Published on
December 29, 2005 in
podcast.
You need portable MP3 player for when you’re on the move. On the move includes: in the car. Why would you want to listen through tiny white earphones, if you have dozens of Watt of pure musical power already at your disposal in that car of yours? Or: how to connect your iPod to your car stereo.
FM Transmitter
First of all, they’re illegal in Belgium, so you can’t buy them anywhere here. Thanks to my numerous maffia friends however, I’ve been able to try 2 Griffins and a white-label gizmo, but my experiences have always been disappointing: impossible to tune right or get an acceptable sound.
Fake tape
There are these cassette look-alikes that you can put in your tape player. Only, who still has a tape player in his car? And what does the conversion electric-to-magnetic-to-electric do for your sound quality?
Custom interfaces
Alpine has a special solution for iPod (didn’t BMW have something like that too?), but we don’t like vendor lock-in.
Line/Aux in
- One year ago I had already talked about Kenwood making car radios with line-in possibility. But Kenwood used the RCA jack on the back of the device, which might have been a good idea in a hifi-stereo world, but not so for portable audio players.I wanted a mini-jack, damn it, but no vendor had that.
- But now: behold the mini-jack!
- Sony has the CDX-GT200 (about € 130) and its bigger brothers CDX-GT300 and CDX-GT400 (not in Europe).
- JVC has the KD-G612 (bout € 150) with “Front AUX Input”, as well as the KD-G510 or KD-ADV6160 (last one even plays DVDs)
I hope the rest of the vendors get the message and provide a frontal AUX in on their products. Car stereos, boomboxes, mini-chains, DVD players, DivX players, …
Rip, Mix, Plug it in!
Technorati: mp3 – car – caraudio – ipod
Published on
December 28, 2005 in
Web2.0.
You might know I like visualizing stuff, so I worked a bit on my Get-Remix-Deliver flowchart to make it into a scratchpad to play with.
Use it in your presentations, use it in your business plans, use it to scare your granny, it’s CC-licensed (non-commercial/attribution) :
An example below for the Web2.0-ishness of Youtube.com:
You can post your own fancy/original/funny creations under the Flickr tag “flowchart20“.
Technorati: diy – web2.0 – flowchart – mememap – generator
While people were buying Christmas trees and turkeys, the U.S. House of Representatives, and specifically Jim Sensenbrenner (Republican) and John Conyers (Democrat), have prepared a very nice gift to the MPAA:
(…) I’d like to continue by looking at H.R. 4569, the Digital Transition Content Security Act of 2005, which proves the point I’ve made many times over the years, that when it comes to technology, government doesn’t really know what it is doing. H.R. 4569, which was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives on December 16th, is intended to protect the intellectual property rights of movie studios by MAKING ANALOG-TO-DIGITAL CONVERSION ILLEGAL.
Under the Act as proposed, manufacturers will have one year after passage to stop making devices that convert analog signals like music and video into digital forms unless those forms preserve some original Digital Rights Management technology present in presumably the pre-analog stage.
What this is about, then, isn’t making it illegal to use a digital recorder to record from analog microphone. Heck, that would destroy the music industry. Congress’s thinking (if we dare call it that — I see no flashes of synapses firing) is that media are going digital more and more and the greatest opportunity for snatching content is during the actual performance when, for the sake of driving a screen or a speaker, the digital signal goes analog.
What’s covered by this proposed law are things like TiVO and RePlay Digital Video Recorders, TV tuner cards for your PC, software intended to record audio or video streams, or just about any device or program you might use to actually implement that part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that says you have the right (though soon not the equipment) to backup or media-shift your own music and movies.
(from I, Cringely)
And someone had the same reflection as I had and did the research for me:
When I go to opensecrets.org and look who Jim Sensenbrenner’s top contributors are a few names tend to stand out: Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI), News Corp., Comcast Corp., Viacom Inc., Motion Picture Assn of America (MPAA) and the Major League Baseball Commissioner’s Office. It’s also interesting to note on Sensenbrenner’s latest reported personal financial statement that he received two all expense paid trips (including other family members) to Vegas and New Orleans from the National Association of Broadcasters and the National Cable and Telecomm Association. I wonder if he was flying first class and I wonder if these people want you to have your TiVo or not?
And isn’t it ironic when you look up John Conyers’ financial information that you find some of the same and some new names as well. Some of the names that stick out as John Conyers’ largest financial contributors? Comcast Corp., Clear Channel Communications, Major League Baseball Commissioner’s Office and ASCAP.
(from thomashawk.com)
Technorati: drm – ad – tivo – replaytv – pvr – dvr – sensenbrenner – conyers
Published on
December 23, 2005 in
Google.
I have often said that Blogger is one of the easiest ways to get started for free with a blog. Even if you don’t have an own domain name, you can start with a xyz.blogspot.com. However, there might come a time that you want to move that blog to another location: because you have bought your own domain, because you don’t want to look like an newbie, … I’ve done that a couple of times (I have more than a dozen blogs on Blogger, and am now transfering the ’serious’ ones to my www.smoothouse.com domain) and these are some tips:
Situation
- you currently have a Blogger blog on xyz.blogspot.com
- you want to move all contents and continue blogging (with Blogger) on www.example.com/xyz
- This is NOT about moving to a WordPress/MoveableType blog on your own domain. That is a whole different story!
