DoubleTwist - Putting media to your Nokia Mobile made easy (MAC)

Some days agora I came across with a software called doubletwist. It had the odd promise of making media transfer easy to nokia mobiles. It is something I have been trying for ages using all sort of suit and tools. None worked as smoothly as doubletwist.

It has been a very big handycap for me, since I sold my iTouch ( for beliefs agains Apple attitudes ), to have with me my media and being able to use it around my day-by-day. Doubletwist is so cool, that it imported even my play lists from itunes, and now I can also buy DRM free , cheap music from amazon, as well as importing everything (DRM free) from my itunes. It handles also the codec conversion, that was so painful before.

So, if you want to get rid from the evil of Apple controlling your mind and making you mad about the "brand new feature" that every single sensible player had since 2001 or by predating nice features just because it "may harm their business", this is a very nice option. The only problem is that it run just on Mac OS. Can be a nice try if you are like me, trying to phase out Apple from your life, but you can't just throw in the bin the £1000+ laptop you bought 2 years ago.

Watching international TV on your Xbox/not 360

This post is to celebrate my success into putting Justin.tv completely working on my Xbox. In fact I'm not using a plain Xbox, but a modified version using Xbox media Center.

Since May 2009, the Xbox media Center SVN version supports playing generic flash videos, and with that a lot of nice websites.

I want to draw attention to the fact that Justin.tv broadcast as lot of live channels from a lot of different countries and gives a very nice opportunity for those who live abroad. For example, yesterday night I was watching the most hated TV show in Brazilian Sunday afternoon live from my coach in Cambridge.

All this support is a straightforward. Once you have Xbox media Center installed on your Xbox you just need to install a plug-in. This is done with a couple of clicks using your remote or Xbox controller.

FlixWagon - Mobile phone live Broadcasting

I have been looking for a nice application to broadcast live with my Nokia mobile. In fact, I was looking something just like as Justin.TV.

I came across to Flixwagon. FlixWagon is a software for you to install on your Nokia mobile that enables you to record live videos and automatically upload to a youtbe like website. This website has some much better features that include video editing and video downloads. it also supports some interesting features such as chatting and tagging directly from the mobile. Very cool for broadcasting live from conferences. I expect to use it in the next one I attend.

Here is a test I did in my own office using my Nokia mobile:

The website for you to download is http://flixwagon.com/. This broadcast costed nothing since I was using the WiFi network within the building.

Spam - How to fight back?

Well during the last couple months I have seen a lot of the efforts about tackling genuine spam e-mail (not including malware) to be as palliative as possible. Basically, what we have been doing in the last years is just trying to conceive a way to discard what is just unsolicited commercial e-mail, not concentrating on the economics of the business.

I have been thinking lately abut it, and what makes spam so compelling is its cost (actually this is not a new idea). It basically means that you do spam because it is cheap, direct and people just try to get rid of it, nobody actually fight back.

When I mean fight back is to take down the spammer by any mean, from the plain and ethical legal process of cancelling the domain name to a raw, and mundane DDoS. If yo are faint of heart or you believe in ethics as the only way to solve the issue, I recommend you to stop reading.

OK, here comes my idea: Lets attack the spammer where it really hurts. Lets change a bit the economics of the matter. If spamming costs more, than maybe some people will not use it as a marketing tool. I mean specially those specialised companies on "direct internet marketing" will start to have bigger operational costs, making them less profitable and thus increasing the costs to the company hiring the marketing tool.

My idea can easily be implemented with today's available technology. I mean that, if we are able to build an e-mail client extension where the user can signal when something is or not actually a spam, we could basically set up some rule to poke the server where an embedded image (in the spam) is coming from, or even an URL present in the e-mail on a regular timely basis.

The interface should be easy to use, just asking how angry the person is that day with spam, and from that derive the counter-attack strategy (poking rates). After that, we can run in a mode where the user can say what is spam and what is not (safer mode) or even let any tool that detects spam heuristically do the job.

The idea behind this is that when a marketing company sends an e-mail, they take into account that no more than 10% will actually receive the e-mail(our strategy is discard), and from that less than 1% (from the total) will actually open it. With our extension, we will increase the spammer's server load poking him for everything that is "pokeable" in the message. We can do it repeatedly, lets say 10 times a minute. This means that his cost with bandwidth and servers will increase without increasing the actual return for the number of spams sent. So we are attacking the economics of the game.

