl Sequencer

At version 0.3, so your mileage may vary, but could be a fun tool to have around -- or the beginning of your very own audio tool, if you've got the programming chops. Who's the gun-toting grrrl who created this little gem? Um . . . Richard Spindler. So I'm guessing he didn't name it after himself. Via AudioMastermind blog, which has been on a roll lately.

Richard also has a simple open-source movie editor project going that looks quite capable. (Also under development; Linux source only.)

Only Gungirl can give you a ghetto rendition of the Ableton Live knobs, however. Enjoy!.

abstract plane - products - uplink

Vara Software : Wirecast

Not sure about either of them as I haven't tested on a PC but looks good..

The Participatory Culture Foundation just launched the Windows version of their internet video player (formerly called DTV) today, and renamed their platform Democracy, which includes tools for playing, broadcasting, and sharing net videos. Like FireANT, which also recently had a big upgrade, Democracy Player makes it pretty easy to subscribe to feeds and browse through videos you've downloaded. What's great about the Democracy solution is that it's very easy to create new channels for other people to watch. You can use their Video Bomb to make your own channel with links to videos anywhere - essentially allowing anyone to curate a found video blog like Rocketboom's (great and fun) Apollo Pony, or collect all of their own videos in one place, like someone at the PCF nicely did for the brilliant ladies of The Variety Shac. You can also use Broadcast Machine to host and create your own video blog or channel, complete with torrent creation to ease the bandwidth on your server.

The whole platform's so well-thought out and easy to use that it's a near miracle that this is an open source project by a non-profit foundation, considering the enormous amounts of money and attention lately focusing on this space, and on sites like YouTube and Google Video, and the Video Bomb front page already stands up very well against those sites in terms of sheer time wasting value (personally, I already prefer it).

It'll be interesting to read what people say about this over the next week or so; until then, it's definitely worth checking out on your own.

FileChucker is an AJAX-based web application that lets you accept file uploads on your own website.

Digital CowBoy, the company we already talked about in the past, presents a very practical kit for iPOD Video so that you can fully enjoy videos anywhere and anytime you want. The Pod Privacy is a privacy filter that you put on your screen so your neighbours in the train cannot see what is displayed on your screen, you really need to be straight in front of it to watch the video. For all the XXX lovers on a trip in China, this is really a must-have. But that's not all, you also get a cable in this pack that allow you to connect your iPOD through an RGB connector to the TV. Quite neat, don't you think so?

Filed under: PC, Microsoft Xbox 360, Online

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Nintendo goes just a little bit further with its plans to update the Nintendo DS, announcing that it should soon be adding features—like web surfing and HD TV programming. Though this would first be for Japanese DS owners, the company hopes to begin selling the web browser (which will work in conjunction with the DS's WiFi wireless network) in June and launch the card with digital TV receiver and antenna by the end of 2006. The web browser was developed with Opera software and should cost about $32.

Other announcements included a new lineup for Japanese software, like a foreign language guide for travelers, a reference guide in Japanese and English, training software to improve penmanship in Japanese and a cooking guide giving step-by-step voice instructions for recipes. Wow. Oh, and Tetris DS that would include characters like Mario and Donkey Kong in awkward poses.

Nintendo unveils TV, Web browser features for DS [Reuters]

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Skype will release a new version of its powerful Internet telephony software that integrates video conferencing for both Intel and PowerPC

A report on MacObserver claimed that Skype 2.0 for Mac (scheduled to ship in the second quarter) would support ten-way video conferences, but would be reliant on the Intel processors Apple now employs.

However, Skype later rebutted these claims, saying: "I can tell you without question that Skype for Mac 2.0, including video, when released, will run on the PowerPC architecture."

He added that one feature may be limited on PowerPC "temporarily" - but not video conferencing:

"There is only one feature that potentially will be limited temporarily to Intel Dual Core machines and that is the ability to host audio calls of between six to ten users," he said.

Skype 2.0 for Windows was announced on February 8, and also relies on Intel processors.

Light Blue Optics Ltd (LBO) has developed a revolutionary technology for miniature laser projectors dubbed PVPro™. Today they announced their latest demonstrator unit, which is only 3.78 cubic inches in volume, and is similar in size and shape to a typical matchbox.

The new Nokia 6136 probably spells the end of the road for Skype & other VoIP companies. this phone allows you to make calls over your home or office Wi-Fi network in a very elegant way.

"PPStream is a network for live media streaming, or you can call it a P2P Streaming Internet TV. In principle it's similar to BitTorrent(BT).

It can broadcast TV programs stably and smoothly to broadband users. Compared to traditional stream media, PPStream adopts p2p - streaming technology and supports full-scale visit with tens of thousands of users online. Its client software can be used as a webpage or as a desktop program.

Currently the majority of PPStream TV channels are from China, Hong-Kong, Taiwan and Singapore."

All your conversations in only one feed! - "The idea is very simple, every time you post a comment in any blog that has the plugin installed, myComments alerts via RSS all the other conversation members."

If you ever thought about processing a 10 mega pixel image or play quake 3 at 30FPS on your phone, nVidia has a new chip out that does that

Canopus is the leading company in Japan when it comes to amateur or semi-pro video editing. With the arrival of the PSP, the iPOD Video and the W-ZERO3, the PDA running on WM5, and other products that offer video playback on the go, Canopus tries to make the life of the users easier and they offer software that converts videos in a number of formats that are compatible with your portable device(s). This is not their first product of this kind, but here are the latest ones from Canopus:

MPEGCraft 3 DVD, a PCIe Mpeg2 video capture card that is designed to capture video in real time in DVD quality but also in HD (1080i/720p) and then transform this into DVD quality (not HD) or in 720x480. It can also produce videos that are PSP, PDA or iPOD Video compatible.


For those who want to keep it a bit more modest, Canopus offers softwares called Nandemo Taro and Nandemo Taro Zaurus that are video conversion softwares for the PSP, iPOD and PDA, but also for the Manga video (DA). It supports the traditional formats like MPEG-1/2/4, DivX, XviD, WMV or DV(AVI), but a special effort has been made for the Manga (DA). This software can also manage HD video as an input, but it does not offer it as an output (I don't really think the PSP will manage 1080i vids).



Finally for the Zaurus only, we have a software called Kantan Taro.

Make your own vlogroll and vogroll
Nice vlogroll creation utility:
"generate your own spectacular vlogroll so all your buddies get hooked up, dont leave em in the dark"

Radiospire is continuing the global quest to remove wires completely with their HDMI wireless solution. The connection works up to 15 feet and will transfer at 3Gbps. Meaning you can transfer full HD video and audio goodness without having to compress any of it. Additionally it will clear at least a little bit of clutter behind that TV.

