Technology
Entries related to technology.
Assorted Updates
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 08/25/2008 - 20:38I’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.
PVRs and the Democratic National Convention
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 08/24/2008 - 22:50During 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.
Latest Tech News
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 08/21/2008 - 12:38As 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Mobile Social Media at the Democratic Convention
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 08/05/2008 - 20:51This 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.
A Post Broadcast Convention?
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.