Prepare old pages on xyz.blogspot.com
- create a placeholder page that you can redirect to:
www.example.com/xyz/index.html
Take for instance the page that is currently on xyz.blogspot.com/index.html.
Remark1: you will probably need an FTP client to do the upload: FileZilla is excellent at unbeatable price (free).
Remark2: you might have to create the folder /xyz first.
- change the Blogger template:
a) add the following redirect code right after the <head ...> tag:
[meta http-equiv="refresh" content="2;url=http://www.example.com/xyz/"] (replace [ by < and ] by > – had to to this to avoid problems with my comment page)
This will redirect both your visitors and the Google spiders to the new location.
b) add the following text in the page (e.g. just below the description <$BlogDescription$>):
<p>This blog has now moved to <a href="http://www.example.com/xyz/">www.example.com/xyz</a>!</p>
- republish entire blog (and check the home page to see if you are redirected to the new page after 2 seconds)
- add new post about the move (can be very short “We have moved” or might include an explanation “Finally have my own domain, …”
Create new pages on www.example.com
- in “Settings”/”Publishing”, choose the “Switch to FTP” and give your FTP publishing settings (check your ISP for that):
FTP Server: ftp.example.com
Blog URL: http://www.example.com/xyz/
FTP Path: public_html/xyz/
Blog Filename: index.html
FTP Username: myusername
FTP Password: ********
- in “Settings”/”Site Feed”, change the following settings (again, these are just example settings, your own settings depend on your ISP’s configuration):
Site Feed Server Path: public_html/xyz/
Site Feed Filename: atom.xml (this will normally be correct)
Site Feed URL: http://www.example.com/xyz/atom.xml
- in “Settings”/”Archiving” change following settings:
Archive Path: public_html/xyz/archive/
Archive URL: http://www.example.com/xyz/atom.xml
Archive Filename: (same as it was, or e.g. old_posts.html)
(this part was added on Jan 31st, because I had forgotten it in the real post)
- change template: remove the
<meta ...> and This blog has moved ... lines we added above
- do a “Republish Entire Blog”
- Voila! You are now ready to continue on your new blog location.
Optional: FeedBurner
- if you have a Feedburner feed (which is always a good idea), you have to change the source feed URL. Change it to the same
http://www.example.com/xyz/atom.xml you specified above.
- Big advantage: all persons subscribed to your feed don’t have to do anything. Eventhough your blog’s location has changed, the feed URL stays the same!
Optional: recover xyz.blogspot.com domain
- the moment you started publishing via FTP, your old blogspot domain became available. To prevent someone else from getting it, create a nex Blogger blog and use your old name as publishing target
- You can publish a new post about the move. Your old post pages will NOT be overwritten, only the index (’home’) page of the blog.
Technorati: blog – google – blogger – blogspot – migrate – template
Published on
December 21, 2005 in
Web2.0.
Ruby On Rails started a nice trend: post a screencast of 20 minutes or less where a (gifted) developer starts and finishes a simple development task (build a blog software, build a wiki, …). It gives a feeling of how much coding is still involved and how much the framework does for you. I collected some screencasts in the following playlist: RAD Framework Screencasts (Webjay).
These are the fancy ones:
Ruby language
- Ruby-On-Rails
- Develop blog application in 15 minutes (QuickTime MOV)
- Develop Flickr tag search application in 5 minutes (QuickTime MOV)
Python language
- Django
- Develop blog application in 7 minutes (QuickTime MOV)
- TurboGears
- Develop wiki application in 20 minutes (QuickTime MOV)
PHP language
- Qcodo (thx, Pascal!)
- Build an issue tracking system in 15 minutes (Flash Video)
- Extend the issue tracking system (Flash video)
Technorati: rad – ruby – rails – python – django – turbogears – php – qcodo – screencast
Published on
December 16, 2005 in
podcast.
When a user enters a music-related search in Google search box, the resulting search returns information about the artist, a few albums and a picture, when available, above the standard search results.
via money.cnn.com
Let’s show you what that looks like.
SERP with music results
One does a google.com search on “Harry Connick Jr” (it works with “Britney Spears” too):
SERP focused on artist
When you click on the “Harry Connick Jr.” title, you go to a precompiled artist page on www.google.com/musica that lists the albums of the artist (and where to buy them on iTunes, Amazon MSN …) , songs and – the MPA will love this – lyrics!! (e.g. “It had to be you” lists three sites that have the lyrics of this classic).
SERP for music (artists/albums)
When you click on the “More music results for harry connick jr”, you go to www.google.com/musicsearch.
Again, the albums, songs and artists that are most relevant for this search. Google even tracks on what albums a certain song is featured. Nice!
Conclusion
A nice addition to the Google search capabilities, but nothing revolutionary.
Remark: this is only music search;, not audio search as I talked about last year.
Technorati: google – music – search – seo – serp
You might have heard that the Microsoft IE team (and 
: Podcast RSS (generic)
: Audio RSS
: Audio RSS (Apple iTunes AAC)
: Audio RSS (MP3)
: Audio RSS (QuickTime MP4)
: Audio RSS (Ogg Vorbis)
: Audio RSS (RealAudio RAM)
: Audio RSS (Windows Media WMA)
: Video RSS
: Video RSS (Windows AVI)
: Video RSS (DivX)
: Video RSS (Quicktime MOV)
: Video RSS (Quicktime MP4)
: Video RSS (Quicktime)
: Video RSS (Windows WMV)
: Video RSS (XVid)
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