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Don't miss Reggie Watts, Mark Frauenfelder, Sparkfun, Techdirt and Sol Design Lab at Expand NY!
With every subsequent post, our excitement for Expand New York grows -- and this is a particularly good one. We might go so far as saying that this is our most exciting speaker post yet, but we'll leave that for you to decide. Improvisational musician / comedian Reggie Watts will be on stage discussing and demoing his sampling setup. We'll also be joined once again by Boing Boing founder and Make Magazine editor-in-chief Mark Frauenfelder, along with Sol Design Lab founder Beth Ferguson, Techdirt CEO Mike Masnick and Sparkfun's educational outreach coordinator, Jeff Branson. And, of course, we've already announced a number of folks who will be joining us on November 9th and 10th, including LeVar Burton, Ben Heck, Peter Molyneux, Ben Huh and folks from companies like Google, Sony, Pebble, Adafruit and The Electronic Frontier Foundation -- and we've still got plenty to come. Check out the full list below.
Mark Frauenfelder on maker culture, openness and Apple
I'm attending Respect The Internet in NYC, a one-day Ketchum conference highlighting the sometimes tenuous and touchy relationship between online culture and traditional marketing/media. Among the morning's star presenters was Boing Boing founder and MAKE magazine/Maker Faire standard bearer Mark Frauenfelder, who discussed the maker ethos and the DIY manifesto (user-replaceable parts! screws not glue!) while highlighting some fascinating sites, companies and grass-roots efforts around the world. I noticed that Mark was presenting from an 11" MacBook Air, which had the effect of making his lap and hands look unusually large -- but it also made me wonder how the idea of a hackable product ecosystem with full user access is reconciled with Apple's attitude toward hacking in general and hardware modification/upgrades in particular. Since I had the chance to ask him about it, I did. His response is nuanced; he's "not an extremist" about openness, although he wants to see greater accessibility in product design. "Not everything has to be open," he noted. A video clip of the Q & A (sorry for the Stickam quality) is in the second half of this post. The conference continues this afternoon; you can tune into the live feed here.
Checking in on the iPhone 4's video quality
When the camera in the iPhone 4 was first announced, I thought sadly of my Flip MinoHD, and how I might never need it again. If my phone can do solid HD video recording, why should I carry another camera around, small as it may be? But can Apple's phone really deliver solid HD quality in video recording? Now that a few handsets are sneaking out to early reviewers and early preorders, we can find out. Engadget posted a video with their review, and you can see how it looks over there. Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin has been recording some video, and has shared it in full size over on that blog. And a few videos are starting to appear on YouTube as well, showing off just what the world looks like through the iPhone's video camera. You can see a bunch of iPhone 4 videos in the second half of this post. So how did it turn out? Here's an old test of my Flip MinoHD (along with some sound issues -- ignore those) to compare. They look pretty close, to my eyes -- both cameras have that weird shuttering issue when showing quick motion, but both deliver solid color and quality HD video. The iPhone, however, completely wins at macro shooting -- the Flip doesn't have any kind of adjustable focus, so closeup footage works much better on the iPhone. Combine that with the fact that the iPhone allows editing (with the iMovie app) and uploading directly from the phone, and it's bye-bye to the Flip. Unless I need the extra capacity to shoot a lot of HD video at one time, there's really no reason for me to carry both.
Apple played favorites with iPad access
Boing Boing's Rob Beschizza has an insightful look at something that no one's really noticed yet: Apple definitely played favorites when it came to sharing the iPad. Here's the list of outlets and writers that got access to the iPad for an early review. You'll note that Boing Boing is on there, as is PC Magazine. Engadget and Gizmodo (along with TUAW, though we got one anyway) are not. Time is on there, Newsweek is not. Clearly, Apple's being careful about who's given access, and there's no one reason why an outlet might be on the list or not. And it might be even more confusing than that -- Fake Steve Jobs (a.k.a. writer Dan Lyons) tells a story about how Apple sent word out that they were unhappy about Newsweek officially hiring him after the FSJ reveal. Apple isn't just controlling access -- they're doing their best to control the entire media perception of the company. One thing that Beschizza doesn't mention (he goes on to gloat a little about Boing Boing's history with Apple) is that, in those first few days of iPad app reveals, it was pretty clear which developers had gotten an iPad early. Firemint, PopCap, MLB, EA -- there are hundreds of thousands of developers on the App Store, and Apple came to only a few to offer them a development iPad to play with early. Unfortunately, again, we'll never know the criteria for selection there other than Apple's whims (and I presume the whole thing is wrapped so tightly in an NDA that we won't even know when and how the offers were made), so we don't have a full picture of what access was offered and how. But there's no question that Apple made specific choices about how and where to send the iPad -- some people and companies got in, lots didn't.
