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The time has come to give away the October 2008 iPod Touch. This month's requirements were simple - be subscribed to the newsletter. Simple enough, especially because it's free. In past months, I've given away a Toshiba laptop and an 80GB Zune, so I decided it was time to give away something from the Apple universe this month. It turns out Dave was the lucky recipient of the iPod Touch. Dave has been notified by email and will be receiving his shiny new iPod in the mail shortly. Stay tuned for the November giveaway in the first newsletter of next month.

When Microsoft's Zune team released the Spring 2008 Zune 2.5 software update, I touted it as the natural upgrade to Windows Media Player 11. Zune 3.0 further extends my recommendation to dump WMP 11 for the Zune software because it adds still more features over the now languishing Windows Media Player offering.

The software updates are interesting even if you have no interest in ever owning a Zune device, but many of the benefits are more meaningful if you also own a Zune. Mixview is a new feature with Pandora like characteristics. When you're listening to an song and switch to Mixview in the Zune software, you get a visual map of artists related to the current artist, artists influenced by the current artist, and top listeners to the current artist (who have given permission to show up in Mixview). This is an interesting way to find new music you might have forgotten or never heard of before.

Channels is one of the features anyone can benefit from. As the name suggests, this feature is pre-programmed selections of music, sorted by genre. So if you want to listen to popular tracks in a given style of music, with reasonable confidence the songs will all be good, channels are the way to go. I've already found several artists I like simply by listening to some of the channel offerings.

One of the new features with the biggest potential is Picks, which is essentially recommendations based on what you listen to. Picks get more accurate the more you listen to music and really make having a Zune Pass worth it because you can download and sample hundreds or thousands of songs without spending any extra money. In some cases, I'm reminded of old favorites not currently in my Zune collection, while other recommendations are for artists I'm not familiar with. The potential weak link here is sharing you music collection with other people in your household because the recommendations can get radically skewed by the person who listens most. I certainly don't tend to listen to anything that would cause Britney Spears to show up in my recommendations and yet there she was in the list when I first tried out the feature. I'm hoping rating her songs with a broken heart (which means I dislike them) helps avoid a similar experience in the future.

The buy-from-FM feature is really handy for the Zune Pass subscriber too. Since Zune hardware has FM radio built-in, I frequently use my Zune to listen to KEXP. When they feature a new band, I can now simply mark the track for download as I'm listening and have it show up in my collection later.

One of my biggest gripes about Zune is finally addressed - both the software and the Zune hardware now support Audible audiobooks. I have an Audible subscription going back many years and found this to be a key reason not to buy a Zune. I'm happy they finally listened. This signals that Zune is no longer targeting the 18-25 crowd, who are a tiny fraction of the audiobook market.

If you like toting around games on your portable player, Zune 3.0 adds Hexic and a poker game to the device. It will be interesting to see if more games start showing up in the next release. I'm also seeing more download-to-own tracks available as MP3, which means if you spend money on a song it will work anywhere, not just on a Zune.

I hesitate to suggest Zune (or anything) will dent the iPod's dominance in the portable player market. I will go so far as suggesting Microsoft is doing many things right with the Zune software, focusing more on making the music experience better, rather than focusing on trying to sell you more tracks. Apple's iTunes software feels like a commerce platform. Zune software feels like a solution for managing your music library and finding more music to listen to. The net result will likely be selling more music to Zune owners, but I don't feel like I'm being sold anything each time I launch the Zune software. It will never happen, but Zune would make a big dent in market share simply by adding support for iPod sync in the desktop software. Once again, I highly recommend replacing Windows Media Player by downloading Zune 3.0. If you're an iTunes user, this might be the time to check out Zune as a possible alternative.

With the release of the Zune 2.5 desktop software, I'm officially declaring Windows Media Player dead. It's not, of course, you still need WMP to playback any of the PlaysForSure DRM stuff you've purchased in the past, like Amazon Unbox videos, but Windows Media Player might as well be dead because Microsoft has created something so much better with the Zune app. You can benefit without ever buying a Zune device or purchasing a single track from the Zune Marketplace. Starting with existing support for h.264 content that WMP only plays after installing additional codecs, Zune software only got better in the current release.

The Zune UI team has succeeded where both Windows Media Player and iTunes have failed, eliminating the confusing folder > sub-folder hierarchy that's traditionally defined the desktop media player. The experience of browsing for music in the Zune software makes finding music in a large library relatively easy. Zune Marketplace integration is useful (for finding albums you may not own) without being invasive. The reason I consider this the real breakthrough release for the Zune software is because it adds back in some features that any media player needs to be useful. Key new features include advanced tag editing for correcting metadata on your tracks, a seemingly improved ability to identify tracks in compilation albums, and smart playlisting (this last feature still needs to re-add mood-based playlists, but most people won't care). Some other new features are a bit more obvious - like integration with Live Messenger. If you have both apps open you can post recently listened to songs to your Messenger status.

Another important addition is the new video store is working toward achieving parity with iTunes. Zune did manage to score some NBC programs that aren't available from iTunes, but I really see the Zune Marketplace video selection as the eventual replacement for (or merger with) the Xbox Live Video Marketplace. The Zune store has the key advantage of delivering videos that work on your PC, on a Zune and on the Xbox (streamed from the Zune software), while Xbox videos are trapped in your Xbox. I'm still more interested in what's available from Amazon Unbox because I don't watch much video on any portable device, but it's nice to see another option.

If you do own a Zune device, another key reason to give the new Zune software a spin is that "The Social" Microsoft has marketed for ages finally makes sense. You can sample the listening tastes of your friends and get dynamically updated playlists based on what your friends are listening to. For me this is a highly interesting way to both discover new music and discover that my friends have lousy taste in music (sorry Andru, but Jordin Sparks?). As someone who already belongs to too many "social networks" I like the Zune experience because I can sample music from people with opinions I tend to trust without needing to go to a site and continuously interact with it. I'd like this feature to go farther so that I can see how many of my friends are all liking the same songs, but it's off to a good start.

There's a solid round-tripping feature for podcast listening in their too. If you start listening to a podcast on your computer and need to hit the road, you can pick up where you left off on the Zune - a feature I haven't seen work on any other device.

With those last two features, I'm not trying to get you to throw out your iPod (or whatever you currently use), just pointing out some key advantages of the Zune experience. There are still things I don't like. Microsoft really should make Amazon Unbox work with the Zune at a minimum. There's no technical reason it can't work, it's intentionally broken. The other inexcusable oversight is Audible support. If Zune had a comparable alternative, I'd forgive them, but they don't and there's really no better library of downloadable audiobooks.

Download the Zune Software

Scott Dunn over at Windows Secrets provides a list of the nine must-have freeware apps, based on the overlap in reviews from four respected publications. To make Scott's list, an application had to appear on the list of three out of four of publications. You can read Scott's methodology in picking the software, then download the apps. Most have been mentioned here before.

Avira AntiVir Personal is one of the most frequently updated free antivirus apps.

Comodo Firewall Pro is a solid upgrade to the Windows Firewall, providing protection for both inbound and outbound traffic.

TrueCrypt is my favorite disk encryption software. If you want to make sure files on your disk are locked down, use TrueCrypt with an external key on a USB drive.

CCleaner is a favorite registry cleaner and temp file remover.

Lightning for Thunderbird is a must-have because Thunderbird lacks a calendar.

Foxit Reader is a lightweight alternative to the slow-loading Adobe Reader for PDF browsing. It is free but the terms are confusing because Foxit tries hard to upgrade you to their "pro pack".

Audacity is the best free multi-track audio recorder period. I've written several tutorials for audio recording and podcasting based on Audacity.

Wavosaur is the audio editor I affectionately think of as "Sound Forge lite". It's a great two-track audio editor with most of the functions you'd need from a pro app like Sound Forge.

Pidgin is my favorite unified instant messaging client. Since Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, Google, and numerous other messaging apps refuse to collectively play nice, Pidgin bridges the gap for you.

My own lists of best freeware solutions are much longer, but it's excellent to see Scott's distilled list of freeware featuring nine overlapping greats.

If you've had an email account for longer than 5 minutes, you've likely encountered at least one Phishing attempt. These are the emails that look like they are from your bank, or Paypal or eBay asking you to verify some sort of security problem by logging into your account. Places that have your financial details will NEVER send you emails like these. They are fake. The emails are attempts to steal enough of your personal info to ultimately steal your financial assets.

But the email looks real, right? I know I've had a few I was tempted to trust. So how do you make sure you don't accidentally end up losing money and screwing up your credit rating for someone else's personal gain? Here's a handful of ways that should make sure you never get tricked.

Don't Click Links - Don't click links asking for your personal information in email messages. Your bank won't send you an email like that ever. SOLUTION: Type in your bank's Web address in the address bar of your browser (or add it to your favorites and click the favorite). From there you can login and verify that your account is as it should be.

Don't Trust Threats - Your bank, the IRS, Paypal, etc., will never contact you via email with any threat of legal action or security breach. They also won't offer you found money via email. If there's some threat for in action in an email message, assume it's bunk.

Use the Phone - If you're still not convinced the email isn't real, call the business who supposedly sent it and get customer service on the line. Customer service people are paid to provide you information about your account and will be happy to make you comfortable with your account status.

Don't Use the Same Password Everywhere - One of the worst things you can do is use the same password everywhere. If you get tricked into revealing your password at one site, the email address and password combination could get the same thieves into every account you hold if you routinely use the same email address and password at all locations. If you need help picking passwords, something like Roboform comes in handy, because it will generate a password for you and store it securely so you won't forget it later. (And it's free for up to 10 passwords).

It is also wise to use different usernames when possible. Pick a unique username for your bank, ebay, your credit card company's site, and any other site that has personal financial data about you.

Tools to Help You Fight Phishing

Use visual cues in software to help identify potential phishing attacks.

Look for the lock in Firefox:

Look for the Green address bar and the Lock in IE.

It's worth pointing out that the secure certificates required to make the address bar turn green are expensive and even many legitimate financial institutions aren't currently using them. IE does a much better job of telling you when a site has a problem with its security by warning you with red in the address bar:

Watch for Warning Signs in email - For instance, Outlook will tell you if links in a message look suspicious.

Use additional software to help secure against phishing attacks. While IE and Firefox offer rudimentary warning signals, you can get additional protection by using one of the internet security software packages.

The best rule of thumb is to assume the messages are fake and verify your account by going directly to the financial institution's site. Your data will stay safe and you still get the peace of mind knowing your account info is up-to-date and secure.

Like most other people, I suffer from information overload. Instead of using some kind of sorting system like the one recommended by Getting Things Done, I prefer to automate filtering so that I read the items I want to see when I'm ready to deal with them. I track information from a ton of places, but I don't pretend to try and read it all - there's just too much information to follow everything. Instead of wading through stuff I don't care about to get to the interesting stuff, I use some simple search tricks to help filter what I consider the cream that I don't want to miss. These tips save me at least an hour every day by eliminating information grazing and getting me straight to the details I need to be more effective. Here's a handful of free solutions that will help you do the same thing.

Saving Time with FeedDemon

Features built into FeedDemon easily save me an hour every day, by eliminating the wait times for Web pages to load and sorting information into contextually organized Watch folders.

Prefetching Web Pages - I use the Prefetch feature of FeedDemon to load the pages behind news items, which allows me to do other things while my computer does the heavy lifting of pulling in all the graphics and stuff that slow down page load times. By the time I'm ready to read, pages load instantly when I click through from an article in FeedDemon. The other advantage to automatic prefetch is always having the articles on hand for offline viewing if I want to catch up on reading while I'm on the plane (Web apps like Google Reader or Bloglines can't do this).

Custom Watch Lists - Custom watches are a big key digesting more information quickly. I use Watches to filter through thousands of posts from hundreds of sites to get to the point quickly. This can even be great for keeping track of my own writing - say for instance that the only thing you care about in my writing is Windows freeware. You can use a custom watch in FeedDemon to filter all your feeds into a Watch that only shows you the items with Windows freeware.

Watch the video to see how to set up both of these features.

Fast Feed Searching - A third way I use FeedDemon is as a search engine to help me find things. Most of what I read starts in FeedDemon, so I get much more accurate results when trying to find something I'm looking for by starting the search in FeedDemon. I don't get junk in my results because there's no way to game the listings in FeedDemon, saving me even more time in wading through results that don't pertain to my needs.

Download FeedDemon and start saving time

Bonus reading tip - subscribe to feeds from Brijit.com to get great summaries of lengthy articles from places like the Economist, New Yorker, and more.

I get emails from people trying to recover files from a computer crash several times a week. The emails generally start with something like, 'my hard drive failed...' and end with, '...how can I get the photos of my kids back? these were the only copy I have.' I empathize with these emailers because even with a backup plan, I've suffered data loss from a failed computer. After providing a few data recovery suggestions, my first question is always, 'where was your backup plan?' This is followed by, 'what are you going to do to prevent something like this in the future?' I often feel like I'd see blank stares if I could watch someone open my replies.

We insure our homes against loss. We insure our cars against loss. Insurance against data loss is making a back up copy - very few people do it; don't be one of them.

The best second copy you can make is one that's offsite and automatic. That's where a service like Roxio's new BackOnTrack Online comes in. You install BackOnTrack Online software once, choose which files and folders you want to back up, and it takes care of the rest. Your files are backed up over your Internet connection to a secure server, covering the offsite portion of back up process. The software on your computer automatically watches for new items in the folders you protect, or changes to files, backing up as necessary. If you delete a file, the online backup keeps a copy for 30 days, so you can even change your mind and recover a deleted file.

I've been testing BackOnTrack Online for about a week and so far I'm impressed. The software provides visual indicators on my desktop when something is being backed up, is backed up, or is scheduled to be backed up. You can right click a file or folder to tell BackOnTrack you want it backed up. Deleting a file on your desktop does not permanently remove it from your world - recovery via BackOnTrack Online is easy. I currently have 1GB of files backed up, which is certainly not a huge number, but I consider it a large enough number to feel like an accurate test. If your computer crashes, you can recover your files to any computer via the recovery mode.

Here's a video demo where I show how I deleted a file from my hard drive and recovered it using BackOnTrack Online:

BackOnTrack is powered by Carbonite, which is an online backup service I reviewed in May of 2006. One thing I like about BackOnTrack versus going straight to Carbonite is having the Roxio brand behind it. Roxio and Sonic have been around for a long time. Backing your files up to a service run by them likely means you can feel reasonably secure that your backup will be available for a long time. As a side note, Carbonite also powers the online backup for Microsoft Money.

While BackOnTrack isn't free, it's highly affordable, with an annual subscription running $49.99 or 2 years for $89.99. That's cheap insurance - far less expensive than any software I've purchased to recover data from a failed hard drive. While storage is theoretically unlimited, most broadband connections will result in a limit of backing up 3GB of new files per day.

As a point of disclosure, Roxio sponsored my coverage of CES 2008. I'm recommending BackOnTrack Online as a solution because it works. If you don't choose to use BackOnTrack Online back your stuff up with something else. It's far easier to recover data from a copy than pray that data recovery software can dig it out from a failed drive.

Two days into CES 2008 I'm rapidly compiling a ton of video footage and photos of new products from the show floor. Much of the show is hard to get excited about because like last year, many of the products are simply evolutions over previous offerings. One thing I'm particularly excited about is the number of digital cameras and camcorders that are designed to work under water without needing a special housing. I have some demo video of the new waterproof Sanyo Xacti shooting underwater that will be posted later in the week, along with a rundown of all the various underwater camera options.

Canon's new high definition camcorders are particularly interesting, with the HV30 offering both feature upgrades over the HV20 as well as backward compatibility with HV20 accessories. Two new flash recording HD camcorders offer some excellent features, but still leave me leery of the AVCHD format.

If you house is a cell phone deadzone, you might be interested to check out the zBoost Cell Phone Range Extender, which is meant to eliminate dead spots in your coverage up to 2500 square feet. Alienware has an amazing new 2880x900 OLED display that will be available later in the year according to recent updates. More updates to come throughout the week.

Toward the end of every year I like to do a rundown of what's been popular over the previous 12 months. This particular list consists of the 15 most downloaded apps from Top Drawer Downloads over the past 12 months. What's interesting is that most of these apps have been in the top 20 every month since the beginning of the year. 13 of the 15 are free. The 2 apps that aren't free, Mixcraft and RM Converter, don't really have a competitive free alternative.

1) RadLight Ogg Media DirectShow Filters enables playback of OGG and OGM video files in Windows Media Player 9, Windows Media Player 10, and Windows Media Player 11. This one became popular thanks to a large number of people from Asia sharing files in the OGM format. [Price: Freeware]

2) MCE Video Encoder streams DivX files to Windows Media Center Extenders by converting the DivX AVI files to WMV on-the-fly. This one will likely be less popular in 2007 thanks to DivX support on the Xbox 360 by way of Media Connect support in Windows Media Player 11. [Price: Freeware]

3) Unlocker overrides the cannot delete file or folder error messages that frequently frustrate Windows users everywhere. If you have a locked file you want to delete, Unlocker can help you delete locked files. [Price: Freeware]

4) RAD Video Tools is one of the easiest ways to convert MOV files to AVI. Since many digital cameras record video in MOV format, this is a useful tool for converting MOV to AVI for editing in apps like Windows Movie Maker. [Price: Freeware]

5) BootSkin is a safe and easy way to change the startup screen in Windows XP. It supports many additional skins from places like WinCustomize.com. [Price: Freeware]

6) VLC Player is among the most useful free media players on the planet. It doesn't play every file, but it plays enough of them that you're less likely to be frustrated with video and audio if you have VLC installed. It's also a convenient tool for extracting video clips from DVDs. [Price: Freeware]

7) Mixcraft is the closest thing Windows users have to Apple's GarageBand. Once version 4 comes out in January, feature parity will be even closer with the addition of MIDI instruments. Mixcraft isn't free, but it's worth every penny. [Price: $49.95]

8) STOIK Video Converter is another great way to convert MOV files to AVI as well as being a utility knife of video conversions for various other reasons. [Price: Freeware]

9) iTube is an easy tool for Windows users to download YouTube videos and convert them for iPod playback. With YouTube remaining the most popular video site on the Web, it makes sense iTube would be among the most popular apps of 2007. [Price: Freeware]

10) Xilisoft RM Converter is among the easiest tools for converting RealMedia RM and RMVB files to any other format. While I wrote about a free solution for converting RMVB sometime ago, Xilisoft RM Converter is a handy tool that simplifies the process and eliminates the frustrating guesswork. [Price: $29.00]

11) GSpot helps find missing codecs when you have trouble playing AVI video files. I personally use MediaInfo more often these days because it has found some file types GSpot could not. [Price: Freeware]

12) VirtualDubMod is a must have video editing tool for working with editing audio files of many types. Based on VirtualDub, this version supports some integration I frequently reference in tutorials. [Price: Freeware]

13) RealAlternative is the most popular alternative to RealPlayer. While I personally find the newest version of RealPlayer to be one of the most useful apps currently available, many people still prefer to avoid anything from Real and sue RealAlternative instead. [Price: Freeware]

14) WinFF is my favorite video conversion app, particularly because of its batch processing support. You'll see it referenced almost anytime I get a question about how to convert one video format to another format. [Price: Freeware]

15) AVISynth is a programming language for video editors that works well in conjunction with VirtualDub and VirtualDubMod. I reference it for things like playing your video clips backward and other tweaks not directly supported in video editing tools like Windows Movie Maker. [Price: Freeware]

Warner Brothers is the first company that gets the new distribution model. If I can pay for a DVD and easily get a copy of movies I can play on my computer and portable device, I won't need software to rip copies for me. The Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix DVD I got in the mail today includes exactly this. Right on the front of the box, there's a sticker reading "Bonus Digital Copy of the Film included".

There are actually two digital copies on the disk:
1) A 320x166 widescreen version for PlaysForSure devices and Zune playback.
2) A 3.6Mb 720x306 widescreen version for PC Playback
Both look great on their respective devices. And both eliminate the need to rip DVDs, without adding any additional price to the disk. The only thing better than this would be a disk that came with a download code for Amazon Unbox. In the meantime, you just validate and copy the files to your PC for playback or transfer to your portable device.

With any luck, the Harry Potter experiment will work well and we'll see many more disks like this one in the near future. Maybe this is the HD-DVD managed copy concept only a year or two late?

I love the deals offered in stores on Black Friday, but I absolutely despise the required trip to the store to get the massive discounts. It seems like you either have to be waiting outside the door at 4am or plan on the stuff you really want being sold out when you get there. Then there's the issue of parking and fighting through the crowds of other people who are all chasing the same deals you are. Fortunately digital downloads don't suffer from any of these problems. You can still get great Black Friday deals on software without having to venture out into the battleground of shopping madness.

Below is a collection of software specials I tracked down, including a few for those of you who are Mac users. These deals expire next week, so be sure to act immediately if you want the savings.