HDTV HDMI Connection Without the Wires from Radiospire [eHomeUpgrade]

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If you're a NASCAR fan, check out this stunning piece of equipment from Nextel and Sprint. An audio/video data scanner called the FanView, it will make sure you don't miss one single moment of racing magic—all over the 2.5 GHz wireless spectrum.

Gives you the race telecast, radio broadcast, up to seven in-car camera channels, direct audio feeds from pit and driver, audio replay and a live feed from the official timing and scoring system. Though not for sale, you 'll be able to rent FanView at the race, starting at $50 a day or $70 for the weekend. And remember folks, Nascar revs up on February 19th, so start your engines.

All of NASCAR in the palm of your hand [Mobilemag]

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The APIs currently allow read-only access to key parts of the YouTube video respository and user community.

And we thought projectors were getting small when they were the size of a Mac mini! Light Blue Optics has created a micromini projector that's the size of—wait for it—a matchbox, and it’s going to be used with a cellphone. Its secret is new PVPro technology, an automechanical process that’s adept at scaling lower resolution images to higher resolutions. PVPro can also take care of pesky annoyances such as keystoning. These capabilities come in awfully handy when you're trying to project a video image onto a nearby wall with a cellphone.

Light Blue Optics is determined to make it easier for cellphone users to share photos with friends and comfortably watch movies on a screen that's considerably larger than a postage stamp. Pricing and availability haven't been announced, but the company will present a PVPro evaluation kit at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona next week.

Micro Mini Projector for your Mobile Phone by Light Blue Optics [Mobile Whack]

Light Blue Optics product page

PVPro technology (pdf)

 
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Here's an example of a photo with longitude and latitude tags appended ("geo:long" and "geo:lat"). More are available at the Geotagging Pool.

(Continued at Daily Wireless.)

According to Mobilemag, TPCom Limited, a subsidiary of TTP Communications, has completed a reference design that can create a fully functional cell phone for less than $20 targeted to emerging markets.

The brilliant minds at Serious Magic have officially released Vlog It, a $49 piece of software that'll turn your computer into a TV station. These are the same folks who brought us the higher end "Visual Communicator" and that staple yesterday, Video Toaster (remember Garth's T-shirt from "Wayne's World?").

I predict this simple product will revolutionize Vlogs by making it easy for anybody to create real time production for television. Go to the Vlog It site and play the demo. You'll be absolutely amazed. I am, and I'm an old TV guy!

(Continued at The Pomo Blog)

ProgrammableWeb: Tag Search

The future..?

A language that can be compiled to Flash, DHTML, or mod_neko, a VM embedded in an Apache plugin.

flexible solar panels to build into anything your heart desires...strait from the manufacturer. HOT DAMN!

Voipster has released their Zoep client-side VoIP engine as an open source project licensed under the GPL (now called OpenZoep) along with an OpenZoep Firefox extension

Smaller than a grain of salt, Hitachi's newest RFID chip measures .005 x .005 inches and is 7.5 micrometers thin. Using Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) technology, it uses an external antenna to receive radio waves (2.45 GHz), and transforms it to energy to wirelessly transmit a 128-bit unique ID number for a high level of authenticity. But most importantly for Hitachi, it can make more of these chips on one single wafer, increasing production by four times.

Most importantly for you, expect to see more and more embedded RFID chips in nearly every product you purchase.

World's smallest and thinnest 0.15 x 0.15 mm, 7.5µm thick RFID IC chip [Hitachi]

 
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via boingboing: CloneDVD Mobile is a new commercial program for ripping DVDs for viewing on phones, PSPs, iPods and other small devices. Based on the free software project FFMpeg,

LastFMProxy is a proxy server for the last.fm radio streams. It allows you to use your regular old audio player to listen to the last.fm streams. It does this by acting as a player itself, connecting to the server on your behalf, but instead of playing the stream, it simply relays it to whichever other application connecting to it.

It's only tested under Linux, but it's written in python, and should be pretty portable.

Media Central is like Front Row but allows you to play:DivX, DV Files, Xvid, MP3, AC3 codecs, MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4. It Links to itunes, and WebTV. It has Front Row like interface and allows you to connect 3rd party remotes

check out this review of They are: AllMyData, Box.net, eSnips, Freepository, (the unfortunately named) GoDaddy, iStorage, Mofile, Mozy, Omnidrive, Openomy, Streamload, Strongspace and Xdrive.

vPod is a program for transferring music to your iPod from Windows. It presents a unified view of all of your music and lets you see what is and what is not already on your iPod. I think that it's a much more intuitive interface for managing what is avail

Pantech&Curitel present their IM-U100 today, a phone with a 2.6" QVGA screen, a 2MP camera, CDMA 1x EV-DO, MP3/MOV/VOD compatibility, and other PMP functions. True, it can play videos, but only VOD apparently (so unsure whether it can play videos that are not downloaded). Personally, I wouldn't call this phone a PMP, that's marketing-speak in my opinion, but it's a nice effort to make a phone behave like a PMP in some ways.

Dojo is the Open Source JavaScript toolkit that helps you build serious applications in less time.

Ever since I did a presentation at the meet the vloggers gathering in SoHo this summer, people have kept asking what software I use to do my vlogs. I’ve been using Wirecast from Vara Software. It’s rather pricey, but it allows for simple changes of precomposed shots with videos, titles, and 2 cameras. It saves the videos right to the desired QuickTime format, or even sets up a video stream. Wirecast is available for the Mac and Windows platforms.

Vara Software has released a lighter version called VideoCue for Mac platform. It is really great as it allows for simple drag and drop of videos, pictures and live camera into a storyboard cue. It also has direct support for adding it to your blog. There is a free trial download to get your feet wet and to see if it is something for you.

LCD, LED, HDTV, plasma, they don’t have anything compared to the latest and greatest display technology that should begin appearing next year. The next big thing is called Surface-conduction Electron-emitter Display, or SED for short. Basically it combines the terrific contrast, responsiveness and sharpness of conventional CRT monitors with the power efficiency, size, and thickness of LCDs or Plasmas. Like any new display technology, it will probably cost an arm and a leg.

Right SED Fred [Red Ferret]

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I Am Alpha is a site for developers and other curious folks to play around with the underlying technology behind a whole new crop of cool AIM products.

Buffalo is going to release 150 to 500GB SATA II HDD's in Japan that offer a 3Gbps transfer rate. I think I'll upgrade to one of these once I'll really start doing some serious HD video business... the speed and size are just perfect! Everything might be in RAID 1 too.

