I’m loving my Blender

I bought a blender after years of wanting one. Amazing purchase, nice modern design and reasonable cheap at only 25 pounds. So far I've made some amazing smoothies since.

Last night I threw in 3 granny smith apples, about 6 ice cubes, juice of one orange, a squeeze of lemon juice and a small spoon of brown sugar. Let the blender go to work on the lot and out popped this green stuff which looked like crushed lemongrass. But it tasted so good, like a ice junkie you get from cinemas but without the stupid amounts of sugar. In actual fact I was getting 2 of my 5 fruits for the day.

Today, Green Grapes, Cranberries, Blueberries mixed together till it goes all pink, served in a large tall glass, yum yum.

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Etherpad + Google Wave = Wave

Google buys Appjet the makers of EtherPad and they joined the Google Wave team. And even better they decided to open source Etherpad but keep the current version running while it get opened. Fantastic move on Appjet an Google's parts and the community has nothing but praise for this brave move. Hey and what a way to solve the biggest issue people have with Google Wave, buy the competition and adopt there UI team into yours. Google are on fine form.

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Nows a good time to signup to a la.conica?

Fail Whale

Twitter is down and people are somewhat freaking out. This is a really good time to install a microblogging application which supports not only twitter an maybe facebook like the popular tweetdeck. But instead go for one which supports one of the la.conica servers. Identi.ca is the most popular of the lot but support for the open microblogging service is a good idea. If Twitter does go down for long periods, its maybe time to consider switching over.

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Software ahead of the curve: Verse Protocol

So I've been checking out the project Verse for a while now but kept it kind of quiet for the longest time. Today I broke my silence and gave a presentation at Social Media Cafe Manchester (#smc_mcr) along side other open source software. The problem with verse is its so big (jokes about the universe stand). There's a lot going on in the uni-verse, but lets get back to basics. So what is it?

Our goal is to create an open source Internet platform for multi-user, interactive, distributed, high-quality 3D graphics and audio for home, public and personal use. The platform will support high-quality 3D-graphics as well as high-quality 3D-audio and acoustic simulation.

The foundation of the platform is “Verse”, a lightweight, low latency, general-purpose network protocol for 3D data, which lets multiple applications act together as one large system by sharing data over the network.

Someone called it Google wave for 3D objects and scenes at SMC_MCR and in actually fact their not far wrong. Its not like Second Life because its very open and the client/server setup is trivial. Ok so there's no Federation but I can't even really imagine how that would work if there was. Anyway diving straight in, we have many components to verse. You have the actual protocol which makes everything work then you. One of the founers Eskil Steenberg has created many things on top of that protocol.

Love – Love is alpha game where up to 200 players cooperatively attack a connected city. The game is freely downloadable and only cost 5-10 euros a year to cover the cost of the server load. It recently was on Coop show and theres screenshots on the pages. Another reason why its worth starting with Love, is that Love is the first full implementation of the Verse for public use. Its a stunning game going by the alpha and its videos. Instead of going for super sharp edges Eskil has gone for super soft shading using some custom filters which portray a foggy landscape and steaming summers. I think the game will do well in some circles but don't get me wrong its super impressive what one guy has some up with but what excites me about Verse isn't Love but instead all the other tools Eskil built to support building Love

Quelsolaar – Eskil, cleverly built this render to make Love, Quel Solaar which is a

real time 3D engine designed to take advantage of the Verse networking protocol. It is fully dynamic and requires no pre-processing of data. It has been designed to be used for any application demanding high quality real time visuals, such as games, simulation, visualization, education and social activities. The main difference from other engines is that Quel Solaar is designed to be fully networked. This means that all data visualized in the engine comes from a Verse server and that any part of the scene can be changed at any time. This makes it ideal for collaboration and an array of new applications. For instance, in a game designed with the Verse architecture the game designers can alter the world appearance in any way while players are in the game. You can also allow the players themselves to have the ability to change the game environment.

