www.nickhodge.com

… to para­phrase the quo­ta­tion below. Thanks to danah boyd for the inspiration.

(click on image to see lar­ger version)

Thanks to Mark Pesce for the recom­mend­a­tion to the Essen­tials journ­al­ist, Nick Galvin.

Oh, and Fiona Mor­ris had a ver­sion of the photo taken with cats. The cat ver­sions were fun­nier. Behind the scenes: when the photo as taken, we were actu­ally look­ing at http://icanhascheezburger.com/ for the LOL inspiration.

more cat pictures

Aus­tralian Gam­ing Industry:

1. Worth: AU$1billion in 2006
   1. Note: Film/Box Office in 2007 AU$900million in 2007
   2. Note: AU$330m is gam­ing con­soles [Update: 4^th January]
2. Industry is Grow­ing: >12% per year
3. 12.5m games sold in 2006
4. Gamer aver­age age: 28 years old
5. Gamers are 60% male, 40% female
6. In 2007, 67% Aus­trali­ans have broadband
7. 35% are par­ents, 8% will tell you to get off their lawn (ie: are grandparents)
8. Aus­trali­ans spend AU$2million per day on inter­act­ive games
9. In 2006 8,500 employed in the games industry
10. Estim­ated in 2010 18,000 employed in the industry

sources:

Game Developer’s Asso­ci­ation Aus­tralia: http://www.gdaa.com.au/docs/%20Submission%20to%20Government-June07-Coonan.pdf

Motion Pic­ture Distributor’s Asso­ci­ation Aus­tralia: http://www.mpdaa.org.au/customers/mpdaa/mpdaa.nsf/(PressReleasesByDate)/11–1-2008/$FILE/MEDIA%20RELEASE%20Year%20End%202007.pdf

ACMA: http://www.acma.gov.au/webwr/_assets/main/lib310631/0607commreport_complete.pdf

At yesterday’s Matt Bai; Polit­ics and Tech­no­logy Forum in Can­berra, I exper­i­mented. Without test­ing, nor a safety net.

Hav­ing just received a new imate Ulti­mate 9502 phone with NextG HSDPA from @JonoH I wired up in the fol­low­ing way:

• Dell XPS1330, using Bluetooth Per­sonal Area Con­nec­tion from within Vista SP1 x64 to…
• imate Ulti­mate 9502, using Inter­net Con­nec­tion Shar­ing at 7.2Mb/s HSDPA on Tel­stra NextG running…
• ustream.tv put­ting pri­or­ity on audio qual­ity over video quality
• Placed laptop on the floor with cam­era point­ing to stage. I used the inbuilt cam­era in the Dell, and the same inbuilt microphone.

The res­ult is this:

Microsoft and Gizmodo.com.au/Lifehacker.com.au have cre­ated a col­lec­tion of smart tips and tricks on Win­dows Vista.

The local Microsoft team asked me to con­trib­ute some art­icles. Writ­ing with an editor with dead­lines is tough! Thanks to Nick Broughall for his patience and assistance.

My art­icles:

• Sil­ver­light Redefines Video On The Web
• Watch­ing One Minute of Online Video Equal To Read­ing The Dictionary
• Step Back In Time With Turn­ing The Pages 2.0
• Use Win­dow­sLive Photo Gal­ler­ies To Tag, Upload to Flickr
• Avoid Bor­ing Slideshows By Shar­ing Pho­tos Via Email
• Use Tags To Organ­ise Your Pho­tos Efficiently
• Keep Your Pho­tos Organ­ised With Win­dows Live Photo Gallery
• Use Par­ental Con­trols To Man­age Your Child’s Online Experience
• Auto­mat­ic­ally Con­vert Recor­ded Pro­grams For Your iPod With MCEBuddy
• Set Up Your Own Home Media Cen­ter PC

There is a little addi­tion to the Win­dows Media Cen­ter setup. It is a hid­den gem that makes life so much easier.

In our home, we have a Win­dows Home Server. Thought­fully named SERVER, it is small and sits quietly near the broad­band connection.

After Media Cen­ter record TV shows on one PC, I gen­er­ally like to store the res­ults safely for later viewing.

The *.dvr-ms files cre­ated by Win­dows Media Cen­ter, espe­cially on Digital TV trans­mis­sions, can be quite large.

So, to fix both of these issues I have installed MCE­Buddy

A tool that quietly lives in the back­ground of your PC, it watches the Recor­ded TV dir­ect­ory. When a show has com­pleted record­ing, MCE­Buddy com­presses the show into some­thing smal­ler (for instance: WMV or even MP4 for iPods!) and trans­fers auto­ma­gic­ally to our Win­dows Home Server.

I highly recom­mend this little utility.

In the early days of radio, the receiver set was expens­ive and sat in the lounge. Today, radios are in cars, mobile phones and the shower.

The same occurred with tele­vi­sion: expens­ive sets star­ted in the lounge, and then migrated out to the kit­chen, car and on small devices.

Now if your PC  Win­dows Vista Home Premium or Vista Ulti­mate, you can make a PC watch TV. And bet­ter yet, record it for later view­ing. Sort of like those VCR things that we once all owned. All using Win­dows Media Center

Here is my setup, feel free to copy/paste:

1. Hard­ware

Inside my Vista PC, I have a Haup­page TV card installed. You can also pur­chase a USB sticks that will also work.

