Kids in Video

Jul 31, 2009 by Dan Taylor    2 Comments    Posted under: Video

In a return of the long lost friday funnies I’ve got two fun videos for ya’ll.  Enjoy!

Sent over my Dr. Poke.

and

Phish Halloween ’09- all but confirmed for Coachella

Jul 21, 2009 by Dan Taylor    9 Comments    Posted under: Music

Save the Date looks to be solved.  Apparently one Palm Desert, California hotel might have let the cat out of the bag as to where Phish’s halloween festival is going to be taking place this year.

And a bit more:

Up until now, the folks over at Phish.com have been playing a game with all of us, cleverly removing a state (or 5) at a time from a map of the U.S. until the final location was revealed.  There’s but much speculation over on the twitter airwaves, but to his credit, it looks like Grill_Meister eagle eyed this hotel deal in Palm Desert, California at the Hampton Inn and Suites.  Speculation has been circulating for a while that the band would land in Coachella for the late October holiday, but when California was removed from the map a few weeks ago, hopes were dashed.  Apparently, this was just a measure to throw fans off track.

So while it was fun while it lasted, it looks like we can all thank the folks over at Hampton Inn & Suites for this tasty heads up.  Thanks folks!

Snow Leopard: What to expect

Jul 21, 2009 by Dan Taylor    No Comments    Posted under: Productivity, Technology

When the news of an OS update for Mac users hit the streets, many users (myself included) got pretty jazzed – only to find out that we were going to have to wait quite a while to get our hands on Apple’s newest creation. Dubbed Snow Leopard, a clear indication that this is more of an expansion pack for Leopard, rather than a whole new version, this OS upgrade release date is set for September. Planned improvements include speed and performance, as well as improvements to the architecture our beloved Mac apps run on, and improved Exchange support (I can haz Mac now, boss?).

Again, as this is more of an expansion pack rather than a completely new OS, Snow Leopard will be Apple’s cheapest OS upgrade to date – priced at around $29. And frankly, at that price, I’d be hard pressed to see why anyone wouldn’t want this update. The exhaustive list of planned features is available from Apple, but for this article, I’d like to present the highlights that do it for me.

Dock Exposé

I arrived to the Mac world with a fresh copy of Leopard in my hands, but I have worked on Tiger, and rapidly discovered the benefits of Exposé. Spaces, I’m not that much of a fan of, but Exposé provides a number of productivity benefits, as well as the occasional…wait, which window was that yadda yadda in, answer. Snow Leopard is bringing exposé to a dock near you. Personally, I use hot corners and mouse shortcuts to access my exposé goodies, but Snow Leopard will now offer users the option to place an icon on the dock. Clicking and holding this dock icon will arrange all open windows in a far more organized manner, aligning themselves to a grid.

QuickTime X

Oh QuickTime, how I love to hate you most times. I’m pretty certain I’m not the only one on this trip (think VLC development community), and it looks like Apple’s noticed. Other than the addition of the H.264 codec in Leopard, not much has changed with QuickTime for quite a while. In addition to a new icon to be used, QuickTime X includes a number of interface enhancements including improved streaming video ability, speed increases, and last but not least, a gorgeous border-less display window (finally!). Oh, and did I mention screen recording? Seeya iShowU.

Stacks

Stick ‘em up buddy! Stacks first appeared in the Mac catalogue with Leopard, and personally, I love them. The idea is simple enough, one way to navigate through entire folder contents directly from the dock. And while highly functional, one of my major gripes is that you only were able to access the top level of this folder structure. Snow Leopard addresses this and allows you to drill down through folders while still in stack mode. Sft+cmd+a is looking further and further away.

Install Speed and Space

If the niceties above didn’t make you smile, perhaps improved system speed, and a bit more HDD real estate will. According to Apple, Snow Leopard will reduce the time spent installing the OS by up to 45%! Granted, this is a (hopefully) one time only deal, but shaving the install time in half? Well done Cupertino. And how about some extra storage space? Snow Leopard is touted to free up to 6GB of space!!! Granted, both of these claims come with fine print, but heck…even if I got only 3GB back, my iTunes collection would be mighty thankful.

