“Danny Perasa and his wife, Annie, came to StoryCorps to recount their twenty-seven-year romance. As they remember their life together from their first date to Danny’s final days with terminal cancer, these remarkable Brooklynites personify the eloquence, grace, and poetry that can be found in the voices of everyday people when we take the time to listen.”
Truly touching.
Decided to throw together a quick video review and demo of MediaMall PlayOn, a software packaging for media streaming to the PS3, Xbox and other products compatible with the protocol. It supports a wide variety of local file formats, and streams video from sites like Hulu, CNN, CBS, YouTube and more. The plugin architecture allows developers to add support for additional services, and there’s plenty available for sites like Adult Swim and Gametrailers.
Aside from the handy streaming support for Internet video sites, they recently introduced beta support for local file sharing. Unlike TVersity, it worked with every file format I threw at it including the ever-frustrating MKV. The only issue I have is that embedded subtitles don’t appear to be working yet.
[rating:4.5/5]
My folks bought a new house in Arcola, IL, and they’re doing a whole-house remodel of it before we move in. Ironically, it’s located directly next door to a home we lived in 5 years ago, which they also remodeled.
Today I thought I’d try my hand at a video tip, a screencast walkthrough of encrypting your hard disk using TrueCrypt. TrueCrypt whole-disk encryption is a fantastic option to further secure your data against prying eyes, and the software is free and open source. Whole-disk encryption is precisely what you might think it is, encrypting your whole hard disk and locking it down with a password. After your encrypt your disk, you’ll need to enter a password every time you boot up or resume from hibernation to unlock the data on your drive.
Whole-disk encryption is a far superior method of securing your data than BIOS passwords or user accounts; user account passwords are easily bypassed or cracked, and BIOS passwords are locked inside the motherboard rather than the hard drive, so anyone could just yank your drive out of your machine, hook it up to theirs and access your data as if you’d never set a password at all. Whole-disk encryption is per-disk or per-partition, and uses a variety of very high level encryption algorithms, so you can’t get much more secure than this.
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This video is also available on Vimeo, Viddler and YouTube. Please favorite it on your service of choice if you find it useful!
You can download TrueCrypt from it’s website, http://www.truecrypt.org, and if you’d like to use the image burning software I use it’s available for free from http://www.imgburn.com/.
Any questions? Don’t hesitate to ask!
Awesome. I dig the iPhone 3G changes, and love the price tag for the Touch upgrade; MobileMe sounds really great, though it’s lack of support for non-Safari browsers in it’s bookmark sync makes it a no-go for me. I suppose you could couple it with other options, like Foxmarks, but I love an integrated option. Also, Apple’s choice in the “me” font brought back some very bad memories for me.
Here’s the full video, complete with exceedingly boring third party app demos, for the masochists among us.
Everyone’s favorite video sharing community Viddler unveiled it’s new Facebook app yesterday to a select number of beta testers. Colin made use of Twitter and Pownce to invite people to the test, and the demand has been quite impressive.
The Viddler app is everything a Facebook app should be; it integrates seamlessly, is easy to use, and provides a legitimate use. It’s essentially a front end to much of what you can do on Viddler already; you can record and post videos from your webcam right in Facebook, you can watch videos your friends have posted, and you can share videos you have posted yourself with visitors to your profile. Nothing new that you couldn’t do before, but now it’s all wrapped up and tightly integrated, so you can access everything Viddler has to offer without having to leave Facebook.
Here’s a video I recorded from within Facebook using the app:
The quality, as usual, is pretty damn good; what’s more, it’s ridiculously simple to record videos like this. Congratulations to the Viddler team; you’ve done another bang up job here and really raised the bar for video on Facebook.
Want an invite to the beta? Add me on Facebook and let me know.
Earlier this evening Don MacAskill twittered that SmugMug released it’s new Flash-based video player and I must say, it’s very slick indeed. Not many folks realize that SmugMug supports video, but it does a real bang up job of it. If you’re a Power or Pro account holder, you can upload videos up to 2.5 or 10 minutes in length respectively. They don’t cheat you on the quality, either; as long as it’s less than 512MB in size, they’ll take your video up to true HD resolution (1280×720) and encode it in H.264, which is quickly becoming the most popular video compression codec.
SmugMug won’t scale your video to an ugly resolution, or artifact the crap out of it to save space on their servers. It’s just your videos, in great quality, without the bullshit.
Alright, alright; all my sweet nothings about their service aside, I really like what the SmugMug did here. The interface is sleek an unobtrusive, it’s quick to load/buffer/whatever (not sure how that works in Flash exactly, especially since you’re loading an external video file) and… have I mentioned the quality? 
Below is a glimpse of their new Flash-based player in “web resolution” (425×240), which I only chose because of limitations in my own site’s design. Regardless, hit up this page to see it in all of it’s HD glory.
If you want to give SmugMug a try, there’s a free 14 day trial. I recently made the switch from Flickr, and I totally recommend it.
An incredibly thought provoking program on “Web 2.0″, and what it means to the world as well as ourselves as individuals. Fascinating stuff, even if it does feel somewhat biased in it’s representation.
Evan is a Game Designer at High Voltage Software in Chicago. He loves Apples, open source and spending copious amounts of time playing MMOs.
I'm currently playing World of Warcraft, Minecraft and Uncharted 2