Just ensure that the card/USB device sup­ports Win­dows Media Center

These cards/USB TV devices con­nect to a stand­ard TV antenna. A good antenna is a must; and with the appro­pri­ate adaptors and extenders: you can use the same antenna the TV uses.

2. Soft­ware

Along with the TV cards/USB sticks there is driver soft­ware to install to con­nect between Vista’s Media Cen­ter and the card. I always check with the card’s web site to ensure the ver­sion is the abso­lute latest.

3. Ser­vices

In Aus­tralia, I have sub­scribed to free*epg from EPGStream.net. This ser­vice integ­rates with Win­dows Media Cen­ter to peri­od­ic­ally col­lect Elec­tronic Pro­gram Guides (EPG). Installing the soft­ware sets up all the appro­pri­ate “bits” in Vista to be wired ready for Australia.

4. Setup

Once all the above is installed, launch Vista Media Center.

Yes, the inter­face is dif­fer­ent to nor­mal PC applic­a­tions. This is because Media Cen­ter is designed to work with a remote con­trol. Don’t fear! You can use a mouse an key­board to nav­ig­ate the menus. Also notice as you move near the top-left of the Media Cen­ter win­dow, you can expand/shrink the Media Cen­ter applic­a­tion to a smal­ler win­dow. I use this often when work­ing: a TV in a win­dow on screen is some­times an excel­lent pro­ductiv­ity booster.

The first time you launch, there is an easy step-through pro­cess to con­nect all the bits together.

With Digital TV, there are more smarts: auto­matic assign­ment of TV sta­tions to the cor­rect epis­ode listing.

5. Record­ing

Click­ing on the Green But­ton returns the main Media Cen­ter menu to the screen.

Click­ing on “Guide” returns the screen as above.

Right-clicking on a sched­uled show allows you to Record it, or Record the Series. Record­ing a series will res­ult in pro­grams with that name on that sta­tion being auto­mat­ic­ally recor­ded. You don’t even need Win­dows Media Cen­ter run­ning (yes, you need to ensure the PC is run­ning, and the antenna is attached)

The shows that are recor­ded are saved as files on your PC in a dir­ect­ory: “C:\Users\Public\Recorded TV” for safe­keep­ing. Or watch­ing inside Win­dows Media Centre (TV and Movies, Recor­ded TV)

With a simple addi­tion of a hard­ware card, you can turn your PC run­ning Vista into a Digital TV that records for later view­ing. I highly recom­mend this setup. Now TV is with you whilst you email.

Excel­lent talk from George Dyson on the early stages of digital com­put­ing:

In 1969, the world looked through their black and white TV tubes at a pair of US Navy Test Pilots bounce around on the Moon.

Today, MarsPhoenix posts Twit­ters. It is the most per­sonal way of describ­ing what is going on. No press con­fer­ences, no sci­entific pic­tures or static web site.

Wired Sci­ence has an exclus­ive inter­view with the @MarsPhoenix.

Simple really. Go to this site: http://www.microsoft.com.au/charity/charity/demo.aspx

Watch the video, and Microsoft donates money to the Smith Family.

Pic­ture: Matt Moran, ABC Com­mer­cial, show­ing off the Sil­ver­light based ABC Online Store

Blogs

• Chris, MSP from UTS: http://www.utsmsp.com/2008/05/remix08-sydney-expression-studio-2-is-here/
• DG.TV Wrapup, not fea­tur­ing me: http://delicategeniusblog.com/?p=687
• ZDNET on Mark’s Key­note: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/business/soa/Twitter-lets-staff-trigger-nuclear-option-on-bosses/0,139023166,339289106,00.htm
• Phil Hel­tewig, “While Site­core was only present as an attendee this time, it was still extremely valu­able for us, not just from a tech­no­logy point of view”: http://philheltewig.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!E339C3F87E43ABC8!226.entry
• Michael Ryan needs winter to be longer: http://michael-j-ryan.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!1EEC06A9FFF94EC3!587.entry
• John Lam­pard, com­ments on Mark Pesce’s key­note: http://www.disassociated.com/2008/05/21/twitter-lets-staff-trigger-nuclear-option-on-bosses/
• Lach­lan Hardy, “the present­a­tion by Jonas and José con­vinced me that I need to learn Silverlight.” http://log.lachstock.com.au/past/2008/5/24/remix-australia-rocked/
• Paul Jen­kins: http://www.aeoth.net/blog/2008/05/25/remix-melbourne-2008/
• Richard Lord, Chief Mar­ket­ing Officer for Hyro (the wiz­ards respons­ible for ABC Shop Online and Big­Borther Sil­ver­light sites) http://hyro-insights.blogspot.com/2008/05/where-oh-where-had-my-little-blog-gone.html
• “The cost of the con­fer­ence was a mere $199 AUD, which was worth every penny”; http://blurg.wordpress.com/2008/05/25/remix-melbourne-2008-a-wrap-up/
• Feed­back on Damian Edwards and Lach­lan Hardy’s present­a­tion: http://damianpedwards.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!A079DE667E1958B3!622.entry?wa=wsignin1.0
• Grumpy­Wookie: http://www.grumpywookie.com/2008/05/28/remix-revisited/
• (more pos­ted here once people do that blog­ging thing)

The Twit­ter hastag ‘#auremix’ was well used, too

• http://twemes.com/auremix

And Flickr.com tag “auremix”

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/auremix