Eureka

About 7 months ago I was in Atlanta for some meetings.  Of course, being a technophile . . . I travel packing a considerable amount of gadgets: my weapons of choice, if you will.  Of course, I also love when I come across amazing deals on technology too . . . like the time that I found a Linksys Travel router online for $12.

Here's what it looks like.

Naturally, my need to be connected drove me to bring this router of mine to Atlanta with me just in case I couldn't hit a wireless internet access point.  If there was a port in the wall, I can make my own wireless.

It worked flawlessly as usual.

Unfortunately, it was a few days later when I gave in to the harsh realization that I had left this prized piece of networking technology in the big crapple (sorry, I know it's not that bad - I'm just not a fan).

Reality is a cruel, cruel mistress.

Especially when she's wrong.

Tonight, while looking for something else incidentally (I lose stuff) . . . buried in a box in our closet I came across the long lost router - sitting there so lonely and ready to "packet" all in (networking joke). It's like being reunited with a long lost friend . . . that's about 5 inches tall and has the ability to transmit and receive radio frequencies.

Oh happy day.

Des

GMail IMAP

Hey.

If you're an email geek you will appreciate this.

GMail is now supporting IMAP. This is very good news for many reasons.

Peace.

Des

The Diamond in the Rough (day of packing)

For the record, while I'm VERY excited to be moving back to Charlotte, I am NOT overly excited about the week of packing that I'm (thankfully) just about done with. However, one of the great joys of packing is finding old stuff that got stuffed away in random places and forgotten about.

Enter the Diamond Rio 500.


This, my friends, was my first MP3 player. It was the first portable media player that Diamond Multimedia sold, according to my quick research. It had a whopping 64 MB of internal storage and room for an expansion card.

How many hours walking to University was I thankful for this little device? It really was incredible and probably did a lot to solidify my fascination with electronic media.

So, I find it and take the perfect opportunity to take a quick break from packing my life into boxes. I thought, "I wonder what would happen if I plugged this into my iMac?"

Wouldn't you know it, iTunes picked it up right away without me having to do ANYTHING other than plug it in. It knew exactly what it was and added it under the "Devices" heading in my iTunes sidebar.



Not too shabby - I can transfer MP3s onto it just like the good old days. Granted . . . I can only hold about 13 songs . . .

Grace,

Des

ubuntu studio

I'm excited about this: http://ubuntustudio.org/

i.e. free media editing for the masses

Des

More Joost Tokens

I've got more Joost Tokens!!!

So, if you're wanting in a very cool new ipTV program that's currently in beta . . . go to http://www.webandflowdesign.com to contact me for a token. It's good for windows and Intel Macs.

Grace,

Des

splicr: the open source video project

I've been working a little more on a concept for a project that is coming along nicely. I'm hoping to really be able to knock some stuff out soon and hopefully promo it at one of the big events coming up soon that I'm involved with.

More (obviously) to come. Enjoy the artwork.

Grace,

Des

Got Joost?

Follow this link and you may be able to get a shiny Joost invite . . .

http://www.webandflowdesign.com

Grace,

Des

the CORE

So, I've started in on a new project:

http://www.thecorevideos.com.

It's army specific - but I think it's going to be hot.

Des

Bandwidth Test II

You may remember that I posted about a new bandwidth testing service some time ago. They're redesigned now but still very cool.

Get Joost

I've been lucky enough to be invited to a new beta test of a great new program. It's from the makers of the Kazaa and Skype - both of which were fairly revolutionary. Joost (formerly "The Venice Project") will likely be similarly revolutionary.

It's a program designed to share high quality video feeds among peers. But it's not crappy user-generated video (a la people sitting in front of a webcam lip syncing to some pop tune). Instead it's got some neat way of distributing video from sources like TV channels, bands, etc and delivering really good video.

It's really pretty amazing. I've been impressed so far.

You can sign up for a beta (windows only at the moment, I'm sorry to say) at http://www.joost.com. If it takes off, it could be a really sweet platform.

Grace,

Des

Death to CDs

In one of the podcasts that I've been listening too lately I heard the following prediction: That 2007 will be the year that the CD (Compact Disc) dies (The podcast was This Week in Media - and the prediction came from this article: http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2007/01/18/the-end/, if you're interested). It's really interesting to think about. I remember moving from cassettes to CDs and how much cooler I felt.

Then along came my first MP3 player - a Rio 500. It was amazing - I had 64 MB of memory and could stick a couple hours of tunes in my pocket. And then, several years later, I got an iPod. Apple has sold just about 90 million iPods now. This past quarter, according to wikipedia.org, Apple sold 21,066,000 iPods. And, yes, there are still some other companies out there too that are selling MP3 players.

So, is this the year the CD dies?


HERE'S A FUN GAME:

Do you remember what you're first CD was?
Mine was Gordon by the Barenaked Ladies. I remember sitting in my room playing bass for hours along with that thing.