First experiment with Imovie '09

This weekend I bought Ilife '09 for the mac. The software packet has four components : Iphoto, Imovie, Garageband and Iweb. So I played around with Imovie '09 and made a small project with my ski trip movies I shot with an Panasonic DMC-FS3. The movies are 640x480 and come in a .mov file container. The video tracks are encoded in Photo Jpeg and the audio tracks are in 8-bit unsigned mono 8KHz. The resulting movie project is uploaded to Youtube by Imovie's built in share function. Here's the result:

The soundtrack is from World of Goo. The track is "Brave Adventure" by Kyle Gabler.

I really enjoyed using Imovie'09 for this task. I works fast and intuitive. It proves that the choice to abandon the timeline is really working out for consumer oriented movie editing. Time will tell if this will also hold for professional editing. Imovie'09 has an export to Final Cut Pro (Apple professional editing program). Hence an escaped path is on board.

Back from ski trip

Back from a skitrip in Nassfeld, Austria in Hotel Berghof with the Sporty organisation. Enjoyed good things in life.

Sync Nokia 6124 Classic contacts with Google Sync via SyncML

I own a Nokia 6124 Classic since a few months. It's the entry model employees get from my employer. Since I work on mac, I could not sync the contacts because there is no free Isync plugin available yet. Recently, Google Sync was announced. It worked very good to sync my contactc on my Iphone with my Google contacts. I use Google Contact as my main database. Hence, I begun to wonder if I could sync my Nokia using Google Sync. Based upon the instructions from Google for another type of Nokia phone, I was able to derive a working setup. Here are the instructions:

1. From the main menu, go to the "Settings" folder and select "Connectivity".
2. From the Sync screen, select "Options"->"New sync profile" and enter the following:
3. Sync profile name: Google Sync
4. Select "Applications" then "Contacts"
5. Include in sync: Yes
6. Remote database: contacts
7. Synchronisation type: Both Ways
   
8. Select "Back" then "Back" then "Connection settings"
9. Server version: 1.2
10. Server ID: Google
11. Data bearer: Internet
12. Access point: Always ask
13. Host address: https://m.google.com/syncml
14. Port: 80
15. Username: username@gmail.com (fill in your own username)
16. Password: the password of your Google Account
17. Allow sync requests: Yes
18. Accept all sync requests: No
19. Network authentication: No
20. Select "Back", "Back" and then "Exit" to save the settings
21. You have now finished the setup

To perform the sync operation, take the following steps:

1. From the main Settings menu, select "Connectivity".
2. From the Connectivity menu, select "Sync"'
3. Highlight your Google Sync Profile.
4. Select "Options" and click "Synchronise".
5. Select your access point: Px Live (depends on your configuration)
   
6. That's it. Your 6124 Classic will now connect and sync its phonebook with your Google Contacts. The contacts on your phone will appear in your google contacts and all your Google contact are stored into your phone. If you don't want this, change the value for the synchronization type set in step 7 of the setup

The synchronisation goes via Internet over the air (OTA). The next I would like to find out if i could pair the phone to my mac via Bluetooth and use the internet connection of my mac to do the synchronisation. I don't now if that possible. On the other hand, the synchronisation of my 800 contacts or so only took a few minutes, so I don't know its worth the hassle.

Login failed for EA Spore : solution on Mac OSX

I bought the galactic version of Spore when it was released in Europe on 5 september 2008. Since then, me and my two kids of 8 and 10 years old, enjoyed playing it offline. Due to some strange reason, I could not get Spore online. The error messages were different over time but last month I got a message something was wrong with privileges. I tried to change my password but that did not help. Finally, I found "What do I do if I get the error: 'Login failed: You do not have the proper spore.com privileges'?" on the support site of EA. Unfortunately, the explanation is windows only. But after some sniffing around I found the login.prop file on OSX :
You can find the file as follows:

1. Go to your home directory
   
2. Double click on Library
3. Double click on Preferences
4. Double click on SPORE Preferences
5. Double click on p_drive
6. Double click on User
7. Double click on Application Data
8. Double click on Spore
9. Double click on Preferences
10. In this folder there will be a file login.prop, right click and delete this file and try Spore once again.

