I commented a few times about the merger of TechTV and G4TV and how it ruined a reasonably entertaining and informative show (The Screensavers), as well as most anything else good on the techtv channel – only X-Play has come through largely unscathed. Not that there was much else on techtv worth watching, but anyway, stated plainly, the G4 folks suck, they seem to have no idea what they’re doing. How these people manage to be in charge of running a television network I don’t know. Anyway, a cool observation – the core of the screensaver show, Patrick and Leo, are back together along with Yoshi, Robert Heron and Kevin Rose over at thisweekintech.com, where they’re offering up a podcast. They’re using skype, RSS and bit torrent to push their stuff out to the community, along with weblogs to help publicize and talk about it. This is well worth checking out, and if you were a fan of the old screensavers, it’s a must. This is also a hint of things to come in terms of niche content publishing. This stuff wasn’t enough to sustain a tv network, we’ll see if it’s enough to sustain their hosting and bandwidth bills and pay their rent. A telling clue is that Kevin Rose announced that quit Attack of the Show (what techtv’s screensavers evolved into) effective this friday in order to focus on his internet publishing stuff, which includes thisweekintech.com as well as systm.org, a new show (video, again RSS/torrent stuff) that he’s putting together, as well as a few other projects. The same is true of a lot of the former techtv folk, a lot of both on and off air people seem to be involved in a set of ‘new distribution model’ projects.

Wouldn’t it be interesting in a year or two if it turns out the former techtv folk are able to effectively put themselves back on the air using this stuff? It’s not mass market yet by any stretch, but is it a sustainable vertical niche market? Can they get this stuff to the point where they’re pulling in the numbers equivalent to what they were when they were a cable show? Even if they can only get a fraction of that market, the larger, more precise dataset they’ll have about their viewers as compared to what they can get from broadcast tv should be worth more to their advertising clients. I have no idea how the economics of this would work but it’s all fascinating to see. And not to get to far down the rabbit hole, but the next generation consoles, particularly the xbox 360, have a potential role to play here as well.

I’ve covered FireANT before, but it’s had a major revision since the last time I pointed at it. Looking to get legal, publicly available video down into your machine but found monkeying with Azureus and the RSS plugins too much of a pain? Check this client out, it aims to simplify the process.

Check out Broadcast Machine, another tool that allows relatively easy video content publishing. This one’s php based. RSS + .torrents = the tivo-ization of your computer. Whether it’s this app or another, this stuff is basically ready for primetime now for technically proficient folk. You’ll spend more time figuring out how to get the appropriate video and audio codecs going than you will getting your pseudo tivo working.

Note, the be clear – this is a publishing tool. I’ve covered ways to get the content to yourself a number of times. This is a tool to get your content out to the world.

I’ve mentioned repeatedly how Feeddemon is by far my favorite RSS reader across any platform. Apparently I’m not alone in feeling that way – today, Newsgator, the popular RSS tool for folks using Outlook on PCs, announced that they’ve acquired Bradsoft and will continue developing both Feeddemon and Topstyle (a superb PC-based CSS/XHTML editor). I own both these tools. I’m happy for Bradsoft – the guy is a class act and he makes excellent products. He was also the author of Homesite, which was one of the first decent PC-based HTML authoring tools back in the day, still available (barely!) from Macromedia. I’m also bummed though. While I am getting a 2 year paid subscription to Newsgator out of their purchase of Bradsoft, and it will allow Feeddemon a method of providing feed synching across platforms (read a feed at work, when I look at it at home it shows as already read), I had already basically solved this problem for myself via Powerfolder, which I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. I’ll keep my fingers crossed that Feeddemon and Topstyle don’t suffer the same fate that Homesite did, and that Feeddemon continues to innovate under its new corporate parent. Meanwhile it’s time to start paying attention to projects like RSS Owl, or maybe switch back to my old favorite on the mac, netnewswire, which has recently moved to version 2.0.

If you’ve been watching my photo galleries you might have noticed that I’ve been putting QTVR panoramas of the mountains I summit in lately. Panorama Factory is what I’ve been using to produce them and it’s just fantastic. I’ve been making QTVR’s for over 10 years now and for most of that time I relied on vrworx. When I left Bowdoin I lost access to my legal license for it, and my personal license was for a pre-os x version. I started hunting around for alternatives and after testing a bunch of stuff decided on the Panorama Factory. Nothing against vrworx, but $299.00 versus $60 made it an easy decision. vrworx is more featureful but it’s mostly things I wasn’t using and all in all it’s harder to use and seems to generate QTVR’s of lesser quality from the same set of photos. With Panorama Factory I literally just point, shoot, rotate myself a bit, and repeat, no tripod and no real effort to maintain a level plain, yet Panorama Factory kicks out QTVR’s of more than acceptable quality. It’s PC only but well worth a look if you’re interested in creating your own QTVR’s, or even just wide angle panoramic shot.

Got a USB thumb drive? I’ve mentioned Tiddlywiki before, the clever little self-contained wiki that consists of a single html file. It’s continued to evolve and gotten its own domain/website. A new version recently shipped. This is a handy way to carry data you have to have around with you – simply copy the file to your thumb drive and load it up at whatever computer you happen to be sitting in front of. There’s also a modified version called GTDTiddlyWiki based on the ‘Getting Things Done’ model of productivity management, if you’re interested in such things. Neither is really a replacement for a full-fledged wiki engine, but if you’re looking to test the waters or you just need something simple that’s slightly better than a sticky or emailing yourself reminders, one of them might be a good fit, and they’re painless to check out.

Building QTVR’s on your mac? Check out PanoPreviewer, a handy little plugin that lets you examine QTVR files you’re working on in photoshop. Unfortunately there’s no windows version and that’s where I’m building my QTVR files these days, but if you’re in a Mac this is super handy.

Check out Synergy2. It’s an amazingly useful little utility that allows you to use one keyboard and mouse to control as many computers and monitors as you like. I’ve got it setup at work to control two machines, one mac and one pc, each of which has 2 screens, and it works beautifully. The setup is a bit of a bear to puzzle out despite the extensive documentation, but once you get it working you’ll never consider a KVM setup again. Just the ability to copy and paste between platforms makes it worth considering over a dedicated KVM.

I’ve described how one can use rss and bit torrent as an alternative to a monthly cable television subscription before and even pointed to a few implementations. I figured it was time to update the list after a conversation with my brother where he wasn’t quite clear on how one might use the Mediagate MG-25. In brief, the model is this: you use a bit torrent client to download content, and you use RSS feeds to inform the client what content you’d actually like to download. Just like a tivo with the season pass, the RSS feeds can be used to tailor a very specific selection of shows/movies/whatever that you’d like to see. A couple of tools that facilitate doing this which I haven’t blogged before – RSS Feed Scanner for the superb java-based bit torrent client, Azureus. If that’s too complicated for you, give Videora a try instead – a task specific (ie get video from rss feeds via bit torrent) client which is somewhat easier to configure.

No, make that three. I’ve blogged before about the excellent firefox web developer extension – anyone doing web development should have it installed imo. Today I happened across two other most excellent tools. First, check out the Mouseover DOM inspector, a bookmarklet (favelet if you’re an IE person, though if you are I’d be surprised to know you’re doing web development) that works in most of the major browsers and gives you a fabulous tool to look at the structure of your pages. This is the most comprehensive tool of this sort I’ve come across. Even so, aardvark is also worth a look as it enables editing of the reviewed content as well as a slightly less robust exploration of the structure if the page.