Consultancy: Bringing a Beautiful Voice into Internet View

Over a year ago I wrote about my friend Neva:

I wasn’t living in Long Beach when Melissa Etheridge made her breakthrough playing locally at a club called Que Sera on 7th Street (funny that her wikipedia article doesn’t mention Que Sera), but every time I come out and watch Neva I think I’m seeing the beginning of the same thing. – neva rocks taco beach! *video* – May 4, 2008

I don’t remember how long I’d been going to my favorite watering hole, Taco Beach, when I happened to be there on a night when Neva was performing. Nothing formal or flashy, just an acoustic guitar and amazing voice playing over the bar PA, taking the passing attention of the audience between their conversations and drinking. Doing a solo acoustic set in that setting was not for the faint of heart. The audience wasn’t overly obnoxious or disruptive, but I’ve seen pretty talented musicians stare down at the floor, reduced to mumbling through their songs because they couldn’t break through the conversational sound-barrier. Sometimes it seemed to take a whole band to grab the audience’s attention, or at least something electric and loud. Neva had a backing-band a couple of times, but most of the time it was just her and her guitar and she was able to get the whole place rockin’ in her direction.

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Hackintosh as Media Server

This time last year I confessed to one hidden cost I hadn’t counted on in moving to a one-bedroom apartment from a studio: purchasing another TV. Well, I seem to be back at it again, contemplating the not-so-hidden costs of moving from a one-bedroom apartment to a two-bedroom townhouse. This time around, in addition to another TV/monitor, I’m thinking of what to use to “drive” it. What I mean is that I don’t have cable TV and don’t plan to, so I need some kind of media player/server on the three TVs for my music, podcasts, video-podcasts and DVDs. I’ve been toying with the idea of getting a PS3 for the living room and another mac mini for the other bedroom, but I’m not so sure if I’ll be happy with the PS3 playing networked media stored on the mac minis. Then I saw the following segment on the Tekzilla show about building a “desktop” hackintosh (9:30 into the episode), that would make for an awesome media player/server that would be much more flexible than a mac mini. hmmm….

Of course I need to get the paperwork through the over-loaded CA teacher-pension system before spending said moneys. Ack. Fingers tapping.

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Mother of All Funk Chords – Kutiman YouTube Remix

I know something is up when I get a link to the same artist from several completely different sources in one day. Earlier today fellow web-voyager, Linda, sent me a link with the subject line: “Interesting music videos.” Ah, understatement. I loaded the video off of the artists’ site and thought something was wrong ’cause it looked like YouTube but wasn’t. Than this afternoon said artist, Kutiman, was featured on CNET’s Buzz Out Loud podcast, after the crew saw this video posted in Jonathan Coulton’s blog. “What you are about to see,” says Kutiman on the ThruYou website, “is a mix of unrelated YouTube videos/clips edited together to create ThruYou. In other worlds – what you see is what you hear.

According to Coulton, Kutiman is an Israel musician who takes bits and pieces of unrelated musical instruction and amateur performance videos from YouTube and creates something really amazing. Here’s Kutiman explaining how he does it, followed by one of my favorites from his collection:
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DIY Mac Netbooks?

While every mac-fan podcaster I know continues to pine away for Apple to introduce a low-cost small-sized notebook, commonly referred to as a netbook, I heard the most amazing podcast from Victor Cajiao, the Typical Mac User Podcast, where he loaded the Mac operating system on to an Asus Eee PC (one of the more popular netbook PCs) (Episode 155). Yeah, DIY Mac Netbook. Victor said that a friend got him up to speed, but that the details on how to do this can be found at the following link: “OSX86 on an Eee 1000H,” an article on the Eclipse Empire blog. Job’s said last Fall, after introducing the new “solid aluminum” Macbooks, that he couldn’t see anyone putting out a $500 laptop that wasn’t a piece of junk. We’ll see at next week’s Macworld Expo whether that comment ends up with the “no one wants to watch video on an iPod” comment Jobs made some time before introducing the 5th gen video-enabled iPod. But if Apple continues to ignore this part of the market then there might be a number of us who will probably choose to boot up copies of Mac OSX on our tiny little Asus netbooks. jbb

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Spore!