In response to the rapid increase in the number of mobile phones being used as music players in Japan, NEC Electronics has developed a dedicated SLI chip for audio. This is a companion chip made specifically to enhance audio in cellphones. It has a CPU dedicated to music play, a digital signal processor and a connection for an application processor. It functions with SD cards and supports copyright protection (CPRM). The chip also minimizes battery drain, thus enabling continuous music play for 50 hours. Sampling started yesterday, and mass production is planned for April. Sample price is $13. Hopefully we'll see these in stateside handsets before the end of the decade.

Press Release

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Glitch is a highly-adjustable, semi-automated, realtime audio manipulation system which allows you to alter your music in a variety of different ways ranging from quite subtle to extremely bizarre.

StoryField is a new desktop database solution for oral history and documentary process, content, resource and idea management.

If you want to fast download Google Videos as .avi format (nor Google Video .gvl default), take a look at this web based parser

Sparkle is a module that developers can stick in their Cocoa applications (five-step install!) to get instant self-update functionality. By that, I mean that your app will be able to update itself, not just check for new versions: it'll read the update information from an appcast on your server, download, extract, install, restart, and even offer to show the users release notes before they decide if they want to update.

It's free, it's easy, and it'll make using a Mac better for everyone, so go for it!

Chatsum is a Firefox extension that lets you chat and leave messages on any website for other Chatsum users to see and interact with.

The Chatsum sidebar houses a fully-fledged chatroom, specific to the page you’re looking at, and all the other users in the room are also viewing the same web page. When you navigate to a different page the Chatsum room changes automagically. If you open a page in a new tab, Chatsum will keep pace with whatever you’re viewing. There is the option to switch between a page level room and a site level room, and you can also see what rooms/pages are popular with other Chatsum users.

Safari and Explorer versions are in development and the developers, George Grinsted and Lee Parry, are planning some other interesting community features: including "non-chat" surprises, a Dashboard Widget for Mac OS X 10.4, etc.

Check it out, sign up for the beta and help them "squash the bugs."

More background information: Chatsum Development Blog; George's and Lee's blogs.

DVB-T is a standard for broadcasting digital television over the air and is found in many countries outside of North America. This hack involves using a video card to generate the DVB-T signal. This project was inspired by Tempest for Eliza, which we covered recently. To pull this off you have to add some custom settings for an additional screen in your X server configuration. When you start up the server and switch to the new screen it will generate the proper signal. The signal strength is pretty weak though and the card has to be wired directly to the DVB-T set-top box. The box will display two different channels, each with a test image. The signal isn’t actually generated directly, but is a product of the VGA card’s DAC’s harmonics.

[thanks james]

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Gnash plays SWF up to version 7 as standalone player (which works) and also has a plug-in for Firefox (which is still under heavy development).

Sony has presented it's newest DV cam, the DCR-HC96, with 3CCD sensor and a 3.31MP resolution (3.05 for the photos and 2.05 for the videos), and it also has a function to record videos in 4ch surround. The device measures 72x120x91 and weighs 490g.

LG presents a new 2.4" VGA screen for PDA's and more specifically a VGA SPR(Sub Pixel Rendering) LCD.

- 1440 line high resolution VGA by 960 line horizontal resolution
- Long running time for mobile devices by low power consumption design
- High level of brightness
- Lead VGA mobile display market with high cost competitiveness

MediaBASE is a software application for creating, sharing and exchanging media objects and compositions within a delimited social context. It places rich media authorship -- ordinarily confined to discrete, resource-intensive media projects -- in the hands of casual users, who are able to manipulate and exchange media compositions with the speed and informality of text-centric technologies such as weblogs, chat rooms, instant messaging, discussion forums and e-mail. Because it is built around an associatively-indexed database, MediaBASE allows these media "conversations" or "dialogues" to transcend their original contexts and take on relevance for subsequent users of the system. MediaBASE can be used: to augment existing discourse communities, such as a school, course, museum, local forum or design collective; to provide a common forum for linked classes and remote user groups; to create networks around a given topic or body of material, such as an online art collection or digital archive.

This is the software that's powering the AT&T U-verse IPTV service that has just been rolled out in San Antonio. And Microsoft is working with Major League Baseball to create an IPTV environment for hard core fans. Pics...

(Go check out the rest of Cory Bergman's pics and commentary at Lost Remote)

Adobe announced on January 3 the availability of Flash Lite 2 — a significant upgrade to Flash Lite 1, the mobile devices software that moved on to Adobe’s shelf with the acquisition last year of Macromedia. In the past year, the number of mobile devices running Flash Lite 1 has tripled from 12 to 45 million. The press release for the upgraded product describes it as enabling high-impact experiences for consumer devices.

By leveraging the Flash ecosystem -- which includes the Flash authoring tool, rendering engine, and an established community of more than two million designers and developers -- Flash Lite 2 and Flash Player SDK 7 can reduce deployment costs and deliver content and interfaces three to five times faster than competing solutions.

The new features of Flash Lite are discussed in the article here by Jonathan Duran, Macromedia/Adobe’s Developer Support Manager for Mobile and Devices.

Blogger Web Comments for Firefox is an extension that makes it easy to see what bloggers are saying about a page you're viewing in Firefox and even make your own blog post about it, all without leaving the page you're on.

Via del.icio.us/tag/unmediated

the title says it all. i want one. NOW.

The iSee 360 revolutionizes iPod by turning any iPod*, iPod mini or iPod nano into a full-fledged video recorder/player. Simply slide your iPod into the dock on the back of the iSee 360 and see more. Better.

Sanyo will debut the world's first commercially available smallest, lightest, high-definition compact digital camera. Hell of a title, but that is what it takes to become a world's first. Here is a spec rundown: 5.1 megapixel resolution, 2.2-inch OLED display, HD recording at 720p, 16:9 widescreen format, 10x optical zoom, and weighs only 8.3 ounces. This will be seen at CES this week and expect it to be available to the public in March for $800 bones, pretty good price compared to some HD video cameras that run upwards to $4,000.

Sanyo Xacti HD1 to debut at CES 2006 [Ubergizmo]

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The XP10 is a plug & play turntable for MP3 mixers...like a panasonic cdj.

Samsung Techwin, part of the Samsung Empire, has unveiled their #11PMP, the first digital camera with PMP functions. This 6MP camera has 45Mb of internal memory and can read a variety of video files and MP3 files. The design is quite cool we think and the device is super-slim (18.5mm). To be followed up very closely as Samsung wants to become one of the top 4 digital camera manufacturers before the end of this year!

By Cutkillavince

SPLITCAM video clone capture driver software
From the site:
SplitCamera is a freeware virtual video clone and video capture driver for connecting several applications to a single video capture source. Usually, if you have a web-camera connected to your computer, you cannot use it in more than one application at the same time, and there is no standard Windows options that makes it possible. SplitCam driver allows you to easily multiply your web-camera video in any conferensing software like ICQ, Yahoo, MSN Messenger, or whatever... and to broadcast it to many users at a time. With SplitCam you can connect up to 64 clients to a single video source. In a few words: SplitCam does just what its name says: it splits the video stream coming from the video source and tunnels it to numerous other client applications.