Loq Ariou is next up which is a 3D modeler that works like a sketch pad if you have a 3 button mouse. I've actually found it almost impossible to use till recently playing with it and following the Manual and videos which explain it better. The interface is puzzling but once you get it strangely natural to use.

The last one is Co On a schematic verse scene viewer and editor.

In Co On you can inspect your data and edit it. Co On includes a curve editor and a material editor with raytraced rendering previews. Co On is the perfect tool for creating and destroying layers, methods, tags and nodes. It lets you edit and keep track over how the data is represented in the verse server format. I've not personally played too much with this yet but its pretty powerful an I love the way everything is hooked together like a semantic diagram. Funny enough, once you get over the control system, the rest seems to get a lot clearer.

Another aspect of verse outside Eskil's influence theres a number of attempts to add verse support to well known and used applications like Blender 3D, 3D Studio Max, Gimp, and many others. One of the most interesting places Verse is showing up in python.

Software well ahead of its curve I think you have to agree? I'm sure there will be more blog posts about aspects of verse in the near future.

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Switched from Storytlr to Soup.io

I just switched ianforrester.org from Storytlr.com to Soup.io. There both lifestreaming services which allow you to attach your own domain but I'm sorry to say storytlr.com is shutting down from New years. There's been talk about open sourcing the platform but to be frank, there's already sweetcron which has also been dropped into limbo when the creator also decided to move on to bigger and better things. It certainly doesn't look too good for lifestreaming apps/services.

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Open Rights Group coverage

I was surprised to hear the Open rights group on FLOSS weekly last week. Don't get me wrong it was all good stuff but its rare I ever hear/see ORG on the channels of communication I'm using. I should blog about the ORG more, but have never the time… Their current big campaign is the three strikes plan which France recently adopted and every one is trying to push through
in many countries
(and there trying to make it 2 strikes instead of 3). Anyway thanks to Tim who introduce me to Dan Bull who seems to be a big big thing in the world of P2P. He has a interesting take on the 3 Strikes bill.

Don't forget to sign the petition at Number 10 downing street, if your a UK Citizen.

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Lily Allen: Bootlegs Ok, Sharing Bad?

Found via Zeropaid, Lily Allen: Sell Bootlegs of My CDs, Don’t Share for Free.

UK recording artist, and vocal anti-file-sharing critic, remarks that she’s fine with people selling bootleg copies of her CDs rather than sharing it for free with others since the person selling it is at least placing “some kind of value on” her music.

“If someone comes up with a burnt copy of my CD and offers it to you for £4, I haven’t a problem with that as long as the person buying it places some kind do of value on my music,” she recently told UK radio station Key 103.

Enter Dan Bull, a musician labeled “one of Britain’s best young songwriters” by Is This Music? Magazine. He’s precisely one of the emerging artists that seems to be using the Internet and the art of the free album giveaway as a means to promote his work and gain fans.

He wrote a melodic rebuttal to Lily Allen’s rantings called “Dear Lily [an Open Letter to Lily Allen],” and posted it as a part of a video on YouTube.

The song really cuts to the heart of the matter and sums up just how short-sighted and naive Allen really is.

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Specs of old and new XBMC box

People keep asking me for the specs of my XBMC boxes. Although I thought I'd done that here (old) and here (new). I've got them line by line now.

Compaq EVO D510 Small Desktop with Intel Pentium 4 2.8ghz processor. 512meg of Ram and 13gig ATA hardddrive. 5x speed creative (no-region) PC DVD drive and GeForce 6200 128meg AGP card (low profile card with DVI output). Came with 2 full PCI slots free and one low profile AGP slot, now have a Trust 7.1 sound card slotted in the PCI slots. Power usage is 185 watts sounds silent unless playing a disc.

