It’s out. Go and get it. On this weeks show Ian Dixon has Joe Harris from DigitalDeck. Joe returns to the show to talk about DigitalDeck and their home entertainment system for the connected home. He also has an update on the Media Center Awards, the vote page is up so get voting!
Listen and subscribe here!
While writing my little story about three of my MP3 players I thought of something. What if Sony was the company that made the Diamond Rio? Sony has done a lot of mistakes lately. Two of the worst has to be:
1. Sony owned the market for portable players for two decades. The Walkman in the 80s and the Discman in the 90s. Then, because of a very stupid deal with some very stupid content owners everything went wrong. From the fact that they where way too late into the market of MP3-players. The fact that their first Mp3-player actually did not support the MP3-format…
2. Then they started to infect their customers with evil software full of vulnerabilities. Evil and absolutely useless software.
That last trick is amazing. They have not stopped one single song from entering the filesharing networks. But they have managed to make their customers, their artists, the dealers and just about everyone very very angry.
In general these two horrible mistakes has both been done because Sony’s content division has been afraid of loosing money to filesharing and piracy.
Now they are struggeling. Would they struggle today if they took the market of MP3-players, streamlined communication from their players with the Playstation, made a music shop for the Playstation and just kept producing good content instead of infecting their loyal customers with evil software that don’t stop any pirates?
(Cool Sony CD image courtesy of Collapsibletank)
The ancient (to the left)
My good old Rio PMP300. Not the first one ever, but the first well known commercial MP3-player ever. 32 MB of on board memory and possible to expand with memory cards. At that point horribly expensive memory cards. Communicates with your computer through the parallell port!
The new one (to the right)
iPod 60GIG. Music, photo and video. Yes, I have managed to turn my mobile phone into a cool device for podcast listening, but there’s no doubt. For convenience, usability, battery life and sound quality. My new iPod’s podcasting capabilities are fantastic. And, I am actually already amazed over the development within the video podcast scene. Already some high quality content out there. Among other stuff, a fun revisit to the Happy Tree Friends. I had nearly forgot about those guys.
I want to play my music both on my iPod and in my Media Center, so after upgrading to iTunes 6 I have stopped buying music at the iTunes music store again. For a while, running iTunes 4 and jHymn to remove the stupid FairPlay DRM I have been a happy customer of iTunes Music Store. Now I’ll have to stick to cool shops like allofmp3.com to be able to buy music that will play on all my devices.
Or, I could of course visit my local CD shop and buy the unencrypted masters they still sell over there. Just stay clear of Sony. Or, maybe not. My media center runs AnyDVD, and has actually protected me against evil stuff like the Sony rootkit from day one. (And yes, I know. There are a lot of free music out there that will play on all my devices and that will not infect my machines with evil software, still – I work for the content industry and I actually make sure that I legally own the music I have on my computers and devices.)
Quite interesting actually. As an old mac user, complete gadget freak, above average interested in design and above average interested in music – this is my first iPod. So all hints, links to web sites, tweaks and hacks are welcome! Use the comments.
Right now I have successfully converted a couple of movies using Videora iPod Converter. High quality. Very easy.
And last but not least – The MP3 player for the kids
I agree with Oyvind, make a huge iPod maxi for the kids. It’s not there yet, so I headed for the sports department. Inovix Sport. 128 MB built in memory and expandable by SD or MMC. Cheap. Built in FM radio. Water resistant. Quite sturdy. Big buttons. No movable parts. Together with a cheap 1 GIG or 512 MB memory card this one is actually quite cool!
After one picture and a story, some well written sentences about the man and a wish for help, you actually feel that you know him slightly and you really want to help him.
A coworker just joined a friend that bought himself a new set of tires for his car. He used a legendary and low priced dealer in Oslo. It is run by some extremely efficient and clever people looking like they divide their time 50% doing work for the shop and 50% lifting weights at the gym. Not the kind of people you would mess with.
At the entrance of the shop they have put up a sign that is kind of interesting here in heavily regulated and streamlined Norway. It says:
“Theft will not be reported. It will be punished.”
Fantastic. This is what I call efficient communication!
Via HappyGoLucky.no (Norwegian)
More fun with my pictures from the year 2005. These pictures are a very good illustration of the four seasons here in Norway. The temperature vary from -20 to +30 degrees celcius. (And please note that -20 is the extreme low. Winter here in Oslo tend to vary between -5 and +5, still talking celcius). Summer should be from +15 to +25 C.
…and to make it easy for the people using an ancient system for measuring temperature:
Extremes through the year: -4 to +86 F
Normal winter: 23 to 41 F
Normal summer: 59 to 77 F
For the last year I have been taking a picture out of our living room window at random intervals. I have found a place in the window where the framing is almost identical for each picture. My plan is of course to edit this into a short video that will morph through the year.