The Architecture

If you’re a developer, Snow Leopard is either going to cause you a bushel full of woes, or make your life much easier. Either way you look at it, Apple is fundamentally changing the way things work under the hood. If you’re not a dev (I assume a majority of my readers full into this category), you’ll probably only notice the changes via improved speed, security, and system stability/reliability.

64 Bit Speed

All the latest Intel Macs ship with 64 Bit processors and are capable of performing at much higher speeds. Leopard has taken advantage of this technology, to an extent, but Snow Leopard will really saddle this pony and take it out for a ride. The OS update includes a number of re-writes for system applications that should make things noticeably faster.

These re-writes will also reduce the amount of memory that can be handled by any given application, thereby (theoretically) allowing for a maximum of 16 billion gigabytes of memory!

These leaps in speed aren’t going to melt your face off, but they should provide a noticeable snappier Mac (provided you’re running on a 64 bit system).

Do More with Core Duo

If you’re running a Mac with Intel Core Duo technology, Snow Leopard’s addition of Grand Central Dispatch will offer even more speed. Preliminary research of how GCD works caused a mild headache, so I’ll leave it at this: It makes things go faster.

OpenCL

Chances are the graphics on your Mac are already pretty darn impressive. With the addition of the new OpenCL architecture, your graphics processor will be able to handle a wider range of tasks. Hailing from the gaming world, this new technology will stand by waiting to assist and increase the speed of your every day use tasks.

Exchange Support

Even the most die-hard Mac offices have to interface with the outside world, and their non-Mac toting counterparts. To this end, Snow Leopard represents Apple’s first steps in making Macs better suited to the suited world. The new Exchange support features will integrate MS features into local OSX applications including Mail, iCal, and Address Book.

Again, a full list of Snow Leopard’s features are available directly from Apple, and I’d suggest you take a look at it to get the full lowdown. The above represent the ones that get me jazzed, but there are sections I didn’t even get to (i.e. if you’re using a Time Capsule for Time Machine backups, you’ll be delighted to discover the process should be up to 50 percent faster).

With that said, my top 5 reasons for upgrading ASAP are:

• Price – $29? Seriously? For that price, heck, I’d buy two if it’d quadruple my speed increases.
• Speed – anytime someone says to me, “Hey, I’ve got something here that’ll make your machine run faster” I’m generally all ears. Knowing that it’s coming out of Cupertino directly from Mac engineers, call me sold.
• 6GB of free space – for $29 and most probably half an hour of my time to install the upgrade, and I get speed and space? Hmmm…what to do with 6 extra GB? iTunes what?
• 64 Bit optimization – perhaps falling under the speed category, but re-writing how the OS accesses and handles key hardware components is nothing short of brilliant.
• The Future – Obviously any time Apple makes a significant OS change, application developers scramble to get the very best out of their current product to take advantage of these features. I’m quite excited to see what type of updates/changes some of my favorites make to meet the new limitations of OS X Snow Leopard

So from where I’m sitting, September looks only a mere 41 days away. Apple’s not given a definitive date for release, but chances are, I’ll be lined up at 9am at the shop to get my hands on Snow Leopard. Will you be upgrading? Leave a comment below.

HD Video: Phish Bug>Tweezer Reprise

Jul 14, 2009 by Dan Taylor    2 Comments    Posted under: Music, Video

Have a view of this outstanding 3 camera HD footage from Phish’s inaugural reunion show at the Hampton Colosseum March 8, 2009. Hopefully this won’t get pulled, as it’s honestly the best Phish footage I’ve ever seen, DVD releases included. Thanks a million earthscapeben!

Video Podcast Review – ABC CBS NBC

Jul 14, 2009 by Dan Taylor    3 Comments    Posted under: News, Video

While living 4234 miles from my home town, on another continent does have certain advantages, there’s also a bit lost in translation (literally).  And I honestly don’t know what’s taken me so long, but I finally discovered/got around to including the ABC, NBC, and CBS evening news video podcasts in my regular rotation.  I work out in the mornings (calm down ladies, it’s really nothing to get hot and bothered about) and figured out that I could kill two birds with one stone: lose the weight, gain some knowledge (and hopefully a bit of muscle while I’m at it) via video news podcast updates.  All three networks provide them free of charge via the iTunes store, but there are some differences, not just in quality, but delivery.