50% Off Specials

50% discount on all Uniblue products! Uniblue makes several system tweaking utilities designed to improve performance, prevent crashes and keep things running smoothly. SpeedUpMyPC, Registry Booster and WinTasks 5 Pro are the most popular Uniblue apps. All of their apps are 50% off if you use coupon code THKUN50%.

50% Discount on Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 You must use Coupon Code BLKDRG07 to get the discount. While I still find voice recognition less than perfect, Dragon NaturallySpeaking is the one app I've found worth using. Dragon NaturallySpeaking Standard is an effective way to talk emails, documents, and instant messages, without ever having to touch your keyboard. With some practice, it's a great way to give your wrists a break if you frequently type.

50% discount on PDF Converter Professional 4 using Coupon Code BLKPDF07. ScanSoft PDF Converter Professional 4 is a complete PDF solution including support for creating, editing, and conversion documents to PDF format. It's far cheaper than Adobe Acrobat and includes a couple of cool features like instant conversion of PDFs to interactive forms and the ability to convert PDF text to speech. This is the only real competitor I've found to Acrobat because it easily supports adding links and embedding images.

Multimedia Software

Get a FREE copy of Roxio Buzz ($19.99) with a purchase of Easy Media Creator 10. I believe this also still qualifies for an additional $20 Rebate on Easy Media Creator.

Or if you don't need Roxio Buzz, there also the option to SAVE $50 when you buy Roxio's EMC 10 and Back On Track 3 Suite Together.

23% discount on Pinnacle Studio Ultimate 11 using Coupon Code STUDIOULTBF. Pinnacle Studio Ultimate is one of the two video editing apps I use almost every day. The ulitmate version is definitely worth the additional features.

System Tools and Utilities

30% Off Registry Mechanic 7 - This continues to be one of the tools I use to avoid frequent operating system installs due to installing and uninstalling many applications.

25% off Webroot Childsafe for up to 3 computers. While the best way to supervise your kid's computer use is to actually be there while their online, you can't always catch everything. Childsafe does a great job of blocking objectionable sites, without making it impossible to navigate to legitimate sites. You can also get monitoring of your child's Internet activity.

ACDSee has 4 different offers possibly the best of which is 2 copies of ACDSee 10 and a 1GB SD memory card. ACDSee has been making great imaging tools for as long as I can remember. These four Web specials are a great way to upgrade to new versions or add some useful tools to your sweet of photo apps.

Antivirus and Antispyware

30% Off Spyware Doctor which is arguably the most accurate spyware defense available. The freeware tools simply don't keep up with the number of online threats and Spyware Doctor is consistently rated near the top by all reviewers.

25% Off Webroot AntiVirus with AntiSpyware and Firewall. If you aren't currently running an AntiVirus application, you should be.

20% off Internet Security Pro from Trend Micro. This is among the most comprehensive security suites available.

Mac Special Offers

Buy Toast 8 Titanium and Get 3 Menu Style Packs for only $9.99 ($50 savings). Toast has long been the CD and DVD burning app I recommend for Mac users. It also includes a great tool for converting analog audio to digital formats.

$10 Off Parallels Desktop Parallels is a great solution for running Windows on your Mac hardware.

Save 30%! on Norton Internet Security 3.0 for Mac using coupon code BFNISM. I'm not entirely convinced Mac users need AntiVirus protection, but it's better to be safe than sorry. This suite includes Norton AntiVirus, Firewall, Privacy Control and Alladin iClean.

If you don't need the full Norton suite, you can still Save $5 on Norton AntiVirus 10.0 for Mac OS.

In an article on InfoWorld today, Jeremy Kirk is reporting that we may finally get to make personal copies of our HD-DVD and Blu-ray movies without fear of going to jail. According to the article, the proposed licensing agreement is under negotiation by AACS Licensing Administrator members (including Sony, IBM, The Walt Disney Co., Warner Bros., and Microsoft) and the movie industry companies who use AACS copy protection to safeguard their content.

HD-DVD has a Managed Copy provision built into the specification, which allows for movie rights holders to enable consumers to make copies within a set of parameters. I'm less familiar with the inner workings of Blu-ray, but it seems to have a similar feature. Essentially the Managed Copy system is designed so that the copy remains in a rights managed state, but you have greater flexibility about what you can do with the copy. While this doesn't go far enough for some people, I certainly wouldn't care about making copies of my movies, if I knew that I could easily put a movie on my iPod or play it back from my home theater PC without having to buy the same movie three times.

While this doesn't solve the problem of making copies of titles currently available only on DVD, having a forward looking solution is certainly a step in the right direction. The next step toward placating those of us who like to have easy ways to consume our favorite entertainment when and where we want is to make it legal for cable and satellite companies to offer network DVR as a valid product offering. This would essentially mean that you could watch any show recently available in your cable lineup at any time, even if you forgot to set up your Tivo. BitTorrent and other P2P services currently fill this need, but at least in the United States we're considered criminals if we opt to locate shows out on the public Internet.

After deciding my HP DV1000 laptop was too slow for high definition video editing, I replaced it with my first Dell machine ever. I originally planned on getting a Mac Book Pro, which would allow me to run both Mac OS X and Windows XP or Vista. I balked at the last minute because Apple doesn't have support for my Cingular BroadbandConnect service, as currently there's no PC Express card for BroadbandConnect and there's no plans to make one. I use BroadbandConnect every day, so this forced my hand to find something else.

I looked around at my options and Dell was the only company with integrated BroadbandConnect support. While I normally don't like additional integration, this is one thing I was willing to compromise on because now I don't have to lug around an extra card. My other major criteria for a new laptop were support for 1280x720 or higher video resolution, Core 2 Duo processor, 3GB or more of RAM. Dell came through at a comparable price to the Mac Book Pro with the one key feature I couldn't live without and 4GB of RAM.

With the myriad of new Web services launching on a daily basis, it's hard to decide which tools to use. One of the few services I rely on every day is Technorati. Here are a few of the ways it can improve your own information gathering:

1) Subscribe to keyword feeds in your RSS reader. For instance, if you want to know every time someone posts a new article tagged with the keyword chopsticks, you simply subscribe to that feed in something like Bloglines, Google Reader, or my favorite deasktop reader, FeedDemon.

The best part of this is you can build the keyword feed without ever visiting the Technorati site. Simply paste the base feed URL in your reader, add the keyword at the end, and you're subscribed:

This gives you all search terms with the keyword:
http://feeds.technorati.com/search/keyword

While this gives you all items the content publisher tagged with the keyword:
http://feeds.technorati.com/feed/posts/tag/keyword

2) Create Your Own Custom Watchlist If you don't subscribe to feeds, the Custom Watchlist feature is a useful way to track information based on keywords or phrases. Any word or phrase may be used in the watchlist and results are displayed on the Watchlist page in your Technorati account as you log in.

3) Search Technorati with Authority If I want to see all the recent posts from many people on a topic like "photography", for instance, Technorati can be a useful place to gather this information. The problem with this is, you tend to get a ton of posts that mention photography but aren't necessarily about photography. This type of search is improved by sorting by blogs with more authority.

The other cool feature in this type of search is the ability to refine your search by adding more criteria - the site does a good job of suggesting results. For instance, here I searched for "video editing" and Technorati suggested I refine my results to include posts that had both "video editing" and things like HDV, DVD Production, Digital Video and some other slightly less meaningful topics.

4) Favorite your favorite blogs This is one of the features I don't use nearly enough. By favoriting blogs, you get a quick snapshot of what's going on in your own personal sphere of interest from your own custom page on Technorati. You can also add keyword tags for each of the blogs, to create a more meaningful sorting system for your own information gathering. Of course, I think everyone should add JakeLudington.com as a Favorite, along with adding xyHD.tv as a favorite too.

5)Using Technorati Favorites to Recall Information After you favorite my site (hint, hint) and other places you frequent, Technorati is an awesome tool for helping you remember stuff. I frequently use it to remember stuff I posted, simply by doing a search for something and only searching my blog. Taking this a step further, lets say you favorite 10 sites you read regularly. You read something 3 weeks ago on one of your favorites, but can't remember which one. A search of your favorites on Technorati for some key topic of that post will help you turn up the source of the information, acting as a convenient memory assistant.

6) Technorati on your Phone If you're a 'net addict like I am and can't tear yourself away while standing in lines or waiting for your wife to finish running errands, the mobile version of Technorati can be a great way to keep track of interesting information on the go. Just favorite m.technorati.com on your cell phone and you're a couple of thumb clicks away from search and information.

Windows Vista is finally shipping, which means it might be time to reassess the state of your existing computer. I know I've been holding off on getting anything new for at least a year longer than I wanted to, simply because I wanted to wait for hardware that would perform well with Microsoft's latest operating system.

My biggest decision at the moment is how I want to replace my current laptop. It's much slower than I'd like for doing things like video editing. I'm leaning heavily toward getting a MacBook Pro and running both Windows Vista and Windows XP via Parallels. That would get me many of the things I loved about having a Mac laptop back when OS X first came on the scene, without giving up all the things that are familiar to me about Windows.

The only thing holding me back on choosing the MacBook Pro is size. Part of me wants to get back to the small form factor of that Fujitsu Lifebook P1510D I toted around for several months. I loved the size. I loved having Tablet PC functionality combined with the size. But it was definitely not the machine for editing video on the go because the screen was just too small. Maybe Dell, Sony or HP will wow me with something in the near future - somehow I doubt it.

In the meantime, I'll still be posting regular tips for Windows XP for the foreseeable future. At the same time, I'll be looking to the future more often and posting additional tips and tutorials for those making the transition to Vista - especially in light of all the changes to Windows Movie Maker since version 2.1 arrived two plus years ago. I'm planning to do another book dedicated to the new version. Of course, if you're still using Windows XP, my first book on Windows Movie Maker, Easy Digital Home Movies, still applies.

As I work with consumer level High Definition camcorders more regularly, I'm convinced they have a long way to go before people will really like the video result. MiniDV options for standard definition recording are at least refined to the point of consistent results, even if those results are often limited by the skill of the person shooting the video and editing the footage. Video output from the consumer HD cameras tends to have quirky results. Consumer HD editing solutions are somewhat limited and often don't work consistently for all formats. Publishing options seem limited to either DVD or Blu-ray disks, with virtually nowhere to put HD content online.

Many of the HD camcorders have potential. I own both a Sanyo Xacti VPC-HD1a and the Sony HDR-SR1. I like features of both camcorders, but find many aspects of the entire consumer HD workflow frustrating. I love the portability provided with the Sanyo Xacti line. The same guys who headed up the Canon Digital Elph line of products are steering the future of the Xacti. The Sony HDR-SR1 takes better images than the Xacti and has potential to be a solid video solution in another generation.

The Xacti VPC-HD1a records MP4 files to an SD card, making it easy to shoot short movies and upload them. It's biggest downside is a 400 ISO, which performs poorly in low light. The Sony HDR-SR1 is more too my liking for creating published content, although not without a few quirks. Sony did something brilliant in offering a Bluetooth wireless microphone, with incredible range and none of the noise you sometimes get from a traditional radio frequency wireless microphone. The CMOS image sensor in the Sony HDR-SR1 camera seems to have issues, making it frustrating to get consistently great video.

The big downside to the HDR-SR1 is the AVCHD format recorded by camera. It requires some convoluted editing at the moment, because Sony released the camera without a supported editing workflow. The camera was quite popular during the holiday buying season, at least in the San Francisco and Seattle areas where every store was completely sold out, so I can only assume there will be many frustrated camera owners trying to edit movies.

I remain hopeful consumer HD camcorders are on the verge of getting better imaging and improved support. Sanyo showed off an updated version of the Xacti at CES, with support for HDMI output, better low-light recording, and a handful of minor tweaks to the design. Panasonic is shipping a 3CCD camcorder with AVCHD support in March, which records to SD cards. And a number of software vendors will finally ship their AVCHD supported products, as well as supporting h.264 natively. Blu-ray support is a standard feature in most of the DVD authoring tools, which hopefully means HD-DVD isn't too far behind.

Unless you have a real need to record in HD, or unless you have the budget to buy a camcorder in the $3000 and up range, I'm recommending that you stick with buying a 3CCD SD camcorder for the time being and wait a few more years for the consumer HD market to mature.

Every year about this time I take a look at some of the most popular articles of the past year. A few of the top 10 were written in 2005, but remain among the most popular for 2006. My photo comparison of an iPod and Zune came in at #1 for the year in spite of having only 2 months to generate interest.

1) The Zune and iPod Photo Comparison remains one of the more popular posts. I'm hopeful Microsoft will announce something cool like the ability to share video downloads from Xbox Live Video Marketplace with your Zune to actually differentiate the Zune from other players. As it stands, the wireless sharing feature they tout so highly hasn't shown much interest. I've never been anywhere to see another Zune in range. A friend of mine ran into another Zune owner in a public place, asked him if he could share a song, and ultimately freaked the guy out because he thought he might get a virus.

2) How to Copy Songs from Your iPod to Windows remains a popular topic. Third-party software remains the easiest way to accomplish this task.

3) How to Change the Windows XP Boot Screen is one of those customizations everyone wants to try at least once.

4)If you want to Sync Your iPod with Windows Media Player 10 (or now Windows Media Player 11) you need third party software to make it work.

5)Easy DivX to Xbox 360 Streaming is still a bit elusive. I think the Zune software makes this easier, even if you don't have a Zune, but the best experience for all media sharing with an Xbox 360 remains via Windows Media Center Edition.

6)How to Play RMVB Files is a question on many minds. This format is growing in popularity thanks to open source Helix project. While many people in the U.S. continue to have mistrust for RealNetworks, people outside the U.S. are finding thier file formats to be among the most efficient.

7)How to Convert RMVB Files is closely related to How to Play RMVB.

8)Convert Movies for your Sony PSP remains a question on many minds. I wrote this article ages ago. The method I describe for converting PAL DVDs for PC Playback is easier for all DVDs at this point, but the PSP article has been around longer and remains more popular.

9)Easy Xbox 360 Wireless Networking is something we all need. It's easy enough to put an Xbox 360 on your wireless network. The real trick is to have enough bandwidth to stream files to the Xbox 360 while performing other wireless tasks throughout the house.

10)How to Sync Google Calendar with Outlook is one of my personal favorite finds for the year. CompanionLink for Google Calendar is a better solution than the original free method I described.

Big news in Western Washington during December was the massive windstorm that wiped out power for hundreds of thousands of residents. Fallen trees accounted for many of the outages. In the early morning hours of 15 December 2006, a tree from the house to our West completely uprooted and fell on our power, cable and telephone lines, barely missing direct impact with our car. As this was an isolated incident, not a blown transformer, it received low priority causing power to remain off until sometime on 20 December 2006. Initially, the car couldn't be moved because it was surrounded by fallen power lines, further complicating the situation.

I was lucky enough to miss out on this power outage while working on a project in Mountain View, CA. My family was not so lucky, enduring several days of relying on a decorative fireplace as the primary source of heat. Hotels weren't an option - the only one vacancy I could find online turned out to be a hotel that went out of business. Fortunately we have some great friends and neighbors who came to the rescue.

Shortly after the outage, my good friend Bre checked in on Robin to make sure she and Wyatt were okay. The neighbors to our East were kind enough to run a heavy duty extension cord from their house to ours, allowing Robin to use a space heater in addition to the largely useless fireplace. The neighbors also kindly accommodated with access to a warm shower. These were both welcomed gestures making things more manageable in an otherwise difficult time.

In checking in on a few of my Seattle friends, it seems that power was a hit or miss commodity around the city. Chris and Ponzi were both initially without power in Issaquah, but were lucky enough to have a gas stove and fireplaces that remained functional throughout. After they got their power back in Issaquah, Chris and Ponzi welcomed Robin and Wyatt into their home, providing the first warm night's sleep in several days.

Now that power is restored, I'm looking at ways to have a better backup plan for the house, including a generator to power heat for the home when the utilities fail. Hopefully we won't have another massive outage like this one anytime soon, but I'd rather be better prepared next time. Batteries of various kinds are great for short term solutions, but just aren't up to the task. In the meantime, it's great to have friends we can count on in a crisis.

I forgot my cell phone at home on my recent flight from Seattle to San Jose. I realized this at the Seattle airport after it was too late to go home and get it. No big deal, I thought. I'll just pick up one of those pay-as-you-go phones in the airport while I wait for my departure time.

Wrong. According to people working in an airport shop in Seattle, it's against the law to cell these phones in the airport. I haven't been able to verify this, but since they sell numerous cell phone accessories, I'll assume the clerks know what they are talking about. The implied reason was that the phones could be used for terrorist activities (presumably because you can pay cash to get one).

I might buy into this theory if it weren't for the fact that thousands (maybe millions?) of cell phones pass through airport security on any given day. All the phones that go through security are deemed "safe". Am I to believe that none of those phones are pay-as-you-go phones? Not likely. If we operated on the same logic used for not allowing liquids to pass beyond a security checkpoint, I should be throwing away my phone before checking in and buying a new phone on the other side. I certainly would think it is harder to misjudge a complicated electronic device like a phone before you'd mistake a bottle of water someone sips from.

When I touched down in San Jose, my first stop was a nearby Target store where I picked up the Virgin Mobile Kyocera Switch Back. I don't think I'm ready to dump my Windows Mobile phone just yet, but I could certainly use this phone instead of many other alternatives from Cingular. The keyboard is functional, the camera takes decent pictures, and the audio quality is as good as anything else I've used. It even worked as my alarm clock. If the airport had carried this phone, they could have had my money instead (and required a credit card to prevent anonymity).

It was almost a year ago when I did my Xbox 360 giveaway. Since that time, Xbox 360 consoles became less scarce and might be the best consumer buy this holiday season - but not because of the games. There's a whole lot of effort in the entertainment industry and in the consumer electronics marketplace to make it harder for people to use their digital media however they see fit. The Xbox 360 consoles of the current generation might be the last consumer set top devices we see that don't encumber our media consumption from a million different angles.

The Toshiba set top HD-DVD player offers HDMI output with HDCP content protection on the signal for delivering digital video to your screen. Using the HDMI output, you get full resolution video of either 1920x1080 or 1280x720, depending on what your television screen supports. It also has component outputs, but those won't display full HD resolution, instead forcing the picture to 480p. If you happen to have an HDTV with no HDMI in, you're stuck with a lower resolution picture. In general, this will become the norm as hardware ships with support for an Image Constraint Token which forces content to a maximum resolution of 960x540. The Xbox 360 currently either lacks this restriction or doesn't have any content with Image Constraint Token support turned on, as demonstrated by my recent tutorial on copying HD-DVD with an Xbox as the source.

The Xbox 360 is the exception in this case. Hampered devices are about to become the norm. Blu-ray players and the new Sony PlayStation 3 also have HDMI with HDCP content protection. Using component connections with either also hampers your experience. The Xbox continues to output the maximum resolution available without hampering the signal.

In general, this is good news if you want to maintain some level of access to your media. Granted, my method for capturing HD from the Xbox is neither affordable nor practical from a time standpoint, but I like knowing I can do it. I specifically wanted to compare some video from the Xbox and would not have been able to do so without this option. Xbox also makes streaming audio and video to your home theater easier with the new software Zune Player (no Zune hardware required) and while the experience isn't perfect, the two combined make it largely unnecessary to have a Media Center PC to enjoy watching movies from your computer in your home theater.

Before you write off the Xbox as just for kids or only for gamers, take a look at what may be the last device in the HD space with what we consider the analog hole in its unhampered format. There's no guarantee that future versions of Xbox 360 consoles will continue to allow this freedom, but in the meantime this seems to be the norm.

If you're looking for some holiday savings that won't have someone trying to beat you down in the aisles of a store, digital shopping might be your best alternative. There are a number of useful software apps offering discounts through the end of the holiday buying season, making it cheaper to either upgrade your existing applications or get the right tools for a given digital problem.

Top of the list in my book is Roxio's Easy Media Creator 9. The new and improved version of Roxio's all-in-one audio and video tool includes my favorite DVD authoring app, MyDVD, a video conversion tool for converting most videos for playback on iPod, Sony PSP, or other portable devices. The video editing app is among the easier solutions to use. The DVD burning app now supports HD formats like a champ and there are at least 500 other things you can do I haven't mentioned here. Using the Coupon Code SAVE10C9 you can save 10% on Easy Media Creator 9. If you owned a previous version of a Sonic or Roxio product there's also a $20 rebate.

For a serious digital video editing suite, Pinnacle is offering discounts off any of their products, which includes $50 off the amazing Avid Liquid. The software supports both standard definition and HDV video editing. For consumer editing, the

Pinnacle Studio is also discounted for the holidays. You can save on anything in the Pinnacle catalog using the coupon code PINN03. This one expires on November 30, so if you're in the market for video editing software, don't wait too long.

