TECHPopuli

Blogging systems overview

SteveG has put together a useful overview of all the blogging systems that he uses, and he uses a lot of them.

At vloggercon, people were asking me what I use for web hosting.

I'm all over the place, .mac, vblogcentral, TypePad, Blogger, BlogHarbor and 1and1.

Say goodbye TiVo

Barb Dybwad of Engadget.com goes into some detail about how a Mac mini can be used as a media center:

We think of it as the central brain of our system; the glue that holds all the devices together. It can serve the role of scheduler, controller, audio/video recorder, audio/video playback, audio/video download, and it even makes a decent audio/video production unit, as well.

[Thanks Hack A Day]

New uses for Mac mini

Michelle Delio in TechnologyReview.com observes that Apple's Mac mini may not be the most powerful computer on the market...

But it's not likely to suffer the same fate as Apple's now-discontinued Cube, which was merely a trophy computer, nor will it be relegated to underpowered cute "starter" machine status like the iMac.

The very thing that makes the Mac mini so endearing -- its tiny 6.5 inches wide by 6.5 inches deep by 2 inches high and less than 3 pounds form factor -- in combination with the very stable, extremely hackable and scriptable OS X makes it the perfect portable brain.

She goes on to list some off-the-beaten-track applications for the machine.

I would add to the list, the idea of someone creating TiVo-like software that allows it to be used as a combination video-iPod and cableTV set-top box.

TiVo is dead

Gizmodo:

Okay, TiVo is dead. Go over to eHomeUpgrade and read Thomas Hawk's excellent round up of first impressions of the slow-to-arrive, slow-to-please TiVoToGo service. TiVo, already back on their heels, had one shot at finding secure footing in this portable media market, and that was to drop the DRM hassles (or at least make them transparent) and provide something far and away better than Windows Media Center. They have failed.

Coupled with the Comcast screw-up and I think it's pretty much over for the company. They broke the PVR space wide open (at least feature-wise), but it's been years since any real innovation.

Learning Flash

As we all know, no project can really be accomplished in the budgeted time. SOMETHING will go wrong.

Earlier this week I set out to create a little, online slide show, with narration. It would be a marketing piece to send to a bunch of potential clients.

My plan was to use Audacity to create the soundtrack, Photoshop to create the bullet-slides and screenshots, then assemble the whole thing with iMovie, occasionally using the "Ken Burns" effect to add some motion.

I wish I had Apple's "Keynote" presentation software, especially the latest version, cause I hear it does this kind of thing real well. But iMovie is what I had, and what I knew, so onward.

The soundtrack came out just fine. Edited the narration, laid a piece of music under it, and exported to an mp3 file.

But when I assembled it in iMovie, and exported it to a stream-able movie, the image quality was really poor. Not acceptable, especially for potential clients.

I played with it for awhile, but it wasn't working.

Then I came up with the bright idea of assembling it as a Flash movie.

I have a really old version of the Flash dev-environment, which I never really learned. So I spent the past three days giving myself a crash-course, and dealing with the peculiarities of this 1999 software on my OS X Jaguar machine.

I think I've finally got it figured out. I've made 3-4 test versions, none of which is good enough, but each one represents some more learning. Now I'll start again, and I think I have a chance at producing a presentable Flash movie that I can send to my clients.

And as a bonus, I've added a little bit of Flash dev ability to the services I can offer.

Tags

David Weinberger writes about the promise of "tags" as a way to organize, and use, information on the web.

This [Technorati is now indexing tags] is exciting to me not only because it's useful but because it marks a needed advance in how we get value from tags. Thanks to del.icio.us and then flickr in particular, hundreds of thousands of people have been introduced to bottom-up tagging: Just slap a tag on something and now its value becomes social, not individual.

Snowflake software

The MIT Media Lab is holding a contest for the best computer program for creating a snowflake.

Snowflake-a-thon is the brainchild of John Maeda '88 who has dreamed of having such a competition on campus since 1988. Aesthetics and computation converge at MIT on January 19!

BMac

At tonight's Boston Mac User Group meeting we watched the MacWorld keynote in its entirety. Interesting to hear the crowd's reactions to the various announcements. It seemed that the most enthusiastic responses were for the Mac mini, and #1 the iPod shuffle.

Keynote Webcast Available Now

Contrary to the announced timetable, the webcast of the keynote is now available on the apple.com site.

Keynote IRC Transcript

I was able to follow the Keynote from here in NH by joining the excellent coverage provided by Robert Levin in the freenode.net's #mwsf channel.

Here is a transcript of that channel.

MacWorld Keynote Coverage

Apple-X
Macintouch
MacCentral
MacSlash
MacRumors
MacNN

Apple announces Pages wordprocessor and Mac Mini low price Mac

I'll post more later, but among many announcements at Steve Jobs' Macworld Keynote, he announced a hi-powered wordprocessor called "Pages", and a low cost ($500-600) Mac called "Mac Mini".

2005 Macworld Keynote on irc

FYI, I'm trying to keep up with the keynote on these IRC servers/channels:

server: irc.slashnet.org
#mercworld

server: freenode.net
#joiito
#mwsf

If I find others, I'll update this posting, so check back.

Macworld Keynote Webcast

According to Macintouch, Steve Jobs' keynote talk, to the SF Macworld Expo, will be available for viewing on the apple.com website after 9 pm EST tonite.

iHome

From SteveG, here's some pics of the alleged new Mac. The iHome. [Look quick, cause these pics will probably be taken down soon.]

Vloggercon 2005

If you're into video, or just exploring rich-media on the net, you should go to Vloggercon 2005 in NYC on Jan 22.

The purpose of Vloggercon 2005 is to look at back at the incredible work the Videoblogging Group has done this year...and to meet each other face to face. We have done such great work because we are a tight, open, ambitious community. Let's get tighter and more open. (we got enough ambition) And of course, VloggerCon is free.

I want to go, and maybe I can, but probably not. But I'm guessing they'll have great online coverage.

No Live Webcast of Jobs' Keynote

Disappointing, but Apple has announced that they will not be providing a live feed of the MacWorld keynote on Tuesday. They say that it will be available on apple.com after it's finished, but they won't say specifically when.

That was scary!

This morning my TiVo remote stopped working.

What would you do if you had a Series One TiVo, with a couple week's shows on it, and the remote broke? Call TiVo customer service? eBay?

Luckily, it appears that it was just dead batteries. But it was scary.

Clean Software for Microsoft Windows

Assuming that this site is not a double-blind source of MORE malware, it screens free products and tells which ones are "clean".

[via J-Walk]

Get a Mac, Part Two

Here's another account of doing family tech support over the holidays.

Went home for the holidays this week, and of course, the annual fix-Mom's-computer event. This year things on my mother-in-law's Windows 98 PC were especially bad; it could've been used as a software showcase of the latest and greatest in malware.

Family Tech Support

Ross Mayfield gives some advice:

If you are reading this, you are probably an early adopter. So when the holidays come around you spend time with your family doing In-law IT. These days it can be dreadfully easy:

* If at all possible, switch them to a Mac -- You know that experience of visiting family only to find their PC infested with spyware and viruses. Call it the crud of mainstream adoption. They complain about things simply crashing, you have a solution, move them to a Mac with at least OS X. This is the greatest gift you can give them, simplicity that simply works.

There's more.