Newest EMDTMS team member, Chris, has been bugging me since we first met to pitch in together so that we can get a copy of the much hyped Will Wright game, “Spore“ together. Watching the embedded DL.TV video below makes me all the more anxious to get a copy (especially the part in the end when the emergency fire-suppression system kicked in!). But I must resist the temptation until I have a better handle on my course before I indulge in the fun that is Spore! Ack, we are such geeks that this is my big temptation this week. Scary. jbb

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Geek Mindmap

I don’t have time to work on my e-Harmony profile or actively pursue that whole thing… but I seem to have time to contemplate future tech improvements of my home system. I originally got the white board to help me map out my FS course plan, but it looks like it’s been drafted to first help me think through fixing tech things at home. Back in the pre-blog journal days I used to spend pages and pages thinking out loud about tech shit that no one else cared at all about. Also, for most, just having a working connection to the Internet, a handful of friends online to chat with and a computer that doesn’t freeze up every 24-minutes is bliss. I have much bigger expectations.

One thing I was really looking forward to when I moved here was setting up my Mac Mini in my living room as a Media Center connected to a big ass* HD LCD/TV. Because of the limited HD space on the Mac Mini I have a horde of external USB hard disks lashed to it where the music, podcasts and movies are stored. It didn’t take me too long to realize that the heat of a typical Florida afternoon…

*NOTE: “big ass” for me means 42″… I don’t really make enough dough to justify a 60″ plasma rig.
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Looking a Little “Boxee” These Days

I love my FrontRow app. FrontRow is an application that comes free with every Mac that uses the simple Apple remote and dead simple interface to view ones TV shows, movies, view photos and listen to music or podcasts. I’ve long lamented that the ones who might most benefit from such a simple and powerful interface (like my folks) probably never will. Well, not being one to rest on previous working discoveries, I heard that someone had ported the X-Box media center to run on Macs, PCs and Linux called XBMC. I’ve been meaning to experiment with it on my Mac Mini for some time now. Well, a new Web 2.0 twist on the app called Boxee has just been released as an Alpha. I’ve just downloaded it and can hardly wait to test it out at home on the Mac Mini. Check out the preview by Veronica Belmont on Tekzilla. enjoy, jbb

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Friendfeed to Replace Twitter?

On today’s “WebbAlert” podcast Morgan Webb questioned whether the micro-blog service, Twitter, is about to become this year’s Friendster. Quoting Tech Crunch and Read-Write-Web, Webb noted the exodus from Twitter to rival micro-blog service, Friendfeed. I haven’t used Friendfeed, but issues with Twitter running slowly or just being down have been so bad that I’ve pulled my twitter-feed from the front page of my website because it was causing load-times to be “hellaciously” slow. Alas, I have accounts with Jaiku and Pownce but haven’t seen anything that leads me to believe that they’ll replace Twitter. Maybe Friendfeed will. Excuse me while I sign up for Friendfeed. jbb

Music/Podcast: WebbAlert – June 30, 2008 from the album “WebbAlert” by MorganWebb

p.s., my new friendfeed handle is jbb

Technorati Tags: blogs, community, friends, internet, podcasts, twitter, video, videopodcast

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Weezer is all about the Pork & Beans

Recently featured on several of the Leo Laporte’s TWIT podcasts, Weezer riffs on Internet Culture, etc…

Technorati Tags: Internet, leolaporte, musicvideo, podcasts, twit, video, youtube

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I’m a TWiT – Now Live Video-Streaming 25-Hours a Week

This past week Leo Laporte went “live” with a proposed 25-hours a week of live Internet streaming video of the goings-on at the Twit “studios” located in Petaluma, California, just over 35-miles north of San Francisco. Laporte says that he wants to claim the Internet video space somewhere between life-cast shows like the one produced by Chris Pirillo and highly produced shows like the ones on Revision3 such as Tekzilla by Patrick Norton and Veronica Belmont and Pop Siren hosted by Sarah Lane and Jessica Corbin. On a recent TWIT roundtable podcast Norton and John C. Dvorak were impressed with the audacity of Laporte’s belief that he can fill 25-hours of on-air content and have it not degenerate into an endless monologue (a la Pirillo’s single camera always-on “show”). When Norton wondered if Laporte’s plan wasn’t going to negatively effect his energy for his Saturday and Sunday 3-hour radio shows, Laporte’s resolve seemed a bit shaken.

Several weeks before, after one of his weekend radio shows Laporte was speaking to his assistant and his chat-room audience and he criticized Revision3 for not going far enough in their shows and for just duplicating the TV-esque formula that they had all worked on when they all worked together at Tech-TV.

Check out my next article when I’ll share more on why Laporte thinks Revision3 is blowing it and his plan to be the Internet (TWIT) King. jbb

Music: Divine Intervention from the album “Girlfriend” by Matthew Sweet

Click here for more on Geoff Smith, also check out his other videos at http://youtube.com/user/ringtonefeeder

Technorati Tags: Internet, leolaporte, media, podcasts, twit, video, videopodcast, youtube

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