Technology
Entries related to technology.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 08/25/2008 - 20:38
I’m spending time catching up on emails, following the Democratic National Convention coverage on sites like the Friend Feed DemConvention room, and generally tweaking and mucking with computers, websites, and so on.
PVR
Yesterday, I wrote a little bit about the Personal Video Recorder (PVR) that I purchased yesterday for a project that involves recording parts of the Democratic National Convention coverage. Today, I tried moving the connection back into the office. In the process, I was asked if I wanted to update the software on the video stick.
The software uploaded relatively smoothly, but it took a few tries to finally get the new version loaded and configured. However, when I did, it managed to find lots of digital stations. So, I believe I can now get the HD broadcasts I couldn’t get before. In addition, I managed to reconfigure the wiring and I can load watch and record the television from my office.
I’m sharing some of the videos I’m recording and I spent a bit of time nailing down the best format to use. The Pinnacle PCTV stick supports ten different formats:
DVD 640x480 It takes 47M per minute. Great quality, but too big.
DVD LP 640x480 28M per minute. Again, very good quality, but too big.
SVCD 640x480 19M per minute. Okay quality, also too big.
VCD 321x240 10M per minute. Okay quality. This is my second choice for formats
DivX Home 720x480 31M per minute. Very good quality, but too big.
DivX Portable 352x240 7M per minute. Okay quality. This is the format I like best.
DivX Handheld 144x176 1.5M per minute. Okay quality. Small screen. Not bad for the space.
Mpeg4 PSP 320x240 6M per minute. Poor quality.
Mpeg4 Ipod low 480x352 12M per minute. Poor quality.
Mpeg4 Ipod High 320x240 12M per minute. Poor quality.
Comments about this site
Recently, one person noted that my welcome message said that previous blog entries were listed on the left. Well, they were, until I upgraded to Drupal 6. Then, I moved things around a little, so the list of articles are now on the right.
Another person commented asking if I knew that I had two different comment systems running. Yes, I know that. I actually wrote a bit about it in this blog entry. I may end up pulling SezWho soon. It slows down the site and doesn’t seem to work very well. I’ve contacted SezWho Tech Support and they were going to look at the issues, but that was a while ago, and I haven’t heard anything since.
I should also note that I dropped a lot of underperforming widgets. My site has always been a bit slow because I like to test out any widget that comes along and I’m always slow to remove them. These widgets slow down the site. Now that I’ve removed them, the site may be a little faster.
The Tiara
I was asked if people who pledged to give me EntreCard credits had followed through and some have, some haven’t. Yes, the tiara was small, but it was all that I had. Yes, the girl standing next to me is my daughter Fiona.
Using Social Media
Also, today, I received my first real Shelfari spam. A lot of people feel that Shelfari is spam in and of itself. Miss Anita Weluha wanted to know if I liked the same books as she does. She also wanted to know if I could help her transfer $5 million.
I also received an email from Twitter, letting me know that Sen. Barbara Boxer was now following me. I wondered if this was really part of her organization, or if it was some random spammer. Later, I received an email from “Friends of Barbara Boxer” highlighting her new Twitter account.
Now, its time to get back to paying closer attention to the convention and all the coverage.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 08/24/2008 - 22:50
During the Democratic National Convention, I’m working on a project that requires me to record the five hours of convention coverage each night in a format that can easily be read by computers and transmitted across the Internet. In order to do this, today, I went out and obtained a Pinnacle PCTV HD Ultimate stick.
This is a cool device. It is like an oversized USB Memory stick, with a mini USB port on the side and a coax connection on the end. The software is stored on the stick, and there is about 2 gigabytes of memory on the stick that can be used for recording onto.
There are a few different options for setting this up. The first option was to use an antenna that comes with the device, or connecting up to a rooftop antenna. My first pass was to connect the supplied antenna, but that did not give me any usable signals.
The second option was to use my cable connection. Since I was planning on doing this in my office, I installed a cable splitter just before my cable modem and tried connecting that way. It claimed to have found something like 69 different channels, but I couldn’t get any of them to play. It may be that this is because I was in a rush and didn’t spend enough time trying to figure out how to get it to work.
The third option was to capture from a Cable or Satellite Set-top box using either composite video or S-video. I got the S-video to work, which was a relief. However, I hadn’t figured out the software well enough to figure out how to record off of the S-Video channel. I suppose I could get the Remote to do that for me, but I hadn’t set up the remote.