For converting your media files, Digital Media Converter remains a consistent solution. It converts most media formats with support for batch processing, including the ability to convert files like MOV. You can save $5 on Digital Media Converter with coupon code DMCOFFER.

You won't get any bruises while shopping for any of these apps, but you might just make your digital audio and video editing a little easier.

What is it about making backups that's so hard? Not the actual process of creating a backup of important data, but the habit of backing up seems to be one of the biggest challenges in computing. I get a fair number of questions from people who need to recover files they've either deleted accidentally or lost due to a crash. Each time I want to ask why they didn't make a backup in the first place.

Whether you use something free like the batch process copy operation I setup to copy my Outlook PST file or a feature rich backup solution like my personal favorite, Second Copy, the point is you should be backing up your files at least once every day. Free solutions don't always expose some of the obvious features, like checking for duplicates, while the pay solutions offer the roadblock of having a small expense associated with them.

Most of us wouldn't ever think of going without insurance to protect against loss of our possessions due to a fire, or the liability of getting in an auto accident, so why are so many people willing to throw the dice on their personal data? There are unforeseen events that happen that make even a great backup strategy fail, but those are rare compared with losing data because there was no backup in the first place.

If you have a backup plan in place, pat yourself on the back and skip the rest of this rant. If you don't currently have a backup plan, stop reading this, go shopping for an external hard drive and download backup software to copy your My Documents folder and your email at the very minimum. SyncBack is a good place to start is you prefer freeware. I personally like the flexibility of Second Copy because it allows me to do things like run applications before and after certain backup operations. The primary reason I recommend an external drive over something like using blank DVD or DVD-RW media is because those ultimately require human intervention to sustain. Minimizing the human intervention in a backup plan helps make sure the backup plan doesn't get sidetracked at some point.

Windows Vista is already behind in its support of digital video cameras and the product hasn't shipped yet. Sean Alexander and Furrygoat, two Microsoft employees, are both drooling over the new Sony HDR-SR1 which records 1080i HD direct to a hard drive on the camcorder. I don't blame them - it's a hot looking camera with great features. The camera won't work with the Vista version of Windows Movie Maker.

One of the key features of the Vista version of Windows Movie Maker is supposed to be HD support. The supported HD in Sony HDR-SR1 is AVCHD, which uses H.264 MPEG-4 compression to keep file sizes down, giving you 2 hours of recording on the 30GB hard drive. AVCHD is not compatible with Windows Movie Maker because Microsoft is electing not to support AVC out-of-the-box.

If this were limited to one camcorder, I'd say no big deal. But it's not one camcorder; it's many camcorders from many manufacturers. Sony, Hitachi and Panasonic are all planning to offer camcorders with the AVCHD format. My Sanyo Xacti uses a different kind of MPEG-4 compression to offer 720p HD, also incompatible with Windows Movie Maker.

The solution is to use something else to edit your movies if you record in HD. Like a Mac. ;) More seriously, Roxio Easy Media Creator 9 works with the MPEG-4 files from the Sanyo Xacti. I'm sure Sony's Vegas Video will work with the files from the AVCHD cameras. Other 3rd parties will provide solutions for a fee. But the promise of HD support in Vista's Windows Movie Maker should be a real one, like the support in Apple's iMovie, not something that's already out of date before it ships. For all its other shortcomings, the XP version of Windows Movie Maker worked with every DV cam on the market at the time it shipped.

There are likely two reasons Microsoft isn't supporting AVCHD. On one hand, the format competes directly with Microsoft's own VC1 offering, which is the secret sauce in HD-DVD. A few people at Microsoft are heavily invested in seeing HD-DVD succeed (which is not necessarily a bad thing), possibly at the expense of the customer because the blinders are on to what the rest of the industry is doing. When the key players in the digital video camera space make a decision, even if it's one Microsoft doesn't like, Microsoft should be paying attention to how it impacts the customer.

The second reason Microsoft isn't supporting AVC by default is the per user cost of adding support for AVC to Windows Vista. It would likely cost upwards of $3 per user to have AVC baked into Windows Vista. While that doesn't sound like much, it eats into their already shrinking bottom line per license. They finally added support for MPEG-2 in Windows Vista, which probably blew the budget for codec support.

The reasons remain bad excuses for not paying attention to what's going on in customer land. People who buy digital video cameras will expect them to work with Windows Vista out-of-the-box. Two key formats matter in HD right now: AVC and VC-1. There aren't any DV cams that record VC-1 video (my guess is there never will be). With the world moving toward HD, we're going to see lots more content in both VC-1 and H.264. The right course of action here is to offer a patch to Windows Movie Maker, in the form of a codec pack or upgrade, within the Service Pack 1 timeframe. Even that's not soon enough. People will be buying new cameras and new computers in 2007. Many of those cameras will be HD. Most of those computers will have Windows Vista installed and no support for what will likely be the popular option for consumer level HD recording.

Are we really back to the argument that buying Mac is your only viable option if you make video?

Seattle continues to surprise me with cool companies that add value to existing services and make the Internet more interesting. In this case, I'm referring to PayScale, a company that surveys people about what they do for a living to get a better idea of what people are making in jobs around the world. On one hand, you might be thinking, why would I tell a site how much I make? On the other hand, you get a better idea of what people working in similar positions are making, assuming everyone provides reasonably accurate data. The next time you decide to change jobs, or when you're negotiating a raise, you can get a feel for what other people in your field are making to get a better idea of what you're worth. We recently posted an interview with PayScale's founder, which offers more detail on how the service works and why it might be useful to you.

While we're on the subject of financial advice, it's been interesting to see all the talk about Paul Farrell of MarketWatch quite seriously suggesting that Scott Adam's 9-point formula for financial success is something worthy of the Nobel Prize in economics. While I'm not sure this is prize worthy stuff, it's definitely good common sense material for anyone trying to keep their financial house in order over the long haul.

1) Make a will

2) Pay off your credit cards

3) Get term life insurance if you have a family to support

4) Fund your 401k to the maximum

5) Fund your IRA to the maximum

6) Buy a house if you want to live in a house and can afford it

7) Put six months worth of expenses in a money-market account

8) Take whatever money is left over and invest 70% in a stock index fund and 30% in a bond fund through any discount broker and never touch it until retirement

9) If any of this confuses you, or you have something special going on (retirement, college planning, tax issues), hire a fee-based financial planner, not one who charges a percentage of your portfolio

I'd add a number 10 here that says something along the line of:

10) Use tools to help keep track of where you're at so you can measure the successes in paying off your credit cards. Organize your bills and pay them in a timely fashion. And have a snapshot of where you are at any given time.

Free Accounting Software is a great app for tracking finances. Most banks and credit unions offer free online bill payments, which makes payments convenient. I'm a diehard Outlook users, but if I needed an new system for reminders, EssentialPIM would top my list.

I wrote about the Zoho online office applications recently and complained the company required a different sign-on for each of the applications. This week they announced that the sign on is unified, so you only need one username for all the services. This is a great step in the right direction for a product I already consider the best online solution for word processing and spreadsheets. While I'm admittedly still not ready to completely abandon Microsoft Office in favor of something that lives online I'm continuing to regularly use Zoho Writer for some quick projects.

I'm currently in the process of putting together some comparisons of the Sanyo Xacti VPC-HD1a and other digital video cameras. While it doesn't do incredibly well in low light (which I expected) it's taking some great looking images. I'll post some side-by-side comparisons with some other consumer grade cameras, including my Panasonic 3CCD standard def camera and the Sony HD cam Bre Pettis uses for the Make Weekend Projects videos. So far I'm impressed with the performance.

Thank you to everyone who submitted feedback for the Tom Bihn bag giveaway. I'm a few days behind on announcing the three lucky individuals who get a free Tom Bihn Bag. Congrats to John Z., Tim M. and Javier S. Look for me to give away more cool stuff in the near future.

One of the most interesting parts of the survey for me was seeing what you are or aren't using to make audio and video. As a percentage of total responses, more people are not currently using audio and video editing software than any one specific software application. To keep things simple I lumped any audio or video editing app with only one person using it into the Other category. Below you can see a breakdown of which apps are most popular with people who responded to the survey.

Adobe Premiere and Windows Movie Maker are the two most popular video editing applications in terms of usage by respondents.

For audio editing, Audacity is the runaway favorite among respondents with 22%. Sound Forge is the next closest application with 8% of respondents.

I think I may run a similar survey about digital photography apps in the near future to get a better feel for what you might be using to tweak your photos.

In other freebie news, it's taken forever but I finally have the two recipients of an iRiver Clix and MTV URGE worked out based on my server stats. In case you've forgotten what this was all about, if you linked to an article on JakeLudington.com between July 19, 2006 and August 29, 2006, you were automatically given a chance to get a free iRiver Clix from me. The person who generated the most traffic from their link (or links) got an iRiver Clix and MTV URGE and one random individual also would get an iRiver Clix and MTV URGE subscription. Sorting through all the details proved to be more complicated than anticipated. As it turns out, Gina Trapani over at Lifehacker came in first with over 8588 people visiting, so Gina came in with the top traffic by a very wide margin. Jay White's Dumb Little Man was selected at random from all linking sites.

If I'm a little slow in responding to email the next few days it's because I'm putting all the final details in place to leave for Beijing, China on Wednesday. I travel often enough that I typically pack the night before and count on having Internet access wherever I arrive. Leaving for China for two weeks is a little more complicated because I need to have a number of things in place and I don't have the comfort of knowing where to get almost anything in the cities I frequent here in the U.S. so I need to plan ahead more carefully.

I started learning Mandarin in December of 2005. Something I've wanted to do for ages. This time I got serious, hired a private tutor, and have barely scratched the surface of one of a very challenging language. I know enough Mandarin at this point to ask for directions, order food, haggle with street vendors and comprehend bits and pieces of dialogue in movies like House of Flying Daggers and Hero. We'll see how much I really know when I get to Beijing.

Part of the trip will be for fun. I hope to see the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, the White Cloud Taoist Temple, and possible take in a Chinese Opera. I'm keeping my options open. If you've been to Beijing and have suggestions, I'd love to hear them. I just found out that two friends from Seattle, Lee and Sachi, will be in Beijing at the same time I am. They have been touring the world since December and I've been following along on their journey through The World is not Flat. We spoke with them for the show a few days before they left, so it will be fun to hear about their adventures in person.

The primary reason for going is to attend DEMO China from September 6-8, where I'll be blogging about every company presenting. In the U.S. DEMO is known as a place where companies attempt to make a big splash by announcing something new, potentially unique and always with tons of buzz. DEMO China is the first time there's ever been a DEMO outside the U.S., which should make for some exciting product launches. You can follow along either through the newsletter and RSS feed or checking in regularly online in my official DEMO China coverage.

I need to thank a number of companies for helping make the DEMO China coverage possible. SnagIt, my favorite screen capture tool, will be making screen captures of all the companies possible. The WebEx MeetMeNow service is providing sponsorship assistance as well. T-Mobile is hooking me up with both Internet access via hotspots and a T-Mobile MDA phone for making calls from China. Tom Bihn outfitted me with some awesome bags (and I'll be announcing a bag giveaway shortly).

Some of the best security you can get for your computer is common sense. Phishing seems to be the most likely culprit of a security violation these days, with hundreds of emails trying to trick you into logging into a fake site with your real bank information or other personal data.

If you ever suspect that one of those messages might be real - don't click the link. Open your browser and type in the URL you know is correct for the bank, or ebay, or PayPal or wherever the scam happens to be. One after you typed in the URL should you enter you username and password.

Beyond protecting yourself with common sense, here are 9 apps that will help make your computing experience more secure through encryption, anonymity, creating barriers or just helping to actively watch for bad stuff on your PC.

ClamWin Free Antivirus - One key to keeping your system secure is a good antivirus program. ClamWin does a great job for free and integrates with Outlook. Also runs from a USB drive, so you can take antivirus anywhere.

Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer - Scan your system for potential security issues, like missing passwords, insecure ports, and other common misconfigurations. This tool will help you find the holes in your current security.

Quicky Password Generator - Automatically generate complex passwords to help secure your user logins. Using your pets name just won't cut it. Supports passwords up to 20 characters.

RoboForm - Password manager with encrypted password storage and automatic login. You can put it on a keychain drive and take your passwords anywhere using RoboForm2Go. It also includes a password generator feature similar to Quicky Password Generator mentioned above.

Tor - Anonymize your Web browsing, publishing, instant message conversations, SSH connections and anything else you do over an Internet connection while still being able to authenticate.

TrueCrypt - Creates virtual encrypted disks mountable in Win XP or Win 2000. The encrypted partitions may be stored on either hard disk or flash memory card, creating the option for transporting data safely when traveling.

Windows Defender - No single anti-spyware app catches everything, but Microsoft's Windows Defender is by far the best from my experience.

WinSCP - if you need to upload anything via FTP, use a secure connection. WinSCP uploads files using secure FTP or SCP and keeps your data (including username and password) from being picked up by a snooper.

ZoneAlarm - Free firewall and access control for securing your computer. Prevents applications from accessing the Internet without your permission and prevents unwanted access from outside. A good firewall is a must when you have a DSL or cable Internet connection.

A few people had some quirks with the order process for the Audio and Video Answers ebook earlier this week, so I'm extending the special pricing through Sunday, August 6, 2006. Everything should be running smoothly at this point, so if you previously hit a snag it' should be smooth sailing now. The full table of contents and details on ordering the guide are available online. As I said before, I recently compiled the 200 page ebook, packed with solutions to many common audio and video problems, organized across the topics Digital Video, Digital Audio, HDTV and the catchall Troubleshooting and Problem Solving. If you've ever had an audio or video headache, chances are there's an answer here that might be the painkiller you were looking for.

I'm also expanding special pricing through Sunday for two other ebooks. If you need details on Converting Vinyl LPs and Cassettes to CD or Converting VHS to DVD, you can get my ebooks on those topics for 50% off through August 6, 2006 as well. Both of those guides are also included as part of the upgrade to the MediaBlab Premium subscription. There are only 5 slots left for the existing Premium subscription format, at which point I'll be offering a slightly modified version of the service. If you'd like to get into the original program and get the limited edition t-shirt, the last 5 spaces are likely to be gone shortly.

On a semi-related note, you still have 25 days to qualify for a shot at one of the two iRiver Clix with URGE subscriptions I'm giving away.

I'm a DIY fanatic! I subscribe to dozens of tag feeds related to how-to hacks, do-it-yourself solutions and productivity enhancements. I write the occasional how to, but for every one I write, there are at least 10 or 20 that inspire me in a whole new way. Call me a Lifehacker or maybe a Maker; I'm a huge fan of both DIY communities.

Chris and I have been honing an idea to bring this enthusiasm for creation to the Lockergnome universe. It won't change the world, but it might help a few people solve a common problem now and then. Instead of reading about it, we're Doing It - part DIY, part Getting Things Done, we've opened up a group blog anyone can join at any time. If you've got a clever hack, a cool project or simply want to share a resource that solved a complex problem; share with the group as often as you'd like.

You can do-it-yourself, without Doing It alone.

Over the course of writing about audio and video for the past five plus years, I've encountered many of the problems people experience in dealing with digital audio and video for both PCs and home entertainment. Many of frustrations appear both in the newsletter and online with answers I provide in an effort to help others who might encounter a similar media headache in the future. I recently compiled many of the more common problems into a 200 page ebook organized across the topics Digital Video, Digital Audio, HDTV and the catchall Troubleshooting and Problem Solving. If you've ever had an audio or video headache, chances are there's an answer here that may be the painkiller you were looking for.

Jake Ludington's Audio and Video Answers is the name of this new guide, filled with over 100 solutions to common audio and video headaches. From solving codec complications to converting between formats, there's something in here sure to solve your media problems quickly and without the pain of figuring it out yourself.

In launching this new guide, I'm running a massive price discount to give everyone reading this first crack at the new guide. For the first 3 days of August 2006 the 200 page ebook is a mere $5. After that time, the price will triple to $15. As I said, there's a ton of great information here, organized, searchable via both via bookmarks and full text to save you time and effort. Download the guide today before the discount expires. You can see the full table of contents here.

Whether you purchase the guide or not, if you have a question you'd like to see answered, drop me a line via the feedback link in the sidebar. I always like a good challenge. I'll answer as quickly as possible and chances are you'll see the response show up here over the coming weeks.

I don't remember where I was when Chris Pirillo called me up and told me to register RentMyChest.com for him, telling me he'd explain later. Several imitators and years later the site continues to thrive, accumulating hundreds of thousands of visitors. At one of the several Search Engine Strategies conferences an attendee commented on the amount of traffic they got by purchasing a phrase written in marker on Chris's chest (something about the best advertising they ever purchased, although I don't recall exactly what was said). There's an unexplainable appeal to words on pasty-white skin I'll never fully understand. When something that started out as a joke stands the test of time, it's time to give in and join the crowd. I recently snagged two words on the newly revamped chest, which is open for rental and gradually filling with a whole new concept.

Oh Yeah, make sure to drop by and wish Chris a Happy Birthday Especially now that you've seen him in a whole new way. ;)

And now for something completely different.

In addition to purchasing the two iRiver Clix I'm giving away, I also purchased one for myself. After living with numerous media players over the past several years, I'd more recently fallen back on using an iPod Mini as my main audio player because it removed most of the BS of lousy interfaces and came in a smaller package than my cell phone. In the time I've spent with the Clix, I think I finally found a PlaysForSure compatible device I actually enjoy using. The Rio Karma was the last player I really dug, mostly because it supported FLAC audio in addition to MP3 and WMA. The Clix has a touch-sensitive control system that was admittedly strange to get used to, but after playing with it for a couple of minutes, it's a well thought out. A slightly larger screen would be nice, but I typically use an audio player to listen to Pimsler Mandarin Chinese lessons on the way to and from Zoka or jacked into the Aux in on my car stereo. I had tried to like the iPod nano and stuck with the iPod mini because a color screen wasn't enough to make me switch.

In addition to music (and admittedly lackluster video support), the Clix also supports Flash games, which is a nice switch from playing solitaire on my Smartphone. Bottom line, the iRiver Clix is the first PlaysForSure device I'm actually excited to offer as a giveaway (which is likely why I never bothered before). Oh yeah, and as I keep saying, MTV URGE rocks too!

With all the uproar over Jason Calacanis offering to pay top posters to places like Digg, Reddit and Newsvine, I'm thinking a ton about how these services work or don't. Articles I've written have hit the front page of Digg, Lifehacker, Boing Boing, Make, Lockergnome and a handful of the other sites everyone dies to get a link from. Still, my single biggest traffic day ever came from hitting the front page of the "new-and-improved" Netscape. Netscape almost doubled my daily unique visitor count while the others only increased traffic by 30-40% at most.

The single most useful feature of sites like Digg, del.icio.us, reddit, Newsvine, RawSugar and the numerous other choices are the people. Takeaway the people and you've got a vacant lot. If you find a person or people who always find stuff you like, you've got a personal tastemaker who is helping shape your reading experience. I subscribe to specific user's feeds on del.icio.us because I know I'm always going to find what they link to interesting. I can't afford to pay my favorites for finding cool stuff, but if a company (AOL in this case) is willing to pay them - awesome! The cool kids might keep finding cool stuff longer if they've got financial motivation.

With his recent offer to pay top posters on many user-generated content sites if the posters simply come and post on Netscape.com, Jason points out one of the biggest inequities in the world people think of as Web 2.0 - the few (founders of user-generated-content sites) are getting rich off the efforts of the many, offering little in return. I think the term for this is crowdSERFing, or denigrating the users to level of feudal serfdom for the sake of lining the founders' pockets. The users contributing to sites gain popularity for being smart and walk away with nothing. The companies are getting big financial gains without investing in the most expensive component of building a publishing business - human capital. Jason is offering to make this a little more equitable by paying people for their time.

Before this sounds like I'm a Calacanis groupie; Netscape is far from perfect. For instance, the front page of Netscape is great for traffic, but being a featured article on the Netscape Movies section has amounted to negligible additional traffic (which is unfortunate because being picked by Karina from Cinematical means a ton and I had a blast interviewing the guys from Clerks). Netscape has a long way to go to be better than the competition. As I'm thinking on what Jason Calacanis and Netscape are doing right for Netscape, here are a few things they could do to make the experience better:

1) Level the Playing Field - if Netscape anchors get to have links to their personal blogs and the various Weblogs, Inc properties in their bio, let everyone else link too or don't let anyone link. The anchors already play god in the system, why add additional unbalance.

2) Sort the Tracker - Having a tracker is great! I want to see the new stories, not the most popular ones, but the Netscape river of news is everything in every channel. I want to watch about 12 of the 30 possible channels. Let me customize my experience so that I only watch those 12 channels.

3) More User Control - Let users add their own photo to a post by choosing from a list of related images from Getty. Posts with photos are trending toward getting more votes. It's great your editors are choosing the photos, but give users more control within defined constraints.

