19 Responses to “The Global Geek Podcast #77 :: Well Oiled”

1. Jessica Says:
   February 20th, 2008 at 1:10 am

   Hey guys!

   Thanks so much for podcasting about PicLens 1.6. We really appreciate it.

   PicLens 1.6 with the 3D Wall is now available for Firefox AND Internet Explorer (Win and Mac) — PicLens is also compatible with Safari, with the 1.6 version coming soon. Your listeners can automatically download the right version based on their browser by simply visiting http://www.piclens.com. In case readers are interested, our video demo can be found at http://piclens.com/demo.

   You guys may also be interested in our PicLens plug-in for WordPress, which basically enables images on your blog to be viewable in a full-screen slideshow. Those with the PicLens browser add=on get the added benefit of viewing your images on the 3D Wall. Lots of fun.

   Thanks, again.
   Jessica & The Cooliris Team

2. Herne Says:
   February 20th, 2008 at 11:30 am

   “Contextual Ads,” the Web2.0 version of the “wardrobe malfunction.”

   I’m glad that I haven’t bought any HD or Blu-Ray DVDS. I don’t even have an HD-capable TV yet…although it is on my list of things to buy for my new condo. Every man needs a large 1080p for his bachelor pad. You know that there was a basket-load of cash thrown out by Sony to convince the big distributors to switch to Blu-Ray. And Cait…there will always be prOn–there was prOn in the 1800’s, there will be prOn after Blu-Ray.

   Re Video Games being the root of all evil–If you’re a parent and you’re not completely aware of what you’re kids are doing, then you’re not doing your job as a parent. Ignorance isn’t an excuse for poor parenting.

   Re eBooks–I read a lot of books (as Dave does) and I would probably never buy an electronic book. Although, having said that, that statement might not hold true for computer-related books, such as books on CSS, HTML, or specific software, etc that is constantly changing. In those cases I might buy an eBook if the revisions were included in the initial price. For me there is no substitute for holding a book in my hands when I read it, and then saving that book in my collection after I have read it. Just having the physical object means a lot to my reading experience. Sure, you can save an electronic file but it doesn’t have the same impact on me as walking over to my bookcase and looking at all my “treasures.” If book companies want me to start buying eBooks then they should consider including the eBook in the price of buying the physical copy of the book. I would pay a few dollars more if say a PIN number was included with the book I bought and I could go online and download the eBook version of the novel I just purchased. Also I very, very rarely buy hardcover books because I feel that, for the most part, they waste valuable paper resources. I’m not talking about something like a cookbook or a coffee table book, I’m talking about your usual “New York Times Bestseller”-type book that people will buy for $35, read, and then throw away. Publishers should either release the mass market paperback edition at the same time as the hardcover, or do something like switch over to a smaller format hardcover that includes say a CD that contains the text of the novel for eBook readers. I hate seeing shelves full of “throw away” hardcover novels of stories that I want to read and having to wait a year for the paperback version to come out so I can purchase it. I also like the idea of making eBook readers cheaper to promote purchasing, because there’s no way I would lay out $400 for something like a Kindle if I could only read proprietary formats on it.

   Re Social Networking sites–I think Facebook has just about come to the end of it’s usefulness. As Cait said, there’s far too much spam in FB, and personally I’m not interested in slogging through a bunch of crap advertising just to talk to my friends. I can email my friends just as easily.

   Re US Military–I’m not sure I want the US firing missiles into Canadian airspace… I’d hate for us to get “Cheney’ed” by an errant rocket. I imagine the Canadian government looked up from their Tim Horton’s and donuts long enough to say “Eh? Suuure, shoot away!” to the US request as our gov’t generally just goes along with everything the US asks. Although I find it interesting that there’s a story out right now about US recalling 143 million lbs of (mad cow tainted) beef recently and nobody seems to care. Yet when there was a beef scare in Canada a few years ago, the US immediately banned all Canadian beef imports! So it’s ok for the US to export mad cow disease, but nobody else can.

   Re WinOff–it’s called a power button. Use it. Sheesh.

   Re PageOnce–I don’t think I’d be giving any one website access to all my Internet activity in one place. If you can see it, then someone else can see it too.

   Re PDF readers–A fast version would be very nice. I work in the Graphic Design industry and PDFs are pretty much an everyday occurrence and I pretty much have Acrobat 7 open all the time. Preview does a pretty good job, but I still prefer Acrobat.

   Re Online C64 Emulator–Sweeeet! Do they have Jumpman? I need to dig up my “I Adore My 64″ button. I went from a C64 to an Amiga2000 before I got a PC in…1999? I also used to use a Commodore PET in school.

   Re LinkBunch–How long before someone uses it for a PornStorm?

   Dave–WYSIWYG is pronounced “wizzy-wig.” “Cache” is pronounced “cash.”

   I still need to send a voice comment at some point… I wonder if I could record something through Audacity and play it through to MyChingo?