Thanks Spencer

The Gamepark GP2X is a new dual core (ARM920T Host Processor - ARM940T Video Coprocessor) gaming machine running on Linux and enecouraging anyone to develop emulators, games, applications, practically anything for this device

Lightbox JS is a simple, unobtrusive script used to to overlay images on the current page. It's a snap to setup and works on all modern browsers.

"With the advent of the DOM, the more widespread usage of new generation browsers, and the adoption of xmlHttpRequest and other technologies which all together are called AJAX, the need for notifying user with what is going on with simple animations can become a necessity, such as using fading colors and resizing elements."

This is a simple step-by-step guide to creating a mobile application using the Flickr Authentication API. A full spec of the API can be found here. See also: web how-to, desktop how-to.

AllPeers "combines the strength of Firefox and the efficiency of BitTorrent" to add media sharing to the long list of available extensions

listens to the song and creates tags for it

The Apple Podcast Server in Mac OS X Server v10.4 is based on the popular Blojsom open-source weblog server project.

Check out the Podcast Creation Guide [ pdf ] located at the bottom right of the page which, among other things, explains how to record a podcast with QuickTime Pro, GarageBand or SoundTrack Pro.

Gijs Geikes has been hard at work since we last saw his latest bizarre Walkman Tape Player / Game Boy Sequencer. A new model sync with the Little Sound Dj cartridge: plug in a Game Boy, and other goodies (like a Walkman tape player and Stylophone keyboard), and you can create wild, screaming patterns like this. (A must-listen, experimental punk/hip-hop chiptune creation.)

Gijs has schematics up, so adventurous makers, you can make your own. Or you can just go buy one of those nifty Stylphones.

SEQ05 Pictures, Sounds, Schematics [Gieskes.nl Instruments]

Updated: That link exceeded its bandwidth restrictions, but you can hear the sounds via a new link! (Thanks, Gijs!) Related:
Gameboy Music with LSDJ: Workshops, Tips, Photos, MP3s.

dflare">

XML.com: Fixing AJAX: XMLHttpRequest Considered Harmful

Looking to get your hi-def, next-gen, hyphenated format on early this year? No worries, mate, looks like a nice new Blu-ray burner is on its way from Pioneer in January. The Pioneer BDR-101A is capable of burning Blu-ray 25GB discs at 72MBps. Totally fast. The drive will also be able to read and play back burned Blu-ray discs, so don't be suprised if you see a surge in legitimate file sharing that's completely legal pirating of movies and warez. No price or release date has been set.

Blu-Ray burner for January! [Akihabara]

MagnaChip semiconductor recently announced its high-performance 3.2 megapixel CMOS image sensor for camera phones.

The MC532MA offers both superb low light performance in a small sized module. It operates at 12 frames per second at full resolution and up to 30 frames per second at SVGA resolution.

The MC532MA is expected to be mass produced in the first quarter of 2006, and according to a representative from MagnaChip the performance gap between camera phones and digital camera is expected to decrease. Via Esato.

20051227_MagnaChip.jpg

how Linux can use a computer parallel port and a $10 integrated circuit to read 8 analog channels at 12 bit accuracy

Open source Gnutella client for OS X with Creative Commons support

Bookpedia is a book cataloging software for Mac OS X. To save you time and effort, it retrieves all book information from the Internet and lets you arrange your books in any which way you like.

MySync provides the Mac-to-Mac syncing capabilities of .mac, without .mac

If script.aculo.us had a cube effect this would rival Keynote. Presentacular adds script.aculo.us visual effects to slide shows created with S5. It has the same advantages than S5 for creating slide shows: printer-friendly version, simple and semantic markup and portable across the most modern browsers.

DropDV is a Mac OS X droplet which converts MPEG video into DV video streams. After conversion, your video can be edited with iMovie, Adobe Premiere, Final Cut Pro, or any other DV video editing system. DropDV converts MPEG video files from Still Cameras, MPEG-based video cameras, Tivo and ReplayTV MPEG files, as well as any other MPEG file you may have from other sources. DropDV 2.0 has been totally rewritten from the ground up to give you the best possible conversion from MPEG video into DV format. DropDV 2.0 has a new look, faster processing, a slick Macintosh user experience and all of the great features of the original DropDV 1.0! Features: Multiprocessor enabled Rock solid audio/video synchronization A Simple, drag-and-drop interface Creates projects compatible with iMovie Uses high quality bicubic scaling for the best video image Full YUV pipeline (no conversions to RGB) Supports both NTSC and PAL output Doesn't lose the audio track Splits output DV files so they are less than 2Gb (optional) Will convert VCD, (unencrypted) DVD and any other MPEG file into DV format DropDV 2 also includes speedups, bug fixes, and many enhancements. No other MPEG to DV solution offers all of these features, including QuickTime Pro or even Final Cut Pro.

Videora automatically and intelligently finds and downloads video you want to watch.

SpiralSynth Modular is an object orientated music studio with an emphasis on live use.

A Shoulder Pad Insert Vibrotactile Display by Aaron Toney, Lucy Dunne, Bruce H. Thomas, Susan P. Ashdown describes a project that aims at integrate a vibrotatcitle display and support electronics into a standard clothing insert, the shoulder pad.

The shoulder pad in particular was chosen as a highly useful garment insert because of its common integration into
the standard business suit, one of the most culturally pervasive garments in western society.
(…)
The objective for this project was to develop a tactile display contained within a standard shoulder pad that could present a stimulus to the user. More specifically, the display needed to be capable of presenting several distinct stimuli in multiple locations at once, and it needed to maintain the the functions of a shoulder pad: shape, stability, and flexibility.

The pad is meant to display to mimic social conventions such as tapping on the shoulder area for alerts or guidance. One of the authors, Bruce Thomas, reports that:

“As one example, we are working on a set of pager motors integrated into a shoulder pad for a business suit,” Thomas said. One idea is to have silent vibration patterns — similar to custom ring tones — coded to incoming phone numbers. “This way, when you are in a meeting you have a better idea of who is trying to contact you and you are not always pulling your phone out to see who is calling,”

…

Talk Digger is a web application developed by Frédérick Giasson that helps users to find, follow and join conversations evolving on the Internet.

simple aggregator combining search engine results.. very efficient -michael

With MonitorThis you can subscribe to 22 different search engine feeds at the same time" Cool way to easily track mentions of something across many different search sites.

make it opml and simple...

MyBlogLog is all about tracking where your readers come from and where they go; in the simplest, most non-intrusive way possible

a neat little javascript for inline views on linking activity

Simply enter the URL of your feed, choose which directories you want your feed submitted to, and click the submit button.

