Baby Kit

A piece of technology I have been using non-stop lately is a Trendnet wireless security webcam to watch my daughter when she's sleeping in the other room. It's a surprisingly versatile yet inexpensive piece of equipment. It streams amazing quality video (i can see her breathing.. which crazy as it sounds i'm constantly looking for) , lets me control wherether audio in (or out) works, has night vision, and so far has easily withstood five simultaneous connections. Because it's wireless i can move it around the house easily... which mean my wife can watch us play when she's at work. My mother in arizona is also a frequent watcher. They each have their own unique logins as well. The client is java/activex so it works from firefox, ie, or safari. Though the activex gives you a few more options than the java version.

Here's a screen shot:

Back to basics.

I haven't posted to this blog in quite some time. I've been, in fact, posting to my daughter samantha's blog.

I haven't had the opportunity write about or even pursue the tech I'm interested in for a bit. I will once again rededicate myself to writing in this fricking blog. I think however I have to expand it a little bit to cover more general tech I get to encounter while working and programming as well as the entertainment/tv tech i wanted to focus on.

Be seeing you....

Carl Zeiss Cinemizer

Thanks to a link from Gizmodo I signed up for a marketing trial of the the Carl Zeiss Cinemizer. I get to test it for two weeks. Every other one I've ever tried didn't work particularly well.. lets hope these are better!

Recording Video

So i've been playing with methods to record my XBMC experiments and found that pointing the xacti at the screen wasn't working very well. (ie the video sucked). I tried recording the screen w ith Jing and while the result looks fabulous it's too big to fit into the blog page properly. The smallest I can make is 800x0600. Then fortunately I found that Snapz Pro was part of the last MacHeist and i have a license key. It takes great looking video that i can shrink down using quicktime (or even Jing on a shrunked quicktime player). So i'll finally be able to post some interface video shortly.

Samantha in a Town called Happiness

This video was generated by Animoto.. an online service that anaylzes music and adds your pictures to it in a rock video manner. It's excellent quality and a really smart business model. They allow shorts of up to 30 seconds for free but $3.00 for a longer length video. I already know I want to extend this footage of my daughter.

Live Video

If you scroll to the bottom of this page you'll see two new players are at the bottom. One is the CouchPotatoTech channel on ustream.tv. The second is live streaming from my cell phone. They'll be dark most of the time.....

Someone beat me to it.

Ok I was debating between using XMBC as the player app and writing my own file browsing system with vlc as the player. Tom Robinson has apparently started an ipod touch extension onto XBMC (xbox version) and it's probably a great working start to port to the mac version.
His site is at http://tlrobinson.net/projects/xbmciphone/