blog.intego.com and ithreats.wordpress.com and finally Bart and I debate whether normal people need a Drobo.]]> Sun, 25 Jan 2009 20:23:26 -0800 nc20090125 Allison Sheridan no http://www.podfeet.com/wordpress/2009/01/18/187-fiwi-rpn-calculators-set-youtube-to-high-quality-desklickr/ wordpower-software.com, more RPN calculator emulators at homepage.mac.com/mba/nsim/ and brouhaha.com and bartosiak.org/nonpareil and nonpareil.brouhaha.com and hp.com. How to set your preferences on YouTube to get high quality video from mydigitallife.info. Ben Fryxell of macmaniapodcast.com does the Honda Bob commercial this week. In this week's episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond, Bart from bartb.ie and I discuss the latest Windows and OSX security flaws, changing desktop wallpapers to a Flickr account using DeskLickr from http://desklickr.isnot.tv/, and the final step in the great Aperture handoff of 2009. ]]> Sun, 18 Jan 2009 19:23:49 -0800 nc20090118 Allison Sheridan no http://www.podfeet.com/wordpress/2009/01/11/186-macworld/ App4Mac.com. Macworld: meeting great people, hanging with the Mac Roundtable crew, I got to dance with wherethehellismatt.com at youtube.com. David Pogue and Ge Wang play Piano Man Parody and Yesterday. Audio reviews of Blue Eyeball & Blue Icicle from bluemic.com, Google Picasa for Mac at picasa.google.com/mac, InclinePro from inclinepro.com, On Chit Chat Across the Pond Bart and I talk about the new iPhoto and our impressions of the keynote (hint: we liked it). Complaints about Apple? write to them at apple.com/feedback. ]]> Sun, 11 Jan 2009 21:03:13 -0800 nc20090111-macworld Allison Sheridan no http://www.podfeet.com/wordpress/2009/01/04/185-quicksilver-vs-spotlight-maccraic-automator-scripts-pages-bad-journalism/ impodcast.tv. On Dumb Question Corner Jim asks why Quicksilver if we have Spotlight, and Jane asks how to make a text file of the list of files in a folder on OSX. Ron David launches his podcast at The Sounds of Wings at thesoundsofwings.com. Maccraic's Justin G Byrne and David Shortle join me for some fun with Honda Bob maccraic.com. I try and try and try to put Ubuntu on my OLPC but don't succeed, yet. Connor writes two automator scripts to help me turn network time syncing on and off before using Skype. In Chit Chat Across the Pond Bart and I talk about how he found Pages useful, and we talk about bad journalism on the net. If you're at MacWorld next week, check out the live Mac Roundtable at 4pm on Wednesday in the Macworld Learning Center Booth (# 3036) in North Hall.]]> Sun, 04 Jan 2009 20:04:33 -0800 nc20090104 Allison Sheridan no http://www.podfeet.com/wordpress/2008/12/28/184-dmg-files-soundflower-picturesync-apps-stand-the-test-of-time/ cycling74.com allows me to pipe Garageband AND my mic into ustream, with the help of Audio Hijack Pro from rogueamoeba.com thanks to the instructions on bwana.org. PictureSync from picturesync.net to help you upload photos to online sites. On Chit Chat Across the Pond Bart and I talk through the 3rd Party Applications that have stood the test of time. Both of us still use: DropBox, CaffineSoundSource, Transmit, FireFox, Twhirl, MagiCal, RapidoWrite, Adium, Skype. Bart also uses: EverNoteNetNewsWire, Teleport, JellyFiSSH, Fluid, ImageWell, Thunderbird, arRsync, Password Vault. Allison also uses: Skitch, Feeder, Firefox 3, Rapido Serial, Camtwist, Quicksilver, AppDelete, Wiretap Studio, SuperDuper, DiskInventoryX, LXVII, Screensteps.]]> Sun, 28 Dec 2008 19:41:43 -0800 nc20081228 Allison Sheridan no http://www.podfeet.com/wordpress/2008/12/21/183-richard-solo-male-aussie-listeners-syncopation-photography-books-ie-exploit/ mactracker.ca to figure out what kind of burner you have. Then David Sparks from macsparky.com joins us with a review of the Richard Solo 1800 from richardsolo.com. Doug from alwaysapples.com.au explains that there are MALE Australian listeners with his lovely Christmas message, and then Scott who is ALSO an Australian listeners reviews Syncopation from sonzea.com for syncing up to 5 Macs to one iTunes library. Robert Lachman of photographyandthemac.com talks about his use of pbwiki and reviews several great photography books. In Chit Chat Across the Pond Bart and i discuss the woes Microsoft went through in the last few weeks with a terrible vulernability that affected all versions of Internet Explorer AND Word. Read the US Cert on the exploit at http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/493881.]]> Sun, 21 Dec 2008 15:46:31 -0800 nc20081221 Allison Sheridan no http://www.podfeet.com/wordpress/2008/12/14/182-blackberry-storm-dockspaces-boxnet/ Elf. Jane reviews Dockspaces from nscoding.co.uk, read the whole review at Galacticstrings.com. In Dumb Question Corner BJ asks about how to help his mom move playlists to her iPhone. I do an EXTENSIVE review of the Blackberry Storm, and I interview Sean Lindo of Box.net. In Chit Chat Across the Pond Bart and I talk about our very different paths to the Mac and we dig into all the ways we use wikis, and in particular how much we like PBWiki at pbwiki.com. ]]> Sun, 14 Dec 2008 19:11:07 -0800 nosillacast-mac-podcast-4 Allison Sheridan no http://www.podfeet.com/wordpress/2008/12/07/181-interfacelift-stanza-ocarina-photomatix/ InterfaceLIFT.com for beautiful wallpapers, Stanza for iPhone/iPod Touch and Mac desktop from lexcycle.com (iTunes direct link to Stanza). Pan Macmillan from panmacmillan.com and O'Reilly's Safari books at safari.oreilly.com for DRM free books Stanza can read. Make your iPhone into an Ocarina from ocarina.smule.com (iTunes direct link to Ocarina) In Chit Chat Across the Pond Steve challenges Bart about HDCP plugging the analog hole, Bart reviews Photomatix from www.hdrsoft.com and Bart describes his glee at his Christmas cards from Apple.]]> Sun, 07 Dec 2008 19:40:51 -0800 nc20081207 Allison Sheridan no http://www.podfeet.com/wordpress/2008/11/30/180-screenium-lachman-waxed-phantom-pcs-christmas-card-photo-shoot/ Sheridan Christmas Card Photo Shoot, Mom is foiled by technology, Robert Lachman gets his car waxed link to Flickr photos of the waxing. In Dumb Question Corner we try to figure out how those phantom PCs keep showing up in our sharing sidebar, and we talk about flinging our Mac laptops around. More on Aperture 2 adjustments, screencasing application Screenium review from www.synium.de. Honda Bob replaces Kyle's EGR sensor with photos at my flickr account. In Chit Chat Across the Pond Bart and I talk about HDCP, taking photos of the canteen burning down using the iPhone and yet another positive Apple Care experience for Bart.]]> Sun, 30 Nov 2008 20:14:18 -0800 nc20081130 Allison Sheridan no http://www.podfeet.com/wordpress/wp-admin/post-new.php?posted=615 splashofstyle.com. Wordpress plugins: Akismet, IWPhone, Subscribe to Comments, Ultimate Google Analytics, Wordpress Database Backup, wp-cache and WP-PayPalDonate. Google Talk gets video, Yum 3.0 released at yum-mac.com/. In Dumb Question Corner Suzanne asks how to move playlists of iTunes paid music from one mac to another and Sebastian asks how to get his router to let him to use a usb pen drive for storage. Best Buy gives me great service with a knowledgeable salesperson. In Chit Chat Across the Pond Bart and I talk about disabling auto-run on Windows, we have the Twitter poll results on whether you like iPhone talk on Mac podcasts, and we go through the new features in iPhone 2.2. Help Bart get attention on the missing proxies in VPN for the Mac by writing at apple.com/feedback/iphone.html. check out the MacRoundtable too at macroundtable.com.]]> Sun, 23 Nov 2008 19:46:41 -0800 nc20081123 Allison Sheridan no http://www.podfeet.com/wordpress/2008/11/16/178-deaf-blind-listener-enhanced-podcasts-liking-aperture/ Sun, 16 Nov 2008 19:14:42 -0800 nc20081116 Allison Sheridan no http://www.podfeet.com/wordpress/2008/11/09/177-perspctv-dumb-questions-screenflow-by-nillan-wpa-hacked-separate-email-from-web-hosting/ thinkmac.net helps me move my email, Victor was right, ICY DOCK repairs my hard drive enclosure, perspctv.com to compare web traffic on different topics. In Dumb Question Corner we answer how to reset your password on a Mac when you've lost it, when to use a portable vs. non-portable hard drive, why there are 4 radios in an iPhone and what you should do to manage them, and finally how to share iTunes and iPods across multiple computers and family members. Nillan talks to us about ScreenFlow from Flip4Mac and check out his first effort at Youtube. In CCATP in the security light section we talk about how to deal with the WPA hack, why you can separate your email from your hosting company and whether logarithmic and exponential are the same thing (http://www.sosmath.com/algebra/logs/log4/log4.html and Pogson's ratio here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_magnitude.]]> Sun, 09 Nov 2008 19:24:11 -0800 nc20081109 Allison Sheridan no http://www.podfeet.com/wordpress/2008/11/02/176-mp3-file-too-big-crossover-redux-redux-windows-7-mac-trojan-horse/ polarcloud.com/tomato. In Dumb Question Corner we learn what the activity is going on in the background in Mail.app and how to better control how much sent mail gets saved. I learn from Marc-André from HumanWare how I've been making your MP3s 8MB larger than necessary for the last 8 months, Crossover reviewed yet again from Codeweavers. Chromium (Chrome for Mac) available for free at http://www.codeweavers.com/services/ports/chromium/, my favorite text editor for Windows is NotePad++ from sourceforge.net. In CCATP we talk about the latest Trojan Horse for the Mac blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/10/mac-users-get-a.html, how much we LIKE what we hear about Windows 7 (arstechnica.com and winsupersite.com) and finally Bart tells us about the historic discovery of TWO asteroids this month by two Irish amateur astronomers http://www.astroshack.net and http://webtreatz.com/content/view/68/1/.]]> Sun, 02 Nov 2008 20:15:37 -0800 nc20081102-mp3-file-too-big-crossover-redux-re Allison Sheridan no http://www.podfeet.com/wordpress/2008/10/26/175-california-council-for-the-blind-humanware-keytweak/ macsales.com buys back RAM when you do an upgrade, in Dumb Question Corner we talk about how to split iPhoto and Aperture libraries across DVDs for offsite backup with a tip from the Apple discussion boards, how to make a template file for GarageBand so you don't have to do the settings every time you open it using tips from mjewing.co.uk, and finally how to use a quick Terminal command to get "Load Complete Preview Before Playing" back in iTunes from the Mac OSX Hints blog at Macworld. ehow.com to find out how to do EVERYTHING, Key remapping on Vista using KeyTweak from krumsick. ScreenSteps discount code NOSILLA for 25% off at screensteps.com. Great talk with Michael Gorman & Maureen Schulz at the California Council for the Blind convention. Braille Display for Windows at Mac from humanware.com. In Chit Chat Across the Pond Bart explains the recent critical update to Windows and we talk about what we expect out of routers. Check out my network diagrams in the shownotes.]]> Sun, 26 Oct 2008 20:15:25 -0700 nc20081026 Allison Sheridan no http://www.podfeet.com/wordpress/2008/10/19/174-no-more-magnets-near-the-new-macbook-pro-writingpad-hp11c-for-iphone/ flicker.com . How I got a new MacBook Pro, broke it, and got a new one. Then what I like and don't like about the new MacBook Pro. Belkin FireWire 800/400 cable, Sonnet ExpressCard/34 Firewire & USB adapter, and Sonnet FireWire 400/800 Adapter. 2 iPhone Apps: WritingPad and HP11C Scientific RPN Calculator. In Dumb Question Corner we solve an iPOd episode ordering problem, and whether it's ok to keep your iPod plugged into the cigarette lighter when starting the car. Google Groups solves a problem but unimpressed by the documents leave me cold. Help learn more about Earthquakes at qcn.stanford.edu/. In Chit Chat Across the Pond we answer a NoScript question and hear how the iPHone 3G works in Ireland.]]> Sun, 19 Oct 2008 20:59:01 -0700 nc20081019 Allison Sheridan no http://www.podfeet.com/wordpress/2008/10/12/173-eye-injury-plasq-rocks-free-dvd-transfer-click-jacking-noscript/ plasq.com/skitch), Drive-in the free way from Ivan using MacTheRipper found at mactheripper.org. IN Chit Chat Across the Pond Bart explains Click Jacking and how we can use NoScript from noscript.net to diable iFrames, and Fluid from fluidapp.com to create separate browsers for websites we want to protect from cookies, etc. Finally Bart talks about his first impressions of iPhone now that he has one in his hot little hands. Bart Blog Post on Click Jacking: http://www.bartbusschots.ie/blog/?p=1104, and his first iPhone experiences: http://www.bartbusschots.ie/blog/?p=1107.]]> Sun, 12 Oct 2008 19:06:55 -0700 nc20081012-eye-injury-plasq-rocks-free-dvd-tr Allison Sheridan no ustream.tv/nosillacast