4) Suggest tags on the fly - if a Wordpress plugin can figure it out, AOL's resources can do it too

5) Change Vote to something more meaningful - most of the U.S. doesn't vote in important things like elections, why would they vote on Netscape?

6) Integrate mail and stock tickers back into the front page - give me some Ajax widgets to go with the user generated news.

7) Let me Subscribe to PEOPLE via RSS - There are people submitting to Netscape who aren't my friends, who I've never met, but who have great submissions. Let me subscribe to those people so I can easily watch what they submit.

8) Allow Posting to Multiple Categories - granted, I've seen several posts that didn't really fit the category they are currently in, but there are times when one category doesn't quite nail it.

9) Better Category Breakdowns - the single most popular tech subject for most users is digital photography. Where's the category for photophiles? Is a camera a technology or a gadget? Or both? See #9, but seriously consider improving customization.

10) Allow Links in Comments - Sure there will be some link spamming, but allowing links allows smart users to correct a story when someone makes an erroneous post.

It's been awhile since I've given anything away and I'm feeling the URGE to handout some gadgets. As some of you remember I gave away an Xbox 360 back in January and I've had numerous software giveaways over the past several years. This time, I'm giving away an iRiver Clix and 2 million songs to play on it (via a year's subscription to MTV URGE All Access To Go). In total this stuff would cost you $350 if were to purchase it yourself.

Like the Xbox giveaway I'm keeping the rules very simple. All you need to do is tell people about JakeLudington.com. You can blog about something you find on the site. Link to a helpful article on your MySpace account. Make fun of me in your favorite forum. How you link is up to you. The official rules are posted here. On August 29, 2006, I'll assess the server stats for JakeLudington.com. If your post referred the most visitors based on my stats, you get an iRiver Clix and a one year subscription to URGE All Access To Go.

With Gnomedex wrapping up last weekend, I came to the realization that I have a massive backlog of audio editing to finish in the next few days. I have over 40 interviews to edit, both from Gnomedex attendees and leftovers from the Seattle International Film Festival, like Eternal Sunshine on the Spotless Mind director Michel Gondry and film composer Mark Mothersbaugh. In the interim, I did an interview with Gedde Watanabe (aka Long Duck Dong from Sixteen Candles) about a short film project shooting this week called Fortune Hunters.

Gnomedex had some exceptionally great sessions this year including a conversation with Senator John Edwards, who took the time to have a conversation with a roomful of geeks about technology and politics. The John Edwards session is currently online and well worth a listen regardless of your political affiliation. I don't typically have strong opinions about politics and my voting record crisscrosses party lines regularly. Senator Edwards impressed me in this case, not because he was trying to push his party's agenda but because he was actually trying to have an intelligent conversation about issues important to geeks. We're looking at a number of technology related issues, like Net Neutrality and the right to make back-ups of your digital media, which shouldn't be considered partisan. I'd love to see a strong Republican figure put himself or herself in a similarly vulnerable position.

The other session at Gnomedex that really got my attention was the session on walking through the venture funding process. We hear plenty about small tech companies getting funding, but the process remains fairly mysterious. Three venture capitalists walked through the process of talking about funding for tag search engine TagJag for both the benefit of the audience and the potential benefit of TagJag. I may never actually go through the process of seeking venture funding, but I feel like I walked away knowing more after the session ended. You can download the TagJag funding session immediately too.

High Definition DVD is one of the most anticipated and over-hyped technology advancements in a long time. In one camp, you've got Sony with the promise of Blu-Ray DVD, offering a better image quality for movies and the never shipping PS3 as the gateway to putting Blu-Ray in every home on the planet. Camp number two is Toshiba and Microsoft proffering HD-DVD, again with improved image quality, already in the market with a limited supply of over-priced hardware and the announcement of an external drive for Xbox 360 owners. To Sony's credit, new Viao computers now support Blu-Ray, but how many people are buying new machines on the eve of Windows Vista (unless they're buying a Mac)? I could go on here to list 20 or more reasons why I think HD content rocks and how we're getting sold out by yet another format war, but Clint DeBoer over at Audioholics gave 10 solid reasons that sum it up in a neat little package.

To summarize:

1) Nobody Likes False Starts
2) Format Wars Don't Sell Players
3) HD DVD and Blu-ray are NOT Quantum Leaps in Technology
4) Studios are Conservative, Greedy and Unmotivated
5) Playstation3 Cannot Save the World
6) Those Who Ignore History…
7) People Want Technology that’s 15 Minutes Ahead of Its Time
8) Enthusiasts Are Getting Tired (and Smarter)
9) A Skeptical News Media Doesn’t Help
10) Broadband and IPTV to Compete?

The detailed versions where Clint backs up these statements is more meaningful than the hitlist itself. Be sure to read 10 Reasons Why High Definition DVD Formats Have Already Failed

A few of these are a leap of faith, because I don't think many of today's enthusiasts remember 8-track tapes and the battle cry of Betamax vs. VHS is one that's taken up simply to argue for the right to make copies, not as a point about the consumer getting ripped off in a stupid corporate battle over formats. Format wars, if they reach an agreeable solution before they go to market, can result in a better product for everyone, but in cases like Betamax, Sony's arrogance and over-pricing left us with an inferior product because the market opted for a cheaper good-enough solution like it always does.

So the question is, are you on the Blu-Ray band wagon? Are you buying HD-DVD? Would you rather skip it all together and get all your high definition content from a cable provider or from the Internet? Or is this one battle you plan to wait out to see who wins? Weigh in with your thoughts at Digital Media Thoughts.

I think they need to issue "I Survived..." t-shirts to everyone who makes it through the 25 day marathon of movies that is the Seattle International Film Festival. I had a blast watching a mere 10% of the 400 films, while interviewing almost an equal number of directors. I have a backlog of interviews to get through, including one with Brian O'Halloran and Jeff Anderson of Clerks fame, who are likely better known as Dante and Randal respectively. Some of the best photos from the event are in Sean Pecknold's Flickr stream.

On Thursday I'm off to BloggerCon, where I'll be handling the audio streaming for both days. The Limelight stream we use for The Chris Pirillo Show will handle the heavy lifting of connecting what I'm guessing will be more than 5,000 listeners. I continue to rely on SimpleCast for getting audio from the desktop to the streaming server, primarily because it handles stuff like re-connecting the stream if it goes down and archiving the live feed locally. SimpleCast is also useful for small numbers of connections and the company that makes it offers a solid alternative to ShoutCast. Bre Pettis from I Make Things might be joining me for the 800 mile road trip from Seattle to San Francisco.

I'm planning to see how well my BroadbandConnect plan from Cingular performs on a cross-country trip. I know it works well in both Seattle and San Francisco, but I've never tried using the card between the two cities. I'm thinking some random Webcam uploads from the car might be in order, although the upload speeds might be painful when BroadbandConnect flips over to the EDGE network. We'll see if my BroadbandConnect tips apply to connecting from the road.

Technology is great when it works and painful when it fails. Tonight my sole Windows server developed a weird issue that ultimately led to the drive being swapped out for a new one. I've got a backup of everything on the drive, so it's a minor inconvenience at best, but there's still the downtime associated with getting everything back to normal. And the downtime came in the midst of trying to get a very cool project under way.

The best defense against having no control over technology failure is a solid backup plan. In the case of this particular server, it's not mission critical, I use it primarily for testing things and as a low traffic file server. Part of my backup plan is simply to make sure there's a second copy of everything on the server, so that I didn't have any unnecessary data loss. At home, this means burning DVD backups of your files or getting a second hard drive to copy your files over.

In the case of an online presence, the second part of the plan involves having a responsive hosting provider. I've tested several hosting providers over the years, ranging from the $10 monthly virtual server accounts to my current setup where I pay a monthly fee for my own dedicated servers at ServerBeach. After a couple of false starts with other companies, I've been quite happy with the service provided by ServerBeach. For the most part, I have no contact with them because I handle day to day server maintenance. When something goes wrong, I submit a ticket and they are on the ball immediately. At home, if you aren't a computer savvy type comfortable with swapping out your hard drive or replacing parts when things go wrong, find someone who can. Like having a mechanic you can trust to fix your car, knowing a knowledgeable computer repair person is a must.

Here are some backup and recovery resources I've covered in the past:

Backup Files to a DV Camera

Carbonite

Allway Sync

Store 'n' Go USB Hard Drive

Easy2Sync

Second Copy

The Hollywood Reviews and Trivia newsletter is finally ready to accept new subscribers. I've mentioned the blog here a few times, and the latest five entries are included toward the bottom of this newsletter, but I'm now encouraging everyone to subscribe to the newsletter as well. Now if you're anti-Hollywood for any reason, don't tune out just yet. There's more than just Hollywood here. The newsletter covers indie films, foreign cinema and will likely be touching on some Web only entertainment as well.

As part of a push to encourage new subscriptions, I'm giving away one 6-month Netflix subscription to two random subscribers who sign up for the list between June 1, 2006 and July 1, 2006. You can subscribe to the newsletter here:

Your E-Mail Address:

The Seattle International Film Festival may be among the most underrated events in the world of cinema. It's highly attended by festival goers and shows more films than any other festival in the United States over the three week festival period. More importantly, the directors behind the films make themselves very accessible to anyone interested in talking. I've had the great fortune of interviewing several of the directors, with a number of the interviews posted over at Hollywood Reviews. More are on their way when I can get a break long enough to edit and upload the interviews.

During the course of the opening weekend, every single screening I attended had either the director or producer of the film on hand for question and answer sessions following the screening. These are people who are passionate about engaging the audience and take the time to answer at length on any number of questions posed by the audience. There's no aire of pretence that anyone is better than anyone else, which is the vibe given off at a number of the more "prestigious" festivals.

The best bargain at the Seattle International Film Festival might be the Secret Festival, which requires attendees to sign an NDA to never divulge which films are shown. Films in the Secret Festival are either under embargo for various reasons and are occasionally banned from normal public screening due to legal complications. I attended the first Secret Festival screening for this season on Sunday. While I can't divulge anything about the film for fear of bad karma or worse, I will say that one film was worth the price of the Secret Festival by itself (at least to me).

If you can't make this year's festival, I'm trying to provide an insider's view with the director interviews. As of this writing, I've posted four interviews and have four more recorded waiting for editing. Several interviews are tentatively lined up for the coming week, so stay tuned. Academy Award nominated director Kirby Dick will be online as soon as I get a spare moment. The topic is his latest documentary, This Film is Not Yet Rated, which takes a hard look at the MPAA rating process. The interview alone was highly interesting stuff. When the movie hits general screening and the DVD market, it will be near the top of my recommended viewing list.

Microsoft releases a new version of Windows Media Player about once every two years. This beta release of WMP11 both improves on features of WMP10 and bridges the gap between what we've come to expect from the current version of WMP and what we can expect to see when Vista finally ships. The biggest changes are in navigation of media, searching and the addition of more media types to the player interface.

Navigation and Playback

The new layout for Windows Media Player took a few visual cues from iTunes, most notably placing the playback button in the center of the application window. Sure iTunes has the buttons at the top and WMP11 places them at the bottom, but the similarities are still there. Granted there are only so many places you can put the playback buttons and centering them is likely better for usability. The biggest annoyance with button positioning is cutting off track information displayed because there isn't enough room to the left of the buttons to fit all the details unless the player is in full screen mode.

Navigation across the top of the application window feels more intuitive with a series of drop down buttons, although finding things like the File menu can be tough. There was a quirk on one of my installations requiring me to verify whether the player was in offline mode from the File menu and I fumbled around until settling on using Alt+F to reveal it instead of trying to locate it via mouse. Track play time is displayed up in the corner next to the minimize button, which is easier to find than scanning the bottom.

All Your Media

In addition to music and movies, Windows Media Player 11 now supports photo browsing from within the interface. The first time you pull in your pictures thumbnails load ridiculously slow, but after the player has gone through all your images this process works almost as quickly as browsing the song library. Video and Music are available from anywhere on your hard drive, pictures seem to be limited to the My Pictures folder (which is either an oversight or the easiest way to avoid having album art pollute the results). The photo feature appears to be limited to browsing in the beta, as editing tag info isn't supported and you can't rename any of the photos. We'll see what the final release brings, but this is a little half-baked at this point.

Improved Search

Search is dramatically enhanced with as-you-type result sets. WMP11 narrows your search on the fly based on what you type in the search box. iTunes had this functionality several versions ago, but Windows Media Player takes it too a new level by making the search blazing fast, even while viewing album art. Depending on which view of the player you start in, this might be across artists, albums or individual songs or within a subset of a particular artist or album. I have a few Windows Media Player search tips to make finding what you're looking for easier. One cool trick is performing a search and leaving out an entire genre from the results, so if you want to look for songs with the word "cry" in the title but don't want any Country songs, you simply type cry NOT Genre:Rap to filter results in a targeted way. This improved search comes at the price of the player using more memory, but if your machine has at least 1GB of RAM (which it should) you won't notice any performance difference. Here's another feature that needs further optimization before final release.

Music Store Enhancements

iTunes Music Store is the benchmark by which all online music stores are judged. With the launch of Windows Media Player 11 comes the new MTV URGE service, which is powered by Microsoft's Windows Media DRM and what seems to be the most robust backend in online music stores. The store supports both per-song purchases and the monthly subscription model we've seen from Napster and Yahoo. I setup the 14-day trial account with URGE and will likely sign up for the service when my trial expires because it works better than any other store at this point. One immediate differentiator is the sign in process actually works and doesn't time out the way Napster seems to do with great frequency. After creating an account, I started browsing tracks and got instant gratification in playing back any song or search result set of songs. Search functions in Windows Media Player 11 will indicate available tracks across both your local music library and across the entire database of MTV URGE, basically extending your personal library to include the entire universe of digital music, which is a great experience if you have the sudden impulse to hear a track from some faded memory. All of this adds up to something stronger than the iTMS experience because you're not limited to 30-second previews and 99-cent downloads of songs you only want to hear for a fleeting moment, and you're not restricted by drive storage because you've got MTV storing a massive online catalog for you.

Don't be confused by the MTV association, there's plenty of music for everyone. For instance, T-Bone Burnett, the guy behind many of the original tracks on Oh Brother Where Art Thou, has a new release prominently featured in the player as well as the latest from Buena Vista Social Club. If you browse by genre, the interface provides total potential listening hours, which translates to almost 10,000 hours for classical and 15,000 for jazz, in addition to the 30,000 hours of Rock.

The "I don't own it" argument doesn't hold water in my view because an always on subscription means you get both the albums your budget would afford you to purchase if you were buying CDs per album and the universe of music you might like to taste but can't because your disposable income creates a barrier to entry. Paying to listen to any song you want at any moment in time, whether it's the latest disposable pop star or a classic Miles Davis record. For me a subscription service is like having IMDB to track down movie stars - if someone tells me about music I can listen to it and understand what they are saying.

There are still a few quirks, like browsing the Billboard charts and getting a 30-second preview of songs instead of the whole track when signed in, but URGE already offers faster performance than any other store, including iTMS. Depending on which view you're in, it can be hard to tell whether files downloaded or not. The only other case against URGE is lack of support for iPods.

Final Impressions

Even in beta, Windows Media Player 11 is already ahead of previous versions. The music stores actually work the way you expect them to. Navigation makes more sense. Searching your music library is actually a joy, with visual searching making it faster to find exactly what you're looking for. There are moments when the interface lags in response to your clicks, features like photo browsing seem half-baked in their current form, but like previous versions of the player, there's still time for changes before the final version ships. I'm running the beta build on my primary machine and have no plans to revert back to WMP10 because I want the MTV URGE service and I like the search features. Even in beta this is by far the best version of Windows Media Player to date.

I survived E3, although I didn't blog much during the conference because there the press events are spread all over the LA area. I hate Las Vegas in general, but it's high time they move E3 to Vegas; at least that city knows how to get people from place to place. I'm an old pro at driving in Los Angeles traffic, which is a refreshing change to the passiveness exhibited here in Seattle where I live, but the time it takes to actually get from point A to point B slowly drains away the day. We still managed to get some great interviews, a few of which are mentioned in recent postings here.

I think my two favorite finds at the show aren't available for public comment just yet. I got to play a few minutes of the new Gears of War game in a press event behind closed doors. Even if you're not a gamer, the amazing things that are happening in computer graphics are a sight to behold. The demo pitted 16 press folks on two teams of 8 in a showdown. I didn't last long because I'm lousy at playing that style of game, which is why I routinely avoid things like Halo, but I can still appreciate the attention to detail in stunning graphics and creative ways the players move. The other game that shows real promise is Mass Effect, which for lack of better description is a space version of Oblivion. The demo team showed off a number of playable sequences and gave us the usual "this is unique" marketing spiel, but it sure felt like I was seeing Oblivion. The one unique aspect to the game was the ability to issue commands to two AI teammates who provide backup to your main character. The endless quests, side quests, story arcs, and expandable universe are all distinctly similar to what Bethesda has already offered both PC gamers and Xbox 360 owners.

One interview I haven't posted over on The Chris Pirillo Show site was with Logitech, who showed off an awesome steering wheel setup for playing racing games. I was ultimately more interested in their new G5 and G7 mousing options. The Logitech G5 comes with counter weights so you can make it feel the way you want and is USB connected. The Logitech G7 is wireless and feels better than any wireless mouse I've used in a long time. I think I might be persuaded to switch away from my Microsoft mouse for something that should be more responsive and comfortable.

On Monday I'm headed to Los Angeles to cover the E3 gaming conference. I'll be posting things daily, so make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed if you want to stay on top of what's going on. There will be daily interviews posted over at The Chris Pirillo Show and I'm going to try and keep my picture uploads current on Flickr, although I always seem to put that off. Even if gaming isn't your thing, the press releases I've gotten so far also include a number of general consumer announcements and most of that looks more interesting than early gaming announcements.

The following week, I'll be covering all the events at the Seattle International Film Festival over on Movie Squeeze Hollywood Reviews. I haven't seen the schedule of films yet, so I'm not sure who we'll be talking to during SIFF, but last year's event certainly suggests there will be good stuff again this time around. As the largest film festival in the U.S. there's bound to be a few gems among the offerings. I'm hoping to get a few people to talk about the process of creating their movies, since many of the same techniques are directly applicable to creating home movies, even if you don't have the budget or inclination to produce a script.

I finally made a change I've been meaning to undertake for a long time. I moved the DVD reviews and movie related topics away from Media Blab and the Digital Lifestyle Newsletter to stand on their own at Hollywood Reviews. The site is currently a work-in-progress as I sort through the logistics of getting everything setup, but it makes more sense than throwing a random DVD review in here, where I typically talk about how to bend media to your will.

Among the features I'm adding to the Hollywood Reviews site is the ability for readers to add comments about each movie and a rating system so you can simply say you liked a movie or not on a scale of 1 to 5. The component I'm having most fun with is building out a database of trivia questions related to the movie industry. There are two sample trivia quizzes at the moment while I finish configuration. Feel free to test them out and see if you can break 'em (or just see if you know the answers). I'm also looking for feedback in terms of things I'm missing.

I'm also actively seeking individuals interested in writing some reviews for the site. I can't promise riches or fame and fortune, but I'll certainly do my best to make the opportunity worthwhile. If you're interested, my email address is just a click in the sidebar away.

Part of my week was spent attending the Domain Roundtable in Bellevue, Washington. The conference is dedicated to the business of investing and speculating in domain names. While there have been a few high profile sales, like the purchase of Golf.com by Time Warner in January 2006 or the $7.5 million in stock and cash paid for Business.com back in 2000, I've previously paid very little attention to the domain market. Turns out its fascinating.

Aside from the obvious strategies for picking up the names you want from auction services like SnapNames, or by simply registering a domain with one of the various domain sellers (I sell domains, for instance), there are a variety of other tricks for picking up potentially valuable names on the day they expire from the various registrars.

There's also the more direct approach of offering domains for sale by way of services like Sedo and Fabulous, which list your domain offer price. Fabulous has a higher benchmark for listing your names for sale, while Sedo merely requires you to have a single domain you're willing to sell. There's no cost for listing your domains for sale, but you will have to pay a percentage of the sale if the company you list with finds a buyer. There's also potential revenue from advertising on the domains listed through parking services, which certainly makes more sense than buying the domain and letting the registrar collect money. It might even cover the cost of your domain registration.

Like many things, there are some useful ways of increasing the value of your domain, like actually offering something useful related to whatever the domain's meaning might be. If you have a dogsandcatsandgoldfish.com, for instance, offering useful information about dogs, cats, and goldfish might increase your chances of selling the domain name vs. simply hoping someone will buy the domain. Asking 5 domain investors revealed 5 different answers about what the best strategy for making money with domains is, all while sharing a table with several people who have all made seven figures buying and selling domains. I already own about 70 domains for a variety of reasons, although my reasons for registering them had nothing to do with potential value. Since I keep adding more domains to my list, I decided it was finally time to get my own domain reseller account and save a few dollars on annual registration fees.

