I just wanted to post how great our vacation trip was last week. The camping trip un-tethered me from the internet enough to give Google Reader some time off too. I have plenty of flickr photos of the trip and some of me wakeboarding, yes I know, I can’t wakeboard. Well, I can’t wakeboard … Read More »
July 25
I’ve used a couple managed voicemail providers in the last few months. My first provider was callwave which sent me my voicemails as MP3 through email and just like any voicemail added the ability to call in and hear the voicemail from your phone in a queue. A month or two ago I started using Spinvox after a hearing it briefly on a forgotten tech podcast. It provides voicemail like any other service with a call in queue but where callwave sends you an audio file through email it converts the voicemail to text and emails me. The result is something really cool.
As a BlackBerry user Spinvox provides my voicemail to my phone immediately as text, allowing me to actually respond to any message much faster in a medium I prefer. Even though I love mobile phones I don’t love them to talk or call my voicemail I love them for the the other connections they provide, ie e-mail, text and internet.
Personally I hate voicemail, it’s awfully time consuming. It’s slow, you have to find the time to call in, listen to the voicemail and then you have to call the person for a reply. The message that I receive now is a very good conversion of the audio left in the queue sent through email that I can read whenever I want, in a setting that I want and I could forward it to the caller with a reply.
No matter who it is I just may not be in the setting where it’s appropriate to pick the phone up; I’d say 95% all my voicemails are the result of me not being able to pick the phone up or I simply don’t want to. Now I wait 2-3 minutes for the email to be sent, I read it either on my computer or the phone and I can call them back when I can without calling my voicemail first. The majority of the time it’s just to get an answer to a question so I just text or email them back with a response. It’s extremely productive for me and it helps me not do something I don’t like, being on the phone.
If anyone want’s a Spinvox account contact me. I’m going to e-mail the contact I know over at Spinvox later this week to sign-up a few friends and he’s told me that I can pass along a full list of people to get free 1-year accounts.
If there are any drawbacks to Spinvox it would be:
After just a few days of using the Apple TV I’m thoroughly impressed. The major reason I purchased the Apple TV was because of all the hacking that’s been going on and with Apple practically saying, “it’s your box do what you will” we can expect some more great hacks, if running full OS X wasn’t enough. I had planned at least to install some Xvid/divX playback through a very simple hack but involves cracking the case open. Instead of jumping right into doing that I’ve instead planned to just use it as intended.
I already live out of iTunes so the unsupported codec didn’t pose a big problem. All my TV Shows have already been encoded for iPod playback so 90% of my video was ready for use. The other 10% had been movies I ripped to DivX to playback on your Heleos DVD player. I truly dislike re-encoding video especially when the original format is already compressed (divX) but I tested out a few conversions and they looked great.
It took me a day or two to export 30-40 movies straight from Quicktime through the “Apple TV” export setting on my MacPro and I’m positive that exporting this much video isn’t practical for the majority. Especially since my assumption would be the majority having more video than I and wouldn’t have a fast pc or mac that could export 10 videos at a time.
After getting all my video to a codec that the aTV supported the device shines. The one problem I have now is whether to export my future video for iPod or aTV. It should be easy since I’m not getting rid of cable anytime soon so I’ll just export any full HD downloads for the aTV (like Lost or Sapranos), otherwise all other TV downloads will go for my iPod which I use daily at work. And all movies will be exported through QT Pro or if it’s a DVD I’ve found ripping it straight to from handbrake is the ideal process.
Quality of converted HD content looks surprisingly good. I downloaded a full HD tv show and converted it’s original format to h.264 through QT pro. After streaming it over wireless, on a g network might I add the video looked great. I didn’t notice any difference in quality from the original format of HD DivX playback on my computer then through the aTV.
Another majorly mentioned drawback to the aTV is streaming HD over wireless. Some say that anything lower then a n network wont work but I’ve got a G network streaming video perfectly fine with about 5 seconds of beginning buffer and solid fast forwarding. It takes forever for iTunes to sync with it in the beginning since it sends 30+GBs of data but ever since I’v had no need to drop a cable.
In conclusion the aTV doesn’t have any drawbacks (for me), other then the minor process of waiting 30-50 minutes for converted HD downloaded video to be supported. And it’s wonderful not having to worry about burning DivX cds or finding a CD/DVD to play some kid video. With it’s simple interface we can pull up a full media library from upstairs on our TV in seconds.
