> tapioca world tour

All the internet stars appear in this freakin ridiculously awesome video put out by savetheinternet.com. Watch it NOW!

My experiments with audio and photo blogging have yielded tapioca mobile tour, which is comprised solely of mobile AV posts.

AWESOME.

I’m still trying to figure out if I’ll be able to cross-post to this blog, much like my video blog, tapioca visual tour. We shall see.

So I’m going to half of Boston’s PodCamp, an unconference for podcasters or podcast enthusiasts. It’s on September 9 & 10 at BHCC, though I’ll be spending one of those days at a wedding.

Interested parties should sign up. It’s free.

I’ve started reading about livecoders on Wired, who are, by definition, DJs who “improvise using Perl or homemade programming architectures to build compositions from the ground up, replacing instruments and samples with raw code authoring before a live audience.”

You can watch a video clip of a livecoder DJing on YouTube. Does this signal a raver renaissance? Does this mean electronica is back, and edgier (read: geekier) than ever? I want to check it out.

Moment of yesterday: walking home from the T, a woman walking out of her yard made actual eye contact with me and actually said HELLO! I was so shocked, I had to pinch myself to realize I was in Dorchester, not friendly Philly. I like my new neighborhood.

Moment of the day today: A woman sat down beside me this morning on the train to work. Halfway through the 25-minute ride, she put her arm around me, kind of laying it on the top of my seat area. As we got closer to Central, her hand began lightly resting on my shoulder, perhaps by accident, perhaps not. Shocked, I sat motionless, then leaned forward a bit. I didn’t get any creepy vibes off her, but could only imagine what it must have looked like to the people around us.

Awkwardness is fascinating! Hence, this is my Moment of the Day.

Thanks to my old friend Ghastlymess, I’ve discovered LibriVox, a digital archive of audio recordings of books in the public domain. You can listen to tons of Joe Shmoes reading Chekov, if you want, even in Danish, if you speak it. Or you can read your favorite Yukio Mishima novel into your computer and upload the mp3 to LibriVox. Endless possibilities, people.

The first one had a brightness-related screen buzz and a CPU buzz. They graciously replaced it for me. After two weeks of perfection, the new MBP started having the CPU buzz, a weird error many MBP users have been experiencing. It goes away when you run Photobooth, but guess what: you can’t run Photobooth at the same time as FCP, else it’ll confuse the machine’s video outputs. Grrr! This has resulted in a big headache for me — figuratively AND literally — and I continue to wait, impatiently, for the next Firmware update to address this highly inconvenient problem.

I won’t even get into the heat problem, how you have to pad yourself with eight layers if you want to put your LAPtop on your LAP. Ironic, no?

Mr. Gates, if you pay my $3k credit card bill that I racked up purchasing your latest, highly-marketed machine, I’ll drop all the complaining. Deal?

So it seems we were on TV on Tuesday for 48HFP. I missed it, but the piece is also available to watch online if you’re interested (click ‘launch CNN video player’).

Press coverage is always tremendously exciting. And a big up to the production team for making a cool movie without killing eachother (or me). I love you all, people!

Seriously, HOW do I email a complaint to Apple?

My new (replacement) MacBook Pro has the whine — the CPU whine, which disappears when you run PhotoBooth in the background. Obviously, there must be a fix for it, but according to Apple messageboards, no fix exists yet. People are hoping the next firmware update will address the problem, meanwhile I want to send an email to Apple Support — not call, because then they’ll just tell me to send it in or some crap — but I can’t find a support email address anywhere.

Anyone? Leads?

*Meanwhile*
Smaller, funky, laundryless first-floor apt. = for rent a mere 3 blocks from my office. Did I mention it’s C-H-E-A-P? I’ve decided the theme of FY07 should be CHEAP. I can’t waste money forever. It’s Savings Time or Bust.

Good people,

I bought a new MacBook Pro, on which I intend on installing Bootcamp (Beta) so I can run Windows applications. However, this requires that I also install Windows XP, which I don’t have a copy of. Can anyone, um, help me out? (While you’re at it, I could also use Macromedia Studio 8 and Final Cut Pro 5 HD and DVD Studio Pro, but, you know, one thing at a time.)

Much obliged. You know where to reach me.

PS: comments still don’t work, but will be working again soon…

What: an external drive or other mass storage device.

Why: to move a bunch of my AV files from a PC laptop to a Mac laptop.

When: tomorrow. Just tomorrow.

Who will be my hero?

Dude I posted my first video blog. It’s just me in Ry’s van, driving around Vermont this past weekend, but I think it’s kind of cool.

I just joined ourmedia.com to start vlogging (video blogging). They have a podcast (not entirely comprehensive, but hey) that explains technically how to begin video blogging, although I’m still kind of fuzzy on how to go from Wordpress or Blogger to an iTunes podcast. Any tips?

Apparently if you want your media (video) hosted, you have to subscribe to archive.org or to blip.tv. I chose the latter, and it seems like a good site. It allows you to auto-synch your video posts to both your blip.tv blog (tapioca visual tour) and your regular blog. They also integrate flickr and del.icio.us, allow for mobile posts, and provide a comprehensive selection of syndication options, text and media-focused.