Hopping back to the first option, I tried taking the channel 3 output from the cable set-top box and feeding it into the PCTV stick. This worked well. However it meant that I needed to watch the same channel on the TV as I was recording on the PC. That is a viable option, but not as good as I was hoping for. I tried shifting around the connection in different places, between the set-top box and the DVD/VHS player, between the DVD/VHS player and the TV. Finally, I found that I could successfully split the cable signal coming into the set-top box and get the analog channels on the PCTV stick. This is the best since it allows me to record on one channel on the PC while watching a different channel on the TV. I also found that I could take the S-Video output from my DVD/VHS player into my memory stick. This will make it easier for me to take some old VHS tapes and digitize them and store them on YouTube, Blip.TV or other sites.
With the wiring working a bit better, I went back to see if I could get any of the digital signals to work. This would be nice, since the PCTV stick supports digital HDTV, but our regular television is an old analog SD TV, so we can’t watch digital HDTV channels.
Unfortunately, I still couldn’t find and HDTV stations. I’ll try that again a little later. I’ve been told that Cablevision does weird stuff with their HDTV signals which makes it harder for people to pull them in without a set-top box.
Now that the basic functionality was working, my next test was to record shows using the stick. There are about ten different formats that can be saved, using various resolutions of DivX, MPEG 1/2 or 4. I’ve set up a bunch of recording sessions to see what the resolution looks like for each of these as how much space they take up. Once this is done, I’ll start testing various things that can be done with the files in these different formats.
I did end up installing DivX and Quicktime on my laptop so I can view the files in different format. This is also supposed to work with the Windows Media Center, so I may try working with as a future test.
So, initial impressions are that you can turn a PC with Windows XP or Vista into a Personal Video Record fairly easily for around $100.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 08/21/2008 - 12:38
As I continue to dig out of my emails as well as messages on various sites, I’ve built up a list of various technology developments that have caught my interest.
http://openmicroblogger.com/
This is another player in the http://openmicroblogging.org/ space. (Note: As I write this post, the OpenMicroBlogging page simply says, “It works!” instead of pointing to the protocol definition that used to be up there.)
OpenMicroBlogger.com runs an instance of the software you can find on openmicroblogger.org which uses the OpenMicroBlogging.org protocol. Confusing? Yeah. I wished they had used different names the way Identi.ca and Laconi.ca did.
What is nice is that it supports federation, including interoperability with Laconi.ca
Other things that are nice is that it supports OpenID. Unfortunately, it didn’t like the delegation of my OpenID from Orient Lodge to my XRI based OpenID at 2idi.
What was nice is that when I set up a new account there, it set up a new OpenID account at e-cred.org. One the one hand, I would have much rather had my OpenID redirection work, but if that isn’t working, at least setting things up to go to a new OpenID server, instead of having a completely separate authentication system seemed good.
I haven’t looked closely at the e-cred.org server, but it looks nice and I’m wondering if it supports attribute exchange and if they might end up allowing custom attributes. As an example, I’ve been looking to see if we could come up with an OMBprofile attribute for OpenID. With that, and getting OMB sites to support the attribute, when you remotely subscribe to an OMB stream, you could simply use your OpenID profile making for one less URL to remember.
In terms of the federation, it seems to work okay with Identi.ca, but I had problems getting it to work with my Laconi.ba based server.
http://bridge.kshep.net
So, this federation stuff, enabling users of one microblogging site to follow users of other microblogging sites is pretty cool. But what if you use a legacy microblogging site, like Twitter that doesn’t support interoperability? Well, http://bridge.kshep.net provides a gateway between Twitter and Identi.ca. It would be nice if it provided a bridge between Twitter and any open microblogging site, whether those sites are laconi.ca instances or openmicroblogger.com instances. I’m sure we’ll get there.