At the close of each personal tax filing deadline, I make a promise to myself to be more organized this year and not wait until the week before deadline to sift through all my receipts and purchases. Like the guy who joins the gym on January 1 to finally drop that last twenty pounds, I start strong only to find myself pushing off many of my accounting duties in favor of things I enjoy more until I hit the week before tax deadline and start the vicious cycle over again. I keep all the information and download transactions from my bank every month; I just don't sort things into information buckets ahead of time. This year, I'm making a change.

One key to making this year a success is to actually use the accounting software I have on a regular basis. I'd love to switch to the Free Accounting Software package I featured back in July, but realistically I need to stick with Intuit's offerings because I do a fair number of sales via Paypal and Quicken and Quickbooks are the only two software packages Paypal officially outputs data for. Paypal also output a variety of delimited files, which I could do some transformations on, but I'm trying to reduce my barriers to success, making ease of use a key to my personal success. If you know MSSQL, Free Accounting Software may be a viable alternative because that's the underlying data structure.

In the meantime, I'm taking several additional steps to make sure I'm better organized across the board. 43 Folders as a hard number hasn't really fit my own personal organization style, but there are many elements of the Getting Things Done system that make perfect sense. I'm gradually improving at identifying the "stuff" (as author David Allen calls it), getting rid of the stuff that I don't need to deal with, creating places for the stuff I do need to keep. I'm still a bit weak in the areas of putting stuff in the right place consistently and doing stuff in context (as evidenced by my promise to organize my accounting above). Fortunately, I'm leaving room for improvement by examining what I'm doing on a regular basis. If you can't find time to read, there's always the Getting Things Done audio book.

I know I mentioned it last week, but ActiveWords is playing a huge role in helping me be more efficient across the board. Reducing the repetitive stuff is helping me spend more time with the stuff I enjoy. If you downloaded the app based on my recommendation last week, make sure you also download a few of the free add-ins as well. Scrolll through the list to see if anything applies specifically to your computing style, but be sure to grab MISSPELLINGS and INPLACE (which does math equations), along with the OUTLOOK add-in (if you're an Outlook user like me). The WEB bundle is also a great way to cut keystrokes in typing Website addresses.

I'm a keyboard shortcuts guy. If there's a way I can reduce keystrokes or avoid using a mouse, I try to find it because I feel more efficient in not taking my fingers away from the keyboard. For apps I use every day, like Word, Outlook, Adobe Audition and Photoshop, most of the shortcuts are second nature at this point, although occasionally I surprise myself and find a new one. I use the password manager AccountLogon to launch and login to the secure sites I visit daily, which saves a few keystrokes. Even with my efforts at efficiency, I find myself repeating many of the same tasks to the tune of several hundred words daily. Until recently I allowed my own ingrained usage of key commands to be my own worst enemy.

For about the last five years, Buzz Bruggeman has told me about ActiveWords. Buzz told me ActiveWords would save me time. He showed me a few ways ActiveWords saves him time every day. Buzz asked me for examples of things I do daily and demonstrated how to automate them with ActiveWords. At the end of the day, I didn't listen because I couldn't see past the idea that ActiveWords was just another method for doing shortcuts I already though I mastered.

I stand here today admitting I'm wrong. ActiveWords isn't just another way to do shortcuts. About 30 days ago I downloaded the trial of ActiveWords and configured a few basic replacements for frequently launched sites. I have 5 different email signatures I use depending on whether I'm responding to a question, lining up guests for a radio show or participating in one of many online forums. I made ActiveWords for each of my signatures. Then I started adding commands for other repetitive tasks. By the time the trial expired, I purchased a copy because ActiveWords is saving me time.

I haven't changed any of my existing shortcut habits. I still copy with Ctrl+C and paste with Ctrl+V. I open the resize function in Photoshop with Alt+Ctrl+I and Save for Web with Alt+Ctrl+Shift+S. ActiveWords has me typing less. From launching Filezilla several times daily with the command 'ftp' to eliminating over 250 typed words daily, I'm more efficient and spending more time focused on the things I like about computing.

ActiveWords is not just another way to do shortcuts. ActiveWords is an app that helps you reclaim time previously lost to repetitive, redundant computing tasks that unnecessarily waste time. At it's core, ActiveWords uses macros to automate tasks, providing shortcuts, text replacements, file and application launching and scripting using shortcuts that can be used anywhere you have a computer with ActiveWords installed. The software recommends tasks to automate based on your computing habits. The included scripting language can trigger multiple actions with using the same key combinations. The proof is in the Productivity chart provided - you get real statistics about how many characters and hours you save in using ActiveWords. I made back the purchase cost in time saved in less than 30 days.

If you launch the same five or ten Web pages every single day, ActiveWords simplifies the launch process. If you frequently switch between two or more signature files in your email messages, ActiveWords almost eliminates the need to type or mouse to get the job done. If you find yourself frequently typing the same bits of data in files on a daily basis, ActiveWords will save you hundreds of keystrokes. It is certainly saving me time.

I ignored all these advantages for a very long time because I felt like using existing shortcuts were good enough. Without a doubt, learning any kind of key command saves time compared to reaching for the mouse when you need to copy or paste, or launch an application, or retype repetitive text. I didn't grasp the full advantages of ActiveWords because I thought my other solutions were good enough. If you aren't concerned with saving 20-30 minutes a day (or more) you definitely should not download ActiveWords. I'm just kicking myself that I'll never get back those extra minutes I wasted every day for the past five years. You can thank me later.

CTIA Wireless didn't showcase anything truly amazing this year, although there were plenty of incremental leaps to handsets, headsets and other wireless gear. Maybe the biggest news at the conference was knowing virtually every cellular handset shipping this year will support Bluetooth, which should mean pervasive support for wireless headsets instead of dealing with a cord trailing into your pocket. Nvidia showed off their handset video chip which currently plays back any video you throw at it without a hitch because the screens aren't even close to the video processing power. Qualcomm is pitching something called MediaFLO which amounts to cable television broadcast to your phone; a concept that's potentially interesting as long as it's cheap. I'd much rather watch advertising and get television for free on my cell phone than pay extra for something I already get elsewhere at much better resolution.

I got a great opportunity to interview the President and CEO of CTIA Wireless, Steve Largent, who happens to be the same Steve Largent with the Hall of Fame NFL career for the Seattle Seahawks. As far as I know, I'm the only podcaster to interview him at CTIA and I certainly the only one with a cheesy photo on a balcony at the Wynn. At the tail end of the interview I even got his comments on the Seahawks trip to the Super Bowl. More interviews to follow as I get caught up on the backlog of audio editing for The Chris Pirillo Show.

The conference also made me a bigger fan of Sony. I'm a huge fan of the PSP but generally despise the confusing array of MemoryStick options across the Sony product line. As a last minute purchase before I left for CTIA I picked up the Sony Cybershot DSC-T5 at Best Buy because they were out of the Canon Digital Elph I wanted and I needed a pocket-sized replacement for a Casio Exlim that met a tile floor with a little too much velocity. The DSC-T5 performed like a champ, taking acceptable shots in low light at the Mortricity party and outstanding shots anywhere there was plenty of light. What really impresses me is the image quality of the movie mode. I shot video of Busta Rhymes from the side of the stage at the Morticity party and am completely amazed at the video quality in a generally dark club (the audio contains profanity, so wait till you're at home if you plan to watch). Since I already had MemoryStick ProDUO cards for my PSP, I didn't even need to get a newer more expensive memory stick for the camera.

If you attend CTIA Wireless in Las Vegas April 4-7, be sure to join me in the swanky Wynn hotel where I'll be hosting The Chris Pirillo Show in the Waggener Edstrom Blogger Lounge. The blogger lounge started at CES and will be open to bloggers and podcasters to use at CTIA. In other words, you don't need to be press to get in.

The lounge is stocked with drinks, snacks, WiFi, and podcasting equipment and WaggEd has a pitch guarantee. Seriously, the WaggEd folks do this right and I wish more PR firms would think this way. The lounge will have stuff from T-Mobile, HTC, Vizrea, AMD and few other companies, but no one will blame you if you just show up for a beverage and snack. You can also join The Mile High WiFi Club. Show up at the Blogger Lounge and you receive a "Get Your Internet On At 30,000 Feet" t-shirt. Connexion by Boeing is also giving away free in-flight Internet access cards and a few other goodies to people who visit the lounge.

There will be an impromptu blogger meetup at the Blogger Lounge at the Wynn on April 4 from 7 p.m. to whenever. During the week, the Blogger Lounge will be open April 5th & 6th from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Drop Kevin Keating of Waggener Edstrom a line so you can join the party.

My experiment at reducing my travel gear worked. I went from 18 pounds of gear in my backpack to about 8 pounds in that REI bag without suffering any loss in productivity. The Fujitsu Lifebook P1510D worked like a champ, providing me with productivity and connectivity via the standard Windows XP features; entertainment as a movie player; and education as a solution for reading ebooks and my feeds. Somehow along the way I managed to get rid of most of my power cords, charging everything via USB. I'm starting to wonder if my real motivation for taking all the stuff I travel with is because the space in my backpack was there. The next step is to attempt the same test with a smaller suitcase.

As I mentioned previously, one of my complaints about the Lifebook P1510D was Bluetooth support without the Bluetooth software. This was an oversight on the part of whoever packed the shipping box for Fujitsu because the missing CD is en route. I'm still not sure why this is a CD and not a download or SD card, since there's no CD tray drive in the P1510D, but I can easily work around that. My Kensington USB Bluetooth adapter worked like a champ in providing connectivity over the Cingular EDGE network using my cell phone during the New York trip.

For me the big surprise of the trip was image quality from the camera on my cell phone. I opted to try going camera phone only for the trip to conserve space, with the camera on my Cingular 2125 working like a champ. Cell phone cameras have finally reached the "good enough" level of acceptability where I'm comfortable in leaving a digital camera behind. No the tiny little image receptors in the cell phone aren't going to replace the need for digital still cameras anytime soon, but for casual photography, a phone is now a viable option. Several examples are available in my Flickr stream.

Note: If enough people sign up through my TextPayMe referral link, I'll give the resulting Xbox 360 away to someone in the MediaBlab community. Giving away the first Xbox was a ton of fun, so I'd love to do it again. You make $5 when you sign up, so everybody wins. To make it count, you need to sign up in the next few days before the Xbox 360 promotion at TextPayMe comes to an end.

If you haven't ever seen what search spam looks like then you've never used Google, Yahoo or MSN Search to find anything. All the search engines are loaded with bogus entries, rich with keywords aimed to take fake sites and bad information straight to the top 10 entries on any search engine with a crawler. These are often pages loaded with links and no real information about the supposed topic you clicked thru to find.

Covering Search Engine Strategies provides a rather unique opportunity to meet the people behind these back handed search marketing tactics, as well as the people who work at trying to stop them. These black-hat search marketers achieve an almost rockstar like status among the search engine optimizers of the world because they've made a game of beating the system and rake in five and six figures monthly as a result. While the results suffer, the annoyance isn't as obvious to the casual surfer because these aren't the people who barrage your inbox with advertisements for physical augmentation and chemical remedies for ills you never knew you had. In fact, most of the search spamming community looks down on the people who overload inboxes with junk mail.

As part of our coverage of SES, we got a chance to talk to both Google's expert on solving search spam, Matt Cutts, and a few practitioners of the dark arts of search marketing. Only one of the black hat search marketers braved the microphone, because he's also got some legitimate Web businesses and he'd prefer not to link the two worlds. You can hear his commentary in Meet Joe Spammer. The interview with Matt Cutts is also quite interesting as Chris talks to him about what he's gone through in Googlefasting and the hurdles Matt and the Google team face in combating search engine spam.

Day one of SES New York included some interesting sessions. A morning session on Searchonomics offered some interesting metrics on the study of search behavior, with Geoff Ramsey of eMarketer and Bill Tancer of Hitwise making the potentially snoozer topic of search behavior seem fascinating. If you want to understand how and when people look for things online, these are the people who know, from the inverse correlation between searches for hybrid cars and SUVs to the fact that the peak searches for diet sites happens on January 1 and drops consistently throughout the year, bottoming out around the end of November every year.

Podcast Search hit closer to home with Daron Babin of Webmaster Radio, Ethan Fassett of the Yahoo Podcast Search team and Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit covering topics related to making your podcast easier to find in the search engines. This is much more complicated than simply submitting a podcast to iTunes and hoping someone discovers you. Darin is a particularly good resource for SEO and audio, as someone who's worked in the search marketing industry for several years while also operating a Web radio show long before podcasting came into the picture. Much of what was discussed during the session echoed things I've said about podcast search in the past, with an overview of key points made in Podcasting Starter Kit.

So far the portability experiment in traveling with the Fujitsu Lifebook P1510D is working out nicely. The hardback book sized laptop is handling all my normal computing duties like a champ. The one thing I hadn't tested was the onboard Bluetooth for connecting to the Internet using the Cingular EDGE service on my cell phone. Apparently Fujitsu forgot to include the configuration utility, but I have an external Bluetooth adapter from Kensington so I'm connecting anyway. Battery life is holding up nicely. I used the Lifebook with both Bluetooth and WiFi off and on for about 7 hours today without running out of juice. I'm feeling confident in abandoning a more traditional laptop for the convenience of light weight and portability.

On the way back from dinner tonight the SNY TV studio was either experiencing technical difficulties or trying to send a message to the MS offices in the building across the street. Even in Seattle, with Microsoft just across the lake, I'm almost positive I've never seen Windows icons on a marquee.

Starting at CES a bunch of buzz is swirling around the DualCor PC concept. It combines Windows and Windows Mobile into a form factor more closely aligned with a portable video player than a computer. The two operating systems supposedly save on battery life because you switch between them depending on what you're doing, using Windows Mobile for anything that doesn't require the full version of Windows. The form factor is small enough the company hopes this will be the computer business folks can't be without the same way people have been known to covet Franklin planners in the paper world. Gear Live has a great video of a DualCor in action.

As I'm currently exploring the concept of highly portable computing via the Lifebook P1510D, I'm here to let the folks at DualCor know they are already late to the party. Fujitsu beat them to market with a computer that is already highly portable and will do everything they promise using Windows XP. You don't need two operating systems to get the job done. In fact having to switch between two operating systems (fast or not) seems like a big deterrent for all but the most serious geeks because extra steps are a hassle. Fujitsu has the upper hand in integrating a keyboard. The battery life on the Fujitsu is good enough for the usage pattern predicted by DualCor.

The expected price for the DualCor is right in line with the Lifebook at $1500, which makes both a little expensive for home users but perfectly justifiable for business use. I haven't carried a PDA in ages and probably never will considering my Windows Mobile phone stores contacts, calendar data and all the stuff I really care about in a usable phone factor. In fairness to DualCor, they claim to have phone support built-in to their unit as well, but the idea of holding a brick to my face gives me flashbacks to early 80's Motorola products. I haven't survived the New York trip yet to know if I can really abandon a full sized laptop, but there are a number of things the Lifebook is already more suited for.

eBooks are something I'm reading again on the Lifebook. By flipping the screen to portrait mode, it's the perfect form factor for reading, with a size comparable to a trade paperback or hardback. Another added benefit of using the Lifebook P1500D is using the stylus to practice writing Chinese characters. Starting back in December, I finally enlisted the services of a tutor to learn to speak Mandarin and read and write simplified Chinese. I'm so out of the habit of writing on paper and typing everything that writing anything feels completely foreign to my hand. Using the stylus that comes with the Lifebook makes it somewhat easier to practice writing without worry about whether I have a sheet of paper.

In the learning space, Microsoft's free Education Pack for Tablet PC includes a flash card app, which is perfect for the challenge of learning Chinese characters (or anything else). It also includes a free Hexic game, an equation writer and the scheduling tool that should ship with Outlook Express. The other must have add-on is the Experience Pack, which includes a snipping tool and a great Ink Art app.

Fujitsu recently sent me a Lifebook P1510D to test and review over the next 30 days. I'm going to use that time to see if I can pare down my normal backpack full of travel gear into a much lighter load. My goal is to see if I can travel with the Lifebook, the M-Audio Microtrack, a microphone, PSP, cell phone and the necessary support cables; completely abandoning a full-sized laptop and all the junk I might be inclined to stuff in my larger 3 compartment backpack.

Last year I picked up the bag pictured at the right from REI, which has room for about the equivalent of 3 hardback books when fully stuffed. The Lifebook fits perfectly, with plenty of room for the rest of the gear I need to travel with and a little room left over for the random stuff I always take just in case. I'm going to make a test run this week while my office is still recovering from our basement flood and I'm out at Podcast Hotel toward the end of the week.

Assuming all goes well, this will be my travel bag for the following week's trip to Search Engine Strategies in New York. Before I get to serious about going portable, I'm going to need to load up the Lifebook with all my usual apps, which I documented about a year ago when my HP dv1000 first arrived. I'm updating the list just a bit because I've switched away from Copernic and over to the enterprise version of MSN Desktop search and I likely won't install SysSense or Cakewalk Kenetic, but the rest of the apps are all necessary for me to provide an accurate picture of what my usage pattern is like on a much more portable PC. The one app I think I'm missing on the list is OneNote, which should be part of every computer user's application arsenal. Microsoft offers a free trial of OneNote and I highly recommend testing it for yourself; it's doing for productivity what WordStar and the other early text editors did years ago for word processing.

My big concerns with the Fujitsu Lifebook P1510D are how I'm going to use my Cingular BroadbandConnect service without a PCMCIA slot (rumor has it there's an external adapter, I'd love to find it) and whether I can get really get by at 1024x800 maximum resolution. I'm sold as the Lifebook being an ultra-portable alternative to my clunky hard drive, but I'm a little nervous about living with a screen resolution I haven't used in years. 1280x768 on the dv1000 was already a concession compared to the massive difference on my desktop system. The other thing I'd like to find is a bigger stylus for the Tablet PC features. About 18 months ago I said Tablet PC is cool but not for me, but a convertible in this small form factor is making me change my tune already.

Awhile back I first killed the MediaBlab forums, resurrected the forums several months later only to quickly kill them again because they got hacked. As I pointed out at the time, I simply don't have the resources to combat attacks on the forum software I was using.

As an better alternative, I'm teaming up with Digital Media Thoughts to provide a space for discussion of articles here (and anything else you happen to want to talk about). I'm a big fan of all the Thoughts Media sites and the community Jason Dunn and the editors of Pocket PC Thoughts, Smart Phone Thoughts and Digital Media Thoughts successful nurture.

As I'm writing this, the section of the Digital Media Thoughts forums dedicated to Jake Ludington's MediaBlab is currently empty, but I'm sure that will change shortly. Of course, I hope you take the time to check out some of the other discussion happening at Digital Media Thoughts; there's a ton of great stuff every day. If you have specific questions for me, keep submitting them either by submitting via the Ask Jake form or by emailing me directly from the feedback link in the sidebar. In the meantime, join the discussion by sharing your Digital Media Thoughts.

I'm trying out the new Vizrea Snap media sharing service. Vizrea Snap debuted at this year's DEMO conference and hasn't gotten nearly the attention it deserves. If you own a Nokia camera phone, stop reading and go download the app now. It's free and you'll see what I mean almost immediately. If you don't own a Nokia phone, you should still try out Vizrea, but some of the cool features aren't as immediately apparent (yet).

So far there are a ton of things I really like about Vizrea and a few things I'd like to see improved. It's hard to specifically peg the service as doing one specific task, because it does a number of tasks well. Like any app I try, there are a few things I'd like to see improved which I will detail below as well. Below I break down the features I like in Vizrea and mention some of the areas where I'd like to see some improvement.

What I like about Vizrea Snap

Camera Phone Image Management: One thing Vizrea does better than other services is move photos from a camera phone to your desktop or the Web. You can either setup the phone service to auto-upload every photo and video to a default category on your Vizrea desktop or manage uploading on a per image basis. The camera phone app lets you title a photo and pick a collection for automatic image sorting. While other photo services like Flickr support emailing images to your account, the killer feature here is the sort. You can create a photo collection on the fly to keep images around a specific location or event grouped appropriately.

Contact/Friend Management: Vizrea provides an important level of granularity in contact management. I can specify individuals and groups with viewing privileges on a per photo or per collection basis. This is far superior to the traditional Friend or Not Friend approach. Even the Flickr Friend, Family or Public options are too basic if you only want to share images with a relevant group of people. Vizrea takes the approach that sharing photos can be on a per individual or per group basis, with unlimited group definitions.

Collection Management: Collection management remains one of the most complicated aspects of sharing photos with friends and family (and in some cases managing your own photos). Vizrea shines here as well. I can define a group of photos as a collection, share that collection with the people I want to see it through the Vizrea service, put the photo collection online and browse collections from any desktop or through the cell phone interface. One photo may be associated with many collections without needing multiple copies of each photo on your hard drive or a confusing assortment of folders. I can also browse any photos shared by my contacts on the phone, on my desktop or on the Web.