This release is "a huge improvement over 0.1 in capability, performance, and polish." Dojo is one of the most clean and well-designed JavaScript libraries around so check it out!

Dojo is the Open Source JavaScript toolkit that helps you build serious applications in less time. It fills in the gaps where JavaScript and browsers don't go quite far enough, and gives you powerful, portable, lightweight, and tested tools for constructing dynamic interfaces. Dojo lets you prototype interactive widgets quickly, animate transitions, and build Ajax requests with the most powerful and easiest to use abstractions available. These capabilities are built on top of a lightweight packaging system, so you never have to figure out which order to request script files in again. Dojo's package system and optional build tools help you develop quickly and optimize transparently.

free plug in to post photos and tag them to your blog from iphoto

Safarilicious parses your Safari bookmarks and allows to export them to your del.icio.us account

SplitCamera is a freeware virtual video clone and video capture driver for connecting several applications to a single video capture source. AWESOME... connect it to SKYPE

cineSync enables multiple people across the world to efficiently review visual media, from static images to movies. What you see is what others see: experience synchronised movie playback across everyone's screen with frame-accurate precision. Annotate movies and images by simply drawing on the screen with your mouse, like a real-time shared whiteboard (with full support for pressure-sensitive Wacom tablets).

Compute and storage resources that allow users to quickly process and store large amounts of web data. Users can view the results of their processes interactively, transfer the results to their home machine, or publish them as a new web service.

Linkubator is an online tool that will create interactive Quicktime movies for you. Based on a movie you provide, Linkubator can add a ‘bug’ to the movie (a small image with a link to your blog entry). In the future it will be possible to create one or more text blocks (with or without links) that appear and disappear as your movie plays.

(Nice work, Andreas! -kc.)

For rich web application developers, the TrimQuery engine from TrimPath is a lightweight GPL open-source component that lets you have the power of SQL queries while running in a web browser.

Freenet is currently undergoing a major re-write incorporating a number of fundamental changes. Version 0.7 of Freenet aims to (in addition to supporting traditional "opennet" operation, whereby users can quickly and easily get onto the network by downloading seednodes files from a central source), create a scalable darknet, where users only connect directly to other users they know and (at least marginally) trust. The purpose of this change is to protect users who may be placed at risk simply by using the software, irrespective of what they are using it for. In the new model, only people you choose to connect to will know that you are running the software. Previous darknets, such as WASTE, have been limited to relatively small disconnected networks. The core innovation in Freenet 0.7 will be to allow a globally scalable darknet, capable of supporting millions of users. This is made possible by the fact that human relationships tend to form small-world networks, a property that can be exploited to find short paths between any two people. The work is based on a talk given at DEFCON 13 by Ian Clarke and Oskar Sandberg (slides available here). Other modifications include switching from TCP to UDP, which allows UDP hole punching along with faster transmission of messages between peers in the network. Anonymous message broadcast ("publish/subscribe"), and other new basic functions, have been postponed to 0.8 in order to get 0.7 out as soon as possible; Freenet 0.7 will support insertion and retrieval of information, as 0.5 does, but it should do it faster, and more securely. It will not include "premix routing" (a difficult technique to provide an extremely high level of anonymity to requesters and posters which we will introduce in 0.8 or 0.9), but we will endeavour to ensure that 0.7 is more secure than 0.5 in every respect. Thanks to the new transport layer, and darknet support, we expect that Freenet 0.7 will be usable in countries with national firewalls (China blocked the current version some time ago - both the web site and the protocol). Currently, we have insert and retrieval of arbitrarily large files ("redundant splitfiles") working, and a text mode interface. We should have an alpha which has initial FCP and Fproxy support by the end of January. Darknet routing is working, but not yet opennet, and there are issues to address with load balancing, but our new model (based on Ethernet and TCP/IP) is currently being debugged and should work as it is based on tried and tested solutions. If you want to help, join #freenet-alphatest on irc.freenode.net, or contact Toad (Matthew Toseland). Using donations through this website, the project has been able to employ one developer full-time, Matthew Toseland. Matthew has since become the backbone of the Freenet development effort. The project is always in need of additional funds to assure Matthew's continued employment, so if you can contribute to our efforts, please visit our donations page.

Clip and save just the stuff you want from any web page (images, text, links).

Wi-Fi Networking News explores the latest ultra-wideband (UWB) chipsets, which will be capable of 660Mbps, albeit over very short distances. Though this Dallas News article dubs it "turbo-charged Wi-Fi", it's anything but. As Wikipedia will tell you it's really a radio communications technique, which can even be implemented to increase the speed of traditional coaxial networks.

NEC has just announced a battery that measures 0.3mm in thickness, it's also flexible and can be recharged in 30 seconds. This is a product that can change A LOT of things and that will give the designers and engineers a lot more liberty. Let's take the following example: this type of battery can be easily integrated into the bracelet of a watch instead of the housing of the watch itself, rendering new designs possible.

Paste the link from Google and get the REAL link now: Announcement fM Google Video Downloader ver2.0 Final is now avaiable ! The features listed below are introduced in version 2.0 since the previous major release.

Awesome

The Wi-Fi Alliance now certifies features for Wi-Fi networks that will extend battery life for mobile devices. This extension of the Wi-Fi Multimedia (WMM) program, called Power Save, helps pave the way for rapid proliferation of Wi-Fi technology into phone handsets where battery life is critical.

WMM Power Save gives device manufacturers and developers a robust framework to improve Wi-Fi power efficiency, via improved signaling capabilities and the opportunity to fine-tune power consumption. The certification for both access points and client devices uses mechanisms from the recently ratified IEEE 802.11e standard, and is an enhancement of legacy 802.11 power save.

"As many as 55 million subscribers for Wi-Fi enabled mobile phones are expected in the consumer market alone," said Monica Paolini of Senza Fili Consulting.

The following devices are the first to be Wi-Fi CERTIFIED(TM) for WMM Power Save, and currently populate the program test bed:

• Atheros AR5002AP-2X Access Point
• Broadcom AirForce(TM) BCM94704AGR Dual-Band 802.11a/g Access Point
• Broadcom AirForce(TM) BCM94309CB Dual-Band 802.11a/g PC Card
• Cisco AIR-AP1231G-A-K9 with AIR-RM21A-A-K9
• Conexant 802.11a/g PRISM WorldRadio
• Marvell Semiconductor 802.11a/b/g WLAN router
• Ralink 802.11a/g Mini PCI
• Winbond Mini PCI 802.11a/b/g WLAN Client

 

The i-garment project aims to develop smart garments for for the Portuguese Civil Protection. The suits will be equipped with sensors to monitor position, vital signals (temperature and heart beat) of the firefighters. The information will be sent via a wireless link to Civil Protection Officers in the HQ, processed and returned to the field officers equipped with PDAs and/or TabletPCs.

