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New media stuff

Friday, January 19th, 2007

It’s been a busy week at work, but I’ve still found the time to put together a couple of cool projects. I finally took the time to wade through all my Lensbaby shots and collect the gems into a Flickr set entitled ‘Best of Lensbaby‘. Check it out for some of my favorites, and to see it grow over time.

In addition I also picked up a copy of EvoCam for my iMac. Bre suggested it as a Photobooth replacement when I was looking to remove the “screen flash” and I ended up falling in love with it for some of it’s more advanced features. At first I was a little hesitant to throw $25 at webcam software, but even after just a few hours I was in love with EvoCam.

It has a really neat way to set up motion activated time lapse movies using the iSight. Basically my iSight is on all the time now. Whenever movement is detected (i.e. I am sitting at the computer) it takes a photo every 15 seconds, and adds the photo as a frame in a time lapse movie. At 24 frames per second playback speed and 15 seconds of real time per frame of video it makes it easy to watch my life go by at a 6 minutes per second. Even cooler is that since it’s motion activated there are no long gaps of nothingness while I’m at work or sleeping.

I’ve got it set to cut the movie and start a new one each day at midnight so I’ll end up with a detailed log of my computer usage, and something that’s actually pretty cool as an art project by itself. Below I’ve posted a quick one that only takes up an hour or so of “real time” and was more of an experiment than anything else – be expecting cooler versions at some point in the near future.

The Quicktime version is very large, but has a keyframe for every single shot in the time lapse so it’s very high quality. I’ve compressed it down to a flash video to show here, but might be making DVD’s to mail out if any of the coming days produce anything particularly interesting or thought provoking. Without further ado:


 

Mind Camp has a posse

Sunday, November 12th, 2006

Mind Camp 3.0 - Favorites

Taken at Seattle Mind Camp 3.0 – Seattle’s premiere un-conference featuring the best and brightest of technology all under the same roof for 24 hours learning from each other, and exploring our passions. This particular crosshatched image was drawn with a pen by a drawing robot put together by the MAKE crew. The original image was taken with a camera and fed into a computer to be processed by the Drawbot. I took a lot of photos with my Lensbaby. Check out Flickr for 100′s of shots I’ve taken in the last 24 hours.

All in all I had a blast. I actually left a little early (I’m too old to stay up for 36 hours at a go) but had 20 great hours geeking with like-minded souls, and playing a delightful game that was passing around: Werewolf. It’s a great mix of social skills, logic, and really getting to know your neighbor in an effort to figure out if they are the werewolf!

I also got my first chance to get some hands on time with the Wii. Nintendo brought one out for part of the evening and let us get some hands on time with it. I’m very impressed with how intuitive the system is, and was taken aback by how small it was – the Wiimote was about 25% smaller than I had envisioned, and the Wii it’self is barely bigger than a DVD case (obviously wider than a single case – but no wider than 4 standard DVD cases stacked together).

“Mind Camp 3.0 – Favorites” by sparktography

Macs at Mindcamp

Saturday, November 11th, 2006

So I’m here at Seattle Mind Camp 3.0 having a blast and I have an observation. A year ago at the first Mind Camp about 10% of the participants had Apple Laptops. Last April at Mind Camp 2.0 about 30% of the campers had Macs, and this time over half of the laptops here are Macbooks or Macbook Pro’s.

Are we the trend leaders, or has Apple really made that much of an inroad into the Seattle tech community in the last 12 months? I realize a lot of companies have come to Seattle that buy Macs for their employees (Google to name a big one) but still – it’s a lot of growth.

Viva La APPLE!

Yet more construction

Tuesday, October 24th, 2006

POTD 10/24/06 - Yet more construction

Today was the first miserably wet day of the year. Rain was pounding when I drove to work this morning reminding me just how poorly my car handles in low traction situations. Luckily it let up enough by the time I had arrived to snap a few quick pictures of the construction around my office that gets ever closer to the building and entrance I use.

As you can see from the picture the massive equipment is now literally up to the door. I can’t imagine being one of the poor people who’s window looked out on to a back-hoe from 5 feet – I know I would go mad with the distraction.

Aside from the rain today was actually a pretty good day – I got a lot done at work, and have been home for the last couple of hours working on reorganizing my condo and poking at email.