After the login.prop file was deleted, Spore asked for a new email/password/nickname combination (or you can login with you EA account). You can find our Spore creatures under the name losesi.

Happy sporing

Canon EOS 5D Mark II : a game changer

Recently, Canon made available a new picture camera that might become a game changer. A good preview, based on a preproduction sample, is made by dpreview. The reason that this camera generates high expectations is twofold : a 35mm (full frame) sensor and the new Digic 4 processor. The large sensor means wide angle shots and excellent low light performance. The new digic 4 processor means that now you can record video from that excellent sensor with a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels (Full HD) at 30 frames per second. Hence, we might see a crossover happening from the photo camera business to the video camera's. The first results are indeed stunning. First, there's a professional made movie called "Reverie". A second movie, made with much lower budget, still captures my imagination:

Tokyo Reality (Canon 5D MarkII) from utsuru on Vimeo.

The resulting movie files are Quicktime Movies encoded using MPEG-4 AVC and uncompressed PCM sound (a total of 38.6 Megabits/second).

I asked Eirik Solheim (Project manager, development department
at the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK)), who already has an Canon Eos 5D Mark II two questions:

1. How is the process of getting the video into Final Cut Pro. Is there decoding/transcoding going on. If yes, does that take time ?
   Answer: You don’t have to transcode, but at this point you would probably end up transcoding: the files are standard H264 and can be edited directly in Final Cut. But the problem is that you need very powerful hardware to edit full HD H264 in Final Cut. If you want to edit on a laptop you have to transcode to Apple Intermediate or another less compressed format.


2. Video quality is amazing judging the videos that already circulating in the net. But how about audio ? How does the build-in microphone performs and what do you get if you connect an external passive microphone. This issue will determine if external audio recording is still necessary or not.
   Answer: With the tests we have done the audio is OK, but not good. Using the internal mic on the camera has serious limitations of course. Picking up the sound of all operations you do on the camera and the image stabilizer motor if you use an IS lens. With an external mic it is better, but still a bit noisy.
   For professional productions you would be better off recording audio with a separate device. For interviews and simple background audio you could do with the built in audio and preferably with an external mic.

To test how my macbook pro with a 2.33 GHZ Intel Core 2 Duo processor would be able to handle the HD files, I downloaded the full HD version of "Tokyo Reality" via bittorrent. Playback on the macbook pro was unfortunately not smooth. On an Imac, playback was perfect. Hence, I guess my macbook pro will not be powerfull enough for working with Full HD files coming from the Canon 5D. Maybe a new technology, called OpenCl (Open Computing Language), will solve this issue. OpenCl makes it possible for developers to efficiently tap the vast gigaflops of computing power currently locked up in the graphics processing unit (GPU). With GPUs approaching processing speeds of a trillion operations per second, they’re capable of considerably more than just drawing pictures. OpenCL takes that power and redirects it for general-purpose computing. OpenCl is a new powerful Snow Leopard technology.

Wifi on steriods in the USA

While all news is currently alloted to the presidential campaign and the election of Barack Obama, on Tuesday 4 November another important vote was casted. The American regulator of the airwaves, FCC (Federal Communications Commission), voted 5-0 for the use of the white spaces between the television channels. Current wifi equipment makes use of the 2,4 GHz band (or the 5GHz band for more modern equipment supporting 802.11a/n, for example Apple Airport Basestation Extreme). The new vote of the FCC means that new wifi equipment will be able to use the unused white space between the channels alloted to TV. Why is this important ? The reason is that the TV spectrum has better characteristics for in home use. The UHF band, used for televison distribution, spans from 300MHz upto 3GHz. Lower frequencies have larger wavelength. Therefore they propagate better trough walls and other obstacles typically encountered in urban environments. It boils down that using the white space frequencies will lower the cost for providing ubiquitous wireless networks. Hopefully we will see more wide area wifi networks that provide free or cheap internet access in the near future.