Media Management: Vizrea isn't limited to photos. In addition to JPEG images, Vizrea supports 3GP and MPEG4 video formats and the ARM audio codec common to many cell phones. The desktop app bundles required codecs, so you don't need to worry about playback once files are on your desktop.

Photo Browsing: Vizrea provides a phone interface for browsing photos stored on your home machine or in your contacts shared images. The desktop app sorts collections, provides image browsing for collections from contacts and offers limited photo editing.

Remote Updates: Everything in your Vizrea Snap universe, from the blog, to photo collections, to audio and video is updateable remotely. Depending on the features in your phone, you could maintain all Vizrea Snap features while going days or weeks without physically interfacing with your desktop.

Note: It's worth pointing out that Vizrea Snap isn't only meant for camera phones. Photos taken with any camera are shareable through the collection tree in Vizrea Snap. The cell phone stuff makes everything more portable.

What I don't like about Vizrea

Walled Garden Approach: While the combination of Vizrea desktop and cell phone apps is necessary for managing photos behind the scenes, I don't like being stuck publishing my photos to the Web in the Vizrea playground. I want to easily publish my photos to any blog service, the same way I can with Flickr. If you don't already have a blog or Web site, this might not matter, but I don't want to maintain a separate Web presence for every online service.

More Phone Support: Nokia makes some great phones, but I don't own one (disclosure: Vizrea loaned me one to test their service). I want to publish from any phone. I'm sure this one is only a matter of time and in fairness to Vizrea, Nokia was a smart starting point.

Can't Subscribe to Contacts: Current Vizrea Snap fuctionality limitsThere are some people who take really great photos. I subscribe to Flickr feeds because some people take really great photos. I want something similar in the Vizrea universe. Give me an "always download Paul's collections" option to reduce the wait time in browsing a friend's collections.

Smarter Phone Caching: While I love the concept of getting any photo from my home machine on a cell phone, I hate waiting. Vizrea Snap currently caches all downloaded images on the same schedule. I want the option to cache a specific collection longer than all others, but still maintain it as a collection, a digital wallet album so to speak.

No Mac Support: Mac users can view Web collections but there's no Mac version of Vizrea Snap at this point. While the Mac market is far smaller than the Windows market, this is the type of app Mac users might be likely to latch on to quickly if available.

Wrap-up

At the end of the day, I love where Vizrea Snap is headed. Managing media is still an imperfect world. We're slowly converging on a world where a cell phone provides camera functions, mp3 player functions and phone functions in one device. Vizrea Snap augments this convergence by providing a much needed media management component. Assuming they add more phones to the mix over the coming months and open up the walled garden just a little, Vizrea Snap will be an app everyone wants to download.

I still use MapQuest for all my driving directions because I like the presentation, but for other mapping needs, like finding restaurants in a neighborhood, I waffle between Google Maps and Microsoft's Local Live. Of course, if you're looking for some unique features like finding the perfect neighborhood to rent or buy a house, or get local weather for a micro-region of your city; Google Maps is by far the best solution because the greater community is constantly extending Google Maps with all kinds of cool hacks. For my most recent InformIt column, I review 10 of my favorite Google Maps hacks.

I got a ton of great questions from the Software Celebration. Look for me to announce the recipients of the software later this week. Of course, if you have a question, don't hesitate to submit it either via email or using the online question form. I'm still answering the last batch as quickly as possible. Most of last week was dedicated to digging out from a flood in my basement (and basement office). I live in a house that's probably 80 years old. A crack developed in the foundation and during a heavy rain the crack fed many gallons of water and a bunch of mud into the basement. You can see the resulting sink hole and some of the standing water on Flickr. The only serious water damage came to my UPS, which was too heavy to keep up off the floor. Fortunately it did its job and prevented anything electronic from getting damaged.

One of the things you might notice in the water is a box from an Insignia Surround System. I've been meaning to write this up for awhile and haven't found the time. The sound system includes a 5-disc DVD changer, surround speakers, amplifier and SD card reader all in one package. Surround sound could use a higher granularity of control (especially in adjusting the sub-woofer), but for the price, the sound quality is probably best in class. Viewing images from the SD card reader is certainly better than having the family huddle around a computer screen. Supported digital file formats include MPEG4, MP3, WMA and JPEG. In general, picture quality is great, especially with the component output. If you have the budget to purchase an all-in-one surround system in the $500-1000 range, you will hear an audible difference. In comparing the sound of this system to others priced in the sub $500 range, Insignia is definitely a winner. In reading the reviews on Shopping.com, it looks like the units have a high failure rate, although the one at my house seems to function properly. My biggest complaint is a huge lag in between pushing buttons on the remote and getting a response from the unit. This is great system if you're on a budget or don't want to take up space in an already cramped apartment; just buy the replacement plan.

This past week I got a chance to participate in Search Champs V4, a small gathering of academic researchers, search engine marketers and technologists hosted by MSN. The idea behind the gathering is to get feedback on existing and future MSN product offerings in hopes of making them better. One side benefit for me in attending is getting to meet people I read regularly, like Dori Smith, and Mike Arrington and new people like the guy behind We Break Stuff and Donavon West who makes gadgets for Windows Live.

Something I hadn't anticipated was the possibility of switching loyalties in desktop search. For a long time, Copernic remained the mainstay for handling all my desktop search duties outperforming both Google Desktop and Microsoft in a number of key areas. After seeing a few features in the Enterprise version of Windows Desktop Search, I'm switching my desktop search loyalties.

I always liked the live as-you-type results in Windows Desktop Search, but a few other quirks, including the bundling of the MSN Toolbar, turned me off. As I indicated recently, the enterprise version of MSN Search Toolbar is now a solid solution. I still won't touch the consumer version.

I'm an Outlook user by choice. It's the only app that integrates all my email, calendar, contacts and task data in a way that makes sense to me. Searching my email is an unpleasant experience. Lookout helped make searching email better, but the combined MSN Search Toolbar and Windows Desktop Search for enterprise rock at searching Outlook. Search results are relevant, conversational search actually works and the window where the results display sits right inside Outlook (a feature Outlook won't have natively until Office 12 ships).

A trick I picked up from Brandon Paddock, one of the Windows Desktop Search developers, is to prioritize indexing, which updates the index as changes happen instead of waiting for idle cycles. All the search tools, including Google and Copernic recommend waiting for idle cycles to update your search index, but I'm convinced my performance is better after running the indexing service immediately after install and just keeping the index up-to-date. At the same time, I would recommend against prioritized indexing if your computer has less than 512MB of RAM or a processor under 3.0GHz.

Just to be clear, I'm not an MSN Search fanboy. Google remains my primary Web search engine, because the results are simply better. Google has a greater wealth of documentation on various search tricks, mostly through third parties, not to mention people are making it easy to use Google tools inside my Media Center.

I decided to turn the entire month of January 2006 into a celebration of 5 years publishing about digital media. I feel lucky to have met some amazing people over that span. I started the month announcing the Xbox 360 giveaway, which continues to evolve and could still go to anyone with a week left in the month of January. For those with no interest in an Xbox or without an online audience, I'm offering one more opportunity to get some cool free stuff before the end of the month. The software developers behind some of my favorite apps have generously donated free registrations to a giveaway with a simple set of ground rules.

A total of 45 individuals will receive a free copy of one of the software applications listed below. To put your hat in the ring, simply submit a tech question using the online form or by dropping me an email message. I'll make every effort to provide an answer and you might get some free software too. If you previously submitted a question I haven't answered, feel free to send it again. You have until the end of January 2006 to submit something.

One of the constants between CES 2005 and 2006 is an over abundance of iPod accessories. There's everything from fake-jewel-encrusting iPod Bling, to a million shades of pleather cases to doodads and whatsits that connect to the universal connector. iPod car connections are now a standard feature in several cars, with more third-party options than you can count.

During the holiday season, I wore what might be considered either the ultimate in iPod accessories, depending on who your style consultant happens to be. Kenpo Fashion sent me a Kenpo Jacket for iPod to take for a test drive in December. It has a wired system inside it connecting an iPod to a set of remote control buttons on the sleeve.

Besides giving away an Xbox 360, I'm also tinkering around with the integration between the Xbox 360 Media Center Extender solution and its integration with the Media Center Edition of Windows XP. Before you tune out because you don't game or because you don't currently have a Media Center, keep in mind this is the future of Windows. When Windows Vista rolls around at the end of this year, one major focus of will be on integrating your whole entertainment experience with your computer. In general, home entertainment means something to do with television. In my estimation, Microsoft comes as close to getting it right this time as is conceivable.

I had some headaches with my home network security, because I have MAC address filtering turned on to only allow specific machine IDs to connect to the network and I have a ridiculously long password for my network. My biggest gripe with the current Xbox setup is having to type in passwords and configuration details using a game controller (yes, you can use a USB keyboard, but that's not a realistic scenario for everyone). After getting the Xbox side of the equation sorted out by adding network connectivity, I went to work on configuring Windows Media Center. Even for someone with limited computing experience, the Media Center config is a piece of cake. You download an app from Microsoft to update Media Center, the app installs, you enter a code to connect to your Xbox and it just works. I walked upstairs after the install and the Media Center guide was on the screen where the Xbox 360 is plugged in.

If you don't game, the $299 base price point for an Xbox looks a little expensive as a solution to connect your PC to your home entertainment center. Hopefully that will drop, but if it doesn't the experience is well worth the price. You can delete channels from the cable guide you don't subscribe to (or eliminate the ones you don't want the kids to watch). You can scroll the guide quickly. You can skip commercials after installing Tweak MCE. Browse your photo library from your television (which is far superior to crowding around the computer screen). You have instant access to every song and video on your computer's hard drive. The television picture on the Xbox even seems better than pushing it out directly to television via a tuner card.

I know a few people have connectivity issues in syncing the Xbox 360 to a Media Center, but overall I'm amazed at the experience. I haven't tested an HD stream on my home network yet. HD is supposed to work with the Windows Vista version of Media Center. The one thing that really gets me is how bad some portions of the games look in standard definition. There are a few sections in the Project Gotham Racing 3 game where shadows make your car practically indistinguishable from the shading onscreen (which is only a problem with in standard definition). Apparently King Kong has a similar issue. Fortunately my experience with watching recorded television and videos proved much better.

I started working with Chris Pirillo at Lockergnome during the summer of 2000 when the company was still based in an Iowa basement. This was before Chris became host of TechTV's Call For Help and launched Gnomedex as one of the most important annual tech gatherings on the planet. On 15 January 2001, Lockergnome's second daily newsletter, Lockergnome Digital Media, launched with writings from both myself and Adam Finley (who currently writes for Weblogs, Inc's Ad Jab). While Digital Media was officially an email newsletter, it was unofficially blogging before anyone really paid attention to blogging. We posted 5 or 6 new things every day and frequently crashed the server's of multimedia freeware apps by sending too much traffic. Five years later, I'm still doing the same thing, although my writing has improved and my tutorials cover a broad range of media topics.

While I'm certain I'd be doing something online today, I wouldn't be where I am right now if I hadn't talked Chris Pirillo into taking a chance on my writing. I've always been something of a media hacker, figuring out how to get audio gear to do stuff it wasn't officially designed to do. I'm a multimedia enthusiast to the extreme. Chris and I don't always see eye-to-eye on everything, but I'm forever thankful that he gave me my "big break".

To celebrate five years of online publishing, I'm giving away my brand new (never opened) Xbox 360. I could sell it on eBay for more than I paid to get it, but I'd rather give it away. As I mentioned earlier, the first issue of the email newsletter currently known as Jake Ludington's Digital Lifestyle came into digital being in January 2001. Five years later, I'm writing about how to hack your digital audio, digital movies and consumer electronic gadgets on a full-time basis, while sitting in my home office sipping coffee in tradeshow t-shirts and pajama pants avoiding the corporate rat race. In celebration of this five year milestone, I'm giving away an Xbox 360 Core System bundled with a 12-month Xbox Live Gold Subscription to one lucky individual.

I already have the Xbox 360 in my possession, so there's no camping out in line waiting for it to become available. I'm even paying shipping to get the game console from my doorstep to yours.

So how can you get the Xbox 360? Simple. Tell your audience about me. Blog about me. Blog about a problem I helped you solve. Call me names in your public forum, if it helps your ego. On 1 February 2006, I'll assess the server stats for jakeludington.com. If your site referred the most visitors based on my stats you get the Xbox 360. I'll post a daily top 20 list of the leading sites and number of total referrals each day starting on 10 January 2006 and continuing with daily updates thru 31 January 2006. If you place second, third, fourth or fifth, you'll receive a $50 gift certificate from Amazon.com.

For complete details, check out the Xbox 360 Giveaway page, where I layout some simple rules and where the stats will begin appearing on 10 January 2006.

I normally leave the Windows security warnings to the security sites, because I simply can't keep up with everything, but it's worth pointing out the most recent security flaw. According to Microsoft and the US Computer Emergency Readiness team (CERT) a vulnerability in the Windows graphics rendering engine could allow remote code execution. The good news is the only way this exploit can harm your system is by actively clicking on a link to view a Windows Metafile with Windows Picture and Fax Viewer. Don't assume this means you are out of harms way.

Like other deceptive attacks, the most likely way this security flaw will enter your computing world is through your email. An attacker may try to convince you to click on a link taking you to a page containing potentially hazardous code. If you get email from an unfamiliar source or if you get an email asking you to do something you wouldn't normally expect, err on the side of caution and ignore the request. You've likely already seen phishing emails purporting to be from banks you don't do business with, Paypal, Amazon or other large Web sites. Delete the suspicious emails and no harm can be done.

You can minimize the risk of damage by changing the association of WMF files to some other application or disassociating them from any all applications on your system and using due diligence when reading your email or clicking on links from site's you aren't familiar with.

Changing the file association for WMF files will make it harder for your computer to be exploited, because you'll need several extra steps to initiate the exploit. To change the association, open Windows Explorer, choose Tools > Folder Options and open the File Types tab. Locate WMF in the list of associations, highlight it and click the Delete button. You can always reassociate the extension after a fix is issued.

As a general reminder for year end system maintenance, take the time to check for the latest version of you antivirus software and make sure your antispyware application is up to date. If you're reading this and thinking 'what antivirus and antispyware software?' make a point of installing software. Microsoft's Antispyware app is among the best available, especially when used in combination with other apps. Most of the antivirus applications are equally effective, as long as you keep them updated. Run a Sober Removal Tool on your system just to make sure you didn't slip up. I know there are a number of people reading this who are infected because the newsletter email account is regularly bombarded with infected mails.

As part of my year end review, I opted to throw the dice in the annual InformIT Reference Guide predictions with a combination of conservative bets and a few guesses leaping out on a digital limb. With MTV URGE not available until next week's announcement at CES, I'm betting the farm on Viacom claiming 30% of the online music market, along with Sony adding support for the Windows Media DRM standard to the PlayStation Portable and their line of devices. A less risky prediction is the price of mid-sized HDTV screens dropping into the $300 range. While predictions are always somewhat suspect, it can be fun to see how right or wrong you were when the next year rolls around.

Happy New Year Everyone!

After seeing the list of most popular articles, with an tutorial on Sony's PSP at number 1, it's not completely surprising to see an app for the PSP as the most popular freeware application of 2005, followed closely by another PSP and iPod friendly app, 3GP_Converter. The rest of the apps are an even mix of media files and general purpose utilities for improving PC functionality:

PSP Video 9 converts movies for PSP

3GP_Converter converts movies to 3GP and MP4

Unlocker releases locked Windows processes

STOIK Video Converter converts MOV and other formats

Index Dat Spy locates index.dat files

GSpot video codec detective

TrueCrypt encryption software

MediaMonkey music and movie manager

ClamWin Free Antivirus virus protection software

SmartClose automatic application shutdown

The previous list of top 10 games included an error that shortened the list from 10 games to 8. The corrected list is now updated with all 10.

I'm too easily drawn into role playing style games like Fable for Xbox or even the tournament concept of Project Gotham Racing. Hours seem to slip away. Fortunately, I'm a binge gamer, playing games non-stop for a day or two before losing interest and returning back to reality. This is what makes online arcade games fun. These are the kind of games you can play for ten or fifteen minutes and walk away from without feeling like you're missing out on the next exciting development in the story.

At the end of 2004, I ran a list of the most popular games featured. Wik & The Fable of Lost Souls was number one in 2004. A year later, it's still the most downloaded game featured here. Wik recently became an arcade title in the Xbox 360 online arcade, which is a testament to the game's popularity. The big surprise on the list is Mystery Case Files: Huntsville, which was featured a few days ago and is already among the most download games of the entire year. Of all the games featured in 2005, here's a list of the 10 most popular titles:

Wik & The Fable of Lost Souls

Diner Dash

Magic Vines

Bricks of Atlantis

Aloha Solitaire

Mystery Case Files: Huntsville

Bubblefish Bob

Jewel Quest

Feeding Frenzy

Slingo Deluxe

I don't keep a very close watch on the server stats for the site, but periodically, I'll take a look to see which articles seem to be popular. What's interesting is, some of the most popular articles remain popular all year long and end up with a rather amazing number of visitors. Certainly more people than I could ever possible meet in a given year.

The top post for the year was an article I wrote back in March on converting DVDs for the Sony PSP. It's been read more than 100,000 times. If you missed it the first time it ran, hopefully this gives you one more shot at gathering the details. Most of the other articles on this top 10 list are considerably more modest and it was somewhat complicated to keep track of all the stats because I switched page naming schemes mid year. In general, they each had at least 50,000 visits so far this year. One of the big surprises is a simple little hack for making a tripod out of a Pepsi bottle and a few parts from the hardware store.

Without further ado here's a list of articles that got the most action during the course of 2005:

How To convert DVDs for PSP

How to Backup Your iPod

How to make Flash Movies

How to connect VoIP to your Phone Wiring

How to Buy an HDTV

How to Remove Sony XPC Rootkit

How to copy Audible Audio Books

How to convert PAL DVDs to NTSC

How to Save Money on Printer Ink

DIY Bottle Cap Tripod

Over at InformIT.com, where I write weekly updates for the Digital Lifestyle Reference Guide, I posted a hit list of 10 things you might not know about Xbox 360, ranging from compatible games from the previous list to compatible peripherals, to alternate ways to connect your PC and Xbox 360 for the ultimate home entertainment experience. If you aren't a gamer, don't count the Xbox 360 out of your house just yet. I'm a binge gamer, as in I don't game for months and then I'll go on a gaming binge where I'll do nothing but game for 2 days straight, so gaming isn't a big part of my life. There are plenty of reasons everyone will want an Xbox 360 in their home, the same way everyone started thinking about having a computer at home back in 1994 when the Internet first hit the public consciousness. This hit list of 10 Things You Didn't Know About Xbox 360 is part practical advice and part list of reasons you should stand in line at Best Buy to get one whether you ever purchase a gaming title or not.

UPDATE: Since originally publishing this article, Roxio has come along and created the best tool on the market for editing DVD Camcorder files. The latest version of Roxio Easy Media Creator is a must have solution for anyone who owns a DVD camcorder.

When I first heard Sony was releasing video cameras that record to DVD instead of Mini DV tapes, it sounded like a good idea in theory. No more waiting to transfer tapes in real time for editing. If you didn't like to edit, your video is already in a format that most people can easily play in their home theater. Of course the reality is a little different than expectations.

Yes it's true, if you don't plan on editing the footage recorded with one of these cameras, your video is already on DVD and it's a simple matter to make a copy of the little 3-inch disk to something more standard in size. However, there are very few times when you wouldn't need to edit at least some of the footage. The cameras offer onboard editing, after a fashion, which might work if you don't care about precision. All the controls on current models of Handycam DVD recorders use touch screen controls on the LCD instead of more normal button controls, which makes editing complicated and must be a nightmare for anyone with large fingers.

I bring all this up because I spent some time with Sony's entry- level Handycam DCR-DVD7 this week testing out some of the recording features. Recording works as expected, although I found myself frustrated by needing to smudge up the screen in order to make changes to the camera settings. I actually enjoyed the form factor, which is quite different than the standard video camera layout, although it's distinctly designed for right handed people (which I'm not). Image quality looked great considering the small lens size, even for the entry level unit (I didn't test low-light). I was quite annoyed with the marketing message that recommended I switch from the Memorex disk I purchased to a Sony branded disk. If I spend $400+ dollars on something, I shouldn't be nagged with an upsell everytime I insert a disk - Sony, that's lame.

I simply can't get past the editing limitations. To get your video off the DVD for editing, you need either editing software that supports the hack I describe in a question I answered this week or you need to rip the DVD and convert the file to a format compatible with whatever your editing software happens to be. Your third option is to do an analog capture, which further degrades the image quality and doesn't seem like much of an option. My feeling is it should say right on the box that they don't intend for you to edit your movies if you buy a DVD camera.

