Axodys

Just under an hour to go until the big digital music announcement Apple’s supposed to make today. I’m pretty excited about the prospects and depending on how things shape up will hopefully be able to immediately shell out some money to buy and download some music. I just wish that there was some kind of online broadcast of the announcement ala the MacWorld keynotes.

Hmm… looks like I may have found “one”:http://stream.qtv.apple.com/events/apr/moscone/apr28_28_56_100_250_ref.mov.

*Update:* Well, I downloaded and installed “Quicktime 6.2″:http://apple.com/quicktime and “iTunes 4″:http://apple.com/itunes, but the Apple Music Store is not responding. Bummer. I guess I’ll try again after lunch.

*Update 2:* Okay, I’m not getting complete functionality, but I have been able to look up artists and albums and listen to song demos. I’ve also noticed that some albums that contain a lot of tracks are selling for more than $10. This seems perfectly reasonable to me if it’s a quality cd and you’re still getting a price break from the $1 a track price. I’ve also found a few partial cds. Hopefully in the case of DJ Shadow’s Entroducing, that’s just a temporary issue because the tracks they included aren’t even the best ones on the album (and I want the whole thing).

“Anything into Oil”:http://www.discover.com/may_03/featoil.html Technological savvy could turn 600 million tons of turkey guts and other waste into 4 billion barrels of light Texas crude each year.

This technology looks incredible and it’s exactly the kind of thing that looks like it could catch on big time because it doesn’t require revamping existing infrastructure like a straight move to the so-called hydrogen economy would. We can drastically reduce our dependence on oil imports in the near term while simultaneously get rid of waste products.

Sticking with my recent Wiki meme I see that the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference “has a Wiki”:http://www.socialtext.net/etech/ of their own.

Pages of note:

* “Emerging Technology Minipedia”:http://www.socialtext.net/etech/index.cgi?Emerging%20Technology%20Minipedia
* “Official Sessions”:http://www.socialtext.net/etech/index.cgi?Official%20Sessions
* “Powerpoint Gallery”:http://www.socialtext.net/etech/index.cgi?PowerPoint%20Gallery
* “Blog Directory”:http://www.socialtext.net/etech/index.cgi?blog_directory

I installed “MoinMoin”:http://moin.sourceforge.net/ (a python powered Wiki clone) on my PowerBook last night. Installation wasn’t overly complicated and the standard install worked out of the box un MacOS X. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it, but I figure I’ll play with it for a while and see what it’s capable of.

Part of my interest in Wiki technology (”What is Wiki?”:http://wiki.org/wiki.cgi?WhatIsWiki) is the trend towards wiki/weblog convergence. I noticed yesterday while reading all the “Six Apart related news”:http://www.sixapart.com/log/2003/04/six_apart_miles.shtml that Joi Ito is experimenting with using a Wiki in conjunction with his “weblog”:http://joi.ito.com/. Exploring Joi’s Wiki led me to “Adam Shand’s weblog”:http://www.spack.org/index.cgi/AdamShand which is totally MoinMoin powered. And that in turn inspired me to download and install “MoinMoin”:”MoinMoin”:http://moin.sourceforge.net/.

Whoa! I saw the “final theatrical trailer”:http://whatisthematrix.warnerbros.com/rl_cmp/trailer_final_frames.html for The Matrix Reloaded before Anger Managment today and it looked absolutely fantastic. I’m downloading it now so that I can take another look.

I discovered “Synapse”:http://www.synapseai.com/ today thanks to a reference over at “Slashdot”:http://slashdot.org. It looks like a pretty sweet mp3 player and much more interesting than WinAmp 3 (all those windows annoy me) because of its built in “Brain”:http://www.synapseai.com/brain.asp and unique interface.

bq. The Brain is the central intelligence of Synapse. When you use Synapse, it learns. When you play songs, it learns. It learns what you like and it knows exactly how likely — to the hundredth of a percent — you are to play those songs. It learns your style from you. There is no master database anywhere telling it to play two rock songs one after other. It knows to do that because you did it. And if you never played two rocks songs together, it wouldn’t either, which alone beats any other product available today.

