Deskrama is a low-cost interactive space browser for three dimensional architectural designs. You move the screen on top of a drawing and it shows the 3D rendered picture of the building.
No point in trying to explain this here. Just click play and the video will show you how it works. Credits to Mr. Takehiko Nagakura.
http://flash.revver.com/player/1.0/player.swf
Link to video on Revver.
Paul Neave is a complete genius that have made amazing stuff like the wonderful flash based frontend for Google Maps and Windows Live Local.
He has also made a very nice frontend for YouTube, blip.tv and Google Video. It’s called neave.tv and it’s close to a service that you would want on your media center. Slightly better keyboard control and it would have been perfect.
As far as I understand the content is selected by Mr. Neave himself. It’s a very nice collection of good stuff from the three video sites mentioned. Including a video that I put out there a while ago…
Most media centers is capable of starting internet explorer in kiosk mode. Meaning full screen without any toolbars. Simply make a shortcut in your media center of choice that starts internet explorer at neave.tv and you have yet another television channel to play around with. The command you need looks like this:
iexplore -k http://neave.tv
Neave.tv lets you play the videos in full screen as well. I wouldn’t recommend that if you have a big LCD. Image quality isn’t exactly what YouTube and the others are known for. And, neave.tv had problems scaling correct on a 16/9 monitor:
Anyway, yet another interesting experiment from Mr. Neave.
Inspired by Brilliantdays I give you the eirikso traffic list. It shows the sites that have given me the largest amount of traffic over the last year. I have removed the search engines.
These are the 42 top sites that have directed traffic to eirikso.com in this period. Most hits from digg.com and so on…
Lots of very interesting sites here. Thanks to all the people in this list and to all the other ones that have linked to this site! My site gets 18% of the traffic from direct hits, 69% from referrers and 13% from searches.
And Oyvind, you know that number 42 is the best place to be… 🙂
And what are people searching for when they find my site? These are the top 20 searches:
And how many people visit this blog each month? So far in September 24,963 people have been here. And here are the total number of visitors for the last five months:
Aug – 31,648
Jul – 29,395
Jun – 46,967
May – 53,356
Apr – 40,226
…I lost a considerable amount of hits in this count the last time I was on the front page of digg (in July). My site went down and most of the traffic went to a mirrored page that didn’t include the counter. However, you can see the impact of digg in Alexa. Quite a bit of traffic and it would have been a lot more if my site had stayed up. Digg eventually had to remove the link from the front page.
And how much money do I make from the Google Ads on the site? According to the AdSense contract I am not allowed to tell you, but a quick estimate tells me that if I keep the growth I have now I can quit my day job in about 50 years. 🙂
So why bother with the ads? I learn a lot, it pays for the hosting and and when adding up a couple of months of AdSense cash I can afford an occasional upgrade of my computers.
Last but not least, thanks to all my readers. To the people commenting and contacting me about stuff they find here. Keep it up.
I’ll keep on posting interesting, amazing, fun, boring, stupid, difficult and strange articles… A couple of them each week. Have fun and don’t forget all the cool stuff that’s already in here.
YouTube and the other video sites out there making it extremely easy for you, me and your grandfather to publish videos on the internet are all cool, but the video quality is absolutely crap. For many of the videos that doesn’t matter much. You still get the message.
But sometimes you want better quality. You want to download the clip and play it locally on your computer. And you want this process to be easy.
Meet the Democracy Player from the Participatory Culture Foundation. It is an open soucre player and subscription engine. You add the video feeds you want and the Democracy Player downloads and manages the files. Just keep the player running in the background and you have interesting content available at all times. The Democracy Player even comes with a built in bittorrent client so it can download files from sites that have decided to use that type of distribution.
The Democracy Player is free, multi platform and open source. Works on Windows, Mac and Linux.
I have been following this project for quite some time and have tried the different beta versions of the player that they have made available. Recently they released version 0.9 and this is the first version that I can recommend everybody to download and start using.
It is easy to understand, has a nice channel guide and plays most video codecs. The only problem is that you will be overwhelmed with the amount of content. Huge amounts of complete crap and some pretty high quality stuff. Play around with the channel guide and you will find something you like.