Lenovo ThinkCentre M55p Small Desktop with Intel Core 2 Duo 1.86ghz processor. 2gig of Ram an 80gig SATA harddrive. 16X speed DVD-ROM and Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3000 (onboard with VGA output). Came with 1 full PCI slot free and 1 weird (swear its not, some forums say its a ADD 2-R or PEG slot) PCI Express slot, now have a Trust 7.1 sound card slotted in the slots. Power usage is 225 watts but still also silent unless playing a disc.

Both machines are running Ubuntu 8.04.1 with Pulseaudio savaged to not run. The Lenovo has the latest beta of XBMC 2.2 while the Compaq is running the mainline 2.1. The main difference is in the CPU usage.

I ran the Lenovo through some of the most challenging trailers and films I own and it made mince meat of everything. The Sony Advert where the colour balls are bouncing down the streets of San Francisco, you know the one. Well I got that in sub 1080p (1440×1080) and on the old machine playback would drop to sometimes 12fps on intense scene changes. Even the audio would sometimes break up and you could see the CPU running at 100% through out. Now with the new machine its running the whole thing at 40% on one CPU! My ultimate test was the Spiderman 3 trailer which was not only the full 1080p but at a high bit rate only reserved for BluRay. The old box would give up playing this half way through, while the new one got stuck in and hit a CPU peak of 60% for both CPUs. Playback was flawless except 3 frames it had dropped the whole 2mins. On other stuff like my HD Back to the Future and Matrix collection, it was perfect, even with DTS sound. This is what Home entertainment should be like…

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Boxee’s app repository, a game changer?

Plex apps store

I adore XBMC, I really do but I do rate Boxee for everything its doing. The social features are not perfect but far better that I've seen elsewhere so far. While the competition plonk twitter an facebook intergration on top of everything they do, Boxee has weaved in the social to be a core part of the platform instead of on top.

Another key thing I noticed about Boxee since my upgrade is the Apps changes. I've said for years XBMC is the best platform to demonstrate whats possible when you move away from broadcast television to ip based vision. Python supplies XBMC, Plex and Boxee with incredible scripting power and new APIs to manipulate the video and interface. So far the scripting has been all the obvious stuff like scraping websites for multimedia content but recently there's been more DVD like experiences to stuff which you may be downloaded or streamed. So maybe a menu or options to dive into more content that just what's in the linear storyline. Nothing too interactive, just options to play more linear content. But you can certainly see that changing in the near future. And unlike before its going to get very easy to see these apps deployed on your screen.

XBMC has always had the ability to download scripts from the net while sitting in the sofa but its been not very clear or popular. Plex from what I gather (I don't run plex) has a apps directory like you would expect from the Apple store but Boxee has gone one step further by including the option to subscribe to your own repository. So for example, the BBC could have not only its own apps with everyone elses but have a total repository of its own which only includes maybe BBC approved apps. This guy from the Boxxxee adult network raves on about what a game changer this could be and to be frank where the porn industry goes, others do follow.

The “open-ness” of the Boxee platform is what, I believe, will ultimately make it wildly successful. The ability for content creators to instantly distribute their creations to monitors and TV sets around the world is a game changer. Unfortunately, installing a Boxee app manually is a task only a developer (or hardcore tech geek) would feel comfortable with. Surely, for those who are using Boxee free from any keyboard (maybe with the awesome iPhone remote app?) manually installing an app is impossible.

Fortunately, Boxee has a killer little feature called the App Box. Within the App Box, users can add “Repositories,” essentially directories that house third-party applications. Once a repository is added, installing the apps from that repository is a one click process. Developers can add additional apps and they’ll show up automatically in a viewer’s App Box as soon as they are available. I love it!

He's quite right to be excited, I expect the apps will become much more mature and boost levels of interaction which will surprise most traditional broadcasters off guard. If that doesn't get them the ability to redefine the rules of TV within the stream and the media of the box will. Avner Ronen of Boxee asks TV programme producedrs to start changing the way they write programmes to fit with a audiences who don't need a cliff-hanger at the end of each show. Why is a show 22 or 44 mins, why the tricks to persuade the viewer to stay on board in stead of a solid plot?