First some listener questions - MANY people ask if it's ok if they just use the built-in mic for recording the podcast. Well technically you certainly can, but I highly recommend against it. The sound quality is simply dreadful. It will also pick up ambient room noise much more than a real microphone will. You don't have to spend a ton of money on a headset. I put a link in the shownotes to the Plantronics DSP400 over at Amazon (using my Amazon affiliate link of course) which is an excellent starter mic for $44.

I've used the DSP500 and it sounds pretty good for the money. When you do get your real microphone, do some experimental recordings with the mic and the internal mic and then you tell me which sound more like something you'd want to listen to. The quality of your audio is second in importance only to the quality of your content, so make sure it's as good as you can get it for the money you're willing to spend. Can you remember a show you've listened to where they had consistently bad audio? Do you still listen to it? I've stopped listening to a single episode of one of my favorite shows because the audio was bad. Alex Lindsay, who does very high end video podcasts, was asked at the New Media Expo, "what's the most important thing to know about doing good video?" You can see where I'm going of course, he said "audio". In fact I believe said, "audio, audio, audio." Hope that clears it up!

Live Show
I've mentioned a bunch of times that I record the show live on Ustream on Sunday nights (at 5pm GMT-8) at ustream.tv/nosillacast. I thought it might be kind of interesting to explain how this all works. It's pretty interesting from a geek perspective and pretty amazing what we're able to do. the first thing I do is go to ustream.tv and I log in as nosillacast. I get a big "broadcast now" button for me to click. the one danger of going to ustream when you're streaming on ustream, is you could end up hearing and watching yourself! That would be a disaster of course, because there's a several second delay. You can imagine how distracting that would be. No one's brain can handle that! I find it works really well as the host to us Firefox with the Flashblock plugin, which lets me log in and instead of seeing myself and hearing myself, there's just a big arrow there in it's place. I'm sure there's other ways to avoid it but that's how I do it.

But WAIT! Before I actually go live, I have to set some things up. First I plug in my audio input and output devices (my mic and headphones). I plug my Heil PR-20 mic into my USB interface called the Fast Track from M-Audio, and the USB interface into USB on my Mac. I plug my headphones into the headphone jack on my Mac. Next I launch GarageBand. If you launch Garageband before you plug in your audio devices, Garageband will pick up the internal mic and external speakers first, and then you'd have to tell it to go use the Fastrack and headphones. It's especially time consuming in GB to do that - it makes you wait a few seconds after each change - very boring! You can do it that way but it's more efficient to plug the components in first. So now I've got my mic and headphones set, and my recording software set up.

Now it's time to think about the people who will be watching live. How do I send video information to ustream and what should I send? If you just want to send your talking head, then you don't have to do much setup, assuming you've got a built in iSight camera, or you've got an external video camera set up. Navigate to your channel, log in, click broadcast now. Ustream will pop up a window where the top half is the video with some information to tell you what stage ustream is at in the process of getting you set up, and down below that will be the chat room for your show.

Once the connections have been made properly on the ustream end, a small secondary window will pop up with Flash requesting to be allowed to use your video as an input device to ustream.

If you click Allow, your iSight will turn on and become active. Now dead center in the middle of the screen you should see two pulldowns, one for audio source and one for video source. For the example in the shownotes, I set the audio one to the internal mic, JUST like I told you never to do, and the video to the iSight. With that set, I can now see my own video showing up in the upper left corner. Once that's working, it's time to actually start by clicking the Broadcast Now button.

That's pretty much it if you just want a talking head show. et's back up now a step or two though - if you watch my live show, you don't just see my talking head and hear me yapping, you also get to see my screen while I'm working, and you can hear anything I play in Garageband, or if I'm using Skype you can hear the other person talking. Let's walk through how I do that.

There are two tools to accomplish this - one to combine all of the video things I want to send to ustream, and one to send all of the audio components. First let's talk about how to combine the video effects.

Enter the free Cam Twist from allocint.com. Cam Twist allows me to send the video of my screen to ustream, AND to send the video from my isight for picture in picture. Camtwist does a ton more things, like I can have a halo over my head, make it rain, crack the screen - many useless but entertaining special effects. Camtwist is non obvious how to set up, and I have to thank the chat room audience on the live show for helping me figure it out. I can't remember exactly who it was that gave me the pointers I needed - wish I could so I could give a shoutout!

When you first launch Cam Twist, you'll see three vertical panes titled Step 1: Select a Video Source, Step 2: Select some effects, Step 3: Adjust settings. Remember that our goal is to create a picture in picture experience for the viewer where they'll see your talking head floating around with your desktop as you're working displayed under your head. In the first pane, click once on Webcam, and then look down at the bottom left of the pane and click once on PIP. You'll notice that now your webcam shows up in the 3rd pane below the title Effects in use, and it will be called PIP webcam. We'll configure your webcam in the 4th pane once we get your desktop working too. Now for the exciting part, in the left pane, double click on Desktop. Now under Live Effects in the 3rd pane you'll see both your desktop and your PIP Webcam.

Let's configure the desktop first. You'll have to decide how much of your screen you want to show. The temptation will be to leave the checkbox on the 4th panel set to full Screen, but things will be so teeny on screen that it won't add any value at all. Uncheck that tempting full Screen button, and now a button will become live that says Select Capture Area. Unfortunately I can't easily capture a screenshot of what happens next - a black bordered, transparent box will show up onscreen with handles at the corners and along the edges, with a button that says done in the middle. In order to get a good idea of what your viewers will see, click the Window menu and choose Preview.

Drag the box around by the border, and resize using the six handles, and when you've got it over what you want to show onscreen, click the Done button. In my case, I set it to capture a portion of the GarageBand window, since that's what people voted they'd most like to watch. The only thing that Cam Twist doesn't do that I wish it did was to show my cursor. the developer evidently is working on it for a future release, and that'll be great when it's done. So many times I'm explaining something to the chat audience and i want so desperately to POINT at something on screen and I can't - drives me nuts! I've even gone as far as moving my PIP around so i can point with my finger at Garageband, but since the image is in reverse I almost always point in the wrong direction! Great for the comedy of course, but not of much instructional value!

Now that we've got the desktop set up, we can figure out where we want to plop our talking head, also known as picture in picture. Click on the PIP Webcam in the 3rd pane, and you'll see, amongst other things, a button that says Nudge, and a little black square on a big background. Simply drag that black button around on screen and you'll see your face moving around on the background in the Preview button. You may also want to use the scale slider to shrink your talking head until you've got it the right size. there's LOTS more options in Cam Twist, but I'll leave you to doing that experimentation on your own! One final step - click on the Save Setup button in the 3rd pane and next time you won't have to do much configuration beyond sliding the background around to match your windows.

