One of the problems with watching video podcasts as an alternative to conventional television is that you have typically and deliberately watch one video at a time. On longer videos it’s not as much of a problem, but with short videos that last 5 minutes or less you have to keep manually restarting the next video after the previous one has finished.

I now have three Mac Minis – one is an old somewhat underpowered Power PC Mac Mini that I’m using as a video podcast aggregator. I have that machine’s iTunes database located on a much larger shared drive that’s available to every machine on my home network. I’m subscribed to a variety of tech podcasts, most of them in the highest resolution file sizes available.

I have two other Mac Minis that are of the latest design. I have an “Eye TV” USB HD tuner connected to one that’s connected to a substantial external antenna. Depending on atmospheric conditions I can receive up to 18 channels counting the various digital sub channels. This enables the Mac Mini to function as a DVR.

The second Intel Mac Mini is in another room and the Eye TV software also loaded on it is able to work from the other Mac Mini’s shared recordings.

Today I discovered by accident when playing around with iTunes on one of the Intel Mac Minis that the shared videos show up in the shared playlists from other iTunes databases. So, in other words, I can pick a shared iTunes list from the Power PC Mac Mini’s shared iTunes and a list of video files shows up. Since the videos are in the list just like audio would be, I am able to start a video file playing and when one file ends it will immediately start playing the next video file on the list. This is particularly useful because I can start videos playing as I do other things and it will continue to play just as if it’s a TV station. This is quite a handy capability to have. The lack of an ability to set up continuous video playback has long been one of the Apple TV’s biggest shortcomings.

Periodically I go to the Power PC Mac Mini and delete the video files that have been played, since iTunes keeps a play count, so I always have fresh material to watch.

Carissa O’Brien interviews Scott from Intel GE Care Innovations. Scott demonstrates the GE Healthcare text-to-speech reader in conjunction with the Capture Station.

Quietcare is a monitoring system for those living in assisted living facilities.

The Intel Healthguide is a remote monitoring unit that enables medical staff to do remote monitoring and interaction with patients in their own homes via the Internet, including video calling.

Interview by Carissa O’Brien of Geek News Central.

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Jeffrey Power talks to Mike Martin of Intel, which announced the incorporation of the Intel graphics processor (the GPU)  onto the CPU across the whole of the Core range (i3, i5, i7).

The stand at CES had an impressive artistic display showing off the power of the new Core processors, which you can see in the video.

Available now – look for the Intel kink (the yellow branding tag) on the packaging.

Interview by Jeffrey Powers of Geekazine.

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In the world of gadgets smaller usually translates to cooler. While the new rnage of netbooks on the market have had some success in this paradigm I have not yet seen much to get me excited by them. They are not small enough to be radically easier to carry, and they are not large enough to be convenient to use for most purposes. The ultra-thin laptops are generally the better compromise position.

Until recently touchscreen laptops have not really lived up to the hype either. The speed of the handwriting recognition has not allowed them to live up to the promise. With the advances in touch screens, particularly multi-touch technology, the likelihood of this market becoming successful is growing.

Intel have combined new the latest touchscreen technology with a netbook to produce a kid-targetted laptop that looks interesting. According to laptop magazine Intel will be including a lot of third party software that is designed to take advantage of the touchscreen for school based activities.

This laptop is launching at CES and is likely to be one of the products that gets a decent amount of coverage. It will be interesting to see what the concensus is after more people post hands-on reports. I’ve been looking for a laptop for the kids, and this might end up being the one.

A Mac virus detected and reported on last week appears to be pretty weak, and so far has only infected about 50 Intel based Mac’s. The virus writer himself expressed his frustration within the code of the virus, indicating he was having a lot of trouble for such a small amount of code. While Mac users continue to enjoy a computing experience that is virus free, the concern for some experts is that the Mac users will become to compliant.

My thought on this is that while doubtful that a sophisticated virus for the Mac is going to appear anytime soon, that if one did it could really do some major damage. Only time will tell but Mac users will continue to be able to sleep easy knowing there operating system is pretty secure. [ZDNet]

I know a lot of the hard core Mac users have been waiting for the Intel Core 2 Duo to be released and that wait will be well rewarded as the notebook will now be up to 39% faster which is a significant increase.

Released in a 2.16Ghz or a 2.33Ghz you available in both 15 and 17 Inch Models [Apple]

This one is gonna blow your socks off, now we not only have to worry about software attacks, we now have to worry about hardware hacks that if exploited correctly and distributed to bring a large portion of the worlds computers to it’s knee’s. It will interesting to see what the Intel folks say. I guess it is time to go inventory how many Intel machines we have and how many AMD machines we have.

Only time will tell if this report pans out but oh man these folks are getting clever. This does not just effect Windows machines in fact the commentary indicates that unix based machines are very susceptible. [Slashdot]

That’s right my geek friends have a spare computer laying around and I think you could have yourself a weekend of fun loading Apple OSX (Developers Edition) on your Intel based PC that you have stored in a closet. May be a bit buggy but it sure will be a lot of fun to show it off to the geek next door who just purchased a dual processor G5. [Extreme Tech]

Rub it in a little and install the build on a high end Pentium 4 that you got for $500.00

Companies will go to great lengths to protect their bottom lines. Just yesterday I was getting my twice monthly Shiatsu session and I was talking with the gentleman that has allowed me to live with less pain. He had a brand new powerbook sitting their, and I asked him what he thought about the Intel deal. His comment was, if I had known they were going to do this I would have waited a year.

I am hearing this comment a lot, and I am sure that Apple will have slower sales in the notebook arena till the next generation of power books are sitting in Apple stores with Intel inside.

Getting back to the point, an article on Infoworld is speculating that Apple did their gestapo tactics to keep the lid on the Intel deal. It was a warning across the bow, you talk about the deal and we will smash you, because we need to make sure that our stock holders get some return on their investment before we make this announcement, which will have sales going south on the powerbook front. [Infoworld]