You find geek classics like Diggnation, Rocketboom and Tiki Bar. You find Olde English Sketch Comedy, French Maid TV and MariposaHD. The last one in a no-so-high-definition but iPod friendly version.
But what’s the brand new channel? Well, the good people at the Participatory Culture Foundation has made a video publishing tool as well. Something like what WordPress does for blog publishing and Gallery does for image publishing. It’s called Broadcast Machine and is incredibly easy to use.
So, of course I have to try this out and give you the eirikso.com video channel. This is an experiment. I have started out by giving you some of the videos you already have seen here at eirikso.com in crappy YouTube quality. Now in much better quality for you to download. It would be very nice if you install the democracy player and try it out.
I would like to know
I will keep experimenting with this based on feedback from my readers. I have a theory that the type of videos that I have been publishing on the site here through YouTube and GoogleVideo is nice as illustrations to my articles and not so interesting as a full download. Something tells me that the content you want in the Democracy Player should be more complete and tell a story alone?
The Democracy Player is indeed interesting for bloggers and private publishers, but could also be interesting for professional media corporations.
Throw some comments here or contact me.
I’m going to speak at several events during October. I will talk about the future of the broadcast industry and how democratization of technology, distribution and production is changing traditional media.
I will bring up issues like DRM, blogging, user generated content, the long tail and the actual reasons for new technology to fail or succeed.
As far as I know all these presentations will be done in the huge and well known language of Norwegian. In November I will be in Poland speaking for MediaGeniX in english, but I think your best bet if you want to catch up on these issues would be to follow eirikso.com
And, because I listen to what my very cool readers have to say you can even shape my presentations yourself by commenting here as I post on the issues mentioned.
This is some of my presentations for October:
And – yes, I still need to post the rest of the presentation in Bergen this spring… 🙂
Photo copyright Gizmodo
Steve Jobs is on stage. Engadget.com is down and updated iPods are on the way. Lean back and follow the hype over at Gizmodo (you know… while engadget is down).
Will be interesting to see if anything really new comes out of this… 🙂
Update:
Now Gizmodo and The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) are both down as well… Only Mr. Jobs can manage this…
More goodies from Siggraph 2006. Morphovision is a project by Toshio Iwai. The combination of a spinning model of a house and some special lights give an illusion that is a strange experience. Something that looks like a true 3D projected image in front of your eyes. And, well – it is. Because the spinning model is a true model. A house made of wood and plastic. Problem is that the light fools your eyes into seeing strange things happening to the house… You have to see it yourself with your own eyes to really get the strange image.
However, for the people that wasn’t able to visit Siggraph this year I have made this little video to give an impression.
http://flash.revver.com/player/1.0/player.swf
Link to video
There’s a new beta of Yahoo Go for TV out. The update includes:
I haven’t had the time to check it out, and I really would like to see a version that would work in Norway as well, but I’ll give it a go and anyone with a working US proxy: feel free to contact me! 🙂
You find my first experience with this software here.
Thanks Dave and Jeff
TVedia is a media center frontend with some extremely interesting networking functionallity and a very nice interface for YouTube, Google Video, Flickr, LastFM and other media related web sites.
I recently gave it a run on my Windows Media Center Edition box. The installation was very easy. The MCE remote worked at once with no configuration.
You let the software scan your drives for media files and it builds a database that lets you browse your images, videos and music. So far so good. A full screen media browser like all the others out there. And, after my quick test I must say that it is a very good one. The animated user interface is fast and user firendly, but not as smooth and slick as Windows Media Center Edition (MCE). The advantage is the fact that TVedia has modest hardware requirements compared to MCE.
But what’s so special about TVedia compared to all the other available options? The network integration. During installation it asked if I wanted access to the media that TVedia found on the other computers on my network. I said Yes, and when installing TVedia on another box on the same network all my media showed up there as well. No questions asked, no configuration. It just worked.
TVedia is a universal plug and play (UPnP) client and server. Meaning that it will communicate with your UPnP enabeled phone or media server. I haven’t tried this yet, so I’ll have to come back to how this works. You can read more here.