Finally we can now launch Ustream again. Get yourself back into broadcast mode. Once you've said allow for Flash to use your camera, you'll see two pulldowns - one for my video, and one for audio. On the video pulldown all i have to do now is choose Cam Twist instead of my iSight camera. Again, the order of events is important here, you have to get Cam Twist up and running first before you jump into the broadcast, or it won't show up in the video source list.

For most people, this will be the extent of what you'll want to do for your live show. The reason i think most people will stop here is because this is where "free" stops. If you want to send multiple audio source through to the live show, the same way we just set up multiple video sources, you're going to have to fork over some dough.

For a long time I just pulled the audio down to my FastTrack USB interface which picks up my mic, but the people watching the live show used to get really bored whenever I was listening to something in GarageBand because they couldn't hear what I could hear. They'd see me dancing to Victor Cajiao's Dumb Question Corner music but they couldn't hear it. enter a brand new beta product called WireTap Anywhere from Ambrosia Software.

Much like Cam Twist for video, WireTap Anywhere combines several audio sources into one. WireTap Anywhere works as a very simple System Preference pane. I choose first my own microphone, which in my case shows up as the Fast Track interface, and then I add Garageband as a source, and they combine into one audio source. You can name that combined source, and in my case i choose to name it ustream. Now when I go into Ustream, for audio i have a choice of built in input, my Fast Track, OR I can choose ustream which is the combination of my Fast Track and Garageband that I created using Wiretap Anywhere. Unfortuanately I think WireTap Anywhere is high price if this is the only use you have for it, it lists out at $120US. I know, YIKES! Maybe for that price your listeners can stand to be bored while you listen to the music! WireTap Anywhere has many other

One last thing - for some reason when I play something in Garageband, it blows the eardrums out of the listeners ears. I have to remember on each show to pull the volume down in GarageBand to keep everyone from typing in really really angry capital letters to TURN IT DOWN! It took us a while to figure out where I needed to go to fix that for me - I'm pretty sure it was Willie who cracked the code on it, and everyone in the chat room thanks him!

So the bottom line is the show goes live on ustream.tv for free, I use the free Cam Twist to provide picture in picture of my talking head along with my desktop for maximum entertainment, and finally WireTap Anywhere to combine my mic with the sounds coming out of Garageband.

this has been a LONG Podcasting on Podcasting, but I wanted to get all those technical pieces together for you to give you the full picture. If you'd like to give me feedback on the show, ask questions, or give advice, shoot me an email at nosillacast@gmail.com. If you feel like buying something at Amazon, click the link in my sidebar to get there and a small percentage of whatever you spend goes to help support the show. i suppose you COULD skip the middle man and click the Donate button too if that's easier for you! Thanks for listening, and stay subscribed. ]]> Sun, 05 Oct 2008 16:27:47 -0700 pop-011 no http://www.podfeet.com/wordpress/2008/10/05/pop-11-how-to-record-a-live-show-on-ustream/ ustream.tv/nosillacast.]]> Sun, 05 Oct 2008 20:50:06 -0700 pop-011-how-to-record-a-live-show-on-ustream allison Sheridan no flip4mac.com/drivein.htm. Mark installs an eSATA drive on his Mac Pro, and David doesn't ask his dumb question. Go get Cooliris from cooliris.com for amazing image viewing on your browser. In CCATP BArt and I discuss how he's wrong about GoDaddy, Bart gives me a clear explanation of dedicated vs. shared vs. virtual dedicated web hosting, and we learn three DNS lessons.]]> Sun, 05 Oct 2008 20:23:22 -0700 nc20081005-new-egg-is-dead-to-me-drivein-coo Allison Sheridan no http://www.podfeet.com/wordpress/2008/09/28/171-iphone-wedding-ttytter-cl1q-picking-a-hosting-company/ ustream.tv/nosillacast, Cloris Leachman on Bonnie Hunt show at youtube.com, iPhone for wedding vows, Pam becomes a hero when she uses Firewire disk mode to boot from a DVD. Martin asks a really hard "dumb" question, but offers us a really geeky Twitter client from floodgap.com/software/ttytter called Ttytter. In a true Dumb Question Pat asks the difference between the two disk representations in Disk Utility. Willie tells us about cl1q.com and cl1q.net - the Internet Clipboard. Donald Burr reviews Caffiene, and in Chit Chat Across the Pond we do Security Lite, and then discuss what you need to consider when choosing a web hosting company.]]> Sun, 28 Sep 2008 20:51:42 -0700 nc20080928 Allison Sheridan no http://www.podfeet.com/wordpress/2008/09/21/170-imovie-08-rant-alex-on-vista-beatnik-videocue-broccoli-ftw/ AppDelete, ScreenSteps from screensteps.com saves my bacon on a test. Debbie T of Splashofstyle.com helps me add Subscribe to Comments to the blog. Donald Burr of otakunopodcast.com and voicesoferinn.com does a review of Minefield from beatnikpad.com. Videocue Pro review in a VIDEO over at podfeet.com. Interview with Alex Perry and his trials as a "regular guy" with Windows Vista. In Chit Chat Across the Pond Bart & I argue about whether Brussel Sprouts or Broccoli tastes worse, how donald and Ivan solved Lindsay's upload video from iPhoto problem, we go through a couple of security issues, argue about apple's iPhone SDK, and we wind up with Bart's interesting solution to how to boot a mac from a DVD if the internal optical drive on said mac eats cd's.]]> Sun, 21 Sep 2008 19:57:32 -0700 nc20080921 Allison Sheridan no http://www.podfeet.com/wordpress/2008/09/14/169-aperture-ichat-screensharing-virtualbox-growl-annoyances/ onepluszero.com replaces my hard drive and in Dumb Question Corner we figure out how to get rid of autofilled email addresses in Mail. Andy McCaskey of sdrnews.com gives a spontaneous review of ScreenSteps and Matt Brown gives us a review of Aperture. I interview Kelly about helping her mom using iChat screensharing, and Donald Burr of otakunopodcast.com and voicesoferinn.com reviews VirtualBox from virtualbox.org. IN Chit Chat Across the Pond Bart and I do sort of a hodgepodge episode. First we discuss the virtues and dangers of Growl from growl.info then I go on yet another rant about iPhoto, and finally Bart winds it up with a rant about how Evernote.]]> Sun, 14 Sep 2008 19:36:47 -0700 nosillacast-mac-podcast-3 Allison Sheridan no http://www.podfeet.com/wordpress/2008/09/13/169-demo/ demo.com.

Say Where from dialdirections.com
Plastic Logic from www.plasticlogic.com/
TravelMuse from travelmuse.com
RealDVD from RealNetworks
YouGotPhoto from UGA Digital
Semantifind from semantifind.com/
Maverick Secure Mobile from maverickmobile.in
Rocketron from rocketron.com

Leoville
This Week in Tech
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

Audrey Reed-Granger from Whirlpool American Family
Tim O'Day from the Official Disneyland® Resort Podcast
Paul Vogelzang from the US Treasury podcast - couldn't find it!

Paul Griffin from Griffin Technologies
Dan Frakes from MacWorld Magazine
Chris Breen from Playlist Magazine
and the famous Leo LaPorte

Adam Christianson from The MacCast
Teachers James Smith and Sylvester Robertson (podcasts coming soon!)
John Chambers of the One Minute Tip Podcast
Darrell Shandrow of Blind Access Journal
Mika Pyyhkala of DC Night Out
Todd Cochrane of Geek News Central and podcastconnect.com

Doug Kaye of IT Conversations
Bryan Walls of NASA and in Spanish
Eric Rice of Ericrice.com

Disney - all about story telling. started by geting the idea out about our 50th anniversary. now we're trying to ge tpeople interested in the 3D experience that IS Disneyland. Want to make you feel like you're in the park during an interview with an imagineer or a cast member. We're not pushing anything, not sales, more of a Brand Emphasizer.
US treasury - we tell stories too. We want to educate the public. the early adopters - efficiencies are something we have to have, so here's an effective way with the public efficiently. Technologies we're interested in pursing will be helped by the early adopters. Nasa and their science group is interesting.
Dis- monthly, themed around the holidays - 50 years of putting up a christmas tree - how you can do it at home. even how to take care of reindeer - we're bringing live reindeer to the partk. You won't know what you'll get month to month.
WP - "American Family Podcast" - they may not have a WP appliance but they'll be able to tell that we're interested in them as people. Our early ones were bad! last month or two is so much better - really meaningful. we don't advertise this - if it's good, people will find it if it's a true organic thing. if they didn't find it, then I'll stop. i measure success with people writing and saying that it meant something to them.
4W - how to measure - what if you had something on the right hand side that asked "what more would you like to know" - that would be good to measure and answer.
Treas - we think our podcast is helping to educate the citizens when we're doing auctions of our debt - we now sell out every time.

how long should a podcast be?

20 min

25-35 min, people won't listen longer than that

great value to have something in the 10-20 minute frame. people have time for a couple of short ones instead of a big long one.

• 30-45 min - if your inteviewee is entertaining let them keep going (guy who designed the Haunted Mansion was great with the back stories). Had all 10 of the original Mousketeers were on for the 50th, we weren't going to cut them off. our goal is 30-45.
• 5 minutes - Witchita Rutherford - he's very entertaining in just five minutes
• really brief - treasury likes 10-15 minute range. Auctions on Tues/th - 2 hours, but the critical time is the last 60 seconds, so we use that content to get people excited.
How important to have a really 'radio' sounding podcast

• American Family they don't want something too polished, not soundbites
• Engadget sounds like they're at a kitchen table with a cheap mic - and I listen to every one. don't edit out every uh and baby crying in the background. Quality of the production - the type of mic, the reduced echo does make a diff in the long run to stay competitive.

