AJays Webcams

Phil over at Big Trousers sent me this site called the Marble of Doom.
If you are a Mac user, you will no doubt recognize the Marble of Doom as the spinning beach ball of death, or what ever you may call it. Needless to say, it’s a total time waster, not to mention it calculates how much total time that Mac users have wasted waiting on it to stop spinning. Got a mac? Add your total to the Marble of Death.

In another small battle in the HD - Blu ray format wars, it looks like Blu- ray has scored another small skirmish in getting Target retailers to stock only Blu - ray players. See the Post here.

In a related note, Microsoft just reduced the Xbox 360 HD DVD to $179 with 5 free HD DVD titles, which you can read about here in this post.

This is one of the better speeds I have had through my ISP (Comcast)           Notice 25 days later the Latency is less  but so is the download speed. Why is this?Upload remains basically the same.   “>

I found this Post by Richard Lawler very interesting in the DVD format wars.It seems to confirm the stronger interest in Blu rays technology.It looks as if Sony will finally have a win back in their camp, after so many recent failures.

I finally managed to get the cam working again. After it went down, I went a couple of weeks without trying to solve the issue, due to other pressing events.
It is now running again, and is my cam of the week.
(scheduling varies)

Click Here to see my personal cam

Also my friend Phil Greenwood at Bigtrousers and his mates down under have just finished up their first episode of Photo Geek.TV

You can catch the first episode here… FGTVShow1

Call it Web 2.0, resurrection of the dot coms, or even the demise of TV as we know it.
Just don’t call it boring. Seems like everyone has decided to jump on the internet video bandwagon trying to make that next multi-billion bucks. Google proved that you could take a handful of decent web based apps, and make tons of money by selling click adverts to go along with them. People said…, “Damn! It’s that easy?” Well not quite…, however every schmo that can surf the net, or had an extra $100,000 laying around to fund a project was looking for some geeks that had a general ideal to make money off the internet to be the next you tube founders Chad Hurley,Steve Chenor Jawed Karim,which the latter of the 3 sounds like a type of fish.

The majority of the thrust to get video on the net started in early 2005. Grant you.., there were some earlier tries, however the major “kick the fat pipe and lets pump some video in some form” got going in Febuary of 2005 when the three aforementioned folks activated the domain name You Tube. The public was offered a preview in May of 2005, and 6 months later it was pumping viewer content, and got a 3.5 millon cash infusion from Sequoia Capital. That was the begining of the uploaded viewer content.

At about the same time in 2005, Apple Inc. had anounced that it would begin selling video content to the masses, even though it had been speculated over the last year, that Apple was going to do this. People knew Apple’s ability to maket cool, hip items, and they had done so well with music, and iTunes, that they didn’t want to be left at the dock with the ships pulling out, so the industry scrambled to throw money at any project that could make money like Google, You Tube, and Apple.

Some of these projects are half baked, and variations of stuff that are already out there. But hey…, competition is a good thing, and some of these projects including video, and popular blogging sites and trackers need to go under (”cough-Tecnocrapi”) if they can’t keep with the publics demand of them.

A new site that’s on the bleeding edge that I’m keeping an eye on, but is only in their Beta as of this writing is a site called Joost. They describe theirselves as a new way of watching TV on the internet, which uses new and established technologies to provide the best of both the internet and TV worlds. We’re in the process of making it as TV-like as we can, with programmes, channels and adverts. You can also see some things that we think will enhance the TV experience: searching for programmes and channels, for example, as well as social features like chat.

Now, I don’t know if it will go over, but if I had to make a bet, I’d think it would. Here is my reasoning as for why it might work. I love the internet…, and when I say love, I mean it very, very, affectionately! Good thing I’m married. I hardly watch TV anymore. Maybe 2 to 3 hours of programing a week. Most of all my entertainment come in some form from the internet. So all these people have been going out and dropping $2000 to $8000 dollars on flat screens, and I’m thinking that is nuts, because I’m still very happy with my 27 inch tube from Sanyo, that I’ll watch maybe a few hours a week.
Someone asked me about TIVO, and why I did not have it. Well…, I have EyeTV on my computer and it does the same thing, and I have this wonderful 23 inch HD Cinema Display from Apple…, so there is not much reason to buy a flat screen. However that may change soon with Apple’s soon to be released AppleTV, that will take everything from your computer and place it in your living room with the flat screen.

I digress…, anyhow Joost could soon replace my $60 a month cable fee, if the content was good and captivating. You can see the screen shots of Joost here.

