Monthly Archives: February 2005

More musing on the nature of communication…

Today I was scanning my list of blogline feeds, and noticed an update to The QuotationsPage, which included this quote by Hansell B. Duckett:

What this country needs is more free speech worth listening to.

A nice quotation, and one that I agree with, but perhaps with a different spin that was intended.

To illustrate, let me present the following anecdote. I’ve taken a number of drawing classes in the past (mostly with beginners, the group that most matches my own ability) and i’ve noticed that I have an approach which is different than most. Most people sit and concentrate, and draw very slowly and precisely. They might work for a full half-hour and only fill in the edges of part of their subject matter. What they’ve drawn looks okay, but it’s clear that it will take them hours and hours to get something fully fleshed out, much less completed.

I have a completely different approach. I attack the page with careless disregard for the exact placement of any line. It isn’t that I actually want to be careless. I simply cannot tell whether any particular line looks right without drawing it in relationship to all the others. The best strategy for me is to put as much down on the sheet as I can as quickly as I can. I can’t visualize the partially completed drawing, only the completed drawing, so it makes sense to try to get a reasonable representation of the complete drawing so that I can see if it matches my vision.

The point? Well, writing is a lot like that. Podcasting is a lot like that. You could spend a great deal of time agonizing over the individual strokes, but you get far more out of just plunging in, boldly trying new ideas, smudging, erasing, and even occasionally wadding things up and throwing things away.

If you want to generate more free speech worth listening to, you can begin by simply trying to generate more free speech. Then your natural internal critic will have some ability to concretely analyze what you did say, rather than what you might want to say. A vastly more productive enterprise.

The cool thing about blogs and podcasts are that they remove any economic or practical barriers to publishing work. This makes it subject to not only your own criticism, but the criticism of others. It would be truly scary if you wrote stuff that nobody could find fault in: it probably means that whatever you are saying is meaningless or useless. Stuff worth listening to is more controversial than that.

Anyway, don’t sweat trying to say stuff which is relevant. Just say stuff. Relevance will come.

Motorola MPx220 – software update

As I have mentioned previously, I’m the owner of the Motorola MPX220 SmartPhone. Overall I’ve had generally mixed feelings about it, but two things which bugged me were:

  • the camera would take garbled pictures when Bluetooth was enabled
  • The volume wasn’t really very good: it was hard to listen to in even moderately noisy environments

Perusing various message boards before the end of the year said that ROM revision 1.3 might cure this problem, but that it required sending it back to Cingular/Motorola. Bah, it wasn’t bad. Well, Motorola decided to release the Flash Update via their website. This morning, while still blinking the sleep out of my eyes, I went ahead an did the update, and according to my lovely wife who I just called, the phone sounds better, the volume levels are definitely better if not booming, and the camera can take even 1280×1024 images with the Bluetooth on.

Word of warning: During installation they ask you to make sure that the Wireless USB Modem driver is installed. Make sure it is. Really. That means you have to disconnect the phone from the USB port, power it off, remove the battery and reconnect the USB cable. If it installs new software, then you didn’t have it. I thought I did, but in fact didn’t, and you get all the way to a point where its downloading flash, and then times out. If this happens to you, don’t panic, just perform a master reset (hold the center button down while powering it on) and retry again. I was able to recover from my groggy, sleep induced stupidity. That will teach me to reflash devices before breakfast and coffee.

Got Gmail?

Got Gmail?Todd over at Geek News Central was handing out Gmail accounts to all his loyal listeners. What a good idea! I’ve got 49 invites I could pass out to interested parties, so if your in need of a nice, big, google-y mailbox, drop me an email and I’ll send you an invite as a special thank you for visiting my weblog.

In addition to my classic address, I can now be reached at brainwagon@gmail.com. First come, first served, when they are gone, they are gone.

Judge slams SCO’s lack of evidence against IBM | CNET News.com

Color me surprised…

Judge slams SCO’s lack of evidence against IBM | CNET News.com

“Despite the vast disparity between SCO’s public accusations and its actual evidence–or complete lack thereof–and the resulting temptation to grant IBM’s motion, the court has determined that it would be premature to grant summary judgment,” Kimball wrote Wednesday. “Viewed against the backdrop of SCO’s plethora of public statements concerning IBM’s and others’ infringement of SCO’s purported copyrights to the Unix software, it is astonishing that SCO has not offered any competent evidence to create a disputed fact regarding whether IBM has infringed SCO’s alleged copyrights through IBM’s Linux activities.”

One wonders just why the judge didn’t issue a summary judgement against SCO.

For more legal commentary, try groklaw.

American Idol blocking fast forwards

I must admit that I’m vaguely scared of the much-rumored impending doom of TiVo. Ironically the issue which causes it to be unprofitable (lack of buddy-buddy deal with a huge cable network) also makes it most attractive: they have to get their customers the old fashioned way, by making a product people are willing to spend money on.

It appears that my vague fears could be justified. PVRblog reports that some programs broadcast on Comcast may disable fast forwarding. Boy! Way to deliver value to your customers, Comcast.

HollerBot: Open Internet Robot

Want a simple (but not too simple) robot project, using easily available, off the shelf components? Try checking out Overview – HollerBot: Open Internet Robot. The idea is to spend under $500, and get a robot with motion, vision, gps and all sorts of other goodies. Seems like a good way to go.

Addendum: I would be tempted to use one of these in the robot instead, or perhaps this one (fanless). Why? Includes a CompactFlash slot and PCMCIA. Seems useful. I don’t think having a hard disk on something with wheels is a great idea.

News Flash: Listeners Hate Commercials

Courtesy of I Love Radio.org, read this remarkable study: News Flash: Listeners Hate Commercials. How surprising, that people resent being pummelled by twenty or more minutes of advertising every hour.

