Google Image Labeler September 7, 2006
Google Image Labeler, a great way to outsource your work. Google uses the info they gather here to improve their image search.
HDTV July 17, 2006 4 comments
I’ve seen HDTV on several occasions, but was never fully sold until watching the France vs. Brazil World Cup game. There were two very nice TV’s, at least 32″ LCD’s, HDTV on one and old school NTSC on the other. I couldn’t believe the difference. Old school was so muddy it was disgusting and impossible to watch when the Hi-Def signal was right there. I’ve had it in the back of my mind ever since.
Does anyone have any advice on what to buy / what not to buy? I’ve been checking out all the different technologies and at these preliminary stages, it seems like LCD, 1080p is the way to go. Are bigger screens worth the bigger price tag? Does an old school signal on a 16:9 screen look crappier than on a traditional TV?
RSS is so New Media June 16, 2006 10 comments
(http://emericaskate.com/features/video.rss)
To avoid entering in the URL next time, hit thumbs up to add the podcast to your favorites menu.
etnies Girl May 24, 2006 2 comments
We launched the new etnies Girl site this week. Still a few things to do. There’s a few comments about the new site on CSS Beauty and The Colab.
your Tivo and you March 17, 2006 1 comment
I’ve been using tv.yahoo.com since they offered the option to record directly to Tivo, more so than the Tivo interface itself mainly because I’m in front of a computer a lot more than my television. The interface is simple enough. Search for a TV show, click “add to my Tivo”, select some options (record no matter what or record if there’s no conflict) and you’re done. Your Tivo then emails you telling you the status of the recording. It’s quite a useful system and I don’t see why you’d ever use one of those free DVR services that leave out the connection to the internet altogether.
I’ve recently been trying out some other sites where you can manage your television viewing. First there’s cozmoTV (reviewed here). The next version of cozmo sounds much more promising than their current offering. In the meantime it does provide the option to record directly to your Tivo, and shows you what programs have been approved by your Tivo and are officially set to record. Despite some buttons that appear to be clickable when in fact they are not, and the 100% Flash interface, cozmo is still fairly usable and you can record a show in a few simple steps. The largest problem is there’s currently no way to view what’s on TV by time or by channel. It’s genre and personal ratings driven. Drama, Comedy, Action, etc. I never use genres and find this method of looking for shows a bit cumbersome. The only other method is through the search box, which is only useful if you know exactly what it is you’re looking for. After the system knows what you like (by rating programs), perhaps the guide will improve.
Then there’s Evoke TV (reviewd on pvrblog). By the way, why are these people shying away from .tv domains? At the moment there’s no record to Tivo functionality (can’t this been solved with a greasemonkey script) but I do like the idea of the outputted info. A simple RSS feed that shows me what I have upcoming (& what my friends are watching) is nice, although one directly from my Tivo would be more accurate. Currently to have a show show up in your “schedule” you need to rate it, which also might not be the best method. Just because I’m rating it doesn’t mean I’m going to watch it. Evoke really needs the record to Tivo functionality to be a player in this space. I do prefer using a non-flash interface to Cozmo’s.
Evoke’s grid suffers from some of the same problems as Tivo’s recently revamped online scheduling does. To jump hours ahead you need to click little arrows several times, then if you schedule or in Evoke’s case, rate a show, the grid jumps back to the current hour. Tivo online’s channel customization is a little nicer than Evoke’s, allowing you to turn off certain types of sports, or all childrens programming for example. Evoke needs to be customized on a per channel basis.
Wow, I’ve just spent entirely too much time on all of these sites. I’m leaning towards Cozmo TV a bit more than the others for its actual Tivo interaction; but be sure to keep an eye on Evoke for some important updates that have the potential to win me over.
Browser screenshots March 9, 2006 2 comments
About 2.5 - 3 years ago I remember using a site that allowed you to put in any URL and it would provide screenshots of the site in selected browsers of your choice. I think it even gave the option of gif/jpg/png output, all in a matter of moments. It wasn’t a large site, just some dude who created the system on his home setup so it may not even exist anymore. It received tons of traffic & was a major load of course, so he took it down for a bit, re-tooled & put up an improved version about a month later. Anyone recall this site? The first time I actually used it was probably five years ago, the last time being 2.5 - 3 years.
NBC doesn’t know poo February 17, 2006 1 comment
Boing Boing has it right, calling the NBC brass idiots for sending a cease & desist order to youtube over their crazy delicious SNL sketch. Who in there right mind would make a decision like that? Luckily for them, they’re slow as hell and the video has already seen it’s day on the interweb. Or maybe they wait this long on purpose, & have to issue a cease & desist to please some other governing body. Either way, idiots are clearly involved.
Tivo desktop February 16, 2006 1 comment
Tivo desktop for mac has finally been updated. Haven’t tried it yet, but I’m assuming the tivo to go functionality is in there. Wait, maybe not. The version that has To Go is 2.2, while this mac one is v1.9.2 . Not looking good.
I still need telnet, or bash access? on my tivo so I can get an FTP app up on there, but my nerd level isn’t high enough for such a task.
Forget ie7 January 31, 2006 1 comment
I wasn’t even going to mention the beta release of internet explorer, but then I noticed the huge page peel, transparent flash advertisement thing on the information week, ie 7 article. I’ve never seen anything like it. Well, I’ve seen similar, but for some reason I was really quite amazed with this ones presence.
Internet Explorer did at least get RSS right (a little late in the game), taking firefoxes’ live bookmarks idea and making it easier to use with a nice sidebar manager deal. Firefox really requires a third party to make it’s RSS features useful. The ever present empty tab in ie is awful, please get rid of that thing. By the way, to even install the app you’ll need to prove to microsoft that your copy of windows is legit through their active-x nonsense.
Alright, I’m ready to get 6 back on my pc, any ideas? Even better would be to run both. I do remember this hack for running multiple versions of ie at the same time, how long till we can add 7 to that list? And whatever happened to that whole thing where microsoft was only going to release new browsers with updated operating systems?
update:
To revert to Internet Explorer 6, read point 6 on the ie blog FAQ.
itunes, Flash video & I hate to say it - vodcasts November 29, 2005 5 comments
Itunes enables you to subscribe to various podcasts, of course. A podcast is really just an RSS feed - get a feed w/ some video in it - and you’ve got yourself a dynamic, self updating, video resource. To hunt down new skateboarding videos for example, simpy add http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/system:media:video+skateboarding as a podcast.
The only problem is - there’s not that many videos tagged with skateboarding. At least not on delicious. There’s a few, & as delicious gains users, it’s worth it to add it as a podcast, but YouTube’s similiar feed (http://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/skateboarding.rss) is looking much better. Twenty new skate videos in the last 12 days, over 2,000 total. The problem here is, naturally, itunes doesn’t support .FLV’s; which happen to be the up & coming format for video on the web.
With all those ipods & itunes users out there - you’d hope apple will try & support as many formats as possible. They of course, don’t have a record for this sort of thing - so keep your eyes open for third party software, or keep your FLV’s in your browser.