Traveling Down the Information Backroad

Revision3 website attacked with denial of service attack by for doing nothing more than using BitTorrent   And it was MediaDefender behind the attack. This can’t be good. These people are supposed to protect legit content makers, not attack them. Stonehenge turns out to be a cemetery. Slew of stories about using coax to deliver Ethernet. I suspect that  there is a movement afoot to create Ethernet to the home based on the cable network. Brazil has jumped in with South Africa to condemn OOXML. I’m suspicious. Sony is in the news for developing a glass speaker. Alien will be revealed on TV. Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth will become an Opera in Italy? What?

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Sony getting back into Interactive TV. What are they thinking? Also the company is going to roll out a 27-inch OLED set. Will Disney buy Tivo? Maybe! The Belgian news story keeps chugging. Google Gears becomes Gears. Ok, whatever. Yahoo suing Nigerian scammers? How do they find them? How about blocking the spam? Norcal man uses cartoon character names to open online brokerage accounts. Ha. Blogger breaks news! Stop the presses. New Dell laptop.  Intel getting into flash business.

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Place your mouse over the photo below, and then move over the squares to see the photo notes:

Photo with notes

This has great potential in Geography classes for detailing geographic features, or in History classes for either noting details in an historical photograph or to point out features in a contemporary photo that tell where historical events took place.

To add notes to a photo, find the photo you want to use and then click “add notes” above the picture. Each flickr user has the ability to allow or disallow this feature for other users.

Once you’ve found a photo with notes or made your own notes, go to the following site:

http://webdev.yuan.cc/flickr/flickr_notes.html

You can grab a bookmarklet for the Firefox browser and drag it to your browser toolbar. Once you find a photo on flickr with notes you want to use, just click the bookmarklet and the code to insert into your web page will be generated.

If you don’t want to run the script from the author’s site you can download the PHP script and run it from your own site. You’ll also need a flickr API key. This is a great use of the flickr API.

[tags] edtech, flickr notes, geography, history. photography, php, geoweb, geotag[/tags]

Belgian newspaper people have got to be the dumbest in the world. Suing Google for getting them links and attention. Apparently the Belgians want no links or attention and cannot figure out how to prevent it. PC Magazine says Windows 7 is a threat to Vista. Windows 7 is still hot air. It will not be out until 2011. Some think that AMD has an opportunity. Look for the Norwegians to try to usurp the Nobel Prize with the Kavli awards. Geez. Tivo fails to keep up with Cranky Geeks. HP gets too much PR, I know why. Look for 8 MP on a cell phone? Agh. 8 MB of blur.

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Holiday blues. Dell busted in NYC — found guilty of misleading advertising, abuse debt collection, etc. Terrible. No new kernel for Windows 7. Also it will not be out until at least the end of 2010 NOT next year as Gates promised. Creative Suite 4 on track. Centrino 2 delayed. Bad radios and bad graphics to blame. FiOS coming to NYC meaning Verizon is now in the TV business.

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I was excited to read about Alvin’s new Canon AVCHD format camera., and I hope he posts an in-depth review of his impressions I mentioned AVCHD in a post last year, and though I own an HDV tape format camera which is still a superior format, going forward AVCHD will be the format of choice for consumers and eventually small independent filmakers. I’ve been working in my spare time on a series of articles covering AVCHD, HDV, and H.264 Hi-def formats and hope to start getting things posted soon. I hope this series will inform school techs about bit rates, hardware, and editing of these compressed formats. In the meantime, here is some interesting information I found last week.

A lot of folks that were in the HD-DVD camp made a big deal that you could burn HD material onto a standard DVD and it would play on an HD-DVD player/ Blu-ray owners don’t need to feel left out, because you can burn AVCHD video to a standard DVD using Nero 8 and play it in most newer Blu-ray players. Articles I’ve read mention that the best compatibility is with the Playstation 3 built-in player, which is firmware upgradeable, and is currently thought of as the best Blu-ray player on the market. All you need to do is open Nerovision from Nero version 5 and up. Click “Make DVD, and then choose AVCHD DVD. Load in your AVCHD files, and Nero will do the rest. Depending on material, you can expect a maximum of 20 minutes total on a single-sided disc. I tried this using AVCHD theatrical trailers downloaded from Sony, and the process, while time consuming to render, worked well. I plan to see if I can convert my HDV material to this format, and I’ll let you know the results. For more information, check out the Nero Vision 5 AVCHD Authoring Guide.

Alvin’s camera has received very good reviews, but I would be more interested in the SDHC flash card version of the camera (the HF10). When I move from a tape-based camera I would prefer to have a camera with as little extra moving hardware as possible. On the right you can see what looks like a typical cheap $99 camcorder, but this is the titaniim body Sony TG-1 AVCHD camcorder which was just released about a week ago. I’m looking forward to reviews of this camera, the only question in my mind is the smaller sensor. The sensor is supposedly improved by a couple of new technologies, and it will be interesting to read what opinions are formed for this camcorder. While not an inexpensive camera with a street price of around $850, if the TG-1 is a good performer it could be a killer product for consumers.

[tags]avchd, canon, hg10, hf10, sony, tg1, nero, nerovision, blu ray, playstation 3, ps3, ed tech, edtech[/tags]

It’s snowing in California? Ballmer says MSFT is going to spend $50 billion one way or the other. Yahoo is not a strategy. Carl Icahn worried a deal will never happen. Vista user account control are confusing says MSFT exec. XP SP3 corrupting the registry says Symantec. HP is now taking over the server business from IBM and Dell. RedHat software is greener. So what? Google slaps Microsoft. I’m just joking when I say the oceans are being carbonated by the CO2 in the air. I suspect the iPhone will have GPS built-in or have a bluetooth gizmo nearby.

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Check out WMWifiRouter, which allows your Windows Smartphone or Windows Mobile Device to serve as a router. You could be anywhere and connect say, an eeePC from a roadside rest stop. As long as your phone has an Internet access plan, your other device will connect, and this can be handy if you don’t want to deal with a bluetooth connection. I received the info on this software from Josh, who told me it works well with his iPod Touch. The site provides a list of devices that can be used as servers (phones) and clients (laptops and other devices). ActiveSync or .CAB files for installation are provided for the free trial. If the file doesn’t install on your phone, check the download page again, where you can find alternate downloads *which I needed to use.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t work with the Playstation Portable. The network settings for the PSP has an AD-HOC mode (needed), but Sony ties this mode to communication only between other PSP devices. Darn.

[tags]windows, mobile, cmartphone, router, wifi, ipod touch, psp, playstation portable, networking[/tags]

Nine hurricanes coming. Sugar OS may be spread to other systems besides OLPC. Meanwhile the OLPC folks say the next XO 2.0 will $75? Har. Twitter gets $15 million. How to beat jet lag? Don’t eat? The Netflix box is a streaming box not download and play. This is not the way to go. Google now trying to get that weird white space spectrum.

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Microsoft is now in the news too much. Gates still chattering about one thing or another. The company decides to bribe users to use their search engine. Microsoft Office not adding support for its own Open XML until Office 14. Apple and CBS sued over stealing Mighty Mouse name. Is Comcast irked over the set top boxes? GTA IV actor irked over only making $200,000 for doing voice work.University of TN prof. sending secret docs to enemies? Xbox360 copying the Wii style controller.

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