But the functionallity that impressed me the most is TVedia’s nice integration with sites like YouTube, GoogleVideo and Flickr.
With TVedia these sites are suddenly available from your remote on the big screen in the living room. The experience works very well. You can search for video clips and browse categories. Compared to the YouTube and GoogleVideo plugin for Windows Media Center Edition this experience is way better. Of course, the quality of the videos on these sites doesn’t look very good on your 42 inch LCD, but the playback is done through ffdshow and gives you an experience as good as possible. When trying to predict the future of technology a couple of things are pretty certain. The quality will be better! This is a preview of some of the functionallity that the future of big screen entertainment will give you.
Such a nice interface for these sites can turn out to be very interesting and really emphasize the possibilities of Long Tail Content in your living room. (If you want to know more about the long tail Chris Anderson explains it in The Media Center Show here. Or, of course Wikipedia comes you your rescue with a great article.)
For Flickr you can even upload pictures to your account directly from TVedia. You can browse your own sets, your friend’s pictures, search and browse tags.
When running a slide show of photos from Flickr TVedia downloads the largest version available and present them with nice transitions on your TV.
If you add the fact that TVedia plays protected music from both iTunes and MSN Music and has an open interface for plug in development you are close to the perfect media center. And you can’t complain about the price of $35,- either.
Unfortunately, there’s a big one. No TV functionallity yet. You need to run it in cooperation with SnapStream Beyond TV or another proper PVR software. I have years of experience with such solutions. Running one PVR software and another media library software. That is not at all something that I would recommend. The fact that Windows Media Center Edition provides me with both a media library and a proper PVR with an EPG was my main reason to switch to this platform.
The usability, navigation and stability always suffer when running several programs. TVedia version 3.5 had PVR capabilities, so I really hope that 8Dimensions will add a proper PVR with EPG to TVedia version 4 as soon as possible.
But, if you’re in for a tiny bit of tweaking and maintenance, the combination of TVedia and the already mentioned SnapStream Beyond TV will give you a media box with far more functionallity than a plain MCE 2005 box from Microsoft.
So far this is one of the most interesting products I have seen in this space for a long time! The music library, networking and online features are way better than what I am used to in MCE. Please guys, add a proper PVR and you have a winner on your hands.
For quite some time there has been some tools that would let you strip the DRM from encrypted Windows Media files. However, they have been difficult to use and have not worked on all systems.
Now a user called viodentia over at the Doom9 forums has posted a tool called FairUse4WM. It lets you remove the DRM from files that you have a valid license for on your computer.
Meaning that you can now safely buy music on all the Windows Media Based music shops and easily “set it free” so you can play it on whatever device you want.
This is great news for consumers and pretty bad news for some content owners and of course for Microsoft. They issued a patch for Windows Media Player shortly after the first release of FairUse4WM. The patch stopped FairUse4WM, but it took viodentia a couple of hours to release a new version that worked on patched media players as well. Let the good old cat and mouse game begin!
It seems like Cory Doctorow was right. DRM doesn’t work.
I have tested FairUse4WM and it works very well. First you point it to a media file that you have a working key for. You can download this one and play it once so a key is issued. Point FairUse4WM to it and when it has done its wonders on that file you get to the next screen where you simply drag and drop DRM’ed files. When you have added the files you want to make device independent you hit one button and FairUse4WM strips the DRM and saves the new files in a location that you have specified. It adds “[NoDRM]” to the name. Simple as that.
Please note that I am not in any way encouraging piracy here. FairUse4WM should be used on media that you have legally obtained and of course you should never redistribute media that you don’t own the rights to.
However, this tool is great if you have been stupid enough to buy music on any of the Windows Media DRM’ed shops on the net. This means that you can unlock and convert WMA and WMV so you can play it on your iPod, your Linux player or whatever box that has not been blessed by Microsoft. It means that buying music from the MSN Music store no longer is so stupid after all…
An article on some of the first tools to break the WMV DRM from Chris Laniers blog back in february 2005.
Engadget covers the story and publish an open letter to Microsoft. The Slashdot crowd chimes in. And, well – it’s all over the blogsphere and all over the net.
eirikso 