Tightly integrated with the fire-fighting garment, sensors, telecommunication, localisation, alert and processing hardware collect the status and position of the fire-fighter and transmit it wirelessly and in real time to a data collecting computer installed in local Operational Field Vehicles (OFV).

Besides, the system will allow the data to be transmitted from the local OFV to the main servers via satellite transmission, making the data available from virtually anywhere there might be a fire situation, without the need for further communication infrastructure.

Thanks Antao.

Ice, the Internet Communications Engine, is middleware for the practical programmer. A high-performance Internet communications platform, Ice includes a wealth of layered services and plug-ins.

Welcome to the Fedora Directory Server. The Fedora Directory Server is a robust, scalable open-source server designed to manage large directories of users and resources. It is based on an open-systems server protocol called the Lightweight Directory Acces

Browse your iPod's TV Shows the way you are supposed to.

Use Nuvvo to: post prep. and follow-up for your live sessions, create a multimedia hub for your classroom teach stand-alone courses online The choice is yours and the possibilities are endless.

PHONifier is an application to make your mobile web life easier. More and more mobile phones have internet access, yet there are very few webdevelopers that really seem to care about the mobile surfer. PHONifier takes care of this by optimizing webpages f

Introducing prototype.js

Prototype is a JavaScript framework by Sam Stephenson designed to help make developing dynamic web apps a whole lot easier. In basic terms, it’s a JavaScript file which you link into your page that then enables you to do cool stuff.

There's loads of capability built in, a portion of which covers our beloved Ajax. The whole thing is freely distributable under an MIT-style license, so it's good to go. What a nice man that Mr Stephenson is - friends, let us raise a hearty cup of mulled wine to his good name. Cheers! sluurrrrp.

Io is a relatively new language on the dynamic programming block. It compares favorably with Python and Ruby in terms of performance. Io is also small and easily embeddable, as would be evidenced by the iol4 operating system. Io is small prototype-based programming language. The ideas in Io are mostly inspired by Smalltalk (all values are objects), Self (prototype-based), NewtonScript (differential inheritance), Act1 (actors and futures for concurrency), LISP (code is a runtime inspectable/modifiable tree) and Lua (small, embeddable).

It's a great little program getting more and more exposure; M-Audio has even added it to their podcast bundle. But it has a few rough edges, and has gone a long time without an upgrade -- until now.

RawSugar is a social search engine powered by user contributions. Find the answers you need by incrementally selecting member-designated tags to refine your search.

QuickSynergy is a graphical interface (GUI) for easily configuring Synergy2, an application that allows the user to share his mouse and keyboard between two or more computers. Without the need for any external hardware, Synergy2 uses the TCP-IP protocol t

Onlife is an application for the Mac OS X that observes your every interaction and then creates a personal shoebox of all the web pages you visit, emails you read, documents you write and much more.

Automator workflow, I love that it doesn't add a bunch of songs to my library

Ajax based feed reader that provides headlines from major news organizations as well as other tech and blog feeds.

amazing library of functions that we can rely on called Prototype.js to ease our JavaScript development practices.

how to stream any type of media file from your computer to another device on your network. We will also demonstrate how to remotely control VLC using any web browser.

The new Mac mini project, code-named Kaleidoscope, will feature an Intel processor and include both Front Row 2.0 and TiVo-like DVR functionality.

Lionhead Studios has released a tool that allows video game players to easily create their own machinima (wikipedia) and then export their work and upload it to the Web. In the past, only the most hard-core video game players created machinima. Even so, marketers already have started placing ads against machinima. On Heavy.com, for instance, a machinima called Pimp My Weapon, made from God of War, got 6 million streams in its first week.

The Movies positions the player as a Hollywood studio owner. In addition to the business management aspect of the game, players can shoot their own movie--designing costumes, choosing sets, adding subtitles, and dubbing audio, then upload it to a community site run by Lionhead, send it to friends, or post it online.

David Carson, from Heavy.com, explained that machinima have slipped under the entertainment establishment, but have capitalized on the growing popularity of video games. "Nobody in Hollywood would've ever considered, 'Oh my God, this is great entertainment,' but people online say it is, and millions of people are watching it." he said. "The appeal is, it's all based out of video games. Anything that's a derivative of that game, people pay attention to it."

Via MIT adv. lab < Media Post.

o BB's post: Political film comments on French riots using video-game animation.

(Stephen Dinehart showed a machinima short he made using "The Movies" at my USC portable video workshop the other week. It aired on the WB last week in primetime. Good stuff. -kc.)

This new release features many improvements including a new VLC cone, new Mac OS X wizard and extend controls dialogs, tree playlist skins2 support, HTTP interface CGI handling, linux binary codecs loader, UPnP and Bonjour service discovery, shoutcast str

Flexible LCDs are pretty important for a few reasons. They can bend without breaking and can withstand some rough treatment now and again without cracking like frat boy on meth. This prototype by Samsung is only 7 inches across but it supports up to 640x480 resolution in color and should end up in laptops and cellphones down the line. They'll have to up the resolution first, but expect a bendy Powerbook any day now.

Samsung claims biggest flexible LCD panel ever [TheInquirer]

TXTmob allows groups of users to share information via cell phone text messaging. Sort of a listserv for cell phones.

Kuwakubo Ryota's fluid (first spotted by Jan) reformats live electronic jamming into a hand-held device. The device allow users to create music by stacking loops using a simple loop function, a drum pad and other switches and controls.

The mass-produced finish of fluid makes the rudimentary percussive sound and sequencing tools easy to comprehend. So, one can bang on fluid, squelch the basic synthesiser, loop the noises and alter the tempo.

Kuwakubo's work is a timely counterweight to today's commuting masses that pass through the city, clutching personal audio technology that serves to isolate, as opposed to the connectivity that recent times have promised. A handheld electro radio jamming unit appears to have more in common with the internet forum-based media used to share ones music, video, photography and writing. Here the artist provides us with another dynamic electronic means by which to connect with fellow players.

Part of the Possible Futures: Postwar Art and Technology exhibition, through December 25, at the ICC, Tokyo.

The show features also Modulobe, gravicells, and Room with Edited Soundscape.

More about it in the excellent report by PingMag.

Wmmna love Kuwakubo.

AJAX Ruby console with tutorial, hooray for Ruby's safe modes.

Preview of an iTunes-like music player built on the Mozilla platform

Much of the data available to view on Last.fm is available in several formats through the Audioscrobbler Web Services API.

Image Tricks is a free image editing application that allows you using Mac OS X Tiger Core Image filters.