More info:

• A vote for broadband in the "white spaces", Official Google Blog


• Open skies for white space broadband as FCC gives thumbs up, Ars technica


• Google’s Election-Day Victory: FCC Approves Unlicensed Use Of “White Spaces” Spectrum, Techcrunch


• Simply Explained, Cartoon by Geek and Poke


• FCC okays white space spectrum for wireless service, Telecom Magazine (thx, Kris for the tip)

On the workfloor

My collegue is wearing this T-shirt this week.

Iphone friendly version of this blog cast42

Apple's Iphone and Ipod Touch can render this blog using mobile Safari out of the box. Unfortunatly, this might not really what you want. Webservice DoYouFeed.com allows for for an Iphone friendly rendering. Fill in the feed address of your blog, choose a theme and click. Et voila, a link to an iphone optimized rendering appears. You can see the result for this blog at http://tinyurl.com/4cgap6 . It looks like this :

Attending Google Developers Days in London

Google is doing a tour around Europe to get into contact with the developers. Today, I'm attending the developer day in London at the Wembley station. More later.

Added Google Followers to this blog

Google has released a feature that allows you to subscribe to a blog and appear in a public list of all other followers of it. More info by Ionut Alex Chitu on his Google Operating System blog. As an experiment, I added this feature to my cast42 blog. Currently, it looks like this:

A bit sad, zero followers. Probably, this fact, that you have to start from zero, will hamper the adoption of this new feature. Who likes to admit there are no followers ? Secondly, I now have to take the risc that no people are willing to follow cast42 via this new feature. That's a kind of social popularity test. Let's hope that you, yes you, my dear vistors, quickly change that for me ;-) If not, i will have move the followers gadget down under the horizon on the sidebar of this blog and eventually remove it if this social feature doesn't gain traction. So lets see what happens.

UPDATE Sunday 7 september 2008, 21u51: Thx to Hendrik the count changed from zero to one. And you can follow yourself. So now we are with two.

Spore arrived in Belgium, workaround for @ sign on mac

After years of salivation, dreaming and projecting, the mother of all games finally arrived. I just walked into the Fnac of Leuven in Belgium and bought the galactic version for 64,99 euros (the standard version was 54,99 euros). My collegues warned me that I was expecting so much from the game that I could be nothing else but dissappointed. However after the first few hours of play I'm still very excited by the game. It could very well be that Will Wright and his team created another master piece.

Installation on the iMac went smooth. Registration didn't succeed. First, the bug that prevents entering the @ sign on a belgian / belgium keyboard was not solved yet. Just pressing the key with the @ sign doesn't work. A workaround is to use another key shortcut. Type the option ⌥ key and the ` key (that's the key left of the enter key and above the shift key on the right, the superscript is the £ sign). That resolved entering the email addres but then Spore refused to register. Trying a previous account created with the Spore creature editor also failed. Probably, the Spore servers are overwhelmed. Lukily, you can start to play. My seven years old son claim: "dad, this is much better then runescape" !

UPDATE: sunday 7 september 2008:19u30, I got an confirmation mail from EA stating that my registration was successful.

An anthropological introduction to YouTube

presented by Michael Wesch at the Library of Congress, June 23rd 2008. He decided to forgo the PowerPoint and instead worked with students to prepare over 40 minutes of video for the 55 minute presentation. This is the result:

An anthropological introduction to YouTube
I already builded the insight that it's not technology that shapes the future. More important is what people do or don't do with it. It is basically the message of Clay Shirky's book "Here comes everybody". Still I found the video of Michael Wesch presentation more insightfull if you're interested in media as cultural and social phenomenon.

More info: http://mediatedcultures.net

QR codes for mobile tagging

A "Quick Response" or QR code is an image that can be decoded into an text. It's like a two-dimensional barcode. Here's an example:

Scanning this picture resolves into the URL of this blog: http://castfortwo.blogspot.com .