3. George Says:
   February 20th, 2008 at 12:52 pm

   wow!

4. Raf Says:
   February 20th, 2008 at 1:42 pm

   I have a question especially to the Mac lab rat. Is there a way to set the size of the buffer for audio streaming in iTunes? I don’t want to be a N00b and have only 3 stupid settings like: small, medium, big or whatever they came up with. Even winamp lets you set the size in Kbs :/.
   As for the iPhone, I will not buy it because Apple has made the dumbest decision for the UK market yet. They went with O2 instead of T-Mobile here even though T-Mobile Germany has the iPhone. The sole reason they should’ve gone with T-Mobile UK is their mobile web offer. You can browse up to 3 GB per month on your mobile with a standard monthly fee. O2 charges you like crazy for the web. Why bother buying the iPhone if I’m counting every byte in my browser???
   T-Mobile has some kind of replacements from Samsung or LG and I think I will go for that with my next sign-up. Opera Mini is enough for me, no need for Safari in such case.

   Cheers,
   Raf

5. Kaity G. B. Says:
   February 20th, 2008 at 4:19 pm

   I’m still working on getting emails to you all,

   Since you kinda went on &on about acrobat reader’s major suckage so I’m commenting on one Firefox extension that solves this issue completely. So just one quick note+app+firefox extension. Its called ‘PDF Downloader’; on Mozilla Add-ons its address is: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/636 - its official site is: http://www.pdfdownload.org/

   What it does is whenever Firefox encounters a URI for a pdf it’ll pop-up a prompt that’ll let you either: Cancel It, Convert it to HTML, Download &Save, or Pass it on to Firefox. Which’ll than open using its default setting: i.e. load it using whatever plug-in you might have; prompt to open, save, or etc.

   So just a quick &easy to use &install work around for the never ending issues around PDFs.

   Lastly, still being wrote from a Dell laptop running software that doesn’t suck… in my case I’m using openSuSE. Which we’re getting ready to release version 11 &it totally kicks ass! &As always your podcast needs more open source news. Something my email discusses in greater detail &who knows you might just get it sometime this month *wink*.
   But anyways back to working on my own podcast. &Especially my web based OSS platform &app that I’m writing to power it. Great podcast, as always. Take care.

   P.S. Your website needs more pink, red, &maroon tones.

6. Global Geek Says:
   February 20th, 2008 at 6:24 pm

   Holy shit Herne… you want to start writing for us???

   Thanks for the early comments, I need to put the kids to bed so I’ll think about these and make a thoughtful comment later.

   Dave

7. Global Geek Says:
   February 20th, 2008 at 7:24 pm

   @Herne: Wow. As for the voice comment, you could always email in the MP3 out of Audacity.

   @Raf: This is typical Apple thinking. I’ve found this type of thing one of the most difficult transitions coming from the Windows world. I’ve been looking around the web and haven’t found any solutions to your particular problem.

   Apple has a tendency to configure applications for the lowest common denominator, and doesn’t bother allowing its more technical users to configure or adjust settings for their own preferences.

8. Herne Says:
   February 20th, 2008 at 10:05 pm

   @Global Geek: True, but then you’d have a return email address! *snicker*

9. Herne Says:
   February 20th, 2008 at 10:15 pm

   @Raf: The best I could find is from About.com which says;

   “If you have a high-speed (DSL or cable) Internet connection, choose the Small streaming buffer size. If you have a slow Internet connection (dialup), choose the Large buffer size.”

   Another site suggests fiddling with the iTunes preference file directly, but this might bugger up the file and you’d have to rebuild it. I don’t see any easy fix to this to get a value in “kb”. Is there a specific problem you’re having with iTunes like streams rebuffering or something?

10. Raf Says:
    February 20th, 2008 at 11:09 pm

    @Herne
    I see you’re becoming a part-time host for the GGP :).
    Sometimes the radio streaming I want to listen to is so dodgy that I need to set it to something higher than Large :]. For example 512kb or more so no matter the quality of the connection the buffer is always keeping up with the play speed.
    But that’s not the real problem here. I want to know how much is Large and how much is Small (and compare it to my Winamp settings) instead of being treated like a baby. There should a non-n00b mode for the iMac. Right now, it would be easier for me to write a bash script on my Mac than to set the buffer size for iTunes, which is funny.

    Raf

11. Herne Says:
    February 21st, 2008 at 5:21 am

    @Raf: Maybe I should become a host on GGP…it certainly needs more Canadian content!

    As for streaming radio, I have my iTunes buffer set on “medium” when I stream radio and I generally have no problem… although I’m on a T3 at work when I’m streaming radio. At home I usually stick to free-to-air radio, or I can get radio stations through my digital tv connection. I would assume that bigger is better and you might want to set your buffer to “large.” At some point, no matter how big you set your buffer, it’s going to depend on your connection to the Internet as to whether your stream drops out or not. Sometimes you’ll just get bad data packets or have problems downstream and there’s not much you can about that.

