Hernandez Life » techies

Joost Beta 1.0 Debuts

Rick — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 02:25:46 +0000

Until late last week, if you wanted to use the potentially cable-TV-replacing video streaming service Joost, you had to have friends. But now anybody can watch Joost online from dusk until the dawn and beyond, because Beta 1.0 of the P2P (peer-to-peer) video service just hit the streets. The good news? The company’s just about gotten it right after umpteen betas, and it’s looking good. However, it remains to be seen whether Joost techies have figured out how to scale the network without crashing it.

On a fast 7Mbps broadband connection, Joost was running well this morning. Its interface is easy to learn, and the video plays back full screen and streams smoothly. The quality leaves something to be desired, though—it’s not even at the level of standard definition, and certainly not high definition. There’s also not quite enough content on hand, with offerings from a couple of big names such as CBS and CNN, but mostly second- and third-tier content sources.

Even though this beta 1.0 is still a bit rough around the edges, we could still see the tremendous potential of this format. It actually feels like television, but everything is streaming. If this network and others like it are completely built out to where they can actually stream near-HD quality video, we might be seeing people abandoning cable for it. But not yet. [Joost, via Ars Technica]

(Via Gizmodo.)

Downloads

Rick — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 08:06:07 +0000

There are 4 files, weighing 40.5 MiB with 3,789 hits in total.

Displaying 1 to 4 of 4 files.

Dog Pics 1
» 22.6 MiB - 652 hits - April 25, 2010
Pictures of Buggy & Angel, our two new pugs.

SerialBox 04/10
» 12.6 MiB - 637 hits - April 25, 2010
Mac data files & reader for Serial Box April 2010

Hacking Gmail
» 5.3 MiB - 1,652 hits - October 11, 2007
A PDF on how to get more from Gmail. Use at your own risk.

Look At Me
» 50.1 KiB - 848 hits - September 30, 2007
An Apple Mac OS X application that puts eyes in your menu bar that follow motion via your web cam.

A Website Reborn: The Director’s Cut

Rick — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 14:05:45 +0000

(Warning: Non-techies just skip this blog entry altogether.)

Here is version, oh let’s say… 2.1, of my website. Basically I’ve moved from hosting my website on .mac (Apple’s servers) to running it on a shared server at HostMonster. Besides going from 10 gigabytes disk storage to 300 gigs, this gives me much more control server side like, perl, PHP, mySQL, Linux Shell Access, CRON jobs and more. All that let’s me put together a slicker website.

The other big change is that my blog (what your reading right now) is now a WordPress blog. Again this gives me greater control over things. Among other thing you can register so you will receive email notices of new blog entries (posts), archives are now segregated by month, and posts can have categories. Another nice feature, for me anyway, is that I can submit these postings from anywhere. In fact, I’m writing this right now, on my iPhone, while traveling on an express bus (x4) somewhere in Brooklyn on my way to work in Manhattan.