Technology

Placeshifting – your media everywhere

eirikso20 Comments

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?
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Placeshifting – your media everywhere

The fastest rising chart ever on Trendmapper?

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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.

The fastest rising chart ever on Trendmapper?

Help for “the left behind”

eirikso9 Comments

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 New Digital Divide
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:
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Help for “the left behind”

How to set up a blog

eirikso13 Comments

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?
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How to set up a blog

The similarity of cars and computers

eirikso2 Comments

On my quest to build the perfect home theatre PC I have stumbled upon several interesting areas of perfection. And on my way, one thing suddenly became very clear: there are two quite obvious similarities between cars and computers.

1. Trimming cars and overclocking computers.
The art of making something go faster without actually buying a bigger engine or processor.

———-

2. Styling cars and modding computers
The art of adding huge amounts of stuff that is supposed to make something look better.

In addition to this, you have some not so obvious similarities:
3. The fanatic and passionate Alfa Romeo owner and the fanatic and passionate Apple owner
4. The idealistic electric car owner and the idealistic linux user
5. The safety freak driving a Volvo and the safety freak running two hardware and three software firewalls

More suggestions? Comments are welcome!

The similarity of cars and computers

Setting up SlimServer

eirikso3 Comments

Edit: I have just tried a product called ORB. And, my first impression: truly amazing! Register at Orb, install a free application on your media server and Orb lets you access your music, video, TV-Stations and pictures from wherever you are. No hassle. No opening of extra ports in your FW. No need for a static IP. If you want access to your media through streaming then Orb is something that you should consider. Not as flexible as SlimServer, but extremely easy to set up, and it gives you access to all your media.

Edit2: You can now read more about my ORB experiments here: Checking out ORB!

I am still amazed over the power of SlimServer. It is a very stable and user friendly tool that lets you stream your music to wherever you want. It is multi platform and it is free!

It works very well together with different standalone harware players, but can be used to stream your music to any networked computer as well.

So, here is a short guide to encourage you to try it out.

My attempt on an illustration to describe how it works (click the image to enlarge):

The concept:
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Setting up SlimServer

Everything you would ever want to see

eirikso103 Comments

Could Google render all possible television pictures and take over the industry?
I am working within the television industry. When going from analogue to digital equipment we started to treat our content as numbers instead of electrical pulses of different magnitude.

When working with numbers things get more absolute than the analogue electrical pulses. Suddenly it struck me that there actually is a limited number of possible television pictures out there. And, that it would be possible to create a computer program that could render all these pictures.

Have a look at this experiment:
We make a very simple picture. It consist of 4 x 4 pixels and no colour or shades of gray. Just black or white. This picture will contain 4 x 4 = 16 pixels. Since the pixels can be only black or white it is very easy to map it to a binary number containing 16 bits. This is the grid for my very simple picture:

Grid

Lets take the number 27030. The binary version of this number is 0110100110010110. Mapped into the 4×4 picture it would look like this:

Numbers

With pixels instead of numbers it looks like this:

Pixels

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Everything you would ever want to see

High flying broadband

eirikso1 Comment

I have been reading about airliners implementing WLAN and broadband in their planes, but never tried it. I know the tecnology, and I have been using mail since 1992. Still, it was somewhat special when I just recieved a mail from a coworker.

He is on his way to somwhere far east and is right now 11 000 m over Mongolia.
He is sitting there, 11 000 meters over Mongolia, watching Norwegian TV, listening to his favourite radio channels and sending email to his coworkers.

I was pretty impressed when I travelled with Singapore Airlines from Penang to Singapore back in 1999. They was very early in including personal entertainment in all seats, including computer games and a broad selection of movies. But, having broadband internet while flying is of course quite unbeatable. Now we’re talking! For a long flight, I am without doubt willing to pay extra for that kind of functionallity.

My friend is flying SAS, but as far as I know more airliners plan to include broadband on board.

Well, add "choose an airliner with broadband on board" to my current
list of travel essentials for long commutes:

– Active noise cancelling headphones
– A bottle of tabasco (to give the airline food some taste)
– The latest number of Wired
– Patience

High flying broadband