12. Terry Says:
    February 21st, 2008 at 9:00 pm

    Hi Dave

    Sorry about the crap link, finally got off my arse tonight and set myself wordpress. It’s been a long time coming, cause I still want to post my entries to LJ, but semagic does that, kinda. Little fiddly, but works okay enuogh.

    As for facebook, I suggest you click this link, then once installed click this. It’s a little buggy. Things will be blocked, but you have to click into the notifications menu for the thing to automatically remove but one click is much better than constantly clicking “ignore” over and over again.

    As for DVD “archiving” programs, I suggest ripitforme. You need dvd shrink and dvd decrypter allready running, but it’s a one-click option without having to open multiple programs and it’s better at getting around some of the nastier tricks the new dvds have that the now defunct dvd decrypter has problems with (like casino royale etc).

    Hope that helps!

    Terry

13. Global Geek Says:
    February 22nd, 2008 at 8:25 pm

    @Jessica pleasure, nice application and we love quality apps that people will love. Nice work.

    @Herne as I said you want to start writing for us?

    @George yeah wow - I thought the same thing.

    @Raf thanks mate and it look like you and the Lab Rat sorted a few things.

    @Kaity thanks for the comments. We actually featured PDF Downloader on a previous show But I maintain that since I have used FoxIT I don’t fear, hate or avoid PDF’s anymore. They are just another file format as far as I am concerned. Thanks for the tip though for people that might have missed it. Let us know what your up to and we are happy to let people know on the show!

    @Herne happy for you to join us anytime

    @Terry thanks for the heads up on twitter as far as your comment is concerned. Sorry it was not posted sooner - don’t know why I was not notified. Great tip with the greasemonkey tip. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. Oh and nice work with the new blog. Let me know if you want any tips - been using WP.com for ages and I have a few

    OK I think I got through that lot NEXT!

    Dave

14. Eric Says:
    February 23rd, 2008 at 6:56 am

    re: DVD ripping. I’m thinking there’s a handbrake for win32/fisher price.

    re: US Military. I dont want them at all. We can have state militia to protect us from the MPAA/RIAA/Feds or other invasion.

    forgot what else I wanted to say!

    Oh. Anyone used Multiply? I really have no idea how to follow all of my facebooks groups. It’s rather annoying. Multiply will generate an RSS feed of your contacts posts.

15. Doug Says:
    February 25th, 2008 at 5:51 pm

    Sorry for the late reply guys, been Mountain Bike racing down Jindabyne way. About the BluRay vs HD. I don’t really care, but was hoping HD would win. I only have about 3 dvds in my house, so doesn’t really affect me TO much.
    Another good show!

16. Blogslut Says:
    February 28th, 2008 at 12:02 pm

    Yea I am a few weeks late but…well who cares.

    I think you said at start of show that keith is the only labrat in podcasting. There is a video podcast called The Labrats hosted by Andy Walker and Sean Carruthers who are both canadians like keith and worked on call For help with leo laporte and now his renamed show The Lab..

    Visualhub is a godsend for thos ppl like me who use the global television netowrk for converting files into .H264 for my AppleTV. Download and then run through Visualhub to create an .mp4 file and life is good, defiently recommend to one all even if you don’t have AppleTV.

    I assume Flash Downloader is similar to Tubesock and other tools that download the videos from sites, cept tubesock is limited in that afaik it only does Youtube. This could be a cool tool, then you could convert the videos using Visualhub

    The PDF tools look ok but as Keith mentioned on Mac we have Preview or Quicklook so don’t really need additional oold to look at PDF files as it’s already built in. May need something to edit PDF’s though.

    C64 Emulator seems kinda cool. I actually went spent the big money and got a disk drive for my C64…hmm or possibly I got it from a guy at work. I think I still them in cupboard at home somewhere.

    Linkbunch also seems like a nice idea, may have to have a look at that one.

    That’s all for now

17. Blogslut Says:
    February 28th, 2008 at 12:07 pm

    Just thought of something else.

    For stripping protection from DVD’s on Macs I beieve MactheRipper is the program you wanna use in conjunction with Handbrake. Can’t remember if Handbrake strips it out as well…Keith??

18. Blogslut Says:
    February 28th, 2008 at 12:12 pm

    Edit 2

    For editing and playing with PDF files look at PDFpen for the mac. It is a lil expensive at $49.95 but it is made by the same guys that do textexpander so you know it’s good. Check it out at http://www.smileonmymac.com/PDFpen/

    Also checkout the screencast by Don Mccallister at http://www.screencastsonline.com who dedicated an entire show just to PDFPen. Best Screencasts around BTW.

19. Global Geek Says:
    February 28th, 2008 at 4:41 pm

    BLOGSLUT RETURNS! YEY

    For a moment there I thought we had to settle for Herne Nice to see you BS

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