ABC

Out of the three, ABC receives the lowest scores.  While the other two networks deliver iPod-ized versions of the previous evenings news, ABC takes another route and creates an entirely new show specifically for the podcast version.  Sounds great, right?  Well, in actuality it’s almost offensive.  ABC is committing an intellectual offense.  By creating this completely new version of the news, I’m always left wondering, “Well, what happened during the actual broadcast version?  Was/Is there something that I’m missing here?”  Granted, ABC does include a 45 second highlight at the end of these podcasts by presenting their ‘Partnership with Google’ segment, in which they highlight the days’ trending (top searched) topics of the day, but to be honest, I’m not sure if they’re not just looking for filler here.

The ABC video podcast weighs in (on average) at a paltry 86 MB, making it a quick delivery (if mid-afternoon news is your deal), but also suffering from what I like to call, RUFK video quality.  Granted, on the average iPod or iPhone screen, this video quality is fine, but on my 24 inch desktop monitor…Well, let’s just say, I’ve counted pixels.  ABC FAIL.

ABC also comes in dead last with delivery times.  I live in Europe, which means I’m 6 hours ahead of the Eastern Seaboard, so when I’m working out at 8am, it’s still only 2am in New York.  However, that doesn’t mean that I’m not hungry for my daily dose of corporate sponsored news.  When I open iTunes in the morning to sync up the podcasts, you can imagine my dismay when ABC’s most recent update is from two days ago.  I tracked delivery times last week, and found that ABC’s ‘special’ (perhaps as in bus?) section arrives around 1 in the afternoon here, or 8am EST, putting them in dead last.  Next.

CBS

The CBS podcast gets 8 out of 10 marks.  They deliver a full version of the previous evening’s broadcast, Katie Couric included (be that good or bad).  The only reason for the markdown is, as we saw with ABC, delivery time.  CBS is only slightly better than ABC, with an average delivery time of 11 am CET, or 5 am EST.

Video quality is greatly improved over ABC, with the average podcast coming down at around 100 MB.  That may sound like a lot, but given today’s broadband speeds and sharing technologies, I’ve never waited more than a minute to download this podcast.

NBC

Mr. Brian Williams, sir, I stand and applaud you.  Ok, I’m quite certain that Brian Williams has, in fact, nothing to do with the NBC Evening News Video podcast, but the IT type folks at NBC have nailed it.  Not just a fluke, the NBC Evening News video podcast is a rock.  Simply due to this podcast, the NBC news is now my preferred source (obviously after The Daily Show and the Colbert Report, where everyone else gets their news, right?).

Video quality is outstanding, with the average download being somewhere in the 120 MB range, and I only very rarely can see a pixel or two, on my obviously way bigger than your average iPod or iPhone screen resolution.  NBC is also the only podcast that is made available in a widescreen format.  Again, not a bank breaker, but to this geek, a duly noted attention, or lack of, as it were, to detail.

Delivery time?  Fuggetaboutit.  As previously stated, I’m looking for fresh content around 8am CET, or 2am EST.  I’ve never looked any earlier than this time, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that NBC is posting this update 20 minutes after closing the show.  Of the three, NBC has never let me down, and always delivers the most up to date (with a day delay – it’s Europe, I’d expect it) news.  We have a winner!

Overall, I’m grateful to all three sources, as none of them have to provide this service, and that’s exactly what it is, a service, and free at that.  I can certainly see merits in what ABC’s trying to do, but I think they’re coming up short of the mark.  CBS, close, but no cigar.  If they’d put a little speed on their scheduled upload and available to the world schedule, they’d be on par with NBC.  And as far as NBC goes, delivery time and quality count in my book, and you folks, deliver on both fronts.

After watching three different broadcasts of each network’s evening news programs, let me simply leave you with this question:  Why do they all report, more or less, the exact same stories as their competitors?  Oh wait…that’s right.  We leave the ‘other’ news to those ‘less’ successful evening news programs over on that cable channel and put them on late at night.  Who could possibly be watching?

Top 10 examples of Data Visualization

Jul 5, 2009 by Dan Taylor    11 Comments    Posted under: Technology

With the tremendous amount of data circulating the internet at any given moment, it’d be nice to see some graphic representations of what’s actually happening, instead of just a bunch of 1’s and 0’s.

