Summer has reached Norway and it is time for an iced coffee.
Find your shaker and throw in a table spoon of sugar. Then fill up with ice cubes. Make a double espresso and pour over the ice. Shake well. Pour into two glasses and top of with some milk. Enjoy!
While browsing the very entertaining archives of 2600.com i stumbeled upon a very interesting hack.
Back in 1999 some Swedish hackers changed the front page of both MacWeek and MacWorld. It seems like they actually did a remarkable piece of prediction. I have tried to recreate a possible conversation between two of the hackers:
January 4. 1999
This is a quote from the front page they made:
APPLE MERGES WITH INTEL !
Today, Apple and Intel released the shocking news that they now have merged into APTEL Inc., starting a new line of Computer Systems featuring the Intel Pentium II processor and Linux Slackware Operating System.
So, it is 2005. Apple’s operating system is based on unix and in the beginning of June all front pages where full of this.
Ian Dixon’s brilliant Media Center Show has reached episode #14. And this time he’s had a chat with the admin of eirikso.com. That happens to be… me… As a modest geek that spent years of education to make sure he always could stay behind the camera I am honoured to guest the show.
I was invited to talk about the little roundup I did of different media center softwares. We had a nice chat about that, and a lot of other digital media related issues.
Pick up your player or listen directly on your computer
This is dedicated content for the people that are interested in HTPCs in general and Windows Media Center Edition in detail. It is time to pick up whatever audio player you have and start subscribing. My favourite is to use my Nokia 6630 cellular to listen to podcasts. Have a look at my guide here.
The simplicity of the technology behind a show like this is interesting.
Ian calls me up through Skype. I’m in Norway, he’s in the UK. He records the conversation, edits it and posts it on his web page. People out there subscibe to the feed and get the show as soon as he has published it. The audio quality of the Skype conversation is far better than any regular phone line.
Related posts:
Everything under my HTPC category and Windows MCE category.
The very talented cinematographer John Andreas Andersen has posted a cool making of from his work on a BMW commercial starring Kermit The Frog, directed by Mr. Stevan Treshow.
The location is Calvinia in South Africa. The area is covered by a desert, but the day the crew arrived it started raining heavily. Yes, when an expensive film crew arrives in a desert where it never rains… It starts raining! After one day of waiting, the rain stopped and the desert dried in a couple of hours.
Here is a link to the movie (Apple QuickTime required):
www.john-andreas.com/makingkermit.mov
Edit:
“The making of” on YouTube
Head over to www.john-andreas.com for more details. The commercial itself is currently aired at German television.
Update:
More info and movie clips over here.
Placeshifting, the art of making your media available where you want it.
Okay, you have a computer at home with some music, some pictures and some video files. Maybe you also have connected a TV-card and a web cam. Now, how cool would it be if you could access all of this whenever you where connected to the net with a device that was able to play your media?
This has been possible for quite a while, but as much of the stuff that is possible with computers, it has been too difficult to set up. To make streaming of media out of your home happen doing advanced firewall configuration and setting up a DynDNS service was necessary.
Content owners – watch out!
I said was. I have written about ORB and SlimServer here before, and I am still amazed over how well ORB works. What makes it especially interesting for content producers and copyright lawyers is the fact that it makes your own media inependent of borders and regulations regarding protection of content within countries.
I have all my Norwegian television channels available no matter where I am. At the same time the content producers work hard on their business model that depends on dividing the world in regions.
Availability
MP3 is a technology that forced its way through despite the fact that it was not marketed and actually heavily worked against by the music industry. People wanted availability. Actually people was willing to sacrifice quality on behalf of availability. (While the music industry was working hard making Super Audio CD because they thought that people wanted better quality).
Placeshifting is all about availability. After using ORB for a while I have been quite addicted to having my music available on all my computers. At work. At a friends house. On my mobile.
So what do I do?
Continue reading “Placeshifting – your media everywhere”
A company called IPDrum did a press release recently. IPdrum has developed patent-pending technology to connect traditional mobile telephony systems with peer-to-peer (P2P) telephony. IPdrum Mobile Cable enables the user to Skype from his/her mobile no matter where he/she is.
Going from 18 hits in Google on the 16th of june to 47 000 hits on the 21st. That is what I call a successful press release! Link to the full trendmap.
Blogging just reached a new height. Gunhild Sørensen of the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation just did a spectacular ride in a paraglider. All the way she posted directly to the blog at the Norwegian Broadcasting Coropration’s web site. The site is in Norwegian, but the pictures speak for themselves…
From the blog:
“Now we are going to do some 360s. Øyvind (the instructor) asks me to hold tight to my mobile. This involves some serious G-forces”
Technical:
She is using a Nokia 6630 mobile and sends her messages and pictures to a blog powered by Easy Moblog.
The well renowned design studio made a commercial for a festival in Oslo, but it was too controversial for the contractor.
So, they published it on their website and has had a traffic boost and feedback that it was difficult to expect. 80 000 downloads since it was published last thursday. Links to it from all over the world and fantastic feedback from all kinds of people.
Update: By Tue-21-Jun-2005 00:17 Toxic reports 131366 downloads
I can’t tell you what festival it was supposed to promote. You have to see for yourself:
Fantastic commercial from Toxic Design Studios
You can read more about the commercial over at brilliandays.
A while ago the always intelligent Seth Godin posted an article on the new digital divide. He sums up certain similarities grouping what he calls “the Digerati” and what he calls “the left behind”. Here is a revised version of his list, a couple of points added on basis of comments on the original thread:
| The Digerati | The Left Behind |
|---|---|
| Uses Firefox | Uses Internet Explorer |
| Knows who Doc Searls is |
Already has a doctor, thanks very much |
| Uses RSS Reader | RSS? |
| Has a blog | Reads blogs (sometimes) |
| Reads BoingBoing (or Slashdot) |
Watches the Tonight Show |
| Bored with Flickr | Flickr? |
| Gets news from Google | Gets news from Peter Jennings |
| Uses del.ico.us | Thinks that’s probably a p0rn site. |
| Uses Bittorrent | Uses a VCR |
The reason why people like this list is because the people reading it find themselves among the Digerati. But if we really are, we should prove it by trying to help the left behind.
So here we go:
Continue reading “Help for “the left behind””
I am currently running several blogs. This one – www.eirikso.com, the hit tracking tool Trendmapper, my Norwegian food blog etc… I have made homepages using flash, I have made them using various web editing tools. I have made them using free blogging tools like Blogger or WordPress.com. I have hosted them at my ISP, I have hosted them at different hosting companies. But right now I have a solution that I really like!
It’s time to sum it all up and tell you what I would have done if I wanted to start a blog from scratch today.
1. You would want to host at a proper web host.
Your ISP gives you crap. Free blogging tools are limited. Go for a blog at a proper host, and you have space to grow in and possibilities to play with.
So what do I choose?
Continue reading “How to set up a blog”
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