I hadn't originally planned to do much writing until after the Thanksgiving holiday, but some developments related to the Sony XPC First 4 Internet Rootkit situation warrant everyone's immediate attention. No one is releasing statistics about how many computers might be infected with this problem; it's a case of better safe than sorry. If you haven't purchased a Sony music CD anytime recently, you're likely in the clear. If you have, assume your system needs to be checked out, assuming you played that CD on your computer.

I'm dedicating almost everything today to the topic of rootkits, rootkit detection and removal and some of the basic information about rootkits in an effort to raise awareness about the problem. Rootkits have been around longer than the Sony issue, but a major corporation releasing malware on music CDs from some of the best known musicians in the world creates a situation where the problem moves from fringe isolated issue to the forefront of public concern. Chris interviewed Mark Russinovich of Sysinternals, who is credited with discovering the rootkit, for our radio show sometime back.

It's taken what seems like an eternity to get from Mark's discovery of the problem to a viable solution. The timeframe is really about 30 days, which is reasonably quick in terms of getting large corporations to pay attention. While a 30 day turnaround is relatively short for corporations, it is apparently enough time for maliciously inclined developers to create an exploit. A number of defenses against rootkits exist in general (including BlackLight and RootkitRevealer), although in this case, the ones mentioned here aren't ideal for the Sony problem because uninstalling the Sony software without following some careful procedures renders your CD drive useless.

The major development is a fix for the problem. Microsoft issued an update to Microsoft Antispyware to include the rootkit bundled with Sony/BMG music CDs. The Decemeber 2005 update to the Malicious Software Removal tool from Microsoft will also include a fix. With the holiday season presenting an opportunity for families to gather, it's also a great time to encourage your family members to update their security software.

If you're dropping by a friend or family member's house sometime over the next month to celebrate any of the end-of-year holidays, take some time to update virus definition files, download spyware monitoring apps and check firewall settings. Even if you aren't technically inclined, these are all ways you can help without needing to be a computer expert.

I haven't said much about Apple's announcement of a Video iPod because it was both inevitable and not news. We've had similar portable video players for years at this point. My old Archos Jukebox Multimedia, which lives on as a portable hard drive, being one of the earliest examples. In fact, Archos continues to lead in the portable video player space with video recording built-in to most of their units.

What is interesting about the Video iPod is the selection of supported video formats. Like Archos, like Sony's PSP, like most of Creative's supported video products, MPEG-4 video is playing a key role in video playback. It's hopeful this is a sign of standardization among hardware vendors, although there's a wildcard in the form of Microsoft's WMV being used by video rental services like CinemaNow for delivering portable video. At the same time, the apparent path of least resistance for creating video is MP4. Instead of fooling around with five or six different output formats, it looks like offering MP4 to anyone who wants to watch your video on a portable device is rapidly becoming the video equivalent of using MP3 for compatible audio distribution.

The irritating thing here is Microsoft didn't get the memo. While Apple is creating cross-platform tools for authoring MP4 video and Sony's Vegas offers direct to PSP support, with most software vendors following suit; we can safely assume the next versions of Microsoft's video products, like Windows Movie Maker and Windows Media Player will lack support for MP4 video without third-party intervention. Even my Windows Mobile cell phone records MP4 video, which won't play on my Windows desktop without additional software. So while Macs ship with video authoring tools optimized for creating universally compatible movies, Windows Vista users will be looking to Apple for a QuickTime upgrade or buying their authoring tools elsewhere so that they don't need to worry about who can watch the movie they created.

Watching A9 demonstrate their project to geo-locate the front of every building in major cities and coordinate the images with a map at Where 2.0 earlier this year is keeping my wheels turning. I don't have any interest in replicating their efforts, although I could duplicate the A9 scenario for Seattle by using the ShotMapper. I'm currently more interested in figuring out ways to mount a digital video camera to my car for other video projects.

Traditional mounting dollies used to film car scenes in movies are pricey and are likely overkill for the single camera setup most home movie enthusiasts use. I looked at the Sticky Pod and realized I can probably build something as good or better for a fraction of the cost. Inspired by my previous efforts in creating a bottle cap tripod from available parts, I'm on a mission to do something on a larger scale for DV cams.

The bottle cap tripod is made entirely from parts available at almost any hardware store. Building a car mounted tripod requires some fittings that aren't readily available from off-the-self components. Fortunately, eBay comes through again with a massive selection of tripods at cheap prices. They also have tripods at typical retail prices, but many bargains await. Monopods at eBay seem particularly suited for providing parts to this project. The key piece to acquire is the tripod head mount to hold the camera securely in place. The actual mounting component isn't as difficult.

The other thing I'm on the lookout for is an inexpensive DV cam. eBay is looking like the best bet for this too. I'm more concerned with price over quality at this point, because I want to test the car mounting system prior to attaching a camera I care about losing. eBay offers this vast list of no name DV cams that probably don't take the best video, but will offer a credible test of mounting a camera on the car and taking it for a drive.

As I put everything together, I'll publish the list of parts I use to build the car mounting kit.

"Democratization of Media" is one of the catch phrases of the podcasting and video blogging movement. The idea that regular folks like us can report on the news from anywhere, sharing our take on world events with the masses, without passing through the gatekeepers who control the "mainstream media" (newspapers, television stations and radio dial) is powerful stuff. At least in the United States, we've had this ability for most of the existence of cable television and very few people ever bother to use it.

Cable access channels, those remote outposts of the cable guide where political and religious zealots seem to be the only voices of public opinion, are by definition available to the public for democratic access to mass audience. Depending on where you live, the masses vary in size, but the access is the same. You might need to jump through a few hoops to get your program aired, but the cable companies are required by the local authority to provide this access in exchange for access to various city rights of way for laying cable. In Des Moines, Iowa, for instance, you simply needed to fill out a form and coordinate a time to air your show. SCAN, the non-profit organization appointed by the City of Seattle, Washington, requires you to attend an orientation class about the procedures required for submission before submitting your show. In both cities, there are facilities and equipment available for creating the shows.

In most cases, if there are more people requesting air time than there are program slots available on any given public access channel, the city has a contract clause requiring the cable provider to free up an additional channel. Unfortunately, the cable company doesn't automatically engage this clause at the point of channel saturation and the city probably won't take action unless someone complains. Like many things in the local community, if you aren't happy with the current state of cable access, its important to let elected officials like the mayor and city council know you aren't happy. Unlike many of the complaints received by local politicians, cable access is something the local government has a great deal of leverage over because the bidding company is vying for a local monopoly.

Sure, cable access gets a bad rap for being lousy material, or too heavily skewed toward religious and political programming as I suggested above, but that doesn't need to be the case. Nothing short of inertia is stopping you from hosting a local restaurant review program for your area, offering an alternative to the nightly news or broadcasting a competing alternative to ESPN's X-Games. You have the same barriers to people finding your show on cable access as you do online, like no marketing budget, limited distribution and competition for people's attention with alternative forms of entertainment.

I'm not suggesting that cable access is a replacement for Web delivery. I am suggesting cable access should be an important complement to Web delivery. The same people who complain about the quality of programming on television aren't doing their part to make it better (me included). With a little careful planning, I'm willing to be a cross-over show from the Web could rate higher in the Nielsen's than many of the primetime shows.

I predicted the demise of Rio's entire line of portable music players when they started selling off the intellectual property rights. I didn't want to be right. My Rio Karma was my favorite portable player, right up until the day it stopped booting. Rio was just starting to understand the need for creating cool devices that weren't named after slang terms for controlled substances and I had high hopes for somebody making a player that really stands up to the iPod line. Not because I feel an overwhelming need to hate the iPod, but because I want real alternatives.

Rio was among the first companies to offer MP3 players. As far as I know, they were the only one smart enough to cater to music geeks with support for lossless FLAC files and open source OGG formats. Rather than wax nostalgic about what might have been, I'd rather look at this as an opportunity. An opportunity to pick up some low cost hardware that is. With the company dumping the entire product line, eBay is now the place to score some brand new Rio players at prices that put the hurt to companies still trying to manufacture new players. Many of the units, like the Carbon support the Yahoo subscription music service.

But there's no support if it breaks, I hear you saying. Of the eight or nine portable players I've owned since acquiring my first from Samsung in 2000, none has failed before the warranty was up. It's either a case of forced obsolesce or a case of strange luck, but the players I own all made it through the warranty period before any glitch appeared. So in my mind, buying cheap makes more sense than buying for the perception of a company's ability to support the player after the sale. The other reason cheap portables on eBay look attractive is because the prices are cheaper than the cost of purchasing one of the drives inside. Buy the player on eBay, gut the drive, and turn it into a portable hard drive or mass storage device for your digital camera.

There's no telling when the influx of Rio gear flooding eBay will run out or when the next iPod competitor will be the next victim of liquidation. In the meantime, I'm keeping my eye on the existing deals. This might be the month I test the limits of Prospector Lite.

The second hour of The Chris Pirillo Show last night was truly amazing. Back in April 2005, I watched with some interest as Jacob Appelbaum blogged and photographed his travels during a two week visit to Iraq. While most of us were relying on news briefings and embedded journalists to paint a picture of what's taking place, Jacob was there in the midst of Iraq's national upheaval documenting his sojourn in war-torn poverty-stricken areas of the country. One of my initial motivations for attending Webzine 2005 next week was to hear Jacob speak about this trip.

More recently, I learned that Jacob was on his way to Houston and New Orleans to lend assistance to those in need during the Hurricane Katrina relief effort. He is blogging and taking photographs of what the situation looks like from his perception. Last night, we got a chance to speak to Jacob via cell phone from Algiers, Louisiana, where he is lending his techie skills in organizing relief efforts. The conversation with Jacob speaks for itself.

I'm still enthusiastically anticipating Webzine 2005 at the end of next week. The conference originated as a gathering point for the emerging group of online zine publishers of the late 1990's; many of the people we think of today as bloggers. After a five year hiatus, the conference is returning to its San Francisco roots and I'm not about to miss it. Scheduled topics lean heavily toward blogging, podcasting and videoblogging (all things I'm currently obsessed with). The entry fee is an affordable $20 for what should be one of the biggest online cultural events of 2005. We talked with one of Webzine's organizers, Eddie Codel, about the particulars of the event on the show last night, further solidifying my position that Webzine is an event not to miss.

Update: I'm taking the MediaBlab forums down. Despite having what was supposedly the latest code for phpBB installed, the forums got hacked. I don't have the resources to combat the constant string of attacks associated with that particular forum suite, so I'm taking the forums down. It's unfortunate, but necessary.

As part of the forum relaunch in September, I planned on doing a series of giveaways. If you already posted in the forums, please send me an email telling me what your forum ID was, so I can give you credit for posting as part of the giveaway. If you didn't post, but still want to win free stuff, send me a tech question to answer using the feedback link in the sidebar and you are automatically in the running to get somethign from the first round of goodies come from my friends at Digital Juice. I've mentioned their Jump Backs video backgrounds and royalty free audio products in the past; they continue to make the best animated backgrounds in television with credits ranging from Comedy Central to America's Most Wanted to MTV. With a client list like that, you might expect the prices to be outrageous - they aren't. If you want to make your movies and video projects look professional, Digital Juice is easily the best way to spend your money.

Of course, video animations aren't their only business. The other really cool product in their portfolio is the Juice Drops series of layered Photoshop files. At 100 to a set, these are themed image files meant to spice up print page layouts the same way the animated video backgrounds enhance movie projects. Web Digital Juice also sells a great collection of stock footage and royalty free background music tracks.

I realize I'm sounding like a big Digital Juice commercial here, but I can assure you I'm not getting paid for my opinions. This is really a giant apology for shutting down the forums less than a month after relaunch. Check out the samples and make up your own mind. To see what I'm giving away to people who email me a tech question, specifically examine the samples in Juice Drops templateCUTS, lifeSHADES andfreshFORM. From the Jump Backs collection, see the demos for Global Impact, High Impact VIII and Subtle Impact.

Don't forget, send me an email using the sidebar link to get one of these great creativity collections.

Please pardon my self-indulgent reflection for a moment; I took a break from technology for the past two days and had some fun. Seattle's annual Bumbershoot music festival closed on September 5, 2005 with a performance by The Stooges. I was excited and apprehensive at the potential of the reunion, rounded out by Mike Watt of The Minutemen on bass (in place of the late Dave Alexander). I wasn't even born when The Stooges carved out their place in music history. More than thirty years later, these aren't kids from Michigan with something to prove.

Iggy Pop continued to perform with intermittent releases over the years after a mid-Seventies disappearance, but nothing he did ever lived up to the memory of The Stooges that captivates the forever-15 audience of punk rock fans. When Iggy climbed Mike Watt's duct-taped bass amp midway through show opener, Loose, kicking the amp with his heels only to see the tape removed a short time later by a stage hand; I was sure we were in for a night of contrived remembrance of performance past.

Two songs later, with the groove behind 1969 swinging into gear, my mind was changed. For a few moments at least, it was 1969 (or The Stooges version of it anyway). The band was tight, probably sounding better than they ever did in their drug-infused heyday. I Wanna Be Your Dog followed, with TV Eye close behind. Somewhere in the set Dirt found its way into the mix, but it's becoming a blur. Between prancing and flailing about the stage, it almost looked like Iggy would leap into the crowd, coming up short when he realized he couldn't clear the security barrier.

During Fun House, Iggy did something completely unexpected, inviting fans to the stage, after an expletive-filled exchange with show security. He even briefly stopped the song. There were easily 100 fans on stage before the end of Fun House. As far as I could tell no one got hurt. At the end of the song, the show paused long enough to direct the dancers back to the crowd with the rest of us; Iggy ushering everyone safely back with encouragement on the microphone. To me, that was cool. I hate arena shows because there's no connection between the musicians and the audience. In music intimacy is everything; intimacy and the space between the notes. At least for some fans, The Stooges managed to make that connection, which extended to the rest of us who weren't on stage.

If memory serves me correctly, Dead Rock Star from a 2003 pseudo-comeback album followed Fun House. I left at that point, satisfied with hearing the best of The Stooges and not interested to see if the show would continue down the path of newer material I feel no connection to.

I'm sure this show wasn't the same as being there for the early days of Iggy Stooge, with bottles flying at the stage and self-mutilation as performance art. I certainly doubt a time machine would reveal people holding balloon animals in The Stooges crowds of old. Maybe The Stooges do still have something to prove. Aside from Iggy Pop with his bleach blonde surfer locks and disturbingly-taut musculature writhing on stage, the rest of the band could easily pass for someone's dad in the Pike Street Market. Of course, no one's watching the rest of the band and they still sound amazing; the illusion remains intact.

I need to find a new cell phone. My one-year contract with ATT Wireless (acquired by Cingular) is about to expire. I signed up for the plan last September to take advantage of the features in the then brand new Audiovox SMT5600. I love many things about the phone, including support for video and audio playback. I can play podcasts, audiobooks and movies on the phone, which makes it a suitable replacement for needing a portable music player and a phone. I already carry around a bunch of junk in my pockets, eliminating an extra piece of hardware is nice. Having access to subscription music services like Yahoo and Napster is great too.

Unfortunately, my SMT5600 suffered a tragic accident and the protective plastic covering the screen cracked several months ago. The navigation button managed to get loose over time, making it harder to browse phone features. The transition to Cingular during the ATT Wireless acquisition amounted to no support for the phone, making it impossible to replace under the plan.

Now I have a dilemma. I like the advantage of having Outlook sync to my current phone. I love carting around music and movies on my phone, although I wish Audiovox had been smart enough to use a standard sized phone jack. So I'm torn in choosing a replacement. I can easily abandon Cingular for Verizon or Sprint; if I can find better hardware somewhere else. I want a new phone with similar features.

I have my eye on two phones with similar possibilities, although neither is currently available from any of the carriers. Nokia's N91 is certainly a drool-worthy alternative, complete with 4GB hard drive and WiFi, with the smart addition of a 3.5mm headset jack, so you can use Etymotics with the phone. It's about the same size as my current Audiovox phone, making the N91 an almost perfect substitute. The downside to the phone is price. It's estimated in the $700-800 range, which means little subsidy from the phone company.

If I hold out until January, the Motorola Q might be a more viable option. It has a thumb keyboard, like the Blackberry, with 320x240 resolution and Windows Mobile v5. A 1.3 megapixel camera for video and stills is standard phone fare these days. The size is a little bigger than I'd want, taking me back to the days of the massive Palm OS powered Kyocera I had a few years ago. My own experiences with Motorola phones in the past is mixed at best.

I might go out on a limb and look at one of the speech-to-text phones from Samsung. They recognition works quite well - I tried it on a trade show floor and it understood me flawlessly. I know Apple is about to announce the iTunes phone next week, but I just don't care. I don't need iTunes on a phone to get a great music experience. Apple is hoping to change the handheld world the same way they shook up digital music and I just don't see it happening. For now, I guess I'll keep the Audiovox; it's broke, but still quite functional. If anyone has any suggestions, I'm all ears.

I paid very little attention to the announcement of Google Talk, the latest addition to IM land. It's based on Jabber, which might be cool if any of the other clients also supported the same open standards. As it stands, I currently have accounts on eight different messaging services, if you include Skype and Gizmo Project as part of the instant messaging universe. Something must give in this standoff between the various parties and their refusal to integrate. Sure Trillian, Gaim and a handful of others are trying to combine everything into one location, but that's an imperfect solution because I still have multiple accounts to manage. I rarely sign in to any of the clients these days because I'm frustrated by the sheer energy of deciding what to support or not.

It's high time Yahoo, MSN and AOL start playing nice. Somehow Apple convinced AOL and Google to interoperate with iChat after a fashion. What I'd love to see is an IM world that worked the way music players or email clients work. Give me features I can't live without so I choose your IM instead of the competition. Integrate your IM client with my Flickr account, Yahoo. Integrate MSN Spaces with MSN Messenger and I might prefer the MSN IM. AOL has no hope because their music service is the only thing I really dig, but I won't count them out yet. Google could integrate with Blogger, Picassa, Google Maps and whatever else they've got tucked away. All these things would be a start. But I really need a killer feature I can't live without.

Google already has a leg up on everyone in one respect. PC calls through Google Talk sound killer when compared against every single other IM style VoIP service. We used it on The Chris Pirillo Show last night and it beat everything. Google Talk even sounded better than the landline. I think a caller from Baja Mexico sounded a little distant and the caller from Malaysia sound like there was some noise in the background, but considering the distance, the quality was quite acceptable. These are the kinds of features we need to see. Don't compete by locking my AOL buddy list away from my MSN contacts. Give me a reason to choose AOL instead of MSN. Who will provide the best video chat performance? Who will add ringback functionality so people trying to contact me when I'm offline hear the latest song from Usher? These are the features that can turn IM into an exciting playground. Competing on protocols is just outdated.

Spam. Spyware. Viruses. These are just a few of the landmines regular folks like us face on the Internet everyday. While I have successfully avoided virus infection for some time now, there's no end to the spam aimed for my inbox and I occasionally bump into a spyware app during the course of testing software. Every now and then it's tempting to just abandon technology for the life of an alpaca farmer.

Fortunately there are people working hard at finding solutions to these digital problems on behalf of all our inboxes. Education is the best way to avoid spyware and virus infections - be suspicious of everything unfamiliar. Spam is a little trickier. All you need to get spam is an email address. The easier your email address is to remember, the more likely you are to get a truckload of spam.

Tools to block and filter the junk help reduce inbox overload, but sometimes at the price of massively inconveniencing both you and the real people who are trying to send you legitimate email. One of the people actively working to solve (or at least contain) the spam problem is Anne Mitchell. I've swapped mail with Anne for ages before finally meeting her in person during Search Engine Strategies in San Jose.

Anne goes back a long way in the spam fight, first as part of the team behind MAPS Realtime Blackhole List, which is one of the first coordinated efforts to shut down spam at the source. She's currently the President and CEO of the Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy (ISIPP), a team of people working to find solutions to differentiate between legitimate email and the stuff we'd all rather avoid. You can hear a conversation between Anne and Chris about her efforts on the radio show site.

Aunty Spam is another great place to get news and editorial comment on the war on spam. Just this week, Aunty Spam announced the launch of a comprehensive guide to stopping spam for Windows in collaboration with ISIPP. I've read the guide cover-to-cover and consider it one of the best resources available for finding ways to prevent spam in your inbox. If your inbox is buried in ads for chemical substances and ways to swell parts you didn't even know you have, look no further than How To Stop Spam For Windows Users.

Of course the best way to stop spam altogether is by convincing people to stop clicking on the offers. More than anything, spam is an economic problem. As long as people keep buying the stuff in spam messages, the senders will keep delivering the garbage to everyone. I think it's time to adopt the school marm method of spam prevention. The next you hear of anyone you know buying a product advertised in spam, wrap them on the knuckles with a ruler.

