Image via CrunchBase

Writing code has been my focus over the past few months, both with personal projects and work, and I’ve given my headphones a good workout. As much as I love to toute my musical savvy, variety is all that I require – I love music, but enjoy hearing a mix of genres and artists. On this front, Pandora is great. If you just want someone to pick the music for you, Pandora will do that task very, very well.

However, sometimes I want to listen to someone specific rather than a style and for this, I’ve turned to Spotify. Spotify has an enormous library of songs and you can chose exactly what you want. My brother in law, a jazz guitarist from Toronto named Andrew Scott (look him up) is in their library. That is awesome. Did I mention that the service is free? If you sign up you get 10 hours free music listening per day – about the length of an average work day plus commute (coincidence? Ha!)

That’s not even the best part – the mobile app is fantastic. You need a premium account, which goes for 10 dollars a month, but it’s worth it. You can download your music to your iPhone/Android and listen offline. Perfect for those who want a large selection but don’t want to waste their data plan on Pandora.

A surprising bonus: you can discover new music using sharemyplaylists.com, a collaborative spotify playlist sharing service. Here you can find new music, check out oldie playlists and share your creations. I needed an option like this when I logged into spotify for the first time – there is so much choice that it’s difficult to know where to start.

Ultimately, I use both accounts. My Pandora stations are a great way to discover new music and Spotify fills the gap when I want something but don’t want to shell out for the album.

Give both services a try and let me know what you think. You won’t be disappointed either way…

~ab

The first step is to get the right hardware (a TV or blue ray player is probably easiest, but you can also use game consoles and other toys). Here is the list of “Netflix ready devices”.  If you’re thinking of buying a TV, why not aim for one that is Netflix ready?  If you’re kids have a console chillin’ (or you do secretly), why not use it for some free vids?  Whatever device you get, it just needs to be on the web and connected to your TV.

Once you’re setup on the hardware, the rest is easy-peasy.  When I go into Netflix, I head over to “Watch Instantly”.  This is old news – I used to sit in front of my PC and click “Play” to watch a great selection of old and new films and TV shows.  What’s new and amazing (to me) is this button:

If you click it, the media you’ve chosen can be viewed by devices other than your computer.  On your device (TV, blue ray player, etc), you just need to go to the Netflix application and voila! You’re choice is there to watch!

I should point out that you need a good internet connection if you want to stream HD movies to your TV.  If you’re planning on doing this over a wireless network, I suggest that you bolster your wireless signal to as close to MAX as possible.  You’ll need every bit of it.  I’ve written about wireless networks before, so read this if you need help.

And then… well, you’re done! You can now watch movies from your Netflix enabled device. There isn’t much more for me to say. In the end, this is more of a hardware look-what-is-possible post than one about software.  I hope you get to play with this technology soon – you’re missing out!

Enjoy,

~ab

What?  Almost 6PB?  I have that much data on my external hard-drive?

What is funny about this, at least in a geeky way, is that 6 Petabytes is a lot.  In fact, it’s so much, that I couldn’t name a single natural or man-made quantity even approaching a PB (and my spell check keeps telling me that it’s not a word).

To prove a little explanation, I did a little searching and found a few interesting hits.  For example, James Cameron’s 3D money suck Avatar takes up 1PB when it’s fully rendered.  The same article claims that a 1PB MP3 at standard quality would play for 32 years.  This site claims that all the US research institutions combined would equal 2 PB.

In a effort to get my head around this, I did a little math.  0.001 PB is a Terabyte.  Terabytes are becoming more common these days and I think I’ve got a good grip on those.  I tend to thing in terms of DVDs.  Your average DVD is about 8 Gigabytes.  Therefore a Terabyte is about 125 DVDs and a Petabyte is 125 thousand.  That is about the same as every single movie made in the world between 1999 and 2007 (Source).

Side note: Despite all this fun, you might be asking “what the heck is a byte anyway?”  The answer is simple if you’re talking about text.  Open a new text document and type 1 character.  Save it and the file will be 1 byte large.  If you’re talking about images, movies or even word docs, there is no human equivalent – to explain we would need to talk about binary, hexadecimals, octets and other nonsense.  Stick with the text answer – 1 character = 1 byte.

The error message was obviously inaccurate.  There is no way that my game required 125 thousand dvds to install.  (If this happens to you, the most likely source was a zip file too large for Windows 7 to handle (5.7GB).)  However, despite the inaccuracy of my error message, the real point is this:  These numbers, strange and somewhat silly as they may be, are part of our lives now.  In my opinion, it’s worth taking a look around and questioning what they mean.

Of all the research I did to write this, this site did the best job of explaining the different terms.  Go check it out!  Also, if you really want to laugh at how geeky programmers are, check out the Wikipedia entry for a “nibble” (1/2 a byte… I’m not even kidding).

~ab

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

Part of the video that I find particularly interesting is the conversation around the magazine cover.  When I was a kid, I got a subscription to Rolling Stone and I’d read it cover to cover.  However, it was the cover art that drew me into each volume, enticing me with (admittedly half-naked) beautiful shots of my favorite stars and short, but catchy taglines.  Here is a link to one of those covers.

I think the issue is larger than just magazines.  We’ve started a fantastic conversion from paper to e-whatever.  However, we’ve forgotten some of our favorite parts – the things that made us read in the first place.  As much as we’d love to pretend, it’s not all about the text.  There is a reason that artists have labored on the surrounding graphics for centuries.

Right now, I’m reading 20,000 leagues under the sea by Jules Verne.  It’s a surprisingly easy read, filled with adventure and lovely science.  The kindle version I’m reading has been cleaned of all images and I can’t help feeling like I’m missing out on half of the experience.  Take a look at this cover (left) of the original book in 1871.  I love the little sea explorers in the bottom left corner and the varied beasts battling it out.  This image was not in my version and I’m glad I went to Wikipedia to find it.

In the end, my thoughts haven’t changed much since I reviewed the kindle for the first time.  The graphics and layouts are the next step.  For the web, we have CSS (cascading style sheets), a method of organizing pieces of HTML (that’s the web language) into a magazine like format.  I apply a “float left” to the image above and the text magically wraps around it.  This can be understood by nearly every browser in the world.  Why can’t we do this for e-books and e-magazines?  We could apply CSS to the dull text of our digital texts and include images without developing anything new?

Anyway, them’s my thoughts.  I’d love to hear what others have to say.  Enjoy the video!

~ab

I made this half-pony half-monkey monster to please you
But I get the feeling that you don’t like it
What’s with all the screaming?
You like monkeys, you like ponies
Maybe you don’t like monsters so much
Maybe I used too many monkeys
Isn’t it enough to know that I ruined a pony making a gift for you?

Something about this video just appeals to my mood right now and the description of a monkey-pony makes me think of the Iphone.  I heard about it first on Mental Floss, a blog that makes a nice change for the normal techie gibberish.  Anyway, here is the video.

Enjoy!
~ab