Interview the "thought leaders" because they want to be heard. they will promote their content. WP - I want our brand out there with people in a feeling of comfort. We were the Tin Man and we needed a heart. What differentiates your brand from everyone else?

how did you sell to podcasting to the treasury being a gov't group? if an idea fits into the organizations goals, then it will go through quickly. I started with the CIO, discussed cost efficiency, which gave us some cost measurement, showed the value early. goes through a serious review - not exactly spontaneous with us!

Secrets of iPod and iTunes (well, sort of)
Paul Griffin - Griffin Tech, Chris Breen - Playlist Mag, Leo, Dan Frakes - MacWorld Magazine
iPod Economy, gear and goods, preferred podcasts, potential of portable video, now and into the future

PG - before iPods, USB adapters, mostly Mac products, but excited when the iMacs came out it started to get exciting, then iPods even more exciting. Probably half of our development is now iPod products. we make the products WE want, and we use iPods. Apple has the right pieces for this to continue to grow - the Nano is stunning hardware. Don't see them losing in the forseeable future.
CB - what if Apple changes a connector? or if they want to get into your products?
someone is always higher in the food chain, but we'll always be in someone's mercy. they do sometimes say "you might not want to make a lot more of those 9 pin connector devices..."
Leo - why aren't people upset with them about the way they closed the market with iPod and iTunes? it's a testament to how great their products are that people aren't incensed.
CB - Dan - do the hardware companies go nuts when Apple changes things?
DF - sure, but it's an opportunity to sell more new products! Now you need a new remote because they got a new iPod.
Leo - there's a reason there's chrome on iPods - this is now a disposable commodity. I think Steve Jobs keeps the desktop locked down so you'll be tired of it after a couple years and then buy a new OS.
User - new iPods will record 44.1kHz, not just 8 bit any more - is Griffin doing a new product for a mic?
PG - don't expect anything soon, first of next year.
CB - how can we make money
Leo - that's the wrong approach. there's money to be had, but we get $10K per month just from donations to the site! If Apple will let us sell video on itunes, that could start to work. we'd like to sell TWIT for $1.99. they said they will, they're working on it in the next couple of months.
Leo - the self actualized people have self deprecating senses of humor, not hostile senses of humor.
Gear
Paul's favorite was a thing they did for the iMac - they made a video serial interface for the bondi blue iMac.
Leo's gear for podcasting - constantly messing with it. Radio show is easy because I use their professional equipment. I use Adobe Audition to do a LOT of compression - reduces the dynamic range. AM radio is heavily compressed, and people are used to it. this punches it and makes it easier to hear. For TWIT it's crazy. Nightmare to record 8 different people. Steve Gibson - Better Late than Never software to record pdocast when there would be latency normally, Skype call would sound bad to you but it will record high quality. BLTN to be released to the community. PC only. well...there will be an Intel version so it WILL be for the Mac. in the mean time, Audio Highjack Pro does 2 way skype calls.
PG - Griffin to make anything for podcasters - new iPod accessories for sure, but podcasters need to do more in software.
Alpine - ipod dock KCA429 goes in the back, control from the screen.

11/12/05 - Day 2

Keynote address - Angel Gambino VP Commercial, Strategy, and Digital Media at MTV

Doug Kaye - IT Conversations
Team ITC - volunteers do all the podcasts
Create not wealth, but value through podcasting
IT Conversations started in April of 2003, long before podcasting started. Idea was to post online the recordings of interviews during events. It grew from IT to Technology to Science to Big Ideas. not a plan, just happened that way because it was what I was interested in.

ourmedia.org for hosting your site for free - see what else it does.

podcast academy - training podcasters how to be good recording engineers. This will be our farm team for IT Conversations. you create the content, produce it, and then post it. We'll have a rating system for how good the production value is.

"Value of Free" - when you charge for something or making it hard to get to, you reduce it's value - it can't be reused, it can't be remixed, it's reduced value. Free is highly scalable.

It's all built on passion - volunteers will bust their butts if they're passionate on something but not if you're making money from it.

"Value is measured by the number of lives you touch and how deeply you touch them." P = # people touched, V = value to each person, total value = P*V.


Bryan Walls - Podcasting for NASA
http://science.nasa.gov/
Section 508 says anything funded by the Federal Gov't must be accessible. No advertising revenue, and no copyright concerns. Started in Dec of 2004 wiht Science@NASA podcast - first Federal podcast. in September we brought out our Spanish version Ciencia@NASA podcast
http://ciencia.nasa.gov/
they automated their process which he recommends, using mySQL and perl scripts, but still recommends using feedvalidator.org - validate your feed every once in a while. Just recently found new rules in there and found some problems with his tags.
When asked how they decided how long to make their podcasts, he said it was related to how long the story was on the website, and you only want a web page so big. "We wanted people to get enough to chew on, more than a bite but not enough to choke on."

He walked us through all of the podcasts both audio and video that they've created and talked about the advantages of each one. new podcast on it's way is This Week @ NASA which is more of a newsreel.
bryan.walls@nasa.gov

Paul Figgiane - Podcasting and Advanced Post Production on the Mac Platform
production engineer for IT Conversations
the.point podcast
podcastrigs.com showing the gear he uses. This guy was over my head from the minute he got up there!


Mike Trainor - Chief Mobile Technology Evangelist
Delighted to be here because it's rare that someone in their lifetime can be at the very beginning of something - the energy level here shows that.

Eric Rice - Selling the Renaissance to Everyday People
ericrice.com

there's a button at the expo that says, "there is no "i" in podcasting, it's all about me"

best thing to do with criticism is to repeat it back to your critics over and over as humor. it works really well, you have free show material, and they also stop criticizing.
Avoid tech speak at all costs.
separate the content from the technology. emphasize how it's at THEIR time.
How do you make money bowling?
]]> Sun, 13 Nov 2005 22:24:20 -0800 podcast-expo-11112005 Allison Sheridan no http://www.podfeet.com/NosillaCast/NC_2005_11_11/NC_2005_11_11.mp3 Fri, 11 Nov 2005 13:51:35 -0800 nc20051111 Allison Sheridan no 7:26 http://www.podfeet.com/NosillaCast/NC_2005_11_06/NC_2005_11_06.mp3
You guys must have friends EVERYWHERE! As soon as I said last week that we had no South or Central American listeners, we got visitors to podfeet.com from Columbia, Peru and Panama! Welcome to our new listeners. Did you guys call your friends in those areas ands say, "let's see if we can get a shout out on NosillaCast? I hope so! We also picked up some folks from Singapore and just today Slovenia! I'm so bad at geography I had to look up Slovenia. Welcome to all our new listeners from all countries. Let's do an experiment. I'll pick a country, and you guys find someone from that country to listen! This week I pick...Russia. I was going to say Zimbabwe, but I thought I'd start with a relatively high volume, and yet strangely missing, coountry. So I expect to see some Russian participation on podfeet.com in the coming week!

This is the last podcast before the Podcast Expo - I hope I haven't built it up too much in my mind, but I'm SO looking forward to it! The chance to exchange ideas on this powerful new technology and where it can take us, not just in entertainment but also in business is fascinating to me. I've never been on the leading edge of something before, and it's a great ride! I'll podcast from the Expo - not sure if I'll get out a couple of shows without notes, staying up half the night doing it, or if I'll wait till my usual Sunday post and do a professional job. My enthusiasm level will probably dictate!

iBook monitor resolution hack
Remember last week when I ranted about my awful experience with Samsung (I still don't have my money back, almost five months now) and how I ended up with the 19" HP LCD? The purpose was for my daughter to use it with her iBook, and imagine my chagrin when I hooked it up only to find that the max resolution on the iBook was 1024x768! It never even occurred to me that it would be that low! Natively the iBook also can't do spanning between two displays (that's where you have two different things on the two displays and they act like one huge monitor. The iBook can ONLY mirror the display. I told her to just hang on and see if I could do anything about it. My daughter had this crestfallen look on her face when she saw how lame it looked (she'd been looking forward to putting up 26 separate AIM windows on screen I guess).

I was instantly successful searching on the web - I found a tool called Screen Spanning Doctor, available at rutemoeller.com:
Screen Spanning Doctor>
This kind of hack isn't for the faint of heart, but I'll try anything, so I installed the application, and it worked like a charm - she can now do 1280x1024 and span her two screens to her heart's content!

Greatest Spam Fighting Tool
You're not going to believe this, but I don't get ANY spam on my personal email account. I don't mean I have good filters that make me not have to see it, I mean I don't get any at all. The magic behind this is a service called Spamex from spamex.com. Spamex gives you 500 disposable email addresses, all of which get routed back to your real address. Here's an example. Let's say I want to buy something from Amazon. I jump over to spamex.com and put in my password, then click on create a new address. I usally choose a name that tells me where I used it, like amazon@spamex.com. Once I've chosen a name, I just cut/paste it into the website where I'm shopping. The whole process takes about one minute, and now Amazon doesn't have my real address.

If you ever get any spam on the amazon@spamex.com address, you'd know that they're the ones that sold it to the spammers. Interestingly enough, I never do get any spam, so I'm guessing spammers won't buy addresses that end in spamex.com.

The real beauty comes in when they start sending junk to you - Spamex lets you selectively blacklist certain addresses. You probably want the email that comes from yourorderhasshipped@amazon.com but you could do without newoffers@amazon.com. In the Spamex website you can blacklist those lame addresses so you stop getting those emails.

Here's the really crazy part - when I first signed up it only cost $9 per year (not per month, per year) and when I signed Steve up the other day - it was free! I don't get it - I've been using them for a few years so I know they're not doing anything nefarious with the information, but there's no advertising, so I don't get why they would do it for free!

Transferring to a new Mac

I think I mentioned last week that I bought my husband a new G5 for Christmas and gave it to him early so he can speed up his DVD Encoding. More on how well that's working out in a bit, but I want to tell you about a cool thing Apple did in the last few versions of the OS to make it easy to move from one Mac to another. When I booted up the new G5, it asked me if I was moving from an old Mac. I said yes, and it told me to hook the old Mac to the new with a firewire cable, and to boot up the old Mac while holding down the T key. This puts the old Mac into what's called Target Disk Mode. This means that the old Mac is not booting up into it's own operating system, but is simply now a firewire disk to the new Mac. After the old Mac is in Target Disk Mode, the new Mac transfers over all of the data, all of the applications and all of the system settings! I know this sounds like magic, and it FEELS like magic, but it really works! It was amazing when we were finished, the desktop background was there, email was set up the way he likes it, his address book was there, his network settings, and all his applications with any tweaks he had made to those in place. It is really a wonderful experience. Leave it to Apple to make it easy.

