Paul W. Swansen - Mar 3, 2009
Unfortunately this is an Adobe AIR application which don’t seem to work on either my Intel iMac or my Netbook.
So far it’s been working fine for me. Not sure what’s breaking Adobe air on your system.
Now that twitter has gone mainstream and fewer people are obsessive about it I’ve been trying to walk the gang plank and arrived on friendfeed. It’s an rss aggregating site, much like facebook where you have none of your friends, but don’t worry. You can populate it with various news rss sources for colour. That’s not the reason for this blog post. What I wanted to really tell you about is the friendfeed notifier thing. It’s a useful application that shows you the latest item transiting through your home friendfeed feed in real time. As a result you can work on other projects whilst occasionaly seeing what is happening there.
Paul W. Swansen - Mar 6, 2009
My first impressions were that the new FaceBook looks a lot like FriendFeed. I’m also noticing some other things in the new Facebook layout that apparently were not fully thought out prior to the new launch.
I do like the features of FaceBook and Friendfeed where I can actually have a discussion/conversation in more than 140 characters.
Facebook is now a mixture between friendfeed and twitter. You get videos, photographs, status messages and more from all your Real life friends networks. One of the most powerful new features is that by using the group feature we can now see our friends according to a number of settings. If I want to look for Uni friends I click on that list of friends. If I want twitter friends I press on that list. If I want Geneva friends and their status I’d press that and get the required information. Now we’ll see a decline in facebook user time due to them not understanding it and not having the time to figure it out but within the next week or two they will use it more and more. The real time view also means that conversation will now be emphasised and help people in different geographic regions stay connected. As my distaste for the way people use twitter grows ever stronger so the new facebook layout encourages me to engage with more of my real life friends there. It’s a big “see what you missed out on” to the twitter owners and their poor website implementation and innovation cycle. I was struggling to see a reason for being on twitter. That has just become stronger.
Asimo is the famous robot created by Honda that looks like a young child. He was at the motorshow yesterday demonstrating his ability to run and I was there to capture the moment in HD, as were several hundred others. Press the HD tab to get it in full quality :-). The normal version is soft.
Today I went to the Geneva Motor Show and filmed lot’s of cars, from the Koenigsegg to Asimo the robot via a few girls giving information about cars and even crowds of people. I spent some time reviewing the footage and yet again I’m happy with the results. I’m going to work on a few compilation videos within the next few days but if you’d like an overview of the result then I have a sample on blip (select the mov), and on Youtube (Select HD). Enjoy.
Whilst I listened to MrTweet speaking on the Net@Nite podcast from several month ago I found it interesting that he spoke of the re-tweet as giving credit to those you follow who share some interesting links. If you spend a lot of time on twitter though after seeing the same retweet too many times you may not follow them anymore. What I propose is to use MrTweet’s recommendation instead. The process is simple. Go to a profile page and you can see two things. You can see who has recommended you (me) or who you have recommended. If you’re a twitter Veteran like those I follow and I then you don’t need MrTweet but if you like my blogging and tweet style then by seeing who I recommend you can find more relevant people to your twitter stream. As a result you will be following a group of friends rather than random strangers. As a result that sense of community will remain strong.
If you love watching trends on twitter then twitterfall is for you. It takes into account the top ten trends or so and automatically updates with the latest tweets from the whole of twitter. It’s great becaues you can see the trends in real time without following six thousand people. A mere 340 should be enough ;-) [gallery link=“file” columns=“2”] On a more serious note it’s a very useful tool. You wake up in the morning and see what are the top twitter stories of the day within a very short amount of time. It’s global of course, so depending on the timezones you may see a different emphasis. There is a local view too. If you choose keywords, for example Tuttle you can seleect the geographic region, London for example, and you will see all tweets from that geographic location.
How comfortable are you behind the wheel? How many hours a week do you think you spend driving? The reason I ask these questions is that I often spend fourty minutes a day on the road and as a result I tend to watch everything that’s happening around me. That’s because car driving is about situational awareness. One of the things you’re taught about when driving is forward planning and anticipation. You look at the sides of the road and develop situation awareness. Where is that child looking. Is there a chance that ball is going to bounce in front of me. What’s behind that bend? You’re constantly analyising what’s around you. Recently as I drive on the motorway to and from work I watch how the cars are lined up. I know how many cars are behind me, how fast they’re going and more. I also know what’s going on in front of me. As a result I change from left to right lanes in a dynamic manner. I’m constantly looking at whether I’m going to be blocked or whether someone else is. In the morning I avoid the left lane. You see people driving just two meters from the car in front of them at over a hundred kilomters an hour. Occasionaly they come a cropper and i can’t help but laugh. It’s well deserved on the part of both parties. I did once have a jeep chasing me down the motorway and I could pull in to let it pass. It came right up to me and I slowed down. I wanted to give myself enough stopping distance. It annoyed the driver behind me but the important thing is that I was safe. If an emergency appeared I would be able to stop safely, and I’d bought the person behind of me a little more reaction. You see what a nice guy I am? The reason I speak about this is that in everything you do situational awareness is one of the best things to have. What are the things that can go wrong, what can I do to avoid them. Are there any tell tale signs? It’s like living in London. You know that the tube may be delayed by ten to fifteen minutes so you make sure to compensate for that. In some cases it means catching the train before the one you need to catch, just so that you arrive on time. If you’re like me you often arrive early. That’s not a problem. When you have a live video transmission t’s better to be half an hour early than 3 minutes late.
It’s no secret that I now own an HDR SR 12. It’s a small light weight video camera that shoots in high definition at 1920x1080i but I’ve been shooting at 1440x900 most of the time. Recently I went through the streets of Nyon filming people as they enjoyed the first real day of spring. I filmed a diversity of things. The White Castle, couples sitting by a wall drinking cans of some fluid and people walking around. There’s even footage of a guy filming a girl presenting products for something. I have no idea of their goal. As I watched the video back on a 40" monitor I was really happy with the results. The picture was sharp, the colours were great and you really could look around the image to see every little detail. Recently I lent my camera to a very knowledgable friend of mine, when it comes to broadcasting and he was happy with the results too. He was telling me about watching images with XV colour, which I hadn’t paid much attention. He told me that for certain natural colours, green for example when the light was just right the saturation was really nice. He was using a Samsung screen whilst I was experimenting with Sony. What I feel is particularly gratifying is that this, by broadcast standards, is a really cheap camera and already it delivers top rate results. Of course with progressive imaging it would be better and it does lack when subjects are back lit. I wrote about some of the drawbacks in a recent post but it’s still an excellent camera. I have a few documentary ideas I will need to get round to filming as summer approaches. I do want to take advantage of having such a light camera.