This kind of pictures are typically used for tagging. Add the QR code picture to a thing, take a picture of the thing, decode the picture on the thing and there's the text. For example, a link to a website with product information.
You can make your QR code yourself here : http://qrcode.kaywa.com/

Using the Google Chart API, you can also generate QR codes. The URL

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=300x300&alt;cht=qr&alt;chl=Hello|World

generates a QR code for "Hello World":


Changing the parameter chl to the URL of this blog:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=300x300&alt;cht=qr&alt;chl=http://castfortwo.blogspot.com/

gives:


Every BBC programme has also an QR code. Just add /qrcode to the URL.
For example, the URL of the Top Gear programme is:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006mj59
Adding /qrcode gives:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006mj59/qrcode

which render to:


There are several free applications on the iphone that can decode QR codes:

• Barcode


• NeoReader


• iDecode


• 2D Sense

Several other mobile phones have such application to.

The BBC has even succeeded in tampering the QR code for the bbb.co.uk/programes URL such that the BBC text is clearly readable:

Eric Schmidt at the Management Lab Summit

The ceo of Google, Eric Smidt, was announced to speak at a management summit on May 29, 2008. But instead of speaking he just opens the floor for questions. If you're interested in innovation, this "converstation" is a must see.

Video: Eric Schmidt at the Management Lab Summit

Dilemma

Nice short movie:



Dilemma

About brands, strategy and innovation

I'm often involved with strategy and innovation affairs of the public broadcaster that employs me. But branding was something I walked around and left to the professionals. Since I saw the presentation of Marty Neumeier titled "Brand Gap: how to bridge the distance between business strategy and design" :

it all ties together. Strategy, branding and innovation fit into a bigger picture. Thank you Marty for providing your presentation. I'm considering buying your books.

New 2.0 firmware for Ipod Touch

I'm a happy owner of an Apple Ipod Touch 16GB. Today, the new Iphone 3G is launched. With it comes new firmware. The firmware is also available for the Ipod Touch. You can buy it for 10 dollar. Iphone firmware 2.0 is for free (meaning Apple is getting 10 bucks from you in an other way). I bought the 2.0 version because my employer uses Exchange. Until now I was using Google but small details prevent me to transparently interact with my work collegues.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Before you upgrade to version 2.0 you must upgrade Itunes to 7.7. One of the nice features, that comes with Itunes 7.7 is that it allows syncing your Google Mail contacts with those in Addresbook and on the Ipod in both ways. Just connect the Ipod with the USB cable to your labtop, fire up Itunes and go to the info tab :

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Now we have to wai untile the Itunes server become available. It seems they are flooded massively by al the new iphones. Let's hope Apple sorts this out soon.

No download mac version of Spore Creature Editor

UPDATE sunday 14 september 2008, 22u08: A download of the complete Spore game for mac is available here : http://www.gametreeonline.com/product.php?productid=16168
(Thx, matt)


UPDATE za 21 juni 2008, 11u30: A download version will become available by Gametree (hopefully soon).

Being delighted with EA's Spore Creature Editor free demo (I excuse them for the bugs), I preordered the full version for 6,99 euro. When the transaction was cleared, I got an email with a download url of the PC version instead of the MAC version. Moreover, it turned out that I had to use EA download manager that is only availble for PC. Today, I got an EA support mail stating that the full version of the EA Spore Editor is only for PC. Lukily, they kindly suggest a refund. I guess EA is more concerned with the Take-2 takeover than building support for games on mac.
Fortunately, this is now cleary indicated on the spore website (it was not when I preordered the full editor):

No download mac version is available. Only the box version is for mac.

Spore Creature Editor Demo is available

Here you can download the free demo of the Spore Creature Editor. This is what my nine years old son made:


I preordered the full version of the Spore Creature Editor for 6,99 euro. For the moment, I can't find the download link. I think it has something to do with the clearance of my visa card.

Also in the free demo, I could not type the @ sign. Very inconvenient because you need to enter an emaik adress to register. This does not work from an Belgian keyboard. A first i8n bug ??

Making popcorn with a gsm is a spoof

Also three bananas are extremely dangerous ;-) :

(thx, bnox for the tip)

The gsm-popcorn movies are viral marketing from a bluetooth vendor Cardo Systems: