Lance Wicks
Kiwi,
Judoka,
Geek,
Husband
Daddy!

JudoGeek Blog

Full length Machima movie 

This is a machima movie, full length, creative commons licensed.
Being CC licensed, I am allowed to share it here and help promote their work, unlike if it was under the control on the MPAA. Grrr.....

[ view entry ] ( 1005 views ) permalink
Dataportability video 

Below is a quite good video on data portability.

DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.
[ view entry ] ( 1691 views ) permalink
Playing for Keeps - Super Mega Fast! 

I have been listening along to "Playing for Keeps" the latest project by Mur Laferty and enjoying it greatly.

I have also just added her "I should be writing" podcast to my iTunes, not because I am planning on a career in fiction writing unlike Chris, I was just curious to leanr more about Mur's work and am finding it illuminating. It would seem that all "effort" is similar, that the effort of writing is the same as the effort to say run a podcast, judo coaching sites, training for a Judo tournament, etc.

To support Mur and to thank her for entertaining me and the (did you say 12,000) other Playing for Keeps fans, I decided to buy a copy of Playing for Keeps at lulu.com the best think about buying it was the delivery options.
Standard - $7
Express - $11

and....

Super Mega Fast - $96

Super Mega Fast, awesome for a novel about super heroes. At $96 I suspect that perhaps there is a third waver out there who has the power to deliver parcels at great speed, but only ones that are printed on demand and written by brave trailblaazers of new media.
[ view entry ] ( 1200 views ) permalink
BBC iPlayer = Rubbish viewing experience! 

So this evening I am away from home, and missed watching Torchwood, but not to worry BBC iPLayer to the rescue!!! So on my shiny Apple MacbookPro I popped over to the Beeb and got to enjoy Torchwood over the Wifi in the hotel here.

So far so good, but take a look at the little image below:

Spotted the problem? No? Well look in the centre of the picture, what do you see?
See the little dots there? Well thats the "Loading" or "Buffering" display when I get iPlayer streamed to me. (infact at this point, only the little circles were moving, the video and audio and stopped! And trust me I saw it a lot. Mainly at pivotal moments in the show. GREAT... Not! Kinda ruining the viewing experience for anyone one not silly enough to have Vista/Xp and Windoze media player.

Now, I am against the iPlayer for other reasons. Mainly the DRM rubbish that some idiots have sold Auntie on. I appreciate there are legal problems with allowing the shows to be BROADCAST for more than 7 days because the producers (aka copyright holders) seemingly don't want their shows watched. But come on it's the BBC, surely if any organisation in the UK could have got a free and open internet download service going on it would be them?!?!?!

I have to say, the 7 day thing is a massive cop out, it is also mainly useless. I have Sky+ and watch probably 90% of my BBC shows on that and often as not over 7 days after broadcast. So the 7 day thing is dumb from a usage perspective. 2 weeks might have been more acceptable, you know you've just realised you are watching episode 2 of a show and go "Hey I'll get caught up". But no, 7 days means it'll be gone just about exactly when you are likely to have that moment. Bummer!

As someone (I can't remember who) has stated elsewhere, the most ridiculous thing about the DRM on BBC iPlayer is that fact that the BBC spends millions (billions?) of the license fee payers money boradcasting their shows over the airwaves in unencrypted format anyway! Both as analogue and digital formats. Any one can grab that signal and anyone can record it completely legally to VCR or SKy+ (for example) and watch it whenever they please. Which is what we deserve given we are paying for the damn stuff with the license fee.

The iPlayer should be open, it is just a giant VCR provided by the BBC really. Or are the BBC going to start demanding from VCR makers that they delete the taes after 7 days too? Maybe they will negotiate a deal with Psy-Ops or the Men in Black to wipe all our memories after 7 days too. After all we have a copy of the show in our memories, that would be a copyright breach wouldn't it.
Oh no, what if I kept that copy of the show in my head and then recalled it to a friend? That would be distributing that material (that I have breached copyright on) making me a pirate!!

What will that do to the poor producers of the shows? Gosh other people might watch the show as a result of me telling them about it and then become fans and them visit the website or buy the DVDs. And that is just if I tell them about it, imagine just what might happen if we were allowed to share the show itself... then they'd get the "full experience" of the show and would be even more likely to become a fan, to visit the website, to buy the DVD, to watch the next show made by that producer, that actor or that director. Then those talented people might get more work, more money and more satisfaction that people are enjoying their artistry!!