The issue is that today writers create artificial suspense before commercial breaks and at the end of each episode (to ensure viewers will tune in next week), and they also feel the need to remind the viewer of key plot themes (since it’s been a week and the viewer may have forgotten). When you watch a few episodes over a short period of time these “tricks” are clearly apparent and they hurt real story telling.

The on-demand experience should also put into question other axioms. For example, why stick with the format of 22/44 min long episodes? some plot lines could be longer and some shorter. A show could also be non-linear, letting the viewer follow different paths from different angles, putting new story telling tools in the hands of the writers.

Lastly If you had any doubt, you should be looking at XBMC, Boxee and Plex for game changing ability just consider the amazing things been done in the field of dual screen ability with Xmote (video). Yes its iphone only right now but there has been remotes for other platforms like Android, Symbian, PocketPC and Blackberry. Generally most of the hardwork has been about connecting the two but now that has been solved your starting to see some amazing enhancements like being able to pull up the cast and crew of the film your watching on the big screen without a break in the viewing. So imagine combining this with the ability to script and manipulate the content? Heck imagine doing this with 4 of your friends or the family. What would be possible? I don't know but rather that dreaming about it, the people working on XBMC, Plex and Boxee are prototyping the future, now! Why don't you get involved now?

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Upgrading the Media Centre

XBMC 2.2 beta

I have decided to make the switch from my old but decent Compaq Pentium 4 machine to a brand new Lenovo Dual core machine. Main reason is to get flawless 720p playback and better support for 1080p video. My LCD only handles 720p/1080i but its good to know that the box can playback anything smoothly.

I choose the Lenovo because of the 1.8ghz dual core processor and full size PCI slots. Other machines I have looked at have had half size or low profile PCI slots and to be honest after all the hassle getting the graphics card for the last one, I'm not willing to do it again. The Lenovo has intel graphics (which seem to be accelerated and are open source) which play well with Ubuntu but I was worried about the OpenGL 2.0 support. So far it all seems to be ok. I also gave the new machine a serious upgrade in memory and space. From half a gig of DDR to 2 gig of DDR3 memory.

Upgrading has been a pain. I took the 5.1 PCI sound card out of the old machine and switched it into the new one. Installed Ubuntu 7.10 (didn't have 8.04 cd) and upgraded to 8.04 over the internet before installing XBMC 9.11 alpha. I had to fight to get the display working correctly when the display defaulted to 1360×768 by 60Hz instead of the 1280×720 I wanted. Rather just living with it, I decided to mess with it and got to a point where the display wouldn't show anything. Unlike a normal computer monitor, LCD TV's tend to throw a message up saying not valid signal, which is no use when your trying to work out whats happening. Anyway I got it working and before long was installing XBMC and Boxee. I had previously backed up my XBMC, so once I SSH'ed in and moved things back I was up and running. Next step was the audio which is fiddly because of my setup using the Onyko Cinema Amp. After a long while I setup Ubuntu to output audio over my Cmedia PCI/DNA card, disabled Pulseaudio from starting by changing /usr/bin/pulseaudio to non executing and trial/error in XBMC till it worked. Now I can play Dolby Digital and DTS without a problem. Oh and here was nice bits and bobs which might help with getting a better xbmc experience.

I did some tests with some 720p content I own, and I was shocked at the cpu usage. One CPU core bearly touched 40% and the other one was almost idiling at about 5-10%. When pushed into sub 1080p content (1440×1080) the 1st core touched 50% but never went over it, likewise the 2nd core almost sat idle. All my 1080p content seems to wrapped in a MKV container right now, which currently seems to crash XBMC at the moment. Quicktime also seems to have the same effect currently. I'm sure upgrading to the beta will solve the problem. So far, I'm impressed but my next step is to file some bug reports around MKV files, get XBMC to launch from login like I use to have it an finally autostart with the wiimote

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