So Steve burns two hour DVDs complete with elaborate scene selections and music. On his 1GHz G4, it would take a full 8 hours to encode the DVD, and then since it was a 4X DVD burner it would take another half hour to actually burn the DVD. Total time, 8.5 hours. With his new Dual-Core 2GHz G5, the total elapsed time to encode and burn the DVD was noly 2 hours and 31 minutes! I'm really happy about that - I knew it would be way faster, just having the processor at twice the clock speed had to help, the fact that it's a G5 instead of a G4 is some unidentifiable speed increase, and then having it be dual core should be an advantage but I wasn't sure how much. The 16X burner cut another 22 minutes off the time, but the real killer was the raw processing time for the encoding process. Steve is really happy with his new machine!

Movie Review - Bewitched

Friday night's movie was Bewitched with Will Farrel and Nicole Kidman. i was a big fan of Bewitched as a child, and this was a nice remake. It's not an epic film that will leave you thinking about it for days, but it's a nice bit of comedy if you like Will Farrel. Several times we caught him slipping into his imitations of people like James Lipton of Inside the Actor's Studio, which at first we thought was a mistake but then the next scene was Will Farrel being interviewed by James Lipton! Nicole Kidman was okay, not great, but Shirley MacLaine played Endora (Samantha's mother), Michael Caine was Nigel (Samantha's father) and they were both well cast. The best casting of all was Steve Carrell (the Office, Bruce Almighty) as Uncle Arthur - he was just perfect. Overall an enjoyable way to spend $3 as a rental if you were a fan of the series, but I wouldn't recommend buying it.

Baby Name wizard
Here's a little site that is a lot of fun. It's called the Baby Name Wizard at babynamewizard.com. This cool tool shows you all the names that have been used since the 1880s, in a serape chart as a function of time to show the popularity of each name as the years go by. You can hover your cursor over the chart and names will pop out to show you what name you're over. The chart is also color coded by pink and blue to show girls and boys names too. That's pretty interesting, but the fun comes in when you type a particular name into the site. The graph mutates into a chart of just that name's popularity over time. If you pick a name that could be a boy or a girl (like Jean for example) it will show both of them on there in pink and blue.

I put in Allison, and it shows that it didn't come into usage as a girls name until the 1930s, peaking out with 1900 girls per million named Allison in the 1990s when it became the 41st most popular name. Here's a fun fact - it was a boys name from the 1880's through the 1920's with 50 boys per million being named Allison. Check out the Baby Name Wizard, you'll have lots of fun playing with it!

Send me feedback at allison@podfeet.com and stay subscribed! ]]> Sun, 06 Nov 2005 13:58:46 -0800 nc20051106 Allison Sheridan no http://www.podfeet.com/NosillaCast/NC_2005_10_30/NC_2005_10_30.mp3
Winged it a bit this episode since I had a CRAZY weekend - went out two whole nights in a row!!! Yes, at 47 with two kids and a stodgy job, I went out. Stayed out till nearly 9pm on Saturday! Didn't have time to write up a lot of shownotes, so let me know if this made me sound more spontaneous and fun or did I ramble?

On Friday night my friend Diane had a cocktail party and I was boring her friend David about my podcast, and he asked me if he could listen to past shows. I said, "sure! there's archives so you can go back in time!" He said, without missing a beat, "wow - you can go back in time? I want to go to Custer's Last Stand!"

Listening audience is growing at 3-5% per day! One day it went up 25% after NosillaCast was mentioned on Geek News Central. If you're new to the show this week - welcome! The amazing thing is how many different countries people are coming from - just this week we were joined by people from 5 new countries - China, Spain, Taiwan, Sweden and South Korea! My friends say I'll have really made it when I get listeners from NORTH Korea, but I think they need to be allowed to have electricity first...



A few shows back I was giving the Aussies a hard time for not listening very much (measured in how much bandwidth they were using) and as you can see above, they're in the MB's so they're listening!

One thing I've noticed is that we have a lot of listeners from Europe and Asia, and the ENTIRE continent of Australia, but nobody is listening from Central or South America, or the Middle East, or Africa. Why would this be? If anyone knows, drop me a note at allison@podfeet.com or post a comment in the shownotes blog at http://podfeet.com

Serious rant coming here - warning!!! After reading you will be unlikely to ever buy from Samsung. It's not a story of one bad product making me sour, it's a story of an endemic problem in their customer service from the first person who takes the call up to the president of US operations. Here's the story:

My friend Diane bought my daughter a 19" LCD from Samsung for her graduation present on June 11 of this year through Newegg. The model is irrelevant, you'll see why. The monitor arrived in time for graduation, and it looked great at first. Unfortunately after a few days it started to color shift to pink, then purple, then settled on a pale blue. I called Samsung and they were happy to send a new monitor, and explained that in the box I would find a return label to send the first one back.

In a couple of weeks the 2nd monitor showed up (but no shipping label was included). Sadly this one died in less than two hours. I was about to leave on vacation (by now it's the middle of July) so I sent an email to customer service asking that I be contacted by email while I was gone, and explaining the issue and including the ticket number. I didn't receive an email, but I did receive a customer survey phone call! That poor woman got an earful of how unhappy I was! She ASSURED me that she would make sure someone called me/emailed me. Of course they didn't.

I'm going to fast forward through 2 months of misery, but let me summarize by saying that I made a total of 11 phone calls, spent 5-10 hours of my time on hold and talking to these people. Oh, and after all that time, I still had two broken monitors and was unable to return either of them because they couldn't send me a darn shipping label!!! I finally got the return labels, but I then asked for my money back. They said they couldn't do that! EXCUSE ME? I had escalated up through 5 levels of management and still couldn't get help. I finally talked them into giving my money back - and then they said they wouldn't give me the $50 in shipping and tax! Can you believe this? They're telling me that after 3 months, 11 phone calls, 7 hours of time, they would CHARGE me $50 to not have a monitor??? Unbelievable.

I went out and bought an HP monitor so my daughter would be happy and wrote a letter to the president and CEO of Samsung Electronics America, Dong-Jin Oh describing in one concise letter what had happened. That was September 4th and I haven't heard back from him during the ensuing 2 months. I've posted my letter to Mr. Oh, just in case you'd like to read it: letter to Samsung

I did talk to one woman named Grace who appears to care, and she assures me that my check will be "in the mail" this week.

So, if you still want to buy from Samsung, go ahead, but I sure hope nothing goes wrong with your hardware! If you know someone who knows someone at Samsung who could help me, I'd appreciate it - send me an email at allison@podfeet.com.

Rant Complete

My husband Steve is a maniac at making iDVD movies - he took all of our VHS movies and converted them to DVDs - complete with scene selections with little pictures and videos on the scenes, adding music, the whole nine yards. He really loves it, enjoys the creative part of it as well as the end product. He volunteered to do Diane's videos as well, and he's been working his way through those, but the one thing that makes it not so much fun is that it takes a full 8 hours to encode a DVD on his 1GHz Powermac G4. I was going to get him a G5 for Christmas, but I was afraid he'd be done with the massive number of DVDs by then and the fun would be diminished. He had a really bad week this week, so Diane and I decided Christmas was coming early to Steve.

I debated at length whether to get him the new dual-core 2GHz G5, or the just discontinued 2.3 GHz dual processor G5 for the same price. Dual core means you get two processors on one chip which is supposed to be faster, but 2.3 is faster than 2. Hmmm... so I compared other features - the new one has PCI-Express, but I haven't put in a PCI card since USB first came out, which is about 10 years ago! Ok, how about graphics? The new one has better graphics, but since encoding of DVDs doesn't use the graphics at all, and we don't play anything more complicated than pong (remember how old we are?) so that doesn't matter. The old one has a much bigger disk - 250GB vs. 160GB. So what am I to do? I decided that Apple wouldn't have come out with a new model at the same price that was actually slower, so I went with the 2GHz. My buddy Brian went the opposite way to the 2.3, but I refuse to do any tests that would prove I made the wrong decision!!!

When I went to buy the G5 I realized I may have a problem with the monitor. We're the lucky owners of a 17" Cinema Display during Jobs' ADC era. This seemed like a good idea at the time - it has one fat cable that carries the video signal as well as power and USB. Nice and clean, right? When i bought it, we had a 450MHz G4, which only had DVI (digital video), not ADC, so I had to buy this ridiculous device called a Dr. Bott that separates all those signals into three cables (AND adds a gigantic power supply). I sold it to my buddy Ron when I got the 1GHz G4 that had ADC, since he needed it. Well, now that we bought the new G5, it's only got DVI again! Luckily Ron upgraded to a G5 just a few months ago and HIS machine has DVI and ADC, so he doesn't need the adapter any more. I just wish Jobs would stick to one video format for more than a few minutes!

The next thing I wanted to do was pull the 300GB drive out of the G4 that I bought for Steve's video projects so he'd have lots of headroom and put it in the G5. I went to put it in and realized that the new machine only takes Serial ATA drives, not IDE drives! Argh. Off to the store again and picked up a 300GB SATA drive from Maxtor for $180. Didn't do a lot of research on that one, but it seemed like a reasonable if not cheap price, and we got instant gratification out of it.

No movie review this week (remember I went OUT this weekend? Crazy, I tell you!) but I have a good Halloween site. Check out pumpkingutter.com - it's really cool. This guy carves pumpkins from the outside in like a sculptor - not going through to the inside, but staying in the outer skin. It's kind of hard to describe, you've got to just go check it out. He's been doing it for years, so there's archives of past pumpkins as well. I don't think there's one of Custer though, sorry David.