LMMS aims to be a free alternative to popular (but commercial and closed- source) programs like FruityLoops, Cubase and Logic giving you the ability of producing music with your computer by creating cool loops, synthesizing and mixing sounds, arranging samples, having more fun with your MIDI-keyboard and much more...

Play Tagger allows you to easily play mp3 files directly on your website or blog. Simply include a tiny javascript, and your mp3 links will automatically become playable right on the page. In addition, your visitors will have the opportunity to easily tag and post the mp3 link to del.icio.us. This script is extremely lightweight, as is the flash movie that plays on demand.

yet another converter....One bonus is that it offers to convert .WMV and .ASF files, which is something I haven't seen any of the others claim.

Chinese blogging sites have unearthed details surrounding the Motorola A732, a slider phone whose keypad may look ordinary, but is touch and heat sensitive, allowing you to essentially scribble directly on the screen. [Mobilemag via Phoneyworld]

"Current incarnations seem to recognize both Chinese and English characters, though a North American version probably won’t do Chinese.

... A shopping helper feature lets you take a picture of a product you find in a store, note the price and which shop you found it at, and files away that information for later reference when you find a similar product elsewhere".

Rest your wrists! If you have ever manually scanned a book, you realize a machine that can do it for you is a major relief. But the convenience is just a start. As the technology to automatically scan and digitize books is put to work it will multiply the speed at which libraries can put collections online. The vision of all the books ever written being accessible globally is made manifestly more realistic by the automatic scanner.

Kirtas introduces its scanner here with an video of the process. Kirtas says the machine “automates the scanning of bound documents at a capture rate of 1200 pages per hour, while using a page turning process that is more gentle than the human hand."

motion sensors for personal media devices

load rss feeds onto your ipod with this utility

yet another video conversion utility. but at least it does batch conversion.

Browser developer Opera has launched a software development kit designed to bring to mobile phones dynamic Web applications using Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX)-based technologies — which are becoming increasingly popular on desktop PCs.

Mobile Web applications created on the Opera Platform Software Development Kit give users access to online resources while providing software developers the ability to integrate mobile phone applications with online content, according to Opera (Oslo, Norway).

AJAX-based Web technologies are becoming more prevalent in desktop applications, driving new Internet services such as Google Maps and Amazon A9 Search. The emerging Web-based techniques, for example, create script on a client while allowing — in the background — XML communication with a server.

As a result, users can grab only the information they need without having to wait for large files to be reloaded onto their screens. "This enables a much more efficient use of bandwidth," said Jan Standal, strategic product manager at Opera. Thus, it’s "much more applicable to mobile phones," he added.

For smartphone users, the kit provides a major upgrade from traditional WAP-based applications, which offered only a basic user interface. Opera has offered the kit to mobile network operators so they can create unique “home screens” on their handsets, using their logos and special links to content.

By releasing the same kit to a larger group of software developers, Opera is hoping richer, dynamic Web applications will proliferate for mobile phones. "This will let software designers develop small, Web-based applications much more rapidly and simply," said Standal.

Starting this month, cell phones can access Google Maps. Google's application can be used on more than 100 current phones that use the Java Brew programming language that can download the Google Local application. From there, they can conduct searches in a specific location and view results plotted on a map.

Google's application and service is free, but users will need an Internet data plan from their cellphone provider, which adds $10 to $25 to monthly bills. Google Mobile and Yahoo Mobile currently provides search on cell phones, but the services are more text oriented.

Google Maps is getting some competition from Yahoo Maps Beta. Local maps have geoRSS feed for searches, showing local traffic conditions, for example. The default view is Flash-based, with an Ajax version of the API available.

Yahoo will introduce its own cell phone, through a partnership with SBC. Operating on the Cingular Wireless network, the phone will link music, photos and e-mail with consumers' existing online Yahoo accounts, address books and preferences. It have an MP3 player, a 1.3-megapixel camera and a removable memory card. The SBC/Yahoo phone will be manufactured by Nokia and is expected to be available early next year for $200 to $300.

Google Location Search can find any number of local resources. O'Reilly has a terrific Collection of Map Hacking Goodies. You can create a real-time GPS tracker using Google Maps API. Don't worry about having a GPS device, you can emulate a garmin using GPSGate.

Yahoo's Konfabulator lets developers create mini applications called widgets (Gallery) used to make customized desktop applications composed like stock prices, traffic conditions or news feeds. AJAX or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is a framework that allows client side code to work with server side code. It's exemplified by Google Maps and Yahoo's Flickr photo-sharing site. Like LAMP, it's is not a technology in itself, but a term that refers to the use of a group of technologies together. Server interactions are minimized — data is cached locally. Here's why AJAX is cool and some free source code.

The Mobilized Software Blog follows the field, while The Wireless Athens Project has dozens of great prototypes, proven in the field.

Related DailyWireless articles include; Revenue for the "Free" Cloud, Rebuilding Media, Are City Clouds Safe?, City Cloud Applications, Handheld Content, Seattle's PlaceLab, Streaming Location Content, Handheld Tours, Wireless Museums, GPS Narrative Archaeology, Wireless Walking Tours, Electric Bike Tours, Mapping to Go Projects, My Pal Mickey, Cellular Walking Directions, Ekahau + ESRI, Linkspoint GPS + Symbol, MapInfo's Hotspot Services, MapInfo's Open LS, ATT + Microsoft + Maps, Location without GPS, Location By Triangulation - Not, Open GIS Magazine, Mapping Oral History, Poem Spots, Geocoding the Wiki, The Un-walled Garden, Tracking Individuals, Tracking Bryon, GPS+TV=Location and Location, Location, Location NintendoDS: Voice + WiFi, PSP Podcasting, Handheld Superpower, Hotspot Access for PlaystationPortable, Portable Photostories, WiFi MP3 Players, PSP Hotspot Gets Hotter, GPS Blogging Phones, The Nokia N-90: Journalist's Tool, Podcasting on cellphones, More News Maps, Map Space, Access Points as Pencils, Solar Electric to Go, Virtual Guides, Embedded MP-3 Virtual Tour, Revolution in Mobile Services, Cellular Insurgency, Tsunami Warning Ideas, Pocket Podcast Software, Newsbreak RSS for Phones.

Remember when I begged for money months ago? Well it payed off, and now the new CitizenSpeak has re-launched.

Briefly, CitizenSpeak is a site that allows people to create and host email campaigns. It allows ad-hoc organizing around any issue that puts a bug up someone's butt. I'll probably blog more about it later this week. In the meantime, check out the site or the open source Drupal module that I built for the site.

Big thanks to Jo Lee for being CitizenSpeak, Eric Gundersen at Development Seed for his fantastic design work and Embolden Design for providing hosting!

