August 2007 Archives

I knew I was going to be disappointed today when the FCC announced the auction rules for the 700mhz Spectrum. They had a chance to allow for true innovation. Instead they have once again allowed companies like AT&T and Verizon to have a walled garden.

I am severely pissed off. Sure, the rules state that the spectrum must have Open Devices and Open Applications but the FCC threw out the baby with the bath water when they reversed course on what could have been the most positive wireless spectrum development since the invention of the radio when they closed the door and are going to allow CLOSED SERVICES and CLOSED NETWORKS.

I am truly unhappy and I hope you are as well. I encourage you to pick up the phone and call anyone and everyone you know with influence and tell them how you really feel about this.

The problem is that the majority of Americans are quite content with these companies getting their way every time. It is beyond criminal to say the very least. Google

It appears the dust storms on the Red Planet have resulted in the rovers being put into extreme survival mode. In a word, the Opportunity Rover is hanging on by a thread. If the dust storms do not let up soon so the rovers can get more energy into the batteries, good old Mars weather may spell the demise of the rovers. marsrovers.nasa.gov

If you won a gift certificate and have not received it please drop me a e-mail. Great show tonight with some great listener feedback. Thanks for all the ongoing support and thanks for being part of the Ohana!

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Listener Links:
On-Demand Book Services
Panraven Contest
iPhone Wallpaper
StreetAdvisor.com
www.truckertomhd.com

Show Notes:
FCC rant
copyscape.com
Dvorak and Web 2.0
Departing for Mars
Verizon & Rural Cellular
Update iTunes
Light Switch Bad Idea
Windows iPhone Display
Progress to ISS
Blogger Journalist Protection
Google Phone
SuperNova.org Relaunch
Google Suggest a Site
Facebook on Netvibes
iPhone Theft and Dateline
Sony Cybershot Recall
Anywhere.fm
Second Life See Ya
Stealing Web Content
Fusion to run Windows on Mac
Apple 30" Monitor Defect
50 Quick Linux Commands
Doc Searls and Fiber Maze
Internet Radio Equality Act
Apollo Image Archive
Feds raid Mod Chip Sellers
Public Internet and Telcos
Aging Infrastructure
Shuttle Repair

Source

I saw an announcement this morning by Tim Bourquin that the Podcast and New Media Expo will be moving from quiet Ontario California to very busy Las Vegas in 2008.

At this point I am still comprehending the impact, but the straw poll of people on Twitter and in the Podcaster Mailing list so far has not been entirely positive.

My company invests a lot of money to exhibit, and entertain at the Podcast and New Media Expo the costs are currently manageable for a small startup, as we are able to have a booth, and a hospitality suite. Las Vegas is anything but reasonable when it comes to hospitality suites or having special events. I shudder to think what I am going to have to budget for this.

In Ontario the community is close knit and media creators are able to interact with all of the companies and other podcasters. You add gambling and shows to the mix plus all of the flash of Vegas and what Tim is risking here is losing the community feel.

This is a very very huge gamble and if Tim had decided on any city other than Vegas I don’t think I would be as concerned. Time will tell what the reaction of the community is. It’s to early to tell but I bet it will not be long before we hear about it.

Angelo my lead developer at RawVoice sent me a email at 4am his time letting me know that Phase 1 of our Podcast Stats package was finished. When I crawled out of bed at 5 this morning I went and looked at the latest revision.

I am really blown away, I really am! We put together a vision for this on paper over 4 months ago. In my head I knew what podcasters really needed and now it’s ready.

I also know a lot of podcast networks and companies need a solution. Well now we have one that can be branded for a group and is available to be licensed from us.

I sent out a email a few moments ago to all of the podcasters we have in ad deals that have been using the system blindly for the past month and said ok it’s open, you can see what we have been collecting.

We have tested this against some shows that have a million plus downloads every month and it has scaled just fine. So now we are going to throw the media creators at it and see what they think.

I am really proud of Angelo and the team for working hard to get this thing to a deliverable state. RawVoice

This is classic, a Dateline reporter tried to sneak into Defcon 2007 and was busted big time. They don’t mind having reporters so long as they register as Press, but the reporter violated conference rules by bringing in a hidden camera. HackaDay

Late start tonight but I have a couple of mini job opportunities available for those looking for some extra tech work. Also looking for Wikipedia expert.

