When Miro 1.2 came out, I decided to give it another try after some previously failed attempts due to annoying bugs. Well, I’ve been using this free and open source, next generation video platform on my Mac for a while now, and I must say it’s quite nice if you fancy yourself watching some of the great, free video content available on the internet.

Miro is RSS + Bittorrent. Find sites with cool videos that interest you, subscribe to their feeds, and when new content is published, you can have it downloaded and waiting for you by the time you realize it’s there. It’s just so smooth the way I can play the first video, and all the new content plays like my personal TV station. Cmd+F throws me into full-screen mode. It didn’t used to work nearly this well, and I’m just all so very pleased with today’s offering. (It will even search and play YouTube videos.)

Ok, so you want to try this. Click the “Miro” link above and grab the player. It comes with some default channels, but I’ve deleted all but the Onion News Network. The Miro Guide appears to be a nice index of most/all of the content available for the platform, but please allow me to recommend a few of my favorites.

• Revision3 is The TV Network of Kevin Rose (of TechTV and Digg fame) with great shows like Tekzilla, Systm, and of course Diggnation. I also have come to watch the goofy Internet Superstar... I haven’t even tasted many of the Rev3 shows yet!
• Mahalo Daily is a great 5-day/wk short form (3-5 mins) show with Veronica Belmont. (Although she’s about to leave…) They visit someone and show of something… usually very interesting stuff. I like the one about the dude who makes music with Gameboys.
• WebbAlert is another daily, short form show with Megan Webb. Just a quick overview of the tech news.
• GeekBrief.TV is yet another daily, short form show with the bouncy character that of Cali Lewis. Again, it’s an overview of the tech news. Maybe a product review or interview here and there.
• commandN is a longer form (15-20 mins), weekly show with Amber MacArthur, Will Pate, and others. They talk about the news and share cool website picks. Amber’s brother, Jeff, usually has a longer segment where he usually reviews a product.
• Hak5 Is a great, long standing show with a great crew. They hack stuff and talk about it on the show.
• Cranky Geeks is a talk show with John C. Dvorak.
• DL.TV is a tech show with some of the folks from TechTV.

Also, anything from Leo Laporte is fantastic. I’m a very regular listener of Security Now, TWiT, MacBreak Weekly, Net@Nite, and Windows Weekly on his TWiT.TV (audio) podcast network. While there aren’t any regular, internet-available video shows from him yet, he’s been talking recently about a new studio he’s setting up where he’ll start doing some video shows. He’s a great personality… One to watch.

I hope I’ve captured the interest of some new internet TV consumers. Watching this web-based, independent content has really never been this easy.

Celemony is set to release Direct Note Access in Autumn of 2008. There is a nice video on the DNA page that explains what it does, but this software is able to identify and isolate different voices within a single audio recording. The user can then change the pitch of and mute individual notes without affecting the overall mix! This is the first piece of software that allows you to reach into a simple, flat audio stream and manipulate its components in this way.

It’ll be really interesting to see how artists use this product to remix familiar tunes.

Holy crap this is totally awesome. Korg will soon release Korg DS-10: a music composition tool that runs on the Nintendo DS. Check out the short video for an idea what it does. It seems like it could be significantly more versatile than the Kaossilator Touchpad Synthesizer.

Link via Wired Blog

Mixxx has just been accepted by Google’s Summer of Code in which students are invited to contribute to various open source projects. Also Hercules was generous enough to donate a couple consoles (the MK2 like I have and another, simpler MP3 console) to the developers, so we should see more solid support for these Hercules consoles in the near future.

This is all great news for anyone interested in this great software. Expect more good news on the Mixxx development front coming up!

Here’s the Mixxx wiki page for brainstorming ideas.

Ubuntu Linux released a new version of their Linux distribution yesterday. As per their goofy naming scheme, it is dubbed “Edgy Eft,” and it can be downloaded for free, as always, on their website.