Tags: drupal civicspace citizenspeak advocacy opensource

Sony is starting to ship samples of their new tactile input device called Touch Engine Module, which can be used to make touch panels, etc. vibrate in responce to a touch.

[Touch Engine]

Touch Engine uses piezoelectric vibrators that can be operated using a low voltage electric power source. Therefore, it could be easily integrated with mobile devices such as digital still cameras, PDAs, etc. (It is already used for SONY UCP-8060, a professional controller device for broadcast stations.) Touch Engine is based on the technology developed at Sony Computer Science Lab.

via Sony Press Relase

Use your webcam for more than just video chat. With Boinx iVeZeen, you can use your webcam to easily record high quality movie clips in various formats.

Chris sent this how-to in from Grynx contributor Dan "This box will house my proprietary Wi-Lan HP45-24 radio unit and set as a client, a 2.4ghz 500mw HyperLink Amplifier connected to a Linksys WRT54G with a third party firmware and set as an access point, the Wi-Lan HP45-24 radio will be the main link back to my base radio. The whole idea of this enclosure is to be as "modular" as possible, i.e. if the PSU blows-up I can simply remove the PSU and replace it, OR if I need to relocate the whole box, I can simply unscrew all the antenna and take it away with me." Link.

TVTAD is an RSS feed reader with support for unlimited feeds. It will automatically download newly released TV episodes that have been added to your favorites." It's free and It works with any BitTorrent client (like uTorrent)

µTorrent is an efficient and feature rich BitTorrent client for Windows sporting a very small footprint. It was designed to use as little cpu, memory and space as possible while offering all the functionality expected from advanced clients.

With BitTorrent, you can download files faster and contribute by sharing files and bandwidth.

Glenn Fleishman at Wi-Fi Networking News points to news of a University of Texas professor who is using pocket-sized mini windmills to run a wireless network of sensors. From the report: "Priya's challenge was to develop a windmill with a diameter of just 10cm which works by flexing piezoelectric crystals as it rotates, causing them to generate a current. A 'gentle breeze' of 16km/h is enough to generate the 7.5mW necessary to power a small electronic sensor. Such windmills are designed to solve the problem of powering Wi-Fi kit in remote locations."

IO-DATA has a video capture card that supports not only Mpeg2 but also Mpeg4 and it also offers recording formats tailored for the PSP or iPOD Video thanks to the GVencoder and a ULead software called Video ToolBox 2 for MemoryStick (that is also iPOD compatible).

These are the GV-MVP/GX2W amd GV-MVP/GX2 cards.




For those of you who ran out of free PCI slots or those that have a laptop, there is also an external version called GV-MVP/RZ3.

The new (AJAX-friendly!) Web browser for S60 is based on the WebCore and JavaScriptCore components of Apple’s Safari Web Kit that Apple uses in its Safari browser.

When the cameraphone first appeared, there was joy throughout the land. Handset shutterbugs dreamed of taking Ansel Adams-like photos without having to drag cameras to high mountaintops. And then there was a collective sigh of defeat. Because, as we all learned in one instance or another, these cameras don't actually take photos. Instead, they render amateur abstract expressionism. But one company is out to restore our faith by making a lens that will make cameraphone pictures usable in the real world. Johnson Electric is that company. It has introduced the NanoLens, a new motion technology that promises to auto-focus cameras in phones. On display in Hong Kong to manufacturers this month, we hope to see it in products as early as next year. Thank you, Johnson. Thank you.

New technology from Johnson Electric promises better pics [Mobilemag]

SuprGlu - Gathers your content from popular web services (del.icio.us, flickr, blogger, typepad) and publishes them in one place online

A Japanese company called Sophia System is going to release a phone running on WM5 (Windows Mobile 5 or Windows CE 5) and it's a Wireless LAN/PHS hybrid device.

A brief look at the specs tells us this: PXA270 520MHz CPU, 64Mb of SDRAM, 128Mb of Flash ROM, 0.3MP camera, Wireless b/g, 2.2" QVGA screen, mini USB port (client), CF Type 2 slot and a MiniSD slot.

"An XPL program defines orchestrated sequences of operations on XML Information Sets (Infosets)."

Pathfire has launched Pathfire Direct, a new software tool that aids backpack journalists by delivering a live stream of video or file over an IP network. Pathfire Direct enables point-to-point delivery of both store-and-forward and live video. It gathers, encodes and tags video - using a desktop or laptop computer – then delivers the live stream or file over any Internet Protocol (IP) network, wired or wireless. By implementing Open Standard metadata and encoding, Pathfire Direct fits into existing news production workflows and enables the repurposing of content for the Web or mobile devices. The software helps news organizations deliver real-time news stories from any locations.

From: http://www.joshkinberg.com/blog/archives/2005/11/greased_google.php

One of the frustrating things about websites that use Flash video is that they rarely provide links to let you download the video files for offline viewing or transcoding/syncing to portable devices like the Sony PSP, video iPod, or Creative Zen Vision.

Case and point: Google Video and YouTube. Neither of these websites allow you to download the video files. This type of lock-down is soooo Web 1.0.

I decided to dive into Greasemonkey and create a couple scripts to expose download links on Google Video and YouTube webpages:

Google Video Getter
YouTube To Me

To install these scripts you will need the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox. After installing Greasemonkey, relaunch Firefox, then right-click the links above and select "Install User Script." Now whenever you browse to a Google Video or YouTube webpage, you will see a prominent download link at the top.

Welcome to Web 2.0 where the user is in control of the experience.

See the screenshots below to see what these scripts do...

This might be interesting for those who want a video capture card and want to work in HD on PCIe... the Canopus VELXUS300 is a HDV native 1080i card and you'll be able to edit and record your HD videos in real time. No price information yet on this beast.

Sphinx-4 is a state-of-the-art speech recognition system written entirely in the JavaTM programming language.

AudioCoding.com's goal is to provide the community with free MPEG-4 audio codecs. Currently implemented are MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 AAC.

Google Print went live this morning. While the bitter copyright battle wages on, the index includes full versions of many public domain works. Some protected volumes are previewed (indexes and tables of contents) and feature links to purchase.

Google Maps is getting some competition from Yahoo Maps Beta. Local maps have geoRSS feed for searches, showing local traffic conditions, for example. The default view is Flash-based, with an Ajax version of the API available.

Here's the inside scoop from ysearchblog.com:

Today we're giving you a first look at the next generation of Yahoo! Maps which, we think, has a lot of features you're gonna like. We've really worked hard to make the product as intuitive as possible while building in some major upgrades in the interface, interactivity, and functionality. Have a look:

Aside from being far more interactive (click and drag!), there are some major differences we think you'll like.

1. Multi-point driving directions. Get yourself from point A to B and on to C a