WARNING - ANOTHER RANT COMING

So years ago I tried to set up WEP for wireless encryption, but the implementation was lame on the Mac (or I was lame) and I got rid of it. Then I bought a new router that supports WPA, which is like WEP but it's a rotating encryption key, so it takes an 18 year old to crack it instead of a 16 year old. Got it going on the 3 wireless Macs, and Kyle's PC running XP, but then I ran into a snag. Steve's work laptop was running Windows 2000, which didn't have support for WPA! Ok, got Steve's computer upgraded to XP, and they put on Service Pack 1, which didn't have support for WPA. Got them to put WPA services on it, and it worked! Yay! the Macs, the PC's all in harmony. So a few days later I'm watching TV on the Tivo, and I notice a message waiting. It says it hasn't been able to download in 4 days! What the heck? Sure enough, I check online and Tivo doesn't support WPA! Sigh.

Ok, enough ranting! I want to talk about Social Networking now. The concept has been around for ages, but it has now moved to the internet. The idea of Social Networking is how you find people with similar interests, and then you share new fun things with them. If you find someone who likes a movie you like, you're more likely to tell them about other movies you like, right? There is a new site (or at least new to me) called del.icio.us which is a place you store your bookmarks, but it's more interesting than that. After you post your bookmarks to them, you can see how many other people have the same bookmark, and you can click on their names and see what else they've bookmarked. I don't think I get the bigger implications of this, but I had a fun surprise the first time I tried it.

Being the narcissist that I am, I posted podfeet.com as a bookmark, and imagine the fun when I found someone else who had posted to del.icio.us their podfeet.com bookmark too! The guy's name is Haagar the Horrible (I actually carry a laminated Haagar cartooon with me that my father gave me 20 years ago) and I'd love to hear from you if you're listening! Haagar listens to many of the same podcasts, like Leo Laporte in TWIT, Security Now! with Steve Gibson and Leo, and of course the MacCast. But he also listens to the One Minute Tip, so I've got to go check that out now!

The one thing that's funny with nearly four hundred listeners - hardly anyone ever writes to me!!! I'd love to get some feedback at allison@podfeet.com - even a quick note to say "keep it up!" or "leave me alone!" would be nice!

Thanks for listening and stay subscribed!]]> Sun, 30 Oct 2005 20:02:29 -0800 nc20051031 Allison Sheridan no http://www.podfeet.com/NosillaCast/NC_2005_10_23/NC_2005_10_23.mp3
Today is November 23rd, 2005 and this is show #13.

Continuing improvements to podfeet.com

• header is now clickable to home
• formatting on the boxes on the right - Photoshop
• subscribe buttons on "how to subscribe to NC"
• iTunes
• Odeo - chipmunk
• Yahoo! - need yahoo login
• still trying to figure out how to do stuff in Wordpress
  

Audacity Review - freeware - Open source

• http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
• audio recording tool I use for recording NosillaCast
• Cross platform - Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems
• record in proprietary format, export to MP3 or Ogg Vorbis or WAV
• takes a fair amount of time to compress, maybe 10 minutes for a 20 minute podcast
• traditional buttons from the old tape recorder days
• triangle for record, circle for stop record, two bars for pause, square for stop, FFW/FFR

               

• can float or dock this control bar (I leave alone)
• easy to import audio and splice tracks together 
• like Lascivious Biddies  http://www.biddycast.com music I spliced in last week
• mono or stereo (my voice is mono)
• good controls for mic volume for input
• Effects are extensive
• Noise removal very useful
• 10 second background noise test, then use as removal tool
• Amplify if some parts quiet (like spliced in bits)
• Fade in/Fade out - used on Lascivious Biddies
• zoom in/ zoom out
•  handy for precise editing
• nice graphical view of the sound
• 
• clearly a lot I don't know how to use - nice to have a tool to grow into.
  

Feeder Review - $29.95 US

• http://www.reinventedsoftware.com/
• creates RSS Feed which is what makes the NosillaCast magically come into iTunes and the other podcatching clients
• creates the ID3 tags that tells players about the podcast - who created it, when it was posted, how long it is, even shownotes can be imbedded in the tags
• creates mutant iTunes tags - duplications
• stores all the separate enclosures (podcasts)
• publishes to my website
• don't have to know xml coding at all - but I did it by hand for a while first just so I'd understand.  couldn't figure out iTunes tags so I went with Adam Christianson's advice from the MacCast and bought Feeder
• lets me manage more than one feed - I use one for doing demos at work on podcasting without wrecking my real feed
• scary if you click remove on a feed, it's gone forever!

Movie Review - House of D

• Written & directed & acted by David Duchovny
• story of a 13 year old boy in New York played by Anton Yelchin, mom played by Teá Leoni (Duchovny's wife), best friend is Robin Williams who plays a retarded janitor.  Duchovny plays the boy when he's grown.
• one of those films that's really sweet and happy and interesting for the beginning third, but you know it's going to go bad.  Luckily it doesn't go all that bad, or at least they didn't pull MY heartstrings that much.  then of course it's all happy at the end.  I like movies like that!
• Anton Yelchin is an amazing young actor, he's funny and interesting, and I hope we see him in a lot of movies in the future.
• Duchovny is ok as an actor, but his direction on this is great.  Teá is mildly interesting, didn't do that much for me in this movie.  Robin Williams is interesting, but I didn't really buy him as a retarded man (they use that word throughout the movie, it's supposed to be 1973.)
• Over all interesting and enjoyable, kept my attention, made me happy at the end, rent it and enjoy!
  

Movie Review - Out of Season

• please don't rent this movie, even Dennis Hopper being in it didn't save it.  100% waste of time.

Wonder how I got so good at podcasting? read a great book that taught me a lot.

Podcasting Do-It-Yourself-Guide $20 US/$26 CAN/£13 UK
    by Todd Cochrane, creator of the podcast Geek News Central at http://geeknewscentral.com

• Todd was one of the very first podcasters (he celebrated his one year anniversary last week)
• Podcasting so new - must have been hard to crank out a whole book on top of podcasting on top of a wife and two small children AND working!
• recommend the book highly
• very easy to read and follow, not too terribly techie
• well organized and methodical
• directions are clear and allow easy experimentation
• too tempting to get started before finishing, e.g. told about how to pick a good ISP long after I'd picked one - luckily vizaweb met his requirements
• understands everyone has a budget - gives solutions for low/medium/high spend
• Book takes the reader from the very basis of podcasting (what it is, how to subscribe) all the way through publishing your own podcast show and even some tips on how to make money at it (I haven't read that last chapter yet...)
• After he explains what Podcasting IS, he gives alternatives for podcatcher software for Windows/Mac/Linux
• I like how throughout the book he is operating system agnostic
• Todd teaches several ways to subscribe to podcasts
• takes through the directories (like iPodder) and how to get the files onto your MP3 player
• Most useful part of the book was how to format your 'cast
• I'd lost energy, no focus/format
• helped to organize thoughts
• He goes into a lot of detail about how to do the recording
• talks a lot about sound cards, but since I did on the Powerbook, wasn't an issue
• microphone and headsets
• really important - I got lucky.  I have a full description on "My Favorite Gadets" page of my microphone headset - USB unit came with IBM's Via Voice - voice recognition s/w I got when I broke my hand.  sound is pretty darn good (but I guess you'll be the judge of that, how do I sound?)
• recording software - he's the one who turned me onto Audacity
• he went into a lot on mixers and stuff like that - I didn't get too much out of that part
• I found his section on the recording process itself very helpfuL
• how to configure Audacity to get good volume and reasonable file size
• reducing noise in the recording
• Naming conventions - I have completely mimicked his conventions - makes it alphabetical, reads well on a small MP3-player screen
• Web hosting
• excellent advice (even though I'd already picked my web host) - I recommend reading this section early rather than later, too tempting to get started!  again he gives advice on different sized audiences so the reader can find an appropriate host for budget and audience.
• Podcasting with a weblog
• Next to Audacity, greatest advice was to use a blogger tool, in my case Wordpress and you know how excited i've been about that.  makes it really easy
• Creating the RSS
• Already told you about Feeder - he recommended it after Adam Christianson and then Leo LaPorte recommended!
• invaluable tool for a professional and easy to create podcast
• Overall It's a great book, very readable, well written, and above all completely practical
  

that's it for the NosillaCast for today, thanks for listening and stay subscribed!  As always, feedback is welcome at allison@podfeet.com]]> Sun, 23 Oct 2005 20:04:32 -0700 nc20051023 Allison Sheridan no http://www.podfeet.com/NosillaCast/NC_2005_10_16/NC_2005_10_16.mp3 BiddyCast.com and the iTunes Music Store.  Many thanks to Lee Ann for letting me use a snippet of the song.  I can't get it out of my head lately as I think about how much fun I'm having making the Nosillicast!

Note:  This is the only technology show this week which did NOT talk about the new video iPod or iTunes 6.

International listenership of NosilliCast continues to rise:

	Countries	Pages	Hits	Bandwidth
	United States	2101	6530	701.9 MB
	Canada	12	49	20.3 MB
	Unknown	29	82	20.0 MB
	Great Britain	3	17	3.6 MB
	European Union	6	28	2.5 MB
	Australia	10	66	1.4 MB
	Hong Kong	34	34	1.0 MB
	Netherlands	3	15	0.3 MB
	Germany	1	7	0.2 MB
	Japan	3	3	0.0 MB
	Poland	1	1	0.0 MB
	Total	2203	6832	751.2 MB

Gave a review of Wordpress as I've been using it to create podfeet.com in a blog kind of way.

