From Television To Podvision

RSS is coming to your living room, and TV viewing will never be the same again.

Coming to your TV: RSS

UnSnapped

Snap was added to this blog by default by WordPress. There’s been an outcry (not here, though) over its use. I’ve dug around in the bowels of the machinery here and turned off Snap.

Ralph Nader In New York City

The Ralph Nader documentary, An Unreasonable Man, will premiere at the IFC Center in New York City tomorrow, January 31st. Call 212-924-7771 for tickets. Ralph Nader will appear in person.

Go see what a real man of true conviction is like.

Giving PalmOS The Joan Rivers Treatment

But without those scary cat eyes!

Reinventing the Palm OS: A How-To Guide

It certainly needs an Extreme Makeover!

Hello, Saguaro?

Tech prOn: Lifebook 1610

Pictorial: Unboxing the Fujitsu P1610 (at last!)

Well, folks, here they are – the long overdue P1610 unboxing pics. Please note that this is the XP version, not the Vista version that will start shipping soon. Vista benchmarks haven’t been very encouraging so far, and I wanted to keep my options open.

Reminder To Me: Try Serph

Serph

Last spring we started developing Serph, a tool that helps you find what other people are saying on the web right now. For a couple of months now we have slowly been inviting a handful of people into our closed beta for testing and feedback. As of yesterday we have officially gone from a closed beta to a more “open” beta. So if you are interested in trying Serph head on over and signup, we are now letting people in. Read further if you want to know more about our reasoning behind developing it and how it works.

Serph’s Up

LifeDrive Notes: More On Video

Watch Videos and/or Movies on your Palm OS device

AsfTools Official Home Page!

AsfTools is a free windows 98/ME/2000/XP program to process ASF,WMV and WMA files.

Features include:
-Join & Split
-Many different Repairing Tools
-Most operations are done without re-compressing so the quality will not degrade
-Converting ASF/WMV format to AVI
-Extracting audio stream and saving it as WAV
-Converting WMV1/WMV2 format to MP43
-Making the stream files “Seekable”
-Creating ASX file
-And more …

FAQ for above

Zune Review Parts 1 & 2

The Daily Gadget Zune Review (Part 1 of 4)
The Daily Gadget Zune Review (Part 2 of 4)

I’ve been using the software for a while now (I actually downloaded it prior to the Zune coming out so I had an idea of its deficiencies) and the thing that REALLY stands out is how slow the program is. When I search for music on the marketplace, I sometimes wonder if I just locked it up. It certainly has a terrible memory leak because if I don’t restart it every so often, it manages to use all of my memory. It’s managed to replace Firefox as the worst offender on my computer. It’s a shame because the performance takes away from what would be a great experience otherwise. Right now it borders on painful at times.

And this one is really an Ouch!

I have a few other issues with it. Some less important than others. One that really bugs me is that the video categories on the desktop don’t match the ones on my Zune. This results in really no control over where the videos end up. If there is a way I haven’t found it yet and I have been looking because I use video on my Zune almost every day. I’ve gotten used to it now but it still bugs me since it manages music so beautifully. I can only hope that when the Marketplace gets video the video section will get some love. Cause it needs it.

But this intrigues me…

One last note on the content is the Zune Pass. If you like music then it baffles me how one might not be even interested in a subscription service. If you have absolutely no interest in listening to anything other than what you own, then ok. (Your loss I say!) In my opinion though, subscription music is a currently undiscovered treasure by most people. My first exposure to it was when Yahoo offered it super cheap when it debuted a couple years ago. Ever since then, I’ve been hooked. I have nearly 862 songs on my Zune currently and that number goes up every week. In my life I’ve owned 30 albums total. You can do the math real quick and see I’ve increased my music collection by leaps and bounds. It’s not my music but that’s ok. In two months of owning a Zune, I’ve already downloaded enough music that will take 4 years of Zune Pass fees to equal in cost to purchasing it. That’s just in two months. This feature alone is a killer. The Zune may have less songs available than iTunes at the moment but for $15 I have access to almost all two million. On iTunes you’d have access to…fifteen.

Errrr… Because Palm Be Eejits And Palm Desktop Ain’t No iTunes Store Neither!

The Wide-Screen iPod is here already: It is a Palm TX

My wide-screen iPod is my Palm TX. Its 320x 480 display rivals the iPhone’s screen and its screen is 3-3/4 inches wide on the diagonal compared to 3-1/2 for the iPhone and presumably a wide-screen iPod. With it I can play all my music and listen to audio books and podcasts using the pocket tunes application which comes loaded for free on the Palm TX. I have 2-2GB SD cards and a 4GB flash drive. This gives me the equivalent of the high end Nano and the just announced iPhone. I store all the music I value or need on my SD cards. I rip my owned CDs using iTunes, but that is the only thing I do with iTunes.

And this entry’s title inspiration:

Why doesn’t Palm spend some of its advertising budget promoting the Palm TX as a good alternative to an iPod? It runs circles around the iPod and even will when and if a wide-screen version is released!

Yeah, well, that last sentence is really over the top. Go carry around 60-120GB of SDs!

LifeDrive Notes: Video Podcasts, iTunes, Flickr

He’s a very clever one!

Video Podcasts and the Palm LifeDrive Mobile Manager

OK, I finally have a solution for converting iPod centric podcasts into a format that my LifeDrive can digest … it’s a bit of a software engineers solution though.

The reason you need to do this is because video podcasts downloaded in iTunes tend to some MPEG4 format that the lifedrive doesn’t understand.

It’s a solution that lends itself to automation, which is what you want when you’re converting podcasts on a daily/weekly basis.

Using Palm’s LifeDrive Mobile Manager with iTunes [update: link fixed!]
Damn Small Linux (DSL)
Palm TX Internet Photo Frame …

I can now let you download and view your Flickr photostream using a Palm TX (or is it Palm T|X) or Palm Lifedrive.