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Listener Links:
Dumb Product
Have Camera go to Jail
Fair Use under Attack
Simpson's Domain

Show Notes:
AddThis
MadKast better use their own Product
Are you a Digital Pack Rat
SoundExchange trying to leverage DRM
Microsoft causing War in Open Source?
Pencil Removed from Brain
Thai Police officer Punishment
Linspire CEO Quits
Defcon 2007 Reporter Outed Update
Old News Cooking a Laptop
Lets Nuke a Meteor
FTC to look at Targeted Advertising
FeedBuddy
Apple facing lawsuit over iPhone keyboard
iPhone Sim Hack is the real deal
Xbox 360 Thermal Issues
Fake Steve Jobs Outed
VC Investment hitting high levels
Windows iPhone File Browser available
Nixie Tube clock really cool DIY kit
Halo-Themed Zune
Microsoft 1.5 Billion MP3 Award Struck down
Patch your iPhone Now!
MovableType Version 4 almost Ready
Knocka.TV
Photosynth Team Film Shuttle
DMOZ Editors helping Mahalo.com (not surprised)
WSJ PC Questions
Shuttle Launch on Wednesday
Progress docks at ISS
Congress cannot count to 100
SoundExchange aught Lobbying
Blogging issues with companies Stick
IT Staff not keeping up with Workplace Gadgets
New Spammer Tricks

Was watching Justin.TV and Alpha Geek at Gnomedex party when he chatted with Dave Winer for a few moments only for Dave to realize mid conversation that the conversation was going out live.

This is a question new media creators are going to have deal with. Filming and streaming live without disclosing it is not cool. Alpha Geek called the Justin.TV folks and asked for advice, seems form the call that they did not have much advice to give.

Alpha geek made a make-shift sign that said he was recording and streaming live. But this does not solve the problem that people are still being recorded without their knowledge and when people have paid to go to a private event and their conversations are being recorded then this is a real issue.

Two major rants tonight: Realistic privacy expectations in new media and signing exclusive podcast advertising contracts. Plus, a lot of great tech news and information.

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Listener Links:
Dorthy iLife08 Video
Metric Conversions
Zune running iPhone Fake or Real
AMIE Street
NYT Lowers some Walls
Amazon Payment system for Developers
HDTV Worth Waiting For
Linspire - Indiana University -- Listen to show
Flashlight that makes you throw up

Show Notes:
Spam Blogs
AOL will Kill Digg Clone
Google Deletes Own Blog as Spammer
MAC vs PC in Cost
Circuit City and No Refunds
Oklahoma Students Fight Back
Apple Strategy
iPhone Touch Screen Issues
Ford almost got my vision correct
Sprint + Nokia N800
iMac teardown
Apple Wireless Keyboard
Xbox 360 has HDMI
NASA Asteroid Buster mock up
Vonage Financials
Google Evil News Walled Garden
Be careful Jason!
Endeavor STS-118
Search Engine Privacy Improvements?
Big File Transfer
Hitachi Blu-ray Camcorder
iLife08
Low Marks on Video Downloads
DRM Stripped from Netflix Movie Stream
Universal Music DRM Free Test

It appears that the goal of Gnomedex for the second year in a row is to bring in a political person to talk during the show that pisses off at least 50% of the audience. The worst part: The guy that lead off the conference was completely whacked.

The back channel conversation around this was beyond negative. Chris, remove politics from Gnomedex. People do not pay to come to a tech conference to hear a whack job political left speaker.

Looks like some potentially bad news coming out of NASA it appears some ICE has struck the underbelly of the shuttle and the team is going to have to have a closer look to see how bad it is. Space.com

This has to be the most amazing picture of earth I have seen in quite some time.  Really nothing more needs to be said. See the full resolution image here

I am going to commend Rob Safuto our marketing guy at RawVoice for posting a very pertinent post on things happening in the podcasting space. I respect Rob’s thoughts and ideas and share many of his same concerns.

At times I am constrained to keep my mouth shut because it is just good business practices to do so.

I am just glad that RawVoice is setup the way we are. I don’t have to worry about investors pulling the plug, and I don’t have to get desperate in making sure the business model is perfect. We have adapted on the fly when needed, and need no ones permission to do so.

In our hearts we keep the content creators needs front and center and also respect their audiences.

But back to the subject at hand. Rob’s post is one that needed to be said and frankly he was a lot more tactful than I could have been within certain subjects. Podcast NYC

While I am not sure how the show was nominated in the first place I was surprised tonight to find out that the Geek News Central Podcast has been selected as a finalist in the 2007 Parsec awards. I am very humbled that the show was nominated and made the finals. Thanks to all of our long term listeners who are part of the Ohana here.

Geek News Central Podcast and 4 others are in the final running for “Best Tech Podcast” the slate is listed below. I am familiar with all of them, except for “The Command Line Podcast” which I will definitely have to check out.

• Astronomy Cast
• Technorama
• The Command Line Podcast (MP3 Feed)
• Geek News Central Podcast
• Typical Mac User Podcast

To see the full list of shows that have been selected as finalist for the 2007 Parsec awards visit the website. ParsecAwards.com

The shuttle crew took a closer look at the gouge in the heat shield using among other things a laser to collect data that would allow a mockup to be made here on earth, and then run through the simulator to see if a repair needs to performed.