• Makes posting new 'casts easy (and blogging)
• Posts vs. Pages - Posts are blog entries, dynamic in nature, and Pages are more like web pages which tend to be more static
• Excellent documentation in a wiki style, plus forums are a font of intormation
• Love how it makes archives automatically - I didn't create the links on the right showing the archives by month
• Themes allow the creator to change the look and feel at any time without recreating any of the content.  I used the Ocadia from Beccary.com theme while editing the files a bit to include the NosillaCast and podfeet logos
• Haven't figured out how to test changes yet, every single thing I do is on my live site...gotta be a draft section somewhere
• You can now post a comment on podcast if you want to participate

I'm going to the Portable Media Expo and Podcasting Conference on November 11/12th and I'm really excited!  Leo LaPorte is the keynote speaker, and I could just about die and go to heaven if I get to meet him.  Ron and I are going together and reallly looking forward to learning a lot.  Adam Christianson of the MacCast told me in an email that he'll be there, I sure hope we get a chance to connect.  I made new NosillaCast business cards and I described the cool new Clean Edge Business Cards from Avery that worked really well, they kind of crack in half so there are no perforations at all.  Very professional looking.

My son Kyle wanted a new wireless mouse for his iBook, and we passed up the Apple, Logitech, and Kensington mice, and went with the Wireless notebook Optical Mouse 4000 from Microsoft of all things!  Smooth scroll, nice small form factor, and stores the USB receiver in the bottom of the mouse.  Features a button on top that magnifies the screen for Windows and Mac.  $25 at CompUSA without rebates.

I asked the NosillaCast listeners for a new freeware ftp client because Cyberduck was getting on my nerves.  Listener Matt suggested RBrowswer which looks pretty good so far.

• free for simple ftp
• It lets you edit documents that are on the server which is awesome
• Like the way it gives two windows, one for the server and one for your local disk
• $35 if you want Secure ftp and folder syncing

Podfeet.com has some enhancements beyond the Wordpress style.  Look for these new pages on the right hand side under Pages (duh).

• added an iTunes podcasting tutorial - how to subscribe to podcasts through iTunes
• added a "My Favorite Gadgets" page

Weekly movie review of Crash:

• Not for the faint of heart - I was literally screaming "NO NO NO NO!!!!!" during one scene
• It's a movie about race
• It's got Sandra Bullock and Brendan Frasier playing rich white people (he's the DA) with a maid named Maria 
• It's got Jennifer Esposito and Don Cheadle playing cops (she's hispanic, he's black) 
• Tony Danza who thinks he's turned into Al Pacino, Matt Dillon who plays a really nasty racist cop
• William Fichtner plays a corrupt assistant to the corrupt DA....
• Anyway, it's a horrifically compelling frightening movie that held 100% of my attention for 2 hours and I didn't even try to pick up my computer!!!!
• Don't rent it if you don't like being on the edge of your seat the entire movie

Yahoo! is jumping on the podcasting bandwagon with their new site podcasts.yahoo.com.  I say the more the merrier!  I submitted my podcast, and it took about about a week for them to get it up, but they did do it!  Here's proof:


The Yahoo! podcast site is pretty busy, but the search window is easy to find, and once you find a podcast you want, it's pretty obvious how to subscribe (see above).  You do have to have a Yahoo! account, which is really annoying.  Not sure why they did that.  You can set your subscription to go to iTunes or the Yahoo! Music Engine.

I forgot to mention it on the podcast, but Technorati linked to NosillaCast without me even advertising it, but I think they've got a bot crawling the web.  It was pretty cool to see their homepage and see NosillaCast as 2 of the entries!

Wall Street Journal had an article about Sun and Google ganging up - sounded like fun.  They said that Google wants to work on Open Office, which would be pretty cool.  I'd love to see a clean googlish interface replace the stodgy but functional Open Office interface.  Sun's Scott McNeally is a junkyard dog, it will be fun to see them team up.

Feedback is welcome at allison@podfeet.com
]]> Sun, 16 Oct 2005 13:53:59 -0700 nc20051016 Allison Sheridan no http://www.podfeet.com/NosillaCast/NC_2005_10_08/NC_2005_10_08.mp3
Our listening audience is 79% Macintosh, 17% Windows, 4% unknown (maybe that's the linux people?), and even 0.5% Solaris!  I suspect that's John Clingan from Sun...

A great measure of the intelligence of our user community is what browser they use, and I'm proud to announce it's only 9% Internet Explorer!  We're 68% Safari & 11% Firefox.  5% are coming in from iTunes, and 3% unknown.

I do wonder why so few are coming in from iTunes, and missing out on the ease of podcasting - so I asked the users to explain why they aren't using podcasting by dropping me a line at allison@podfeet.com.

I've added some enhancements to podfeet.com, so check them out.  I added a freeware/shareware section, which I expect to see change frequently because I love new software!  Added a section on my podcasting tool suite, don't expect a lot of change there though over time.  Also plan to add a gadget page at a later date since I love a new gadget almost as much as I love freeware.

I'm trying to learn to use Wordpress as a blogging tool to publish the shownotes, look for improvements soon.

In the "best mom EVER" category, I pointed the listeners to my other website where I posted pictures of how we burned a model rocket last night.  It was great fun, and very appropriate during Fire Safety month!  Check out the pics and video at http://homepage.mac.com/asheridan/videos/broadsword_web/index.html.

Reviewed two freeware applications:

Konfabulator
http://www.konfabulator.com/

Widgets from before Apple "borrowed" the idea - cross platform for Mac and Windows.  Very pretty and provide more flexibility that Apple's Dashboard Widgets.

JAlbum
http://www.jalbum.net

Slick tool for creating web albums of pictures.  java-based, so it works on all forms of UNIX including HP-UX, Solaris, Mac OSX, Linux, as well as Windows and even OS2.  Check out their website for forums, tutorials, and FAQs.  They claim it speaks 24 languages.

I'm looking for a good freeware ftp client, so if you know of one, drop me a line at allison@podfeet.com because Cyberduck isn't quite doing it for me.  I have trouble with it not refreshing properly after I load things on my website, and the folders pop open too easily (and stay open) when I'm just trying to drag past them.  I tried using OneButton, but once I navigated into a folder I couldn't figure out how to go back up (and any kind of clicking on the ..folder icon had no effect), and writing to the developer just got me a bounced back email.]]> Sat, 08 Oct 2005 15:52:49 -0700 nc20051008 Allison Sheridan no http://www.podfeet.com/NosillaCast/NC_2005_10_02/NC_2005_10_02.mp3 podfeet.com!  You can now email me at allison@podfeet.com, and find show notes, podcast recommendations and more.  Please visit my website and more importantly drop me a line with suggestions, ideas, and corrections.

Today's podcast covered the following:

Widget TV VF1
OSX Tiger widget that's like having a small screen television right on your desktop
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/28056

Think Free Office
It's a web-based version of an office suite of products, allowing you to create Microsoft Office-compatible files using only a web browser.
http://www.thinkfree.com/
Sandisk Ultra II SD Plus Card
It's a 1GB SD Card that has a USB plug bulit into it!
]]> Sun, 02 Oct 2005 20:12:51 -0700 nc20051002 Allison Sheridan no http://www.podfeet.com/NosillaCast/NC_2005_09_24/NC_2005_09_24.mp3 Berlin, and a 24/7 geek like me!

We discussed a variety of topics:
    String theory
    How to record a podcast
    Pretty vs. useful technology
    Is it a bus error?
    Holes in the space/time continuum
    Navigating the digital world
    Stuff we would really use...if it existed
    Penguins

I also revealed my email address - contact me at allison@podfeet.com if you enjoyed the show, or if you have suggestions for improvement!  The show will be moving to http://www.podfeet.com soon, so stay tuned to change your subscription to keep up.]]> Sat, 24 Sep 2005 20:04:21 -0700 nc20050924 Allison Sheridan no http://www.podfeet.com/NosillaCast/NC_2005_09_18/NC_2005_09_18.mp3
Lindsay has left us for college, but we're bearing up well.  I didn't get a tattoo, and Kyle hasn't changed her room, but Steve has been Instant Messenging her all day!

I'm working on a new website to host the NosillaCast:
    http://www.podfeet.com

It's DEFINITELY under construction, haven't exactly figured out how I'm going to make it look - Niraj is trying to convince me to use Mambo to make it easy, but I haven't really got the hang of  it yet, so there's placeholders in there for now.  I'm doing this so i can get more bandwidth - my hosting company is http://www.vizaweb.com and I get 70 GB/Month as well as 1 GB of storage, and infinite email addresses.  Imagine the prestige of having a podfeet.com address!

Two fun freeware apps were covered today:

Bits on Wheels
http://www.bitsonwheels.com

jAlbum
http://www.jalbum.net

Is Windows over?  Should Microsoft close their doors if they're not going to invent anything else?

Why WebTV is wonderful

Wall Street Journal article by Don Clark - Airgo Bypasses Standards Panel With Wi-Fi Chip dated 9/15/2005.

Look forward to a joint podcast with my buddy Ron

]]> Sun, 18 Sep 2005 21:35:49 -0700 nosillacast09182005mp3 Allison Sheridan no http://www.podfeet.com/NosillaCast/NC_2005_09_09/NC_2005_09_09.mp3 Fri, 09 Sep 2005 21:41:28 -0700 nosillacast-09092005 Allison Sheridan no http://www.podfeet.com/NosillaCast/NC_2005_09_03/NC_2005_09_03.mp3 Sat, 03 Sep 2005 21:39:04 -0700 nosillacast07102005mp309032005mp3 Allison Sheridan no http://www.podfeet.com/NosillaCast/NC_2005_07_10/NC_2005_07_10.mp3
Version Tracker
http://www.versiontracker.com

Adium X
http://www.adiumx.com

Azureus
http://sourceforge.net/projects/azureus/

VLC
http://videolan.org

Cyberduck
http://cyberduck.ch
After creating my podcast, I found out Cyberduck had been renamed h2mweb but that just doesn't have the same ring to it, does it? If you want the new one, not the Chinese site, go to http://www.h2m.biz/h2mweb/index.php but you won't get the cool ducky icon. It's your choice, of course.