Whenever I listen to real radio, it isn’t boredom that kills me (I’m only wounded by boredom) but just the irritation of having any kind of coherent thought broken up by worries about taxes, my deodorant, or whether my windows need replacing. Not to mention that any real news that might actually come accross the airwaves does so in the form of predigested pablum, neither appetizing nor nourishing.

It’s a step in the right direction, but you guys don’t just have to remove the interruptions: you have to improve the meal.

Why Try To Improve on Perfection?

Beastie on the way out?Slashdot is running an article which suggests that the FreeBSD core team is running a contest to design a new logo to supplant the ubiquitous BSD daemon that has long symbolized Berkeley Unix and its derivatives. Some people don’t seem to understand it, and now the world must seemingly work to accomodate these knuckle-draggers.

Sigh.

How can you argue with a mascot that was designed by John Lasseter?

It’s supposed to be about the podcasts, man…

I’ve come to suspect, as my brother has often asserted, that I’m a hippy.

You won’t find me squatting in a geodesic dome, smoking plants that I grow in my garden. I don’t drive a broken down VW bus, crudely decorated with cans of spray paint. I’m not a fan of “free love”: my wife gets all I have to offer.

But as I have recently come to realize while trying to put out more podcasts, I am a bit of a hippy. I’m not the slick, polished voice of the media. I’m the broken down folk singer who isn’t always on key, and doesn’t always sing about what’s popular, but does it “for the love of the music, man.”

Not everyone who is podcasting is a hippy. Some people treat it like a business. Some people treat it like a contest. Indeed, a great deal of the discussion about podcasting seems to center around how to become popular and how to make a buck. Nearly every podcasting index site seems to run some kind of ranking, and many podcasters nag their listeners incessantly to vote for them. Some even have created podcast awards.

I’m not sure whether to be amused or depressed. For all the talk about how different podcasting is, we see that podcasters are (as a whole, with exceptions, obviously) not much different than the people involved in the more traditional media they hope to replace. Ultimately, people will scramble for bits of money and bits of fame, and in doing so, they lose sight of anything truely interesting they have to say.

I’m perhaps as guilty as the rest, but I promise to try to not waste your time in some attempt to move up a couple of notches on the popularity scale. If you want to vote me up on some list, go right ahead, but I’m not going to waste your time telling you to. I’m not trying to sell my own vision, but merely to put my own vision out for consumption. It’s up to you to decide whether you want to buy into it or not, and ultimately, whether you do or not doesn’t affect my desire to put it out there.

I don’t have the ego necessary to believe that what I do is important: let’s face it, I talk mostly about geeky stuff and gadgetry. But I would like to make one point: if you are considering doing a podcast, just do it. Don’t worry about not having the right equipment, the right voice, the right message, or enough technical knowledge. Don’t listen to the naysayers who run down blogs and podcasts as being the noisy, useless voice of an uniformed populace, and particularly don’t listen to yourself when you listen to your first attempt and begin to think those same things. I still think I sound funny when I listen to my own podcasts. It’s natural.

Frankly, I’m sick of talking head media. People in suits. People who smile while discussing pain and death. Pop music stars as role models. Fashion. Bleh. I’m just not interested.

If you are sitting in front of a machine capable of showing you this posting, you probably have access to everything you need to create a podcast. I used to think of computers as boxes for computation. Later, I thought they were all about applications. Now, 90% of what I use my computer for is communication, and podcasting is just another way that I can use to reach not just an audience, but a real community.

I’m not selling anything. I just do it for the love of the podcast.

Addendum: Special thanks to Lisa Williams for helping me clarify this train of thought with her excellent Four Minutes About Podcasting.

TivoToGo -> PDA, mission accomplished!

Yesterday morning while I was stuck at home sick, I decided to try to accomplish something novel. Well, perhaps not novel, but cool. Well, maybe not cool, but useful. Well, not actually useful, but…

I accomplished something anyway.

Recently Tivo has updated their service with the so-called TivoToGo feature, which allows you to copy programs from your Tivo to your PC for playback. In doing so, it inserts a tiny bit of Digital Rights stuff that makes you have to type a password before you can play it back on your PC. This is to prevent widespread sharing of these files. Or, so the story goes.

As has been noted elsewhere, it is relatively easy to strip that bit of cruft off of your stream and save it as a perfectly ordinary MPEG-2 data stream, which you are then free to mangle in anyway that you see fit.

So, yesterday, that’s just what I did. I transferred an hour long classic Star Trek episode from my Tivo to my PC, performed the EvilLabs magic from the link above, and then used Microsoft Media Encoder to convert it into a 131 megabyte WMV file. I then copied this to a 256M CompactFlash card, and popped it into my PDA. Voila! Instant Star Trek, suitable for watching in line at the bank or supermarket.

Not content with this, I decided to create a version that could be streamed, rather than downloaded. I used ffmpeg to convert the MPEG2 into an MPEG1 video stream, and then used the freeware PocketTV program to watch the video streamed over the wireless, after setting it up as described on their page, and it worked just fine. Since MPEG-1 is kind of a crufty format, the video quality wasn’t nearly as good as the same bitrate, but it did work.

Ah, such an achievement.

Slashdotted! Okay, maybe not quite…

Daily TrafficWhile after about five yesterday I was trying to sleep off my miserable cold+headache, I noticed that I got an increase of traffic from this podcasting article. How much of a boost? Well, it’s visible on my daily visits graph, which I reproduce to the right. If you are one of the 200+ who visited my website as the result of the article, I hope you’ll be back and that you’ll subscribe to the podcast.