| Friday, 3 July 2009, 3:30 pm Tags: |
The iPhone reduces resolution on emailed photos (boo!). Here’s the original.
Posted via email from Leo’s posterous
Loading ...| Thursday, 2 July 2009, 11:07 am Tags: |
Henry kills time in the airport lounge. Next stop Tokyo.
Posted via email from Leo’s posterous
| Tuesday, 30 June 2009, 6:19 pm Tags: |
Testing audioblogging using an iPhone 3GS and built-in voice recorder
Posted via email from Leo’s posterous
| Tuesday, 30 June 2009, 7:32 am Tags: |
Posted via email from Leo’s posterous
| Monday, 29 June 2009, 7:55 am Tags: China, Geek Cruises, Travel |
I’m off for China on Thursday with my son, Henry. As you’ve probably figured out by now I love to travel. Last year I was lucky enough to visit Egypt, Australia, and France, but going to Asia has been a lifelong dream. I was a Chinese Studies major in college and yet I’ve never been closer to China than a one week trip to Singapore a decade ago.
I began planning for this trip last year when Neil Bauman of Insight Cruises asked me to go on MacMania 9. I love these Geek Cruises but I’ve been so busy building up TWiT that I haven’t had a chance to take one since 2006. When Neil told me the itinerary included China, Korea, and Japan I knew I couldn’t miss this one.
I’ve been working on four lectures for this cruise: 60 iPhone Apps in 60 Minutes, 60 Freeware Apps in 60 Minutes, Using a Mac mini as a Home Theater PC, and Using Social Media for Fun and Profit. They’re far from done but that’s what trans-Pacific flights are for, right?
The cruise itself is pretty quick and we only get one day each in Cheju, Korea, and Fukuoka and Nagasaki, Japan, so I opted for a one week land tour of China in the week before the trip. There’s no way I was getting that close to China and spending only one day there. Eight days is not nearly enough to see the vast Middle Kingdom, but Don McAllister of Screencasts Online, Henry, a half-dozen other intrepid Mac fans and I will get to hit the highlights: Beijing, Xi’An, and Guilin.
I’ve posted my full itinerary on Tripit.com – what a cool site. You can forward your confirmation emails to them and they automatically build your itinerary, plus there’s an API so a number of third party programs can also use the data.
There’s a free Tripit app for the iPhone but I’m using Travel Assistant Pro instead. It updates flight information and helps you store checklists and notes. Plus there’s a cool presentation mode you can use for check-in at hotels and airports. Friends can view my itinerary on Tripit, too – and I can share details with other members.
I hope to post regularly from Asia. I’m buying an International Data Plan from AT&T for my iPhone and the hotel has broadband. I expect to be using the full social media toolkit including Brightkite, Twitter, Facebook, Smugmug, and Flickr. All of it pipes right into Friendfeed so that’s probably the best place to follow my trip.
Dom’t worry, TWiT will continue mostly intact while I’m gone. There won’t be much live video, but we pre-recorded all The Tech Guy, Security Now, and Daily Giz Wiz podcasts. Additional shows were recorded for FLOSS Weekly, net@night, and Windows Weekly, too. John C. Dvorak will host TWiT on July 5 (tune in early at 5p Eastern/2p Pacific for a special wine Q&A with John). I’m not sure yet who will host on 7/12.
There will also be some special events on TWiT Live. July 15 Chris Marquardt will take over the studio with a full day of photography interviews and information. I hate to miss that! And Alex Lindsay will be in (new baby willing) on many other days to host shows.
I’ll be back live July 19. See you then!
UPDATE: Don McAllister has one-upped me with a lovely iWeb page he’ll be using to post from the trip.
| Sunday, 24 May 2009, 8:46 pm Tags: roz rows, roz savage |
Exactly one year after leaving San Francisco for Hawaii, Roz Savage is off on the second leg of her attempt to become the first woman to row solo across the Pacific. She’s already rowed the Atlantic and we covered leg one last summer on the TWiT network. Now she’s at sea again, rowing leg two from Hawaii to the South Pacific.
Here’s video of her departure thanks to Hawaiian web geek (and FriendFeeder) Ryan:
There’s a Ustream stream right now:
We’ll be talking with her live via satellite phone every Thursday at 4:30p Eastern/1:30p Pacific/1830 UTC on TWiT Live or subscribe to the podcast from the TWiT website.
You can also listen on Roz’s site, follow her on Twitter, or via the Roz tracker:
| Sunday, 24 May 2009, 8:16 pm Tags: Google, puzzles, wolfram alpha |
My father-in-law just asked me an interesting question:
How much would an inch of water covering an acre weigh?
It’s not such a difficult question. It seems like a perfect query for Wolfram Alpha.
WA doesn’t get the question at all. In fact, it seems to have classified an acre as an animal. Maybe I should have said hectare? Nope. It does no better.
Interestingly, Google makes solving this problem trivial, thanks to the useful “convert” command. I solved the problem in two steps. (It helps to know that a cubic centimeter of water weighs a gram – in fact, that’s the definition of a gram.)
Convert 1 inch x 1 acre to cubic centimeters -> 102 790 153 cubic centimeters
We already have the answer, 102,790,153 grams, but to put it into terms that are more human I Googled:
and got the correct answer, 113.306748 short tons.
No matter that my father-in-law used a calculator, we both got the same answer, proving that Google is, in some cases, better at numeric analysis than Wolfram Alpha.
The real problem with WA is that it’s not easy to formulate a query that produces the results you’re looking for. Type ‘blood alcohol‘ and you’ll get fascinating results (thanks to Chris Heath for finding that, by the way), but not necessarily results you can expect. And, as it turns out, predictability is an important feature of any search engine, or computational knowledge engine for that matter. Before it’s useful you need to have some idea of what kind of answers you might get, and, for the moment, Wolfram Alpha’s results seem utterly random. I’m rooting for it, but it may be that it’s just too smart for The Rest Of Us.
(Thanks to Edward Coffey who points out that the query “1 acre * 1 inch * 1g / cubic centimetre” works on Wolfram Alpha. Quite well, in fact. But I don’t think that changes my point.)
| Wednesday, 15 April 2009, 6:03 pm Tags: TWiT Live |
Thanks so much to Graphics Point Engineering LLC for writing an amazing Windows app for watching TWiT Live. You can choose from the Bit Gravity, Ustream, and Stickam feeds, chat in the IRC or Ustream chat rooms, visit other TWiT sites, and even listen to Geoff Smith’s anthemic “I’m A TWiT” song.
Download a copy for any version of Windows here.
For Peter Elst’s Adobe AIR app that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux, read on!
| Wednesday, 15 April 2009, 3:55 pm Tags: adobe air, Software, TWiT Live |
The great Peter Elst has done it again.
The TWiT Live Desktop 2.0 is out. It’s written in Adobe AIR so it will work on Windows or OS X…
If you don’t have AIR already installed the installer will download and install it first, then install the app.
A couple of things you need to know about using it. Double-click on the video to go full-screen. Right-click (or control-click) on the window to get the pop-up menu. From there you can open the Interactive window which has links to chat, the Army, the calendar, and more.
A really nice, minimum screen real estate, maximum functionality app from Peter. Thanks!!!!
| Wednesday, 8 April 2009, 12:28 pm Tags: |
Posted via Pixelpipe.
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