At this point NASA is feeling pretty confident that no repair will be needed as NASA has seen these types of gouges in the past. You would think that after all this time they would have figured out how to get past these incidents. BBC

I discuss a very disturbing email I received and also cover some of the hurricane preparations here in Hawaii along with all of the usual Tech News

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Listener Links:
Hurricane
Metric
The Bartenders Show
Parsec Awards

Show Notes:
ISP Throttling
World's Oldest
Hitachi 1 Terabyte Review
Best of July
China Toy Recall Boss no More
File Sharing Kids
AACS DRM Tentacles
Skype on iPhone
Fallen Astronaut
Death Valley Od Things
iPhone Bill
Broadband ISP Fear
Pligg the Open Source Clone
Podcast NYC
Cool Way to take a Picture
Google Traffic Loss?
Multiple Windows Patches coming Tuesday
Alexa Junk Data
SCO Stock Dives
Walk and Make Money with Google
Search Engine Privacy
ISS and Shuttle News
Hotmail Storage Boost
Linux Command Line Tips
Sony Mini HD Camera
Google Gmail Storage
China Astronaut

I am pretty excited to see the new edition of MovableType being released today but the sad thing is I have not had time to even look at it. I suppose I should just hire someone to do the upgrade because I cannot see my schedule opening up much in the coming weeks.

So if you have been playing around with MT4 and know your way around the new version drop me a line and I will put you to work. geeknews@gmail.com

Rob has put up a demo of our Podcast Stats system, and to date everyone that is using it is pretty happy. The time and effort put into developing the first phase of the project was significant. Check out the video at blog.blubrry.com

Do you want to bend your brain for a second or two? Do you realize some really sane people say that we could all actually be living in a virtual world! I kid you not -- this is what some people are thinking.

It’s a mind bender but if someone thinks this then I hope they run a subroutine that will cause me to lose weight and fill my bank account. Weird! gizmodo.com

See the main site for the list of Category winners. The top two winners will be announced at the Podcast and New Media Expo Awards Ceremony. PodcastAwards.com

One thing about podcasting, there is a fine line between opinion and libel. How you say something about someone can have very significant consequences. Some Podcasters think that their microphone is going to protect them from a libel suit.

In my book on podcasting I spent some time talking about the ways one can usually keep him or herself out of trouble. But recently I have been listening to a particular podcast that was brought to my attention that could land that podcaster in the middle of a libel suit.

Podcasters would be wise to spend a little time looking over some basic Journalism rules and learn that their actions and commentary could land them in a court of law and cost them a pile of money to defend those words. 

Well I woke up this morning to Skype being off line. Did not think much of it till I tried to IM a buddy of mine and sure enough Skype is down. It’s not fully clear why. Skype is reporting it is a software issue, looks to me like someone pushed a update without doing the proper regression testing. Skype

I really like the ease of use of Twitter and have been thinking of a couple of cool little side projects that could be run if there was a open source Twitter Clone.

This should not be a hard thing to come up with. If anyone knows of a open source twitter clone please send me a email. Twitter

Full show notes for the podcast are now located on the main podcast page. Reason for the minor change will be explained in the next show

Link to Full Show Notes

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It is quite obvious to me that Skype is under some form of Attack the service just would not work one minutes and not the next. They are being quite secretive about what the issue is.

They say they the issue is from some code or algorithm but I bet someone found a big hole and has crippled the service with a denial of service attack.

Not having Skype going on two days shows how much I depend on it working. Skype

Over the past 96 hours I have been working my tail off to move a huge pile of Podcast Advertising inventory. The vendor that submitted the increase is pretty pleased with the latest results, and increased the total buys on some of our deals by a significant amount.

Not everyone lives online like I do, so waiting for confirmations from shows takes a lot longer than I wish it would. Typically I have month or more to get this level of traffic engaged and at this point we are practicing getting inventory turned on instantly. RawVoice

I am officially on a mini vacation but the show must go on. Lots of interesting tech tonight with a little bit of good to know information.

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See Full Entry with All Show Notes

For most geeks this will not come as a surprise as a lot of people know that Skype really taxes the connections of those Skype users that are on big fat broadband pipes. After all Skype is a Peer to Peer application correct.

Well I just wonder if many of the systems that have been designated as Super Nodes even really know it. The question is how do you determine who is a super node at this point I don’t thing that is something Skype would be willing to comment on.

I do know that when I go from Broadband to EVDO, sometimes I have to shutdown Skype because it starts sucking up more resources then it should does the application think I am still on my big fat broadband pipe? While I know Skype relies heavily on the Super Nodes I wonder if in the long viability of Skype is not in question. If Super Nodes revolt Skype’s party could really be over pretty quickly. Skype