I have not set up the bridge yet, because I’m concerned about feedback loops, or at least duplicate entries. I may get around to tweaking my network so I can plug in the bridge, but I may try to set up my own OpenMicroBlogger.org instance first.
http://rejaw.com
I’ve mentioned Rejaw before. However, yesterday, I had some good discussions there. It is still very early there, but its looks like it is about to jump the chasm from being just an innovators playpen to being an area for the early adopters. I think it may have blown past Kwippy.com, yet another microblogging site that hasn’t seemed to jump that chasm yet.
http://chi.mp
chi.mp is currently in alpha, and I haven’t gotten my invite yet. Besides having an interesting URL, it is focused on open standards, like OpenID, Oauth, Attribute Exchange and Atom. They are saying the right things. It will be interesting to see what they can deliver.
http://blip.fm
Also coming across my transom this week was an invitation to play with blip.fm. As best as I can tell, it is trying to play in the last.fm or Pandora space. Personally, I really like using the Pandora/last.fm mashup. It will be interesting to see how blip.fm fits into this landscape, and if any sort of interoperability emerges.
I’ll play with this a little bit more later.
http://xoost.com
Xoost is an interesting idea. Social searching. Do a search on Xoost. Find out what other people similar to you are searching on, shared interests, which pages they found most interesting, something like that.
It is in beta, by invitation. I’m not sure that there are enough innovators on the list yet to obtain critical mass and make the searches particularly interesting, but the idea is fascinating.
http://UrTurn.com
Other’s have encouraged me to check out URTurn.com. When I checked recently, I was told that it was down for repairs and upgrades. There slogan is that ‘Every Click Counts’. I’ll try to remember to check back.
Nurien
Okay, this will end off my list for today. Nurien is another virtual world system. It is supposed to have very good resolution and physics. I’ve seen a video, but that is about it. The video looked very impressive, so I look forward to a chance to explore that in more detail soon.
So, that pretty much catches me up on some of the new technology that has been catching my eye. What’s been catching yours?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 08/05/2008 - 20:51
This evening, I ran a BlogTalkRadio show about Democratic Delegates to Denver Using Social Media. Jen Just, who is an Obama delegate from Connecticut called in, as did a friend of ours named Sheila.
One thing I mentioned on the show was the demconvention room that I set up on FriendFeed. It is aggregating social media from various people going to Denver, including Jen as well as many of my friends around the country. Please check the room out, and if you know of people who will be using Social Media in Denver, please let me know so I can add their material to the feed into the room.
With BlogTalkRadio, besides saving an archive of the show, which should be up soon at the link above, there is also a chat. I don't believe the is saved, so I've saved it here below the fold.
We will have this show again next week to check in on how everyone is doing with mobile social media as they prepare for Denver, so if you have things you would like to share, please let me know.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 08/04/2008 - 18:21
(Originally published at Greater Democracy.)
Much has been written about post-broadcast politics, networked politics, or any other number of phrases about the political process moving beyond the thirty second soundbite on the evening news. Obama’s use of the Internet has been compared to JFK’s use of television. JFK understood the new medium of television and used it to his advantage, just as Obama has understood the new medium of the Internet and used it to his advantage. Yet campaigns remain very top down organizations, with control centralized.
Perhaps the most highly controlled and centralized traditional media extravaganza remaining in politics is the national conventions. Yet, slowly, even these are changing. The Obama campaign has moved his acceptance speech to Invesco Field to allow 75,000 people to participate first hand.
How participatory will this be? The Associated Press reports,
Enter the 75,000 people who will have to come hours early for Obama's acceptance speech to get through security, most carrying cell phones. As they settle in their seats, campaign aides will be on stage asking them to text message their friends and use call sheets to get people to register. "There will be a lot of idle time. We put idle people to work," Hildebrand said.
While there are concerns about the bandwidth available in the stadium, this is a great start. However, I would like to see it go much further. Why only use text messages from the attendees of the acceptance speech? The convention is four days long. There are lots of interesting things that take place during those four days, much of it away from the convention floor.
Sure, the DNC has credentialed a record number of bloggers to cover the convention, making sure that there are bloggers covering each state. Yet what is really needed is to take the message from both Gov. Dean and Sen. Obama about empowering people to be the change that they want to see.
Every delegate should receive information ahead of time about how they can use all aspects of social media, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, and so many others, from their cellphones at any point during the convention. They should be encouraged to publicize their social media accounts so their friends, family, neighbors, constituents, and anyone else they can get to listen.
Slowly, but surely, I’m contacting delegates and getting them to think about how they could do this. Please, consider doing the same.
