Another video publishing tool

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.

Looming health crisis

Man, I don’t know when folks will get the message and really start paying attention to this. I suspect not until the generation this article refers to ends up swamping the health care system as the bills come due for not paying attention to their condition. For those who don’t want to click through on the link, it’s an article covering how 2/3rds of the folks with type 2 diabetes are basically doing little or nothing to manage their condition, which will ultimately lead to serious health complications as they age. I’ve said this before, the end-game for folks with unmanaged diabetes is spectacularly unpleasant – the best you can hope for is a sudden heart attack, but you’re more likely to suffer kidney and liver failures along with possible blindness and limb amputation before you get there. They should do shock therapy for these folks in the way they did for smoking when I was young (this is a healthy lung, this is the lung of a 20 year smoker, and hey, take a look at the guy with the hole in his throat). For what it’s worth, I’m not in that 2/3rds category.

Newsgator buys out bradsoft

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.

Excellent software – panorama factory

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.

Updates to the photo gallery

I updated the software that runs my photo gallery and added several new photo albums. Before I get to the links for those, I want to commend the menalto’s gallery folks. It’s just a superb piece of software and a shining example of open source at its best. The upgrade process went off without a hitch and was clearly and comprehensively documented, and they added a bunch of new features to the system. One of the new features is a handy RSS feed system. I haven’t gotten it configured quite right yet so you might want to hold off on adding it to your feed list, though the address won’t change so there’s no real harm if you do.

Anyway the new albums are all under the ‘Other hikes in the adirondacks’ section, which you can access here, and include photos of several recent hikes, including a monster 13 mile hike to the top of Pharoah Mountain, a short hike in and around the Split Rock area on the west shore of Lake Champlain, and a hike to the summitt of Crane mountain. The Crane and Pharoah galleries both have excellent QTVR panoramas to check out, and there are tons of photos of me, Soolin, beautiful vistas, and even a few of Andrew. Check em out.

Tiddlywiki keeps getting better and better

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.

Summer’s almost here and I’m thinking about watersports again

I happened across this cool watercraft – $600 gets you a super light weight water skimmer. I’m somewhat tempted to pick this up for my two Lake George camping trips this summer, we’d have a blast playing on the thing. Check out the video for details on how it works. Anyone know of a DIY kit or other source for a watercraft like this that isn’t quite so pricey? Seems like you could build something very similar relatively easily, the toughest part would be getting the wings angle correct. It also seems like it would be possible to make one that had a better way to transfer energy to the thing instead of hopping like a kangaroo. Still very cool though.

Handy free photoshop plugin

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.

Software better than hardware for KVM apps

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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.