On another good note Firefox 2.0 launched today. I have always loved Firefox from a functional perspective but prefer Camino for it’s speed, elegance, and simplicity. The new 2.0 release is a lot leaner and faster than 1.5 yet improves on usability. Given the power that Firefox brings to the table with it’s extensible plugins I might just have to try using both it and Camino for a while to see what my long term impressions of the new release are.

“POTD 10/24/06 – Yet more construction” by sparktography

Delicious unix geekery

Wednesday, September 20th, 2006

I’ve re-discovered two distinct technological pleasures: screen and Delicious Monster. Aside from spending a few days of quality time with those two gems I’ve been keeping busy with work and keeping up with my day to day stuff around the house.

Screen is an old session management tool for unix systems and boy is it neat. It basically lets you run terminal programs in sessions, and manage those sessions in very interesting ways. You can connect, share, and disconnect from remote sessions at will making managing multiple context-insensitive applications over SSH a breeze.

Delicious Monster makes a DVD/game/book management tool that I had looked at previously, but not investigated fully. They offer some amazing technologies to make it easier to manage a big collection. Most uniquely it offers easy data entry via the camera built into my iMac by “scanning” the barcodes and pulling all the information down automatically.

It took me a little under two hours to scan, sort, and manage all 300+ movies that I have in my collection. I used a tool called Deliweb to create this nifty view of all my movies.

Cory Doctorow: interview at the Singularity Summit

Sunday, September 3rd, 2006

Check out Cory Doctorow’s interview with Rick Kleffel at the Singularity summit. It’s a great interview and goes into some of Cory’s thoughts on the future, and the economic and social impacts on our society as a result of the onslaught of technology.

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Holy sweet visitors (or fun with MySQL analytics)

Wednesday, June 28th, 2006

So not only am I getting some search engine love but I’ve just discovered that I actually have viewers! I installed Counterize on Futurist Now a few months back, and then promptly forgot about it entirely. I was just checking out my admin panel to do some maintenance (I don’t get there often thanks to the glory of Ecto) and happened upon my stats.

Counterize does a great job of giving some high level stats, and as well puts a row into a MySQL table for each visitor with some basic information about what is being requested and such for statistical analysis. I broke out the PHP and had some fun.

Now up until now I had assumed I had about 10 readers. Some close friends, perhaps a few random strangers, and of course my mom. I guess I was wrong – I have had over 11,000 page views in three months from 1,827 unique visitors (not including known bots). These figures do not include viewers who view my site entirely via RSS and never visit the blog directly. Given my sometimes blathering rantings I’m actually rather surprised.

Now for the statporn: The highest pageview days are Thursday, Friday, and Saturday by a good margin. Tuesday’s on average get about 23% of the page views of a Friday. The last week in any month has about 10% more page views than any other week. About half of my page-views come either between 8-9am PST or between 2-4pm PST.

I have no idea why this would be, but for some reason I have visitors who only seem to visit me during certain parts of the month. I can see later in the week being more popular because some people are looking for minute little escapes from their jobs on Friday’s, and weekends being popular because people have a chance to “catch up” on their web browsing.

My most popular two entries are about my encounter with Ambien, the saga I went through to get my sweet Oblivion, and an example of my hatred/fear of company parties.

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Some SEO love has come my way

Tuesday, June 27th, 2006

Aside from having a great couple of days at work I’m very pleased to announce that my campaign to raise my search engine vanity rankings has gone well. Thanks to all the people who have linked to Futurist now using the word Sparky I’m finally on the first page of results for my own name!

That’s all for now folks! Keep up the linky love that I might keep my own name in cyberspace! Remember: a vote for Sparky is a vote for progress!

The quest for a perfect mail client

Saturday, June 10th, 2006

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – e-mail is the ultimate form of personal and business communication. It’s non-realtime, polite, indexable, searchable, cross-platform, and easy to use. The only problem I face right now with my favorite little mode of communication is the perfect way to access it.

I have over 6Gb of server side email with three different IMAP stores spread across the globe. I send and receive anywhere from 50 to 300 emails a day (in my personal life – closer to 1000 if you include my work life) and need a way to manage that incoming email as well as to refer back to it from a number of different platforms.