Of course no idea is perfect, and I can see at least two initial drawbacks to the idea: First we as we know spammers will adapt putting less "pokeable" content in their messages. There will be no URLs, no images and no return e-mails. This means two things: or the spam will come with everything already embedded in it, thus costing more server time and bandwidth to send it, or it will less appalling to someone to buy anything, since they will loose a lot of the marketing power by not being able to use the above mentioned things.

The second drawback is a bit more (ethically) discussable. Imagine that someone just hires a "direct marketing" to take down some other's website. Well as we know this is a possibility, and will actually affect more the smaller players in the Internet game. But I think this is a worth causality to a greater good (like in any war), since that when the spammers hit someone and take them down or increase the cost of their business, for sure there will be legal cases against the spammers. If they hit some one bigger the bigger will be the case.

Even though ethically questionable, this idea, I think, is one way for an individual to fight back the spam industry. What we can do is unite power and spend some Kb of data each to increase the spammer costs, changing the dynamics of what is happening. Transferring the fight to another niche and making the whole business model less profitable is for sure much more efficient than most methods we have seen so far.

What do you think? leave comment in the blog.

Dim Dim - Video Conferencing

I have been searching for good solutions on web-meeting tools for a while. My main objective is to setup a remote training grounds, where I could give some training to people remotely and also keep this for posterity. Almost all the good ones are not free, and the 100% free one just stink.

I was looking for a solution that would be ideal for webcasts and also for teaching purposes. So it should include some VoIP (voice communication), a white board mechanism e also screen sharing.

Skype running on the Mac is a good solution (100% free), but it lacks some of the (free) features I would like, and one is the recording of the conference. Actually its screen sharing is really handy, and I can not understand why it is not available in Windows for the main stream.

Well, after a lot of research I came across this site:

http://www.dimdim.com

Dim Dim is a (most) free solution that has everything I need. Indeed it covers all my requirements, and is free for what I want (less that 20 users). It is a really cool solution that mostly run on adobe flash, and gives you all the functionality needed for a proper teaching session online. These include, a white board, a chat, a camera for the teacher, voice, and screen sharing. All this allied to the possibility of recording everything and download it in .flv, thus enabling you to create your own lectures library.

I will test my main idea next term, trying to put a supervision group to work over this solution.

And now ITV catch up and Films

Since my last post on the BBC iPlayer I have been looking for other plug-ins to use on my XBMC, and fortunately I found now two interesting ones.

One is a script called Navi-X. I had that on my old version of XBMC, but now it is really complete. A lot of films ready for you to watch online without having to download it first (but you have the option to do it. I don't because my connection just got upgraded to a 100Mbps FD, and it don lag anymore). I got on the scripts directory of the following plug-in:

XBMC Zone Installer

This plug-in enables you to "automagically" install a lot of nice things. Being my recommendation, the National Geographic and Navi-X

After that I tried to find ITV catch up, since I like to watch some of its content, but I often forget to record on my PVR. Here is what I found:

http://code.google.com/p/voinage-xbmc-plugin/download/list

XBMC - BBC iPlayer on your big telly

Well, yesterday, after a long log time without update, I decided to update my XBMC. XBMC is a media centre software that I run on my old XBOX, and that support all media types I need, plus some extras, like you tube, national geographic, and since yesterday BBC iPlayer (it is really great to get it on a 32 inches monitor) fifth.

One of the best features it has is the ability to connect to a SMB share available on the network, and since last November I have a 1TB hard drive attached to my main router, making this space available to my Xbox. So from it I have access to all my libraries, including films, music and photos.

It is amazing how the software evolved in the last two years. From a Mplayer skin that ran on the Xbox, to a fully functional media centre software. I'm running right now a Beta version distributed from the SVN, but with all the brand-new functionalities.

Included in those functionalities the brand-new plug-in system, which now enables developers to write new media support to XBMC, like the BBC iPlayer. So, if you are interested in this, here is the URL:

http://code.google.com/p/xbmc-iplayer

If you want to know more about it, I recommend this article on how to convert your Xbox, and to understand how you can build an amazing media Center with less than £30.

If you are outside the UK, the restrictions on BBC content still apply, but there are other different plug-ins to other different services.

Back to Track!

After some time without posting I intend now to resume my activities within the Blog. I will try to post again at least once a week.

Probably very soon it will move to a different URL (personalised), so keep looking here for news.

So sit tight and enjoy!!!