Anyhow, it looks to be a interesting project if they play all their card right. I was hoping to be a Beta tester, however I just found out that they don’t have a Mac PowerPC, or Linux port yet. If you have a intel Mac, or windows you are good to go to sign up to be a beta tester. Mannnn…., anyone want to lend me a couple of thousand dollars to buy me a new intel MacPro? Well at least click a google ad for me so I can be on my way…, a few cents at a time.

Robert Adler, the co-inventor of the TV remote control passed away February 15th.
The cause of death was heart failure at age 93. Apon hearing this, a fellow nursing home patient suggested putting new batteries in him to work again.

It was a sad day for many a couch potatos.

Adler spent a unheard of 60 years career with Zenith, and held 180 U.S. patents. He was best known for his Zenith Space Command remote control which was thought to be the last time someone would have to get up to change the channel, but was proven a little premature though because you still had to tell someone to go adjust the rabbit ears and hold their left arm up while kneeling on the ground, until the advent of cable.

Adler joined Zenith’s research division in 1941 after earning a doctorate in physics from the University of Vienna. He retired as research vice president in 1979, and served as a technical consultant until 1999, when Zenith merged with LG Electronics Inc.
He was a pioneer in Surface Acoustic Waves (SAW) tecnology. The same stuff that goes into touch screen technology, and even used in cell phones. Can you say “iPhone”?

The U.S. patent office published his most recent patent February 1st for advances in touch screen technology

Adler wished he had been recognized for more of his broad-ranging applications that were useful in the war and in space and were building blocks of other technology, but then again, the remote control changed the life of every man.

In a related note…, Police were called to a Long Island man’s house, and discovered the mummified remains of the resident, dead for more than a year, sitting in front of a blaring television set. (apparently he didn’t have a remote control)

The 70-year-old Hampton Bays, New York, resident, appeared to have died of natural causes. Police said his body was discovered on Thursday when they went to the house to investigate a report of a burst water pipe. Officials could not explain why the electricity had not been turned off, considering he had not been heard from since December 2005.

I was doing some casual reading through news and information sites, and happend upon Bob Browns Open Source Ministry site. He had an interesting blog about Web Cam Security.
Normally, I would have heard about what he was talking about in his blog through my news feeds and other feeds, however, the news about the DHS (Department of Homeland Security) and the FBI specifically using face recognition and anomaly recognition software with public web cams to determine if something has happened based upon whether there are many fewer people or many more people in the scene than statistically expected caught me off guard.
(see PDF) The way it caught me off guard was not so much that it was a suprise to me that the FBI does this kind of thing as much as the time they spent researching it and using funds for it, when that money could have been spent more resourcefully. It’s like these federal grants you hear about where in Alaska they wanted to build this $315 million bridge that connected a town of 8900 to an island of 50 inhabitants saving a 7 minute ferry ride.
The money ( Tax payers Dollars) can and should be spent more effectively.

I digress…, This is wasted money in DHS & the FBI, when they could take what ever they spent on that study, and put more personel on the streets with their ears to the ground. It was said in the last few years by Bob Baer and Greg Treverton, former case officers for the CIA that while technology is good, it does not replace people in the field, and that the FBI’s main job is to basically be a law enforcement operation and do forensics, and do investigations of crimes. But they’re not supposed to be out there poking around groups that might break the law.

Anyhow, I got a little deep with this subject, however, I think the FBI needs to focus on their primary mission, and leave the face recognition and anomaly recognition software to other departments that specialize in that field.

Ok…, guess I can expect a black sedan to pull up in front of the house tomorrow, if carnivore is secretly still in action.

Last week Steve Jobs of Apple inc. (formally Apple Computer) put out an open letter to consumers, and music companies about the need to dump DRM (Digital Right Management).
He made some valid arguments about the reason to dump DRM. Grant you, they were probably self serving, but Steve is no idiot. There are plenty people out there that feels the same way about DRM, but they be damed to give Steve Jobs any credit for coming out and saying it, considering the fact of who he is, and that he holds 70% of the music download business. There are many folks, including the music label big 4 and other competing music devices that would love to see Apple knocked off it’s throne, just so they could increase their profits and prestiege. John Gapper of Business Day wrote this interesting article, that seems to sum up a lot of what most people feel about DRM. The only people I hear complaining about having DRM are the music companies, and people that offer a solution for inoperability between devices, all which are self serving. Interesting that we have not heard from any big name musicians on the DRM topic, but I sure they are being kept in line and told to follow the script that their bosses (big music) are advocating.
Much like the Berlin wall, the cracks are already showing in DRM, and it will be just a matter of time before digital downloads become DRM free and the wall comes down.