I use IMAP because it stores my email server-side and allows to to connect and synchronize a number of different clients. I have Windows, OS X, and Linux boxes floating around my house, and a number of phones and PDA’s which I use to keep up to the minute with email on the road. Having my main mail store be a server makes for easy mail setup – just point a new client at my mail stores and let them cache content to their hearts content.

I’ve used a lot of IMAP clients in my day (more than I can count), and none of them seem to really meet my bill of perfect. All I want is something fast, flexible and fully featured that I can rely on to never crash.

Here are my favorite email clients at the moment with my thoughts on each. Do any of my readers have any suggestions of clients I could try that might meet my needs and overcome some of the flaws of their brethren?

Apple’s Mail.app
Mail.app is close to perfect, but not quite there. It’s a friendly, easy to use interface, provides indexing and searching via Spotlight, and easily handles downloading from multiple IMAP stores. It’s stable, has great performance even on older machines, and has a great plugin architecture for adding things like PGP.

It’s flaws: difficult to configure advanced IMAP options (how to handle sent mail, rules support is a little lacking) and a serious bug for IMAP where the read/unread flag on messages sometimes flips about randomly making mail management difficult.

Windows Mail (the Vista version of Outlook Express)
With Windows Vista Microsoft has done a bit of work to help the aging Outlook Express client along. It’s a bit faster, and now includes indexing and search features thanks to Vista’s Windows Desktop Search technology. The interface has not changed in a while, and it’s not the most feature complete mail client in the world, but it would for the most part meet my needs.

Where it falls down? Windows Mail has some stability problems (which hopefully will be fixed before Vista releases) particularly when dealing with large IMAP stores. I have over 6 gigs of mail on IMAP servers across the world, and Windows Mail chokes quite frequently when doing send/receive’s to synchronize it’s offline cache. Windows Mail has built in certificate support for email verification, but no good PKI solution for sending mail to PGP users.

Outlook
In a phrase: Outlook has a fat ass! Outlook is by far the most fully featured mail client out there – in fact it barely even qualifies as a mail client any more and is much more of a portal to the enterprise world. Calendaring, tasks, resource allocation – it does it all. Unfortunately with this glut of features it’s bloated, slow, and only barely more stable than Windows Mail. Outlook is also very Exchange centric. Exchange is wonderful for the enterprise, but with the ability to only connect to a single Exchange server per Outlook install it falls flat on its face when it comes to consumer scenarios. Outlook is also a fairly poor IMAP client insisting on caching items locally, and making the invalid assumption that it’s the only client that will be connected to the server at any given time.

Thunderbird
Thunderbird is the “odd bird out” in this flock. It’s fast, stable, and has pretty much all the advanced security, mail management, and encryption features I could want. To boot it’s free and open source software and has a thriving development community behind it. Given that it’s cross-platform and highly configurable I would use it exclusively if it were not for a few fatal flaws.

Thunderbird has no good indexing and search story – something that is becoming more and more critical as people become more and more dependent on mail clients to manage and store incoming information for them. This would be easy to fix if Thunderbird would abandon their monolithic mailbox store format and adopt a single file per email plain text solution enabling both Spotlight and Windows Desktop Search to index them.

Thunderbirds other fatal flaw: it’s ugly. I recognize that it’s difficult to develop software for multiple platforms and make it look good on them all, but that’s why I feel that Thunderbird should fork their UI development significantly more. Make the OS X version feel more like Mail.app and the rest of the Aqua desktop environment. Make the Windows version feel less like Linux, and more like a part of the Windows family.

Webmail
Webmail can be a good thing – I occasionally use webmail to access a few of my accounts IMAP stores and find it to be an adequate substitute for a real client in a pinch. The fundamental flaw all web based mail solutions offer is that you need a browser and internet connectivity to access them – no working on mail while on the road or in a plane – no offline cached mode whatsoever. Sadly when you are as e-mail centric as I am no web based solution comes even close to being a full time solution.

Gmail gets close, but it’s inability to give a good experience on a mobile device shoots it right in the foot. Yahoo and Hotmail have even worse experiences on the web (with Hotmail being by far the worst), and don’t even really offer a good story when it comes to mail on a PDA or phone.

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