While working on it I made this index overview. Even that one looks quite nice. It starts with a picture taken in the beginning of January 2005 top left and ends up with a picture taken december 2005 down to the right.
Update
Here’s the video:
http://flash.revver.com/player/1.0/player.swf
You find more information about how i did this here.
Update2:
The high definition version is now available here.
I will post back here when I have finished the video. My plan is also to publish all the pictures so that you creative people out there can experiment with them as well.
All hints on software that could help when putting the video together is appreciated. Use the comment feature on this post.
Update:
And here are four pictures that describe the four different seasons very well.
Update2
Been there, bought the T-shirt.
I want to keep on providing strange little projects like this one. I have a truly excellent hosting with Dreamhost. It’s cheap but not free. So, here’s the deal. This probably extremely limited edition T-shirt will give me a couple of euros to use on hosting and domain registration: Eirikso T-Shirts
And what’s that other T-Shirt? The guy with a bag on his head? Well, that’s Bill the Hacker. A character from another very popular post here on eirikso.com.
Yes I know. This is pathetic. “His blog got digged and now he starts selling T-shirts“. How awful. Don’t be afraid. Eirikso.com will not turn into a big shop. Making a commercial site out of this one will take the fun out of it. Consider this an experiment.
And why the limited edition? That comes as a natrual result of the fact that only a very limited amount of very intelligent people are going to buy it!
Please comment if you want me to set up a US shop as well. 🙂
I have already told you how to set up a blog. I am using the fantastic tool called WordPress to publish this one. You can enhance WordPress by installing plugins. Huge amounts of trial and error is needed to find the best enhancements out there. Now it’s time to share my experience and list the plugins I am running at the moment to power eirikso.com:
Continue reading “Essential plugins for WP”
So, what’s these two pictures? The one to the left is NRK’s official service for Windows Media Center Online Spotlight. The one to the right is a very unofficial NRK media center plugin for Meedio.
As mentioned in my post about Webshots and Flickr, one of the reasons why Flickr succeed is because they have a powerful open API. I have linked the acronym API to Wikipedia for the people that want to know more. The quick version: API is short for Application Programming Interface. It gives programmers a possibility to build new services on top of the service that provides an API. Google provides an API. In other words: people can build new services on top of Google. An example is the classic google fight.
Even without an API it is fairly easy to build new services on regular web pages. A plugin for Firefox called Greasemonkey puts this into a system with special scripts for adjusting and editing web pages as you visit them. Currently there are more than 400 000 scripts out there. Doing anything from removing the side bars of Slashdot.org to building advanced price comparing capabilities on Amazon.com. Wired magazine has an excellent article on Greasemonkey, explaining the details.
As the internet users get more advanced and the tools and programming languages become easier to use things like these happen. The BBC has experienced a lot of unauthorized remixing of their content and have been running around closing down web sites that is built on top of their news services and programme tables. Not anymore:
Continue reading “Come on. Take it all. Do what you want!”
Alexa is a web site that tracks traffic over time. The data from Alexa is collected from the people running the alexa toolbar in their browser, and in general that is enough to give a quite reliable picture of how a site is doing.
You can also compare charts, and the chart that shows the traffic rank of the popular photo sharing site Webshots vs. the chart of the relatively new but much hyped and right now just as popular service called Flickr is a very interesting illustration.
Webshots started as a general photo sharing site in 1999 and are celebrating their 10th anniversary as a brand these days (they started out as a professional service around 1995). Flickr emerged around february 2004. So, how come that a new site with a name that is difficult to spell and impossible to pronounce can rival Webshots after less than two years? It is difficult to say exactly why Flickr has this fantastic success. But, as it has been discussed all over the web as people realize this interesting and relatively new service – there are some properties of Flickr that is a good example of the successful web 2.0 service:
– A system that is easy to understand
– A clean interface with focus on usability
– Social functions like tagging, groups, commenting, evaluations and friends
– RSS feeds for everything
– An open API
The high usability grabs even your mother as a user. RSS feeds and an open API give them cred and collect users from the tech savvy digerati. The social network and possibility to create communities make both your mother and the geeky neighbour happy.
And while you’re here, please vote for my blog in the Norwegian competition that wants to elect the best technology blog in norway: Now I really need your help 🙂
Update:
Thomas Hawk has extended this article with more thoughts on the comparison of WebShots and Flickr here.
Update2:
Narendra Rocheroll has some interesting issues as well. Definitely worth a read.
Update3:
Due to a heavy load of spam on this post I have closed the comments and trackbacks.
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