To continue this discussion, Tuesday evening, 8 PM Eastern time, I will host a BlogTalkRadio show about Getting Democrat Delegates to Denver to Use Social Media. Please consider listening and if you have some ideas to share, calling in.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 08/01/2008 - 17:41
Last night, I began testing Laconica 0.5.0 on microblog. It is an update from Laconica 0.4.4. I created a new tarball, laconica050.tar.gz. I initially had some problems with OpenID and found that there was a patch to the OpenID code that is in the laconicadepends.tar.gz, so I created a new file, laconicadepends01.tar.gz. This didn’t fix the problem, and subsequently I found that for some reason my 0.5.0 hadn’t been properly installed and on reinstalling that the problem went away, so the depends01 file may not be necessary.
Upgrade Steps
Make sure you keep a back up copy of your installation. Then, install laconica050 and laconicadepends01 into your laconica directory. Copy over your config.php file. You should note that there are a bunch of new options in the config.php, so you may want to take the options you set in your config.php and copy them into the config.php.sample file and save that as your new config.php file.
Copy over any theme you have created. Copy over the avatars that have been created.
The Database Update
The database has changed a lot from 0.4.4 and earlier. Instead of trying to come up with all the alter statements necessary, I took a script that Evan had written and generalized it to work in my environment.
#!/bin/bash
export DB=$1
export SCR=$2
export USER=$3
export PW=$4
export HOST=$5
mysqldump -u $USER --password=$PW -h $HOST -c -t --hex-blob $DB > $DB.sql
mysqladmin -u $USER --password=$PW -h $HOST -f drop $DB
mysqladmin -u $USER --password=$PW -h $HOST create $DB
mysql -u $USER --password=$PW -h $HOST $DB < $SCR
mysql -u $USER --password=$PW -h $HOST $DB < $DB.sql
It worked very nicely for me. However, just to be safe, I did take a backup copy before I ran the script, separate from the backup copy that gets created at the beginning of the script.
With all of this in place (once my 0.5.0 version was properly in place), everything started working nicely. New features include hashtags, which I’m a big fan of, and I’m glad to see incorporated into the site. I’ve gotten SMS working, at least for sending out notices. Incoming SMS probably won’t work well because of how email is configured on my shared host.
One other problem that I had, which I’m not sure if it was because of the failed initial upgrade, or something else, but the public timeline didn’t show any of the entries prior to the upgrade. This wasn’t a big concern for me, and for more active sites, most people would never notice.
I’m still having problems with people being able to remotely subscribe to my microblog. When I turn on database debugging, it works, but when debugging is off, it doesn’t work. Go figure.
Other Stuff
The next thing that I was thinking about was adding TwitterFeed like functionality. Twitterfeed checks RSS feeds and submits a summary to Twitter. To my surprise, Twitter Feed has been modified to support Laconica. What is even better is that it supports any server running Laconica, so, I’ve set it up to send the RSS feed from my blog not only to Twitter, but also to identi.ca as well as my personal Microblog.
Another very interesting development is the translation tool for laconi.ca. I haven’t played with that yet, so I don’t have any details.
So, after a few minor problems, the 0.5.0 upgrade went very nicely. I’m interested to see how it goes for any of the other Laconica sites. Please leave your notes in the comments.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 07/31/2008 - 18:28
(Originally published at SLNN).
As Virtual Worlds Proliferate, Linden Lab explores interoperability, but is it the sort of interoperability that users want?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 07/29/2008 - 20:50
Barring any unexpected events, Thursday will complete another month of getting at least one blog post up every day of the month. The idea for this grew out of National Novel Writing Month. Various bloggers that wanted to make some sort of writing commitment but didn’t want to write a novel, so they created National Blog Posting Month. It grew and every month, bloggers commit to writing at least one blog post each day. Some hardcore people are even shooting for writing a blog post every day for a year.
Initially, I didn’t feel inclined to commit to this. My life is too uncertain, and I have so many other things going on. Yet, I have managed to make the goal, so far, every month this year. I had doubts about whether I would pull it off for July, since I was on vacation for a week, and then at a folk music festival for five days. However, using my cellphone, I’ve managed to get in a post every day.
How did I do it? Different people have been asking me about different ways of posting from cellphones, so I thought I would go into a little detail here. For blog posts to my blog, I send a picture to Flickr, with title and text attached. Yet I also send content a bunch of other ways, so I thought I would give you the full picture.