DVD Cache
http://www.humantrained.com

ToDo
http://nomicro.com

QuickSilver
http://blacktree.com

]]> Sun, 10 Jul 2005 21:40:40 -0700 nosillacast07102005mp3 Allison Sheridan no http://www.podfeet.com/NosillaCast/NC_2005_07_05/NC_2005_07_05.mp3 Tue, 05 Jul 2005 21:15:56 -0700 nosillacast07052005mp3 Allison Sheridan no http://www.podfeet.com/NosillaCast/NC_2005_05_23/NC_2005_05_23.mp3
I’m podcasting again from the Wall Street Journal sponsored D3:  All things Digital conference.  Today was a full day with Bill Gates, Scott McNeally, Ed Zander, Nicholas Negreponte, and Mitch Kapor.  I’ll try to keep this under 20 minutes and give just the highlights.

Bill Gates

If you listened to last night’s podcast, you know that poor Bill had to sit through Steve Jobs’ keynote, and have the cameras watching him while Steve made snyde remarks.  Today Bill was in good form.  He was interviewed by Walter Mossberg.

Walt had to start off asking about security.  Oddly Bill sees that the spam filters from MS are doing a good job at reducing spam – wasn’t clear to me what filters he was referring to – maybe in Exchange?  He said viruses are down in the last year (has he been counting?) and then put in a caveat on viruses in terms of the damage it has done to people.  He must not count the damage to industry (and home life for that matter) of the money and time wasted doing patch management and virus updates and cleaning.  He said that if you have kept your OS up to date with the automatic updates, you shouldn’t have gotten any viruses.

He said that malware (his term for spyware and adware) is up, but their acquisition of Giant and subsequently giving away the malware scanner software for free has helped to keep these problems off of computers.

He talked about a new way to protect customers from malicious code, which he called reputation-based downloads. The idea is that when you download a piece of software, you’ll be asked later how it went for you, and you give a rating to say whether it was good software or bad.  He says that a surprising number of people respond to these mini surveys, and that it will be a way of knowing right before you download whether this s/w causes problems.  They think this will be more effective than putting the “are you sure” button there that we all instinctively push, AND more effective than Apple’s requirement to enter the administrator password.  I think he missed the point there though – with the requirement for a password you eliminate the installation of software without your knowledge.  The reputation based model still might be interesting to watch.

Walter said that so many people have to get their hard drives reformatted – even if they have firewalls, antivirus programs and your malware program – and now we have all these warnings jumping up alerting us  - when can we just sit down and work at the computer and not worry about it?  Bill says that if you opt in to the malware program and automatically install windows updates it IS silent.  Hmmmm.  He said that they will be getting into the Anti-Virus business, and since industry has set a precendent for charging for AV, they will too.  This triggered an angry question from the audience later on – asking why after causing billions of dollars in damage to customers, they can stand to profit from security software!  He defended his position by pointing out that they don’t charge for malware protection or search.

Walt asked if there’s a divergence between when corporations and individuals want upgrades to the OS (such as closer together than 5 years.)  Bill said that everyone wants the small updates, but any changes to the user interface must come with dramatic changes to the scope of the tools, graphics, or power to understand documents if large corporations are going to change.

Bill talked about the tablet quite a bit – he believes that it’s the great new thing – that there are rabid users in healthcare and places like that.  He says the use of One Note has dramatically increased his productivity.

Bill demo’d desktop search, and it looked surprisingly like spotlight in Mac OSX Tiger, except maybe even better.  The panes of information were the same, but where Tiger only does previews of jpegs, MS’s product shows previews of powerpoint slides – you could even click thru the slides as tho you were in PP.

He also demonstrated their web search service, called “Start”.  It looked pretty good – the attraction is that you start with a blank page (instead of ready made content like Yahoo) and the you add the content which interests you, he showed adding weather, stock quotes, podcasts.  The funny thing was that he kept referring to it as the dashboard – which is the name for OSX Tiger’s widgets.

Finally he showed off their mapping site, which wasn’t that good, looked a little worse than Yahoo and nowhere near as good as Google, but then he showed something cool.  He brought up an address (Walter Mossberg’s HOME address, by the way, including his home phone number) and then he showed the satellite view as many services show, but then he showed a hybrid view, which shows street names and lines on top of the satellite view – it was pretty nice.  Then he explained that they bought a company called Pictometry who has been flying around with cameras at 45 degrees photographing the country, so soon you’ll be able to see Walter’s house not from the rooftop view but from the side as well.  

Scott McNeally – CEO of Sun Microsystems

As soon as Scott sat down, Kara Swisher showed videos of the other CEOs from last year talking about Sun – like Larry Ellison of Oracle, and most notably Carly Fiorina of HP talking about how Scott just doesn’t get it – of course ironic as Carly was fired from HP and Scott is still hanging on.

Scott says that he looks at Dell as an Auto-Zone, where HP is more of a car dealer.  Neither one of them make their own components or middleware.  He used a lot of car analogies throughout his pitch.

Scott talked extensively about the fact that Sun has $7.5B in cash in the bank (partly thanks to the $2B from MS.)  He talked about the fact that Friday the 13th of May, Sun and MS announced several collaboration efforts.  The ones I could follow were single sign on – a way to bring together both ldap and active directory environments together with Java.  They also certified all of their X86 machines on Windows.  He talked a lot about their acquisition of Tarantella, which will make it easier for their Sunray thin clients to serve up Windows applications using licensed RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol).  Clearly we need to learn more about this.

Kara asked how friendly MS and Sun are now.  Scott said that the agreements are all around interoperability.  He said they’re not friends, but they’re not biting each other’s ears off when wrestling.  

Kara mentioned how the stock price is languishing, and Scott pointed out that they have 16 years straight of cash flow positive years (and mentioned again that they have $7.5B in cash in the bank.

He then talked about how every CIO who didn’t get a job at a computer company has built themselves a data center, and they’re all home made jalopies.  (see the car reference again?)  He said he’s never seen 2 data centers alike.  He said buying a Dell Server is to providing web services as buying a piston ring is to transportation.   He asked “if I brought you 262 parts to build an SUV and dropped them on the floor for only $250, would that be a good idea?”

He said that one of their businesses is “multi-tenant processing grid”.  This is where they sell cpu cycles for running Monte Carlo analysis or oil exploration software – running on opterons and Sparcs running Red Hat and Solaris.  They’re selling these cycles for a buck per cpu hour.  He said that IBM’s pension costs alone are more than a dollar an hour so they can’t compete with Sun.  He looks at it like unused airplane seats – if he doesn’t sell them, they go away, can’t store them.  He says he treats their grid as WIP, or work in process, because “we have the shelf life of a banana here!”

Scott then talked about their new Niagra chip – it’s the next generation past the risc architecture, which has chip multi-threading.  It has 8 cores, and 4 hardware cores per thread.  It has the bandwidth of an E15K, with networking built in, full symmetric multiprocessing on a chip.  He’s really interested in bringing down the total cost of ownership – he pointed out that it’s a 32 way, 64 bit core, at less than 56 watts.  He pointed out that Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google has his single biggest expense is energy costs, second is floor space so this should be attractive.

He brought up another grid – this one he calls the Display Grid, which is his term for the Sunray thin clients.  He asked “wouldn’t it be great to have a buck a display per day for all desktop services?”  He said that over half of his employees are homeless – they can walk into any office and work, so he saves $3M a year by not having a Wintel space heater for each one of them..  They used two system administrators and $65K in software to move 30,000 people to a new software upgrade over the weekend, and no one needed to know.  

Nicholas Negroponte

Nicholas is the chairman of the Media Lab and Professor of Media Technology.  He is dedicating his efforts to finding a way to get laptops into the hands of children in developing companies.  His strategy is that if he could build a laptop for $100 each, he could get them into the hands of millions of children by 2007.

He has worked with school children in Cost Rica, where there isn’t even electricity.  He said the teachers try to do well, but they only have 6 or 7 years of education themselves.  He brought in satellite dishes and generators, and laptops he bought off of eBay, gave one to every single child and let them take them home.  The families loved them because they were the brightest light in the house!  The kids took wonderful care of them, polishing them like bicycles, making little bags for them.  They found on their own a website that would speak English words to them so they could learn to speak the language.  This was much better than when the teacher tried to do it – Nicholas said that it was unintelligible, bore no resemblance to English.

The technology path for this has 3 generations.  Generation 3 is going to use media ink.  This is a method of actually printing on the screen, which has extremely high contrast so it’s very clear, and can be done on a flexible non-breakable screen – maybe even one you could roll up in your pocket.  They can make these screens around $0.50/square inch, when LCDs cost $10/diagonal inch.

2nd generation will be a laptop that when opened reveals a small LED projector – and then the screen could even be made of white cardboard.  The LEDs have low energy requirements, and you could even make the laptop go all the way open flat so the projector pointed at a wall.

The 1st generation is actually harder, they’re looking at using something like the 7.2” DVD players you can buy now for around $110, gutting them taking out the optical drive, put in a processor and a keyboard.  They’ll put in wifi, 4 usb ports, a 500MHz processor, 1GB of flash memory (no disk) 128MB of RAM and run linux.  He said the developing world doesn’t want to talk about any OS other than linux.  The kids want Logo, Google and Skype, no kind of office application at all.

Ed Zander – CEO of Motorola

I didn’t take a lot of notes on Ed, but he did “accidentally” show us the Motorola iTunes phone.  It was white, and he said it had an iTunes interface, and killer sound.  He even treated us to a Neal Diamond song by holding it up to his microphone.  He emphasized sound in all of their phones, showing off the Razr as well as an even thinner phone (not a flip phone) called the Sliver which is 12mm thick with a speaker and a camera.  He also showed off full motion video of CNN on a cell phone available now through Verizon.

That’s it for today’s NosillaCast – thanks for tuning in.  Not sure if I’ll podcast tomorrow, the content looks a little light, but you never know!]]> Mon, 23 May 2005 20:18:28 -0700 nosillacast05232005mp3 Allison Sheridan no http://www.podfeet.com/NosillaCast/NC_2005_05_22/NC_2005_05_22.mp3 Sun, 22 May 2005 21:16:18 -0700 nosillacast05222005mp3 Allison Sheridan no http://www.podfeet.com/NosillaCast/NC_2005_05_13/NC_2005_05_13.mp3 Fri, 13 May 2005 15:01:33 -0700 nosillacast05132005mp3 Allison Sheridan no