Edgy didn’t even include any sort of 3d capabilities by default (probably for good reasons), but I wasted no time in installing Beryl, the community fork of Novell’s Compiz window manager. It is a seriously nifty 3d environment for your linux desktop that makes OS X graphics look old. There are so many new effects and the gui configuration tools let you tweak nearly any aspect. I must say, I’m quite impressed with what is being done with Beryl, and I look forward to see what Novell themselves are doing with their Compiz version. This YouTube video will give you an idea of the eye candy we’re talking about.

I also wanted to link to this review I just found on osnews, with plenty of screenshots. Give up windows already!

I’ve just posted on our Blogs for Learning blog here at MSU about RSS: Web News Simplified. I list a good number of RSS readers, including some way nifty web ones.

Subversion is a really nice version control system that many people have migrated to from CVS. I’ve recently needed to set up my rails applications into subversion repositories so I can make use of the quite proper application deployment tool, Capistrano. I wanted to take a moment and post about generally how using Subversion works—for the reference of people stumbling upon my blog, and also my own.

Read the rest of this entry

I’ve been getting more and more into using Textmate as my choice editor, despite continuing to need Zend for Quicken Loans as I need to work on remote files (over VPN) and the drawer update issue makes it simply unworkable. (One must wait minutes to bring TM to focus.)

Well, I wanted a nice way to blog without going into the Typo control panel. MarsEdit is cool, and so is ecto, but both are commercial software, and I already have a license for my beloved Textmate.

Actually, I would have tried blogging with Textmate much sooner, but there was some weird issue with it when connecting to my blog, despite the other two aforementioned editors working just fine. Someone in the #Textmate IRC channel suggested reloading my bundles (Bundles -> Bundle Editor -> Reload Bundles). And that seems to have solved whatever problem I was experiencing, because now Textmate blogging works just fine.

Wh00t.

It seems TextMate has become quite a popular editor as of late. Some even say it is the best editor on any platform which is quite a bold statement, indeed. Cheat sheets such as this one might give you some idea of the breadth of features available at the tap of a key, but allow me to attempt a bulleted list of my favorites:

• Yes! There are hotkeys for everything! I almost don’t even miss vim at all! Hotkeys to navigate around and manipulate your text are essential, and TextMate doesn’t let you down.
• Moving around couldn’t be easier. Cmd+T brings up a dialog that intelligently figures out what file you’re looking for in your project from what you type. This lets you open up a file with the quickness. Cmd+Shift+T is similar, but you’re jumping to a symbol (class, function, etc) in the current file instead. Bookmarks let you cycle through important lines of code.
• Snippits are amazing. Type a snippit keyword and hit tab. It will be expanded to the full snippit with the first modifiable area selected. Type to replace it with something new, and hit tab to move to the next “hot” spot. With “smart typing” automatically closing my quotes and brackets, the code practically writes itself!
• You can execute a line of code as ruby and insert its result. You can commit code to versioning systems. You can …
• Extensibility. You can add third party bundles such as the that include new commands, macros, snippits, etc.
• It is a native cocoa application with predictable keybindings (Cmd+w closes, etc) and snazzy-clean mac-friendly interface.

People use this editor to maintain their todo lists and weblogs.

My biggest and nearly lonesome gripe with TextMate is how it freezes for a couple seconds when it comes to focus when you’re working on remote files (nfs, samba, etc). The upcoming version 2.0 will fix this issue as well as bring numerous exciting improvements.

Serious respect goes out to the mighty Allan Odgaard of Denmark for this incredible editor.

Flock — The web browser for you and your friends

So I heard Flock came out—I had to try it again. Last time I tried it, it was a technology preview or something and it was buggy and would crash fairly often. I haven’t had much time using it just yet, but it seems pretty snazzy. Among its nifty “web 2.0” features is a nifty blog tool. It asked me my blog url. I simply inputted “http://threadbox.net/”. Next, it asked me my username and password. That was it! Now I can not only blog right to my website with a nifty interface, but I can right click on things select “Blog This” from the pop-up menu to start off my post with an image/link. Maybe I’ll actually start posting again :)

I’ve been invited by some friends involved with the Openbox community to participate in a new “planet” project (a la Planets Ubuntu, Gentoo, or Gnome) called Planet Openbox in the name of our favorite window manager.