I like to send a mix of data. Not only do I send text messages, but I also take pictures and videos which I send as MMS messages and I leave voice messages on various audio sites.
My cellphone is a Motorola Razr V3xx, which allows me to have mailing lists for messages that I send out. It allows me to take 640x480 pictures and videos. The videos are limited to 17 seconds. I've added 2 gig memory card to it so I have more space for pictures, videos, as well as music that I've downloaded to it.
For text, I send my text messages to Facebook, Twitter, Utterz, and my wife Kim. When you set up an account with Twitter, you have an option of linking in your cellphone. When you do that, it sends a confirm message to your cellphone. Once you've confirmed, you can just send a text message from your cellphone to their special code, and it shows up on Twitter. Facebook and Utterz works pretty much in the same manner.
For pictures, I send them to Facebook, Flickr, Kim, Ringo and Utterz. Kim's message goes as a message straight to her cellphone. The others go via email. When you set up mobile accounts at Facebook, Flickr, Ringo or Utterz, they give you an email address you can send pictures to. The pictures are typically posted immediately, or almost immediately. If you add text after the picture, that goes into the description. You can set the title by entering the subject in the sending options.
Typically, I don’t bother with a description or title because I want to get pictures uploaded and pay more attention to the event. However in some cases, I would take a picture and then save it to send to a special Flickr account that is set up to automatically cross post to this blog.
It is basically the same process for videos. I send my videos to Blip.tv, Facebook, Kim, Utterz, and Youtube. They often take a bit longer to process.
Then, I tie a lot of this together with various other linking. For example, there is an application to tie together messages on Twitter to messages on Facebook, so, I could omit Facebook, and my messages would eventually show up there. However, I send it to both places to cut out some of the lag between different sites.
Likewise, I subscribe to both Twitter and Facebook from FriendFeed, although I rarely post anything directly to FriendFeed, with the exception of commenting on other people's feeds.
Now that I’ve been home for a while, I’ve had a chance to go in and add descriptions, titles, tags, and format the posts better.
For sending audio, I’ve mostly been using Utterz. It is good for messages that I speak into the cellphone, but doesn’t do well at picking up music in the background. Utterz has the ability to cross post as well, though I rarely use it.
Now that I’m home, I’ve uploaded pictures and videos from my camera to my computer. I have a Canon SD 1000 with an 8 gig memory card in it. I can store about an hour of high quality video or thousands of high resolution pictures. I typically take a lot of pictures and then select the ones I like best to upload to Flickr. The videos I run through Movie Maker to compress down to a more manageable size. You can see several of these videos on blip.tv, or on various places, like this blog and MySpace which blip.tv cross posts to.
I also have a Panasonic GV-39 camcorder, if I want to record more longer videos. However, now that I have the 8 gig card in my regular camera, I use the camcorder less and less.
To get a sense of what I did at Falcon Ridge, check out the music section of this blog, my Twitter account, my Flickr photos, my Blip TV and YouTube videos and my Utterz. Also, check out my FriendFeed which aggregates many of these sources.
One problem with posting content like this from the cellphone is that you don’t see many of the comments that people make until you get back online. However, you can build a wonderful view of a festival by using these tools.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 07/21/2008 - 14:19
Today, I’m upgrading micro.orient-lodge.com to the latest version of Laconica. Given the frequent updates to the core, I figured I needed to come up with a better way of doing these upgrades, so I’ve split my tarball into two different pieces. laconicadepends.tar.gz and laconica044.tar.gz.
The laconicadepends tarball are all of those little files, that you would normally install using PEAR or by hunting around that laconica depends on. The second tarball is a straight tarball of the current darcs repository. In theory, you should be able to combine the depends tarball with just about any standard repository to have a version that runs on many shared hosts. If you do set up a site using this, let me know how it goes.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 07/21/2008 - 11:10
Before I went on vacation, I was writing a bit about laconi.ca and about my efforts to make it easier for developers to start contributing. One of the first hurdles to face is getting used to the version control system.
Many people I’ve spoken with are used to using CVS or SVN to get and submit code from a version control repository. I don’t know as many people that are up to speed with darcs. In my case, my hosting service already has CVS and SVN installed, but darcs is not an option. So, I spent a little time playing around to see what I could do.
|
|
Rate on NewsTrust