So much progression in modern technology, so little time…I’ll post a full step-by-step setup process once I figure it out. Stay tuned for the upcoming Home Workout podcast D. and I will shoot tonight…

Google isn’t releasing any info to the government, says Wired.

That’s cool.

The smarties at Lifehacker have just reported on the latest feature in iTunes: video sharing. But what’s cooler, in my opinion, are the iTunes video podcast tutorials. Right now I’m watching Photoshop TV, which puts out weekly episodes. There’s also DV Gear Talk and Digital Bootcamp, and hundreds of additional topics, for those of you with interests other than digital media.

In other non-AV techie news, I just got a stat report of my site traffic which included the best Google search term ever that’s led to my blog: “we will be doing a full mouth extraction and making a denture for you said dentist I cried”

Watch the dormitory boys!

Wireless goes to new levels with UWB…am I the only one who wonders if those wireless frequencies have any physical effect on us?

Ultrawideband — or UWB, a wireless standard that has been hyped for several years as the ultimate solution to very fast PC and consumer electronics connectivity — has made its U.S. debut as real products at Macworld and CES.

UWB devices are designed around a chipset from Freescale Semiconductor and are expected to be commercialized in the early spring.

UWB proponents say it is only a matter of time before the new technology will offer wireless connectivity for all kinds of ultrafast wireless applications, from digital cameras to flat-panel TVs.

Remember in the 80s when we started learning about subliminal messages in radio and television? And we began getting paranoid that while we ambled down the aisles of Zayre’s there was the slight chance marketing messages promoting Clorox were wafting in an unheard fast-forward prerecording under Bette Midler’s latest hit? Well, digital technology now allows embedded meta tags, as it were, to be stashed in between every five minutes of movie frames at the cinema. Creepy, or not? Article courtesy of our friends at Wired:

The digital projection guidelines, published in July by a consortium of Hollywood studios called the Digital Cinema Initiatives, say every five-minute chunk of video must contain a 35-bit “forensic marker” specifying the date, time and location at which the movie is shown. The guidelines don’t say how to get that information into the movie, but they require it to be “visually transparent to the critical viewer” and “inaudible in critical listening” tests.

We went to the Apple-sponsored Final Cut Pro tutorial in Waltham tonight — me and some of the production boys. It was, um, well, more tailored to professional editors, and aside from discussing how to fine tune gaussian blur filters on titles, the only relevant video part was the beginning, which had to do with codecs and 8-bit this and that, all of which was totally over my head. The boys seemed to get something out of it, though. There were also free cookies, which is always nice.

In the room, there were about 45 white men, 1 black man, 1 asian man, and three other women, all middle-aged. It was like the perfect sampling of video editors, reflective, I can guarantee, of the larger anthro-lineage in the video editing family of the Global North. The men all had beer bellies and/or were balding on their crowns; everyone in the room was OCD, a given when you’re talking about hyper-precise graphic artist perfectionists who treat video like a fine science and make their living mechanically aligning images to sound, frame-by-frame. There was a lot of twitching and techy talk, all FCP jargon completely incomprehensible to a novice. However, I did learn that they’ve launched Creative Calf, offspring of Creative Cow, a forum for all things digital art-related. (The Calf, as I’m sure you’ve gathered, means the forum is targeted towards non-experts, while the Cow is more suited to professionals.)

Seeing G. was interesting and fun, despite the fact that the tutorial was uninteresting and boring. I haven’t seen him for more than three minutes since June. It’s always odd to hang out with an ex again, especially when the breakup was never filled with ill-will: you start to remember why you liked being around them in the first place, that they’re a good person, and maybe funny, and they also like greasy Thai take-out. Walking to the car after the session, I instinctively reached over to grab G.’s hand. Quickly catching myself before he noticed, I threw my hand in my pocket and crossed the street noting how strange it is that our physical memory can retain old gestures and habits even while emotionally or practically we have given them up or exchanged them. I let the cold air swirl around my head and we drove back to Cambridge, his old Jetta humming on the concrete as if it’d never aged.

Wired has just published an interview with anti-Communist, W-supporting, Harvard Law grad Viet Dinh, an accomplished Vietnamese immigrant lawyer better known for authoring the Patriot Act. The article is entitled, “The Patriot Act is Your Friend”. I just thought cyberspace should know.

Also, in other mildly-Orwellian techy news, Google has apparently launched Google Print, which allows you to search ostensibly any book ever written — except, perhaps, all the black market books available at Raven:

For works under copyright, a search would produce snippets around the search term used. But for books in the public domain, a search would also yield access to the full text of the works. Almost 90 percent of the books Google might scan are out of print.

The Authors Guild filed suit against Google’s “massive copyright infringement.” And the Association of American Publishers has piled on with what it calls “grave misgivings” that Google may be infringing copyright. In response to these concerns, Google offered to delay the project until now and to exclude from scanning and indexing any book the pub­lishers identify.