Thanks goodness the MPAA/RIAA and now the BBC is doing all they can to ensure that instead of me being able to enjoy their product and share that good feeling with others (and through doing so increasing their market and brand), they are ensuring I have a bad user/viewing experience and feel compelled to write a tirade like this at midnight!!

Thanks BBC, you've made me mad and made me tell as many people as possible that I hate the iPlayer, rather than focussing on saying that I actually quite liked Torchwood.
[ view entry ] ( 1283 views ) permalink related link
PlazeCamp - My contribution. 

Today was PlazeCamp in Berlin, Germany.
Sadly, I ended up not being able to attend in person, only virtually via IRC mainly. But I was not detered and managed to add something I hope. In any case, I was at least able to create a hack which I am able to share here and on the wiki over at plazecamp.com ( Direct Link ).

It is an idea that Roel came up with at HackdayLondon actually, that being to pull events from upcoming.org (now http://upcoming.yahoo.com ) based on your location from Plazes.

So, I sat down with the two APIs and came up with THIS okay technically this but lets not be fussy. It is not pretty but it works and shows how location can be used. ( available HERE ) now, I know I have done this in an ugly manner and I invite you to clean up the source. Give me a break I'm a noob and I had about 1/2 an hour to get this done before the kids took over my time. :)

Peter, the primary evangelist, came up with http://ruk.ca/wii which is a pretty cool step in the direction of a client that is usable on a mobile phone screen. In fact it works great on the larger screen on my E90. Obviously (from the URL) it is designed for when you are accessing via a Nintendo Wii, so the fonts are too big for the smaller (more standard sized) screen on my mobile.

SvenG was pretty active for a while on the IRC channel and also took some notes at http://www.guckes.net/plazes/ which are interesting reading as he is a new Plazes user.


On the channel I mentioned some ideas I had, basically similar to the ideas I've blogged about and Dirk (over at www.NoseRub.com ) has been thinking about. I am still looking for context in plazes/twitter/facebook/noserub/etc. I think location can be key to your context, I'd like to be able to filter what groups of people I know see about me, based on the context I produce that content. EG If I am at work, my work contacts should see my tweets, etc. When at home I want friends and family to see my tweets. My family don't want to see my work tweets and I don't want my work colleagues seeing my personal tweets.

Perhaps a great pairing of German technologies would be noserub & plazes.
I know NoseRub is working towards filtering data and Plazes could be a way to add that contextual data. It is better than pure geo data (GPS) perhaps, as (like today) I was able to set my Plaze location to Plazes HQ, whereas a pure GEO location system would have had me at home. I used Plazes to define in a way where my focus was. The comments I added to my plaze status/activity used wors like "attending PlazeCamp - Virtually" so people could tell (if the looked) that I was notreally there.

My gripe with Plazes, if I have to have one; is that it is becoming IMHO a bit of a twitter clone. The PLAZE has lost some priority and activity is becoming more important. Maybe I am old, but I preferred it when it was more about the Plaze. I also think that becoming too like twitter might be a bad plan for Plazes as it puts themin there with Jaiku and Twitter and all the other "micro-blogging" services.

I'd prefer it in many ways if plazes became a twitter client? why not?
Then when I used the plazer I'd be posting to twitter (i have more contacts thre anyway) but perhaps plazes could do come of what I have written above. Maybe at some locations the activities (I likes the term Trazes by the way guys!) would go to Twitter maybe in others I might choose that they go to Jaiku or similar. Maybe to... SMS to a group. Maybe to a email mailing list/address? Maybe direct to my status on Facebook? The possibilities are pretty huge.



It will be interesting to see where Plazes goes after PlazeCamp, Yahoo FireBird will be interesting, as from what I have read it is direct competition.

Lance

p.s. Anyone able to answer the question "How do most people access Plazes? Via a plazer? Via SMS? Via the WWW site? Other?"

p.p.s I hate the SMS service. No actually I think it works really well. Obviously well built. I just hate that it costs me 12p a pop, especially as I have a wifi phone and also GPRS on a (almost) flat tariff. A proper mobile interface would be a good project guys!
[ view entry ] ( 1481 views ) permalink

<<First <Back | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | Next> Last>>