It was a beautiful weekend in Spokane and it seems to have spilled over into Monday as well. Mary and I both have the day off so we’ve been taking it pretty easy. I’ve been fiddling around with computers (big surprise) and Mary has been doing some reading for work. Gitte’s been enjoying lots of play time in the backyard. I think we’re going to try to go to “Anger Management”:http://us.imdb.com/tiger_redirect?HPBO_1&/Title?0305224 later this afternoon.

“The new Safari: if this is still beta, then I’m a giraffe.”:http://billpalmer.blogspot.com/2003_04_13_billpalmer_archive.html#92593023

bq. This new Safari is so innovative that, despite being “just a web browser”, it has the chance to make a real impact on the user experience, more so than the last three Safari betas combined. I woke up this morning being a hater of tabbed browsing. This evening, I can admit that I’ll never again enjoy web surfing without tabbed browsing.

I started using “Safari Beta 2″:http://apple.com/safari on Monday and probably wouldn’t have any reason to go back to “Camino”:http://www.mozilla.org/projects/camino/ if I could get new windows from other applications to open in a tab. *Update: there is a radio button under general preferences that allows this.* I’ve been a huge fan of tabbed browsing since it debuted in “Mozilla”:http://mozilla.org. In fact these days I simply won’t use a browser for any length of time if it doesn’t support tabs. So that definitely means I keep my Internet Explorer use to a minimum.

And that goes for my new XP box as well. “Phoenix”:http://www.mozilla.org/projects/phoenix/ was one of the first things I downloaded and installed after setting up the machine.

Mary and I had the misfortune of discovering that this year’s tax bill was much larger than anticipated. Even worse we initially compounded the mistake by not supplying Mary’s student loan information to our accountant and inadvertantly increased the amount owed by almost $400. I ended up using “Turbo Tax for the Web”:http://www.turbotax.intuit.com/promo/ttweb/welcome.htm for the first time to help figure out the impact of her loans and it proved very helpful. It’s cheaper than using an accountant too so like “Brad”:http://www.bradchoate.com/past/001517.php we may go that route next year.

I ordered “Pinnacle Studio 8″:http://www.pinnaclesys.com/ProductPage.asp?Product_ID=577&Langue_ID=7 for my new computer last week because “Outpost.com”:http://outpost.com advertised a $50 rebate offer that brought it’s price down to $20. I had wanted to get some “iMovie”:http://apple.com/imovie equivalent software since my PC is probably at least 4-5 times faster than my trusty Powerbook and I’m fairly interested in digital video. The computer magazine reviews were promising, but I found some disturbing user reviews that indicated there were quite a few bugs in the software. I weighed my options and decided to place the order because the price was right and Studio 8 offered svcd* creation support.

bq. *Mini Rant:* I really think Apple is missing the boat by not providing built in svcd creation (or vcd creation for the matter) capabilities in iMovie. You can store up to 40 minutes of near dvd quality in svcd format (480×480 mpeg2), cdr media is cheaper and faster to create and reproduce, and a lot of dvd players can play them.

I didn’t install Studio 8 for a few days because I was busy “playing GTA III”:http://axodys.com/archives/2003_04.html#004522, but when I finally got around to it I ran into a problem where the installer seemed to hang after reaching 100%. It turns out that problem was caused by a pesky background application that doesn’t serve any obvious purpose. -Force quitting- End tasking it from within the Task Manager fixed this problem. Once I figured that out I was able to register the application and launch without any problems. I briefly fiddled around with the application, determined that it did seem fairly similar to iMovie, and put it away to play some more GTA III.

Fast forward a couple days to yesterday. Studio 8 indicated that there was a newer version of the application available (8.521 I think). I dutifully downloaded it and ran the update application. I then got out my Panasonic MiniDV camcorder, hooked it up to the firewire port on the back of the computer and tried to launch Studio 8. Windows XP indicated that it had recognized my camcorder, but just past the splash screen Studio 8 threw up a couple vague error messages and quit. Nonplussed I decided to disconnect the camera and try again. It didn’t make any difference. Studio 8 displayed the same errors and then quit.

The next two hours were a blur of failed uninstalls, failed reinstall attempts, soul searching and registry examination. Ultimately I succeeded in getting the application loaded again (but not updated- I was simply too tired to brave that once I got it launching again), but it required finding a couple obscure registry manipulating files and a lot of frustration to get there. Exactly the kind of thing that your typical user is not going to be able to deal with.

Tonight I will find out if I can actually import any video. Stay tuned for Pinnacle or Precipice II.