WoW's EULA and Blizzard's OS support
Cory Doctorow posted on Boing Boing the other day about WoW's EULA being unreadable when installing the game on Linux. And obviously he's right -- Linux doesn't always have the font that Blizzard's installer uses, and so when you try to run it on Linux, you get gibberish, at least during installation. But there's more to this story here -- running WoW on Linux is actually unsupported by Blizzard: you can do it, and it's not against the EULA or ToS (in fact, Blizzard actually worked with the WINE guys to make sure the game ran correctly), but obviously any issues you have are an "at your own risk" kind of situation. So Doctorow's pretty much out of luck (or in luck as the case may be -- it's unlikely a EULA could be enforced on an unsupported system).And Linux isn't the only unsupported major OS out there -- Microsoft will release the beta of Windows 7, the new version of Windows, into the wild on January 10th, and Blizzard has made it clear that they won't support that, either, at least until it gets out of beta and into a release state. Of course, Microsoft has an interest in making sure old versions of Windows software work with the new OS, but if you only have one computer and absolutely need to play WoW on it, you should stay away from Windows 7 until the bugs are ironed out.Then again, there are worse OSes to deal with.
BlizzCon: interview with Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow is a science fiction writer, a blogger, and arguably, a futurist. In fact, we'll let Wikipedia do a much more thorough job of informing you who Cory is. After you've digested that, be sure and visit his website, where you can download many of his books for free, and check out Boing Boing, which he co-edits.I first discovered Cory Doctorow by reading his excellent novel "Down and Out In The Magic Kingdom" a few years ago. I had worked at Disney World for most of 1992, and as a result I've always had a bizarre fascination with all things Disney. So it was somewhat fitting that I caught up with Cory at Disneyland during the recent BlizzCon and asked him about MMOs, WoWers, and other acronyms.
Steven Levy on BoingBoing podcast
Steven Levy, the author of The Perfect Thing (reviewed here), is the guest on Boing Boing's fourth Get Illuminated podcast (warning, some things on Boing Boing may not be work safe). He discusses the all things iPod with Mark Frauenfelder.Steven's audio is a little rough around the edges, but the podcast is still interesting.
Get that authentic "cinema experience" on your Mac
You know the "cinema experience" that movie executives keep harping on about? Y'know, the "experience" that cinemas use to justify stupidly high snack and ticket prices? Well, a company has created a program that lets you relive this authentic experience from the comfort of your Mac. Peanut Gallery, billed as a "shared media experience" by its creators, allows you to recreate this experience from within a virtual 70's style movie theater. You can even chat over the movie along with seven other viewers via the web or Bonjour and animate little silhouette avatars that sit in rows of seats. Getting up and leaving after you realize you've spent your hard earned money on another piece of Hollywood crap has never been so easy; you don't even have to leave your chair to leave your chair! Don't worry if you're a little late for the showing, because there's also an option for a pre-show reel which, for extra realism, you'll be able to fill with annoying commercials and trailers for films you're completely uninterested in.Still, I'm a little angry that there's no implementation of a few other cinema features we all know and love including "mobile phone goes off at the tense bit" or the "crying baby". They didn't even place an obligatory anti-piracy PSA at the beginning! The pre-screening frisk down by a burly police officer is also missing. Another thing: Peanut Gallery doesn't disable my iSight or jam my cellphone for the duration of the film. Talk about unrealistic. How am I supposed to feel like I'm actually at the movies with essential parts of the cinema experience missing?!I give the program a B+ for effort, but I think a little more of a police state/Big Brother-style attitude is needed.[Via Daring Fireball]
Read Joystiq from within Second Life
A recent update to Second Life that allows players to view the game's online help pages using a custom Mozilla browser has been hacked so that you can view any webpage. Although there's no way to type web addresses without some basic hacking knowledge, it's quite simple to change the homepage to Google or any other website. Of course you could always just tab-out and use Firefox, but this option has a much greater "geek cool" factor. Let's just hope Fox News doesn't cotton on to the possibility of people browsing "questionable" content from within SL. Anyway, the first commentator to post a screenshot of themselves commenting on this post from within Second Life bags themselves a star.[Via Clickable Culture]