Including in that library is podcasts, photos and images. Watching video podcasts is great. I only wish now that I had a faster internet connection so I can drop cable TV and just download all our HD shows to playback on the aTV. Or what would help, HD content downloads from iTunes.
I’ll still be following the Apple TV hacking scene and I’m sure they’re going to compel me to break the box soon.In the meantime I’ll order a new 2.5′ drive so I can keep the factory drive untouched.
What are the judicial implications/ramifications and responsibilities of a site owner unknowingly exposing sensitive customer information (names and CC information) over the internet? What about if it was just a possibility and without knowing for a fact an intrusion or vulnerability had occurred? Or what about the person or persons that know about the vulnerability without properly securing said data that decide it’s okay since the exploit could only be done in an extremely rare and random instance?
Keep in mind these questions are completely out of curiosity since I know our duty is to protect and server as bloggers, business owners and employees of the web.
“We tested five shareware or commercial keylogging programs: HomeKeylogger 1.70, GhostKeylogger, KG-BKeylogger, Spytector 1.2.8 and ProBot. None of them captured passwords entered using the trick we describe.”read more | digg story … Read More »
November 23
Another copy and past from Jason’s original post on scary stats.
I agree that BOOKS are regarded too high, almost as if they are the great tool of knowledge. In the past, books were the mainstay for increasing knowledge, fair perceptions of life and the world. Now it’s different and with many new media streams people can be very knowledgeable, still increase imagination and find avenues of philosophy without even touching a paper book.
Similar to what Nathan said, smart people have convinced the majority that books are for smart people and if you want to be smart you do what smart people do, which is read books. I really don’t see smart people reading because they’ve decided it’s the smart thing to do, I see them reading books because most are introverts and that’s a way of expression. Now I am generalizing a lot and I’m assuming that smart people are smart not because they’ve read a few books but rather they’re smart from the begining. Because it can’t mean that if I read Chomsky (never had) my scope logic is comparable to a genius.
Here’s where I flip-flop a lot.
As I said there are a lot of media streams rather then just books and IMHO these new inlets are ruining us. Since most aren’t calming and thought provoking we turn into fast passed media whores. TV, film, mags, music and the web I read only makes me only knowledgeable in the present rather then the future or the past; decreasing thought and imagination.
Unless we can consciously be aware of the numbing effects of this new media and are retroactively increasing thought through these forms we’ve essentially created a worse replacement to the books that brought us here in the first place.
So, I’m for books but personally I just can’t bring myself to complete a book maybe it’s because of childhood and just in case that’s why I’m going to take an effort in reading to Avery (or making sure Sara does) and limiting mind-numbing media from her.
My other problem; I’ve become a whore to tech, since it’s my hobby I want to broaden myself by reading a lot on the internet but the scary thing, I don’t see an end in sight. With no point of reflection, contemplation and thought in order to create something of my own it’s useless. And IMHO that’s true knowledge, when you’ve created or solved something for others that’s beneficial to all.
I’ve closed the comments so you’d go here instead.
Not to bring the conversation here, I just wanted my very large comment to be hear for others to see as well.
Not to encroach on your fun/debate/conversation I’m hoping for Google to just buy up all the dark fiber across the US and create their own backbone to the internet, a backbone that they would never be charged to … Read More »
June 11
We need your input! What are you looking for in a Bible search tool? We are trying to innovate the way people find things in the Bible, and how they find what they are looking for. We want to know how you find things, how you know where to look, and what things you would like to see in … Read More »
May 09
Ventura according to my parents had power outages around the town but our place had no power for over 24 hours and it was horrible. It was weird to not have any internet, TV or any lights on Saturday night and we took advantage of it by going to bed early; something we both needed after the rag’r at Roger’s house on Cinco and the full day of Avery’s first B-Day, which was a blast and a huge success.
Sunday morning we had no power so we used the human alarm clock of Avery, she woke us up at a perfect time to get ready for the Bridge. At this point we were worried about the left overs from the B-Day party but we hoped for the best and we never opened the fridge. No until that evening did our power come back up and we had to throw out all of our dairy stuff just in case and all older left overs (probably didn’t have to but I cleaned them out anyways). The good news is the taco meats are still good because our new fridge kept them at a good temp throughout the power outage.
What a weird weekend that was.