Why do I still use and love openbox? Because its XML-based configuration file affords me pretty amazing flexibility in my keyboard & mouse bindings. My favorites include the ability to roll the mouse wheel on the desktop to cycle virtual desktops or on a title bar to shade/unshade. I also use openbox to bind the forward/back thumby buttons on my Logitech MX518 to move me around my history in Firefox quickly.

It was a few days after I saw Ubuntu Dapper Drake Flight 5 featured on Digg that I realized I needed to try it out on my laptop, upgrading it from Breezy. Wow was that ever a good idea.

Now, not only does my laptop properly go into and out of suspend AND hibernate (where this would fail in Breezy), but I get to use the excellent Gnome 2.14 before it even comes out. (The final release is due out today, however.) Linux just keeps getting better.

I like to listen to some podcasts… but I find myself getting behind simply because I have to constantly revisit the separate websites, click around, find the torrent link… No it’s not that hard, but it certainly could be a lot easier.

Somewhere in my digg reading today, I read that Azureus supports RSS feeds. “Wow,” I thought, “That would really be the easiest way to get my podcasts!” I consulted google, and found that this functionality is offered via an extension. I gave it the rss feeds for thisweekintech and a couple other podcasts I like to listen to, and it lists the episodes and lets me download them with the click of a button. It will also poll the feeds on an interval and download them automatically.

This is perfect. I just had to share it.

I decided I’d better list some of the extensions that I really enjoy having around the most in firefox. Right now, I have 13 extensions installed, but the really good ones are as follows:

• All-in-One Gestures lets me use mouse gestures for a few things (still using hotkeys for a lot of stuff). UL/UR for switching tabs left/right and RLR to close a tab are really the only ones I really use.
• Sage reads RSS feeds in a handy sidebar. Who knew it could be so easy to check a bunch of sites for updates?
• FlashGot lets you use an external download manager and also queue up a bunch of links on a single page for download at once.
• Adblock preserves my www sanity.
• Forecastfox puts 3 days of weather in my status bar. Oh boy do I like this one.
• Web Developer is an a must-have tool for any web developer. It gives you a giant toolbar for doing all sorts of stuff.
• SessionSaver should have been (and may be in the future from what I’ve heard) bundled with Firefox. It makes firefox start with the same tabs and windows open as there were before. (even in the unlikely event of a crash!) Opera has done this for some time, and ff kinda annoyed me by not doing it.
• ColorZilla is a nice extension that will let you pick colors out of a web page among other things… although somewhere along the way, it decided something about my system wasn’t compatible with it’s ColorPicker feature… so it doesn’t exactly work for me right now.
• All-in-One Sidebar (original author’s site this time) puts a whole lot of really useful goodies in your sidebar! I actually only just discovered this one while link-hunting for this article, and I am very impressed!

Comment with your favorites please!

Firefox 1.5 came out yesterday, and although I tried a beta some time ago and was impressed with the speed increase, I’ve held out upgrading for day-to-day use until the final release. This isn’t even so much because for the sake of a final release but also so the extensions I want would become available.

So, since I hear it might be some time before we see Firefox 1.5 backported to Ubuntu Breezy (let alone 64-bit packages!), I decided to just build it myself from source. Well, I had a tiny gotcha that I was able to solve, but now I’m lovin’ the Firefox!

It’s really cool:

1. It’s 20-30% faster than the old 1.0.x versions in most cases making it rival even Opera’s speed.
2. It caches pages so that when you go back/forward, the new page loads instantaneously. This is especially pleasing when I can use my mouse’s side thumby buttons to zip around in my history!
3. You can drag/drop tabs around to reorder them—even between windows!
4. It has lots of really nice extensions
5. There are friendlier error messages.
6. UI enhancements, particularly in the preferences.
7. Loads of other stuff.

Firefox has been a really great browser for quite some time now. Version 1.5 seems to be very well refined product that is fast, easy to use, and very flexible.