After I saw Michael Arringtons post on “Animoto On the iPhone“, I had a little play with both the iPhone app and their website. I’m impressed. It solves a problem I’ve had for a while – how do I make quick and dirty slideshows from my photos? Well, with it’s flickr/Facebook/SmigMig/Picasa/photobucket integration, as well as the ability to upload photos and music from your computer, it took me <1minute to get my first 30s video working. Take a look here:
I’m liking it, in fact I’ve just bought an “all-access-pass” which will let me create and download longer videos.
SANSSCORE is a good effort in promoting minimum security standards and best practices. Amongst the various checklists, I came across a good one for OSX, with Eric Conrad being the team lead.
Along with Apples “Mac OS X Security Configuration for Version 10.5 Leopard” [PDF link], it provides a good background into securing your Mac.
Brightkite is a geosocial network. Based loosely on twitter-style short messages, but with a much stronger leaning towards location awareness.
I’ve used both the standard Brightkite website and also their iPhone optimized site for many months. There are three things I really like about Brightkite. Firstly, they’ve done a great job in making the application agnostic. I don’t care if I’m accessing Brightkite via Safari on my Mac in my office, using the iPhone optimized site or now, the native iPhone application (link to the iTunes store). While obviously the look is slightly different, the feel is alway the same.
Secondly, Brightkite is great at getting my location. When access from a desktop or notebook computer, Brightkite will do a pretty good job at guessing your location either by using the Loki plugin, or Mozilla Geode (more here and here). When using your iPhone, Brightkite will use CoreLocation to discover your location. I like the way the iPhone native application will sort your placemarks by what it thinks is nearest to your estimated location. When the estimated location isn’t quite right, you can “pick a place”, by searching for your actual location. It’s nice that locations are named, rather than just co-ordinates, it’s a nice human-friendly touch.
Lastly, the balance between openness and privacy is ideal, and customizable. For example, if I want to make my exact location known or hidden, or obfuscated (Brightkite calls this “City” and is really just your location generalized to a larger area), a simple switch lets me do this. I can also set privacy levels for different categories of contacts, including trusted friends, friends and everyone else.
This aspect makes it ideal for meeting fellow Brightkite users in real-world social gatherings. Use Brightkite to see who’s nearby and send them a message!
In fact, it’s how I met Brightkite founder Martin May, at a recent Tech Cocktail event in Boulder.
Of course, Brightkite lets you stream your consciousness a’la most other social networks, via a simple URL:
This will take you to my stream of checkins, photos and notes.
It can also stream directly to twitter, and meta-update services like ping.fm support updating Brightkite. Links to services like Facebook, Flickr and Linked-In are available via your profile page.
Here’s a video demo of the Brightkite iPhone app in action.
UMapper makes it easy to embed Flash-based maps in your website, blog or popular social networks. If you quickly need to create and share a one-off map for almost any purpose, UMapper is a great way to do it.
UMapper home page
I like UMapper as both a technologist and as a traveler. It has one of the easiest interfaces I’ve used; I created and embedded my first map within 3 minutes.
WIth the ability to choose from map providers Google, Microsoft and OpenStreetMap, and the ability to embed maps easily into Facebook, MySpace, Blogger blogs, Wordpress (hosted) blogs, Orkut and iGoogle – as well as providing a Wordpress plug-in, there is enormous flexibility and ease of use.
There’s also the ability to add custom markers, polygons, circles and lines, making it useful for a whole set of businesses from mining companies to real-estate agents.
Import options supported include KML, GPX, and GeoRSS.
The traveler in me really liked twbr’s map, outlining his route through Africa.
I’ve recently bought a 2nd generation Drobo. It’s a cool little box that attaches to my Mac Pro via Firewire 800.
I had some drives from my failing ReadyNAS 600 (now retired), so after temporarily copying the data to a non-resilient drive I loaded the following in the the Drobo and copied the data onto it.
These are good quality SATA 3.0 Gbit/s drives that I even ran through SpinRite (highly recommended) to check for errors.
Anyway, I’ve discovered that when I unlock my Mac Pro (the screensaver automatically locks after a while, but I don’t put it to sleep), the Drobo restarts. No warning, just a whirring reboot. I’m running the 1.2.2 firmware and the 1.2.1 dashboard. I’ve tried plugging it into another Firewire port and also unplugging my other Firewire devices with no luck.
I’ve logged a support ticket with Drobo, let’s see what they come up with.
I’ve been liking Jott, a great voice to text recognition service. It’s proven to be accurate and reasonably fast – ideal for taking quick notes on the go.
I’ve also been playing with Evernote over the past week, touting itself as “remember everything” – or what I like even better, “capture, sync, find”. It’s just out of closed beta, so now anyone can sign up.
Now, Jott is great at capturing data and Evernote is pretty good at organizing it. I was wondering if I could combine the two, and I came across this great Lifehacker article explaining just how to do that.
A great combination, which is worth keeping a close eye on.