Add to that the what would most certainly be a maddening exercise in trying to find related content to the mix, and data visualizations become all the more important.  These data visualizations below represent to me the most meaningful and useful tools available.  They cover everything from Digg activity to Network connectivity, to simply watching the world tweet the day away.

Music and Movies

Liveplasma is movie and music visualization app that allows you to see related musicians and movies you might enjoy based on your initial input.  Enter the name of your favorite band, film, artist, or director and Liveplasma will map corresponding links to other similar artists and represent their relevance by size.

Fidg’t uses both last.fm and flickr tags to allow you to visualize your network and their tagging activities.  A rather handy tool, as I noticed most people that photograph flowers also like classical music.  Perhaps this is just my network, but interesting to correlate the data.  You might be surprised at some of the trends you discover.

Digg, Twitter, and Flickr

Arc has been my screensaver for quite a while.  Not only does it track the latest stories on Digg, but also shows the relationships between users that are submitting and digging these articles.  Arc offers two different modes, one a blitzkrieg of (semi) real time output, and the other (my personal choice) is a bit slower, allowing you to actually read the story headlines.

Stack takes the functionality of Arc a bit further and shows stories with the most recent activity across the bottom of the screen.  New digs drop from the top of the screen and load on top of the most recent, and a real time graph visualizes the activity patterns.  As activity for one story or another increases, those decreasing in activity are brushed off the bottom of the screen.

TwittEarth is pure twitter joy.  This one uses geotagging of tweets to visualize a worldwide conversation.  Using a global map users are represented by cute often armless, pixar-like mosters, with their tweet visualized above their heads indicating user name and geographic location.  Maybe not the most productive of the visualization, but certainly one of the most fascinating to watch.

The Flickr Related Tag Browser is a might handy feature when either trying to narrow down a flickr search, or when simply flipping through the massive collection of images.  Using a chain-like sequence, by clicking on one related tag (those circling the original tag), users are presented with a Polaroid type image containing a selection of images that have been tagged with the search word.  A circle then surrounds the collection of images with associated tags.  If firehouse didn’t quite give you the image you were looking for, chances are Dalmatian is a related tag, and from there you might also explore sporting dogs to find that perfect Golden Retreiver image you were searching for.  On the flip side, expect a laugh or two when you realize others’ similar tagging preferences can lead you down a rather interesting path.

Teh Internetz

The Twingly Screensaver, which I use on my windows (only, sorry OSX peeps) machine pulls rss feeds and visualizes blog activity from around the world.  I always know when it’s 8am on the East Coast without even having to look at a clock.  Quite fun to watch America wake up and hit the ‘publish’ button.

The Web Trend Map 4 reminds me a bit of the Los Angeles subway map on a quiet day, and something akin to the Moscow subway system on a busy day.  While this is the fourth version of this tool, I only became away of it via twitter, where I regularly watch internet trends via twitscoop.  Unfortunately, I didn’t get a screenshot last Thursday, but as you can imagine, all roads lead to Michael Jackson.

Others

The TED Sphere is one of the most enjoyable ways to navigate through the tremendous amounts of offerings from TED.  The 3D sphere allows for navigation from either outside or inside, and presents videos based on semantic relevance and compatibility.

The We Feel Fine tool provides a visual representation of the overall feelings of the the blogosphere at any given time.  Users can filter results based on age, location, sex, weather, and many others.  We Feel Fine isn’t just limited to one presentation either, but provides users with sex different options: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds.  Each of these unique visualization provide a different portrait of real-time events.

After playing around with close to 50 online data visualizers, there were the 10 that struck me the most.  Naturally, I didn’t list them all, but something tells me there are probably even a few that I missed.  What’s important to you in data visualization?  What are some of your favorites?  Let me know in the comments below.

Squeeze – new DJ mix

Jul 3, 2009 by Dan Taylor    19 Comments    Posted under: Music

Here’s a brand spankin’ new dj mix for those of you that have requested.  Recorded in one shot, July 2nd between 5:08 and 6:08 pm, this gem runs the gamut from deep house, takes you a bit deeper close to the techno border, and lands you softly.  If this don’t make yo’ booty move, yo’ booty must be dead.  Enjoy!

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You can also find previous mixes under the Audio tab.