My Desk

Trying out the qik live video app on my phone. This is my desk at work. Maybe i'll have something more interesting later.

You can watch 60 minutes, even captain kangarooo!

Most of the television, movies, and video I now get online. I can finally choose from a large selection of programs thanks to newer online video sites. Most of my television show viewing is now done from Hulu. I think it's funny when at the start of the show they have the message to tune in at such and such a time on some channel that I don't get. Don't they know if you use Hulu, watching television shows after they air is better than watching live or dealing with maintaining your own DVR service.

I also watch video podcasts using Miro. Miro has a guide to new podcasts and just came out with version 2.0 too! There are many podcasts that are technology and science related that I enjoy watching. This is a niche that would probably never make it on a broadcast tv station, and having it as a podcast can reach a global audience. One can also subscribe to youtube channels just as if they were regular podcasts, which makes it easy to keep up with them.

I've also started watching some academic lectures at academicearth.org - this site combined the open course videos that are available from top universities in an easy to navigate form. And you get a front row seat all the time, which is not really possible if you attended the class in person.

Some of the places I get shows from are:
Hulu - has many tv shows, only slightly delayed
Miro - internet video player with a built-in podcast guide
Academic Earth - watch online courses tuition free
Top Gear - top gear car videos
Revision3 - internet tv shows like tekzilla
A-Z of Bushcraft & Survival - actual survival information, not bear grylls doing the most dangerous thing they can think of.

You'll be able to download or stream many of the shows you watch now, and more will be available every day. Some content producers may have a subscription, but I think that will be pretty rare except for things that have enormous costs involved like mega-dollar sports teams. Some day having a subscription tv service will seem as quaint as having a landline dialtone service. You have gotten rid of your landline dialtone haven't you?

Inauguration Streaming Online

Watch the inauguration on Hulu:

pygame number puzzle

This is my first little game using the pygame library. I seem to remember and old mac desk accessory that was a 4x4 number square puzzle, so I wanted to see if I could make something like that with pygame. With all the help from pygame it's only 75 lines. Programming in pygame reminds me of programming for Quickdraw, so it's sorta fitting to make a game similar to the old mac desk accessory game.

It needs a little tweaking and randomness, but it's playable.



You can dowload it here

Firefox 3 Usability

While I generally like Firefox, I think it's usability has suffered with the release of Firefox 3. They seem intent on making it look the same as the platform it's on. Firefox is my interface to everything, I really don't care whether I'm on windows, linux or mac. The browser is now MORE important than what platform it's on, and I think they can dictate their own look and feel. If you want a platform matching browser you can use the native one, IE, Safari, Epiphany, or Konqueror. I really want the keyhole button in my linux browser, since I move between different OS's, but now it looks inconsistent. In windows there is also an X for the Stop Loading button. I think of an X as close, and it's not clear that that means Stop Loading to me. Bring back the stop sign! I'll probably change my theme to work in these ways eventually, but it would have been nice to be better out of the box.

Moved data to blogger

I finally got around to moving my old postings into blogger, after an evening of cutting and pasting. I found out that if I post many entries to blogger in one day they start throwing captcha's at you for each entry, so that kinda slowed me down a bit. I swear they got harder and harder too, like some were instead proving that I was human by not being able to read them and had to try again, not that I was not a robot.

Moved to blogger

Maintaining a separate wordpress install for my blog was beginning to be a pain in the neck, so since google says they won't be evil, i've moved my site to blogger. Google, you better not be evil! I'm going to try and copy some of my old posts back here, I have website blog entries going back to before there was blogging sofware so it may take me some time.

Emergency Eyeglasses

I just watched a podcast video from Krampf.com's rss feed, Emergency Eyeglasses. I guess I kinda already knew about the pinhole lens effect, but it's fun to try it yourself if you usually need glasses. I recently subscribed to the Krampf.com Experiment of the week feed. He's like a modern Mr. Wizard, with little bits of science every week.

brain age