As someone with a front row seat to all of the independent media creation going on right now, I'm starting to feel a little overwhelmed by all of the new audio and video appearing online. It's not that I want to watch or listen to everything. I want a filter so I don't miss any of the really good stuff. What I define as really good stuff isn't what you define as really good stuff and the guy across the street thinks we both have poor taste.

I make a point of sampling a little of everything because I enjoy seeking out new and different form of entertainment and information. Even I have my limits. I hit a point where I need to pull back and spend more time creating than I spend consuming. I don't think I'm unique in that respect. There comes a point where I find myself needing to respond to everything I'm taking in.

At what point do we hit a threshold where everyone is so completely overwhelmed with audio and video we start to tune out? Aside from editing audio files related directly to The Chris Pirillo Show, I haven't listened to a single podcast in almost two weeks. There's only so much talking I can handle. I'm more interested in music for the time being. I'm even tuning out from the reliable sources I know find great music because I found some great music in the strangest of all places; a record store in the physical world. Of course, that leads back to seeking out more music by the same artists online, followed by seeking out music by other bands with overlapping members.

Television stations like KRON in San Francisco are empowering a small group of people from their viewing audience to capture more of the community news on video. This might be a good thing if publishing to the Web results in more human interest stories and community events being archived in favor of the ever popular violent crimes, accidents and natural disasters we see on traditional television news broadcasts. It could also backfire, reinforcing a picture of further criminal activity and accident coverage because that's where the excitement is and that's what will draw in Web viewers the same way it draws in eyeballs for television programming. How much can we watch or listen to before we simply implode?

I'm sure you've hit one of those domains where the only thing on the page is advertisements and highly relevant links. SeattleDiscounts.com is an example of this. At SES in San Jose, we ran into a company that boasts over 400,000 domains with ads like that and several hundred thousand more managed for other companies. The company, Dark Blue Sea is publicly traded in Australia and is apparently in the business of selling these domains.

Most of the domains are available for around $500 each. A few sell for even more. Presumably the sale price of each domain is some multiple of advertising revenue on an annual basis. The entire business is built around domains you might be likely to type in directly when searching for something. Take the SeattleDiscounts.com example above. Say you're planning a trip to Seattle this year and you want to find deals before you get there. What might be the obvious place to look for deals in Seattle? I would probably go to Google and do a search, but some percentage of searches type in settlediscounts.com and are taken to a page filled with ads.

When you consider a domain registrar can purchase domains for about $6 wholesale (maybe less), this starts to look like an amazing business model - assuming you have the cash on hand to purchase 400k domains at $6 each. Even if you don't, it might be possible to turn as few as 200 domains into a six-figure income, although the annual registration costs will be in the $8-10 range, so you have a little more overhead.

I'm not advocating a similar strategy, especially not without some education about domain value. I'm simply fascinated by the idea that a company can make a ton of money by essentially populating thousands of domains with nothing. No pop-ups required. No spyware needed. Just a bunch of links that result in payment when clicked. Who says the Dot.Com insanity ended in 2000?

Back in March I wrote about my trip to Portland for the mastering session for Steve Robinson's album, which is being released on my Midnight Gypsy record label. It's the first time I ever sat in a mastering session and found the process fascinating. Mastering doesn't make bad recordings sound good, but it certainly puts a nice polish on good tracks. Mastering was done with ProTools on a Mac rig, but the original recordings were all done with Cakewalk SONAR.

Before the public preview of the album could go live, I had to get a few things in order. Top on my list was getting a great looking design for the site. On most of the label sites I visit regularly, the designs are painful to navigate and you can't ever find what you want to know about the artists. After looking around for designs I liked, I realized that many of the sites with a style similar to what I wanted were all done by Julie at Bonafide Style. The whole team there does great work, but I particularly like Julie's designs and consequently hired her to do the work. She took my vague idea of what I wanted and turned it into what I consider to be an awesome design. Julie will definitely be my first choice for future Web design needs.

The second and infinitely more frustrating part of what I needed was a way to effectively stream the album without a crippling playback experience. I hate the way the embedded Windows Media Player and QuickTime options deal with buffering, so they were out. I tried several other options, including an open source app that looks quite similar to Wimpy, but none of them worked quite the way I expected. I think I found what I needed in the Wimpy Website MP3 player. It's basically just a Flash player with some sort of code mojo that makes it skinnable and seriously cool looking. Using a combination of PHP GetInfo to pull file information and the skin to make the player look like something people recognize as a media player, Wimpy is almost perfect. It's got track skipping and track shuffle built in, which is totally cool. The real test will be to see how it holds up to everyone who reads this taking the songs for a spin.

Of course all of this leads me to the real excitement. The album is now available for online preview. You can listen to every track on the album from the site. CD copies of the release are available for pre-order if you like it, with instant gratification from a lossless FLAC version of the album available immediately on purchase of the CD or as a separate download. And while I'd love to have everyone who reads this buy a copy, I'll be happy if you just drop me a line and tell me what you like (or dislike) about the online listening experience.

I was reminded again on Thursday why carrying a tripod or monopod is always a good idea. Chris and I had the opportunity to interview BNL singer, Steven Page, following his in store performance at Easy Street Records here in Seattle. He is currently on a press tour of the U.S. promoting his solo release, The Vanity Project, on Flagship Recordings. I brought a DV cam along just in case, because I thought having a video of the performance and interview might be more meaningful than audio if we could get permission to do it. I intentionally left my tripod at home because I didn't have a convenient way to carry it if we couldn't record and the record store can get a little crowded.

As the performance started, it became clear that photography and recording was okay. Easy enough for the first few songs. Slowly, my hand started cramping and it became increasingly difficult to hold my hand still. Instead of recording the entire performance as one continuous effort, I ended up taking brief pauses between songs so that the feeling would come back to my hand. There are a few spots in the raw footage where this becomes annoyingly apparent. I'm still cleaning it up. At least the audio from the DV cam sounds good. I'm still cleaning up the footage from the musical performance, but the interview video is already live.

The Vanity Project album is quite good, btw. If you like BNL, you will most definitely like The Vanity Project. The entire album is co-written with Stephen Duffy, who is probably best known for his group The Lilac Time, although he also happens to be a founding member of Duran Duran. The Vanity Project is probably described by critics as an album demonstrating how much Steven Page has matured as an artist, but that kind of thing always seems kind of silly. It's a great pop record with catchy hooks and introspective lyrics. You can find The Vanity Project online at places like Napster and iTunes or at your local record store.

Virtual Earth is one of the more exciting things I saw at Where 2.0. It takes MSN Maps and combines a handful of features to make it more useful and markedly more visual. A scratch pad keeps track of locations, so you can build a map based on all of the places on your list. When you find what you're looking for, you can create driving directions, email to someone else, email to yourself, or blog about it on MSN Spaces automatically. There's a slick Locate Me button that finds your current location based either on IP address or an ActiveX control, which I'm sure will have privacy advocates buzzing, although both versions of the feature only pinpointed me as being within 100 miles of Seattle. You can find out more about Virtual Earth by listening to this interview with Steve Lombardi of the Virtual Earth team and by taking it for a test drive. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by the results.

Virtual Earth went live a little earlier than anticipated, presumably because Google just integrated satellite photos with their mapping service. I'm more impressed with Virtual Earth at this point. It gets a closer zoom on the satellite images and produces more relevant results. Google had the wow factor down ages ago and an open API certainly gave them a head start in letting people create cool stuff with Google Maps. What Virtual Earth does better is give me the data I want instead of giving me a bunch of other junk too. When I search Google Maps for Whole Foods (the grocery store in my neighborhood) for instance, I get a bunch of other junk along with it. Virtual Earth only shows me Whole Foods locations around Seattle. I still get better results using Google's text search engine, but I was put off by the driving directions feature of Google Maps from day one and I remain less than impressed as they add new features.

I'm currently brainstorming a way to create my own media server / navigation system for my car. Last week I wrote an article for InformIT on all the variations on integrating your car stereo with an iPod, but I want to take that concept further. I want to add a PC that can use my Audiovox 5.6-inch screen as a display for both browsing music and providing driving directions. If touch screen technology weren't insanely expensive, I'd try that instead. I was originally toying with the idea of only building in GPS navigation from scratch, but if I need a computer for that, I might as well take several extra steps beyond. The biggest missing piece is user interface components. Voice activation might work, but I'm thinking I'll need some kind of manual control as well. If the computer had a continuous internet connection, I could skip GPS nav and go straight for integrating with something like Virtual Earth, which might be possible with a Bluetooth adapter and my Audiovox Smartphone. Once I find all the parts, expect a full photo how-to.

The growing popularity of podcasting is making me realize more and more that we need more portable devices with video support. Not so we can all walk around burying our heads in the latest news update from CNN or some ridiculous no budget short film from some film school dropouts. Although some of us will do both. No, video support is necessary because the killer combination for podcasting is in narrated slideshows style presentations, which work well in a video framework.

We are a visual society. We like illustrations to accompany what people are telling us. It doesn't have to be full motion video. A new picture every minute or two would be enough to keep most people tuned in. Apple sort of gets this with their support for chapters in the latest version of iTunes and in their iPod photo implementation. What they didn't get is making it simple.

For all the strengths of the iMovie and iPhoto apps at making it easy for people to create and share, the support for images combined with audio in their little iTunes universe is severely lacking. Apple's chapter concept involves the command line or hand-coding XML, which is a hack brought about by lack of support for real video codecs in their iPod framework. With iTunes chapters, you have to manually designate that image #10 will appear at exactly 0:03:13:21. Where's the Apple polish on this one?

This is where video comes in and this is also where I think Microsoft could potentially gain some ground. The free Photo Story 3 app is a marvelous solution for combining still photos and voice narrative to produce an interesting presentation. Pocket PC owners and the ten people who own a Portable Media Center can watch and listen to Photo Story created content right now. At the heart of these stories is the spirit of podcasting; people telling personal stories about their view of the world. Of course you don't need a portable player of any kind to enjoy a photo story; you can watch them on your PC.

The reason I think Photo Stories are more compelling than video in the next round of podcasting evolution is attention. The big argument against video as the successor to podcasting is attention. You can't watch a video while you drive a car. You can't watch a video while you jog (although the people on the treadmills at the gym might disagree). You could however briefly glance at an image and if the verbal description is any good you might not need to see the image if it isn't convenient.

The missing piece is video support on most of the small devices. Color screen models barely support still images, let alone video. No, video won't look good on a super tiny screen, although it doesn't look too bad on my Audiovox SMT5600. It certainly didn't look good on my old Archos Multimedia Jukebox. But were not talking about full motion here. Photo Story has a bunch of pan and zoom effects, but you wouldn't even need those for small screens, just give me images combined with narrative and make it easy to create.

Apple combined images and audio, but they did it wrong. Even if they do add video to the iPod, they still aren't getting it right. Microsoft combined images and audio but forgot to provide me with any options to take it with me (the Portable Media Center doesn't count). If Apple and Microsoft won't do it, who will? Maybe this is where Sony plays the PSP trump card and gives us another reason to buy a portable gaming system. Make it easy to create and share slideshow content on PSPs and you've got another use for the WiFi capabilities of the devices coupled with a more compelling reason for non-gamers to want a PSP. Just don't make the video format proprietary.

I'm making a renewed attempt with speech-to-text. At least three times in the past I attempted to use voice command software in place of typing and each time I gave up frustrated. The last time I made a concentrated effort to experiment with voice recognition was at least three years ago. My previous efforts all ended because I became frustrated with the lack of recognition. So far this round seems to be fairing better.

My current experience is being driven by Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred, which is definitely my personal best experience in using a speech product. Rather than struggling with the software recognizing words, I'm having a different kind of learning curve. The struggle is to get used to the idea of speaking things I normally type. I'm a quick study on the idea of assigning keyword commands that automatically input text like signature files or frequent responses to common questions, but actually thinking through the process of saying outloud what I plan to put on paper is an entirely different process.

The speech part of my brain wants to say something very different than the typing part of my brain and so I'm having this internal battle over how to specifically verbalize what comes very natural through typing. I honestly can't say enough good things about the software. In terms of recognizing what I say, it works quite well and the infrequent mistakes are memorized so the software doesn't repeat them in the future.

My only complaint at the moment is too many verbal commands to learn. If I can eliminate virtually all mouse movements, I'll be elated, but I don' think the software is quite up to the task of some things I'd like to try. For example, I want to read my email by using voice commands to move to the next message, reply to messages and send messages all without using the keyboard or clicking the mouse. So far, I'm able to combine voice commands to do some, but not all of those things.

I'm still not fully comfortable with speaking as a replacement for typing, although if I keep at this I may be a better speaker because I'm thinking more about what's coming out of my mouth. Much of what I've posted over the last few days is a blend of spoken text and typed text, not because the speech-to-text isn't working, but because I'm concentrating on a completely different mode of communication and I don't have it down just yet.

I'm posting a little less than normal this week because we're headed for the Washington coast to see what the world looks like on the other side of Puget Sound. Wyatt's never been to the ocean before and while the Sound ultimately connects to the ocean it isn't quite the same. We're also hoping to visit the rainforest area of Olympic National Park, but the weather prediction for the far side of the Olympic mountains range doesn't look so hot, so our outdoor activities may or may not be limited. With any luck, I'll have some interesting pictures to post on Flickr when we return.

If you haven't tried Flickr, go get a free account and check it out. One of the things that makes it seriously cool is a tagging feature that lets you assign keywords to your images. After you tag your images, you can see the kinds of photos other people on Flickr are tagging with the same keyword. There's also a social component where you can label other Flickr members as friends or family, which makes it easier to assign permission to certain photos, but you aren't required to have any friends to take advantage of tagging. I'm personally a big fan of tags because they make it easier to sort information when used effective. For a recent interview for The Chris Pirillo Show, we talked to Kevin Marks who is one of the developers making tag search engine Technorati work better. I've been using tags in a somewhat limited capacity to find news and information about things I consider important, but that conversation with Kevin opened my eyes to the subtly to tagging.

If you happened to hit the Free Accounting Software app I featured earlier in the week, only to discover the download was unavailable, apparently the company switched to requiring registration prior to download. Maybe it became too popluar to quickly, who knows? Regardless, it's definitely a high caliber app, whether you just want to balance a checkbook or manage your business finances. I updated the link and it should work as expected now.

I've posted some infrequent audio tips to what may eventually become known as the MediaBlab podcast over at Liberated Syndication. It's primarily a testing ground for the various tools promoted to podcasters. In most cases, I find myself better able to convey the information in text, rather than trying to break things down in a descriptive monologue. For my own method of communication, there are some things I don't find speech to be particularly helpful in communicating.

Of course, there are some things I like to talk about that might take on new life in an audio form. Back when I lived in Iowa I published an email newsletter / blog dedicated to stuff going on in Des Moines. I stopped doing it in 2002 because I didn't have time and realized that I only enjoyed doing the commentaries on restaurants and reviewing local theater. Compiling the events listing every week was a huge pain because it was very difficult to track down the stuff I was interested in.

Now that I'm living in Seattle, there's a whole new world of restaurants to visit (or at least they are new to me). Instead of blogging about every restaurant I go to, I'm thinking seriously about doing a podcast dedicated to Seattle dining. I love to dining out. I love trying new restaurants. I'm always on the lookout for coffee alternatives to Starbucks which led me to some of the best coffee I've ever experienced (Zoka and Herkimer) and some of the worst (I won't bother to point fingers). Once a week is often enough that I can try something new without ever running out of restaurants. I realize this will only appeal to a small audience (if it appeals to anyone), but it's a creative change of pace from writing and talking about technology while still finding a practical application for the stuff I'm constantly prattling about in this space.

So far I haven't found any other podcasts with people covering restaurants in their area. I know when I travel to conferences the one thing I want (besides WiFi) is reliable recommendations for food. The concierge desk is generally encouraged to recommend certain places whether they are good or not, so you can't always count on the hotel. The various online rating sites tend to be skewed with ratings of 10 or 1, so it's hard to distill the quality of a restaurant from dining sites. I'm not saying my recommendations will be more accurate for everyone, but there's something you can tell about a restaurant from the intonations in a person's voice that you don't get from reading about it or seeing which box they checked on a scale. So here's my 10 cent idea for everyone who loves to eat out and tell their friends - start recording your recommendations and share them with the world. If you're interested, I'll even host the files so you don't have to find a bandwidth provider.

Two things are on my mind in a big way this week, so please indulge the overwhelming coverage of geo-location and the new version of iTunes. Location aware services are becoming particularly important as MSN, Yahoo and Google race to embrace local search with open technologies perfect for creating extended applications. iTunes 4.9 is a big deal for me because it's pushing podcasting into the mainstream and helping put the radio show on the map in a different way.

There's a certain irony to our inclusion in the iTunes podcast directory. The Chris Pirillo Show is sponsored by Microsoft Windows Media on an ongoing basis and MSN Search plays a key role in sponsoring our coverage of conferences like Where 2.0. Without Microsoft technologies, the live stream of the show wouldn't be possible because the entire backbone of streaming services is built on Windows Media technology. Now Apple is comes along and make subscribing to podcasts a simple process inside an interface everyone is comfortable with - media player software. If you have iTunes installed on either Windows or Mac OS X, I can direct you to our page in iTunes with a link and there's no additional software to download or understand.

The next step is figuring out how to tie geo-location information to the show recordings so we can deliver a better experience about where in the world we are located when a recording is made. Where isn't always a relevant question, but when we talk about a specific location it might be more interesting if you could easily launch a map and find out something about the area we're talking about.

A more practical use for this is tying location specific information to photos. There are a few specialized cameras and camera add-ons capable of tagging photos with latitude and longitude coordinates, but there's very little available for making use of the information. What I'd like to see is every camera offering the option of GPS so that if I go on vacation somewhere, I could post the pictures online and re-create a map of the vacation using the photos, tying the images with each location I visited. The technology to do this is already available; it's lacking in sensible implementation to make it all stick together.

I completely overestimated my available time at Gnomedex when I made any plans for interviewing attendees. In an ideal universe, the dedicated connection we were originally given for the live stream should have been dedicated, not a wired connection pooled with all the WiFi connections at the conference. Ultimately we got a dedicated connection, which solved the initial headaches associated with the live stream and the conference location will know better next year (I'm optimistic Gnomedex 6.0 will be at Bell Harbor, because aside from the minor bandwidth issues, the facility is amazing).

Fortunately, there were plenty of people on hand with recording devices. In fact, from my view at the back of the conference room, it looked more like a massive press conference with numerous recording setups, video cameras and cameras. Geek News Central covered the opening night party. The M Show provided some candid coverage. The Podbot Podcast did this crazy recording from a robot. I know Michael Lehman was busy recording at the show, but I'm not sure if he's had time to break away from podcasting for Microsoft long enough to post the recordings. Matt May of Staccato recorded at an interview or two as well, so I can only image he'll be posting a Gnomedex wrap-up in the near future. For those who prefer video with their audio, Steve Garfield has some highlights. And I'm barely scratching the surface of all the recording going on.

This week I'm off to Where 2.0 for a massive brain-dump on geo-location services, mapping software and developing applications for all the mapping technologies now available to us through the Web. I'm a little disappointed they didn't make attendees figure out the location of the conference based on map coordinates, but that probably got shot down by the marketing team behind the event. Instead of an audio recording device in every fist at Gnomedex, I'm envisioning a room full of GPS receivers. Don't be surprised if I can't stop talking about cool mapping tricks for the next few weeks following the conference. I'm already quite obsessed with many of the ways people are linking Google Maps to other online applications, although MSN Maps and MapQuest continue to provide more accurate directions.

I attend conferences for a variety of reasons. I attend to learn something new. I attend to meet new people. I attend to stay on top of the latest technologies. Most of all I attend to connect with familiar faces. For the past five years the only conference I never missed was Gnomedex. Sure, I was involved with planning the first three and on some level I was required to attend, but there's no way I would miss Gnomedex even if attendance weren't required. It's one of the few conferences where I gather with likeminded people and talk about what's going on in my world without getting blank stares and glazed eyes. It's one of the few places where newbies and industry experts mingle and share in the common culture of the event.

A live audio stream of the sessions is available again this year, this time through the radio show audio feed. We're lucky enough to have the continued support of Microsoft and Limelight Networks, in addition to all the Gnomedex sponsors making the actual event possible. If you are at all curious about podcasting, blogging, online education or just enjoy technology, I highly recommend tuning in to at least some of the conference stream. The broadcast runs 8:30 a.m. - 5 p.m. Pacific (GMT -8) on June 24, picking up again at 9:30 a.m. Pacific on June 25. The audio feed isn't quite like being at the show, but it certainly gives you a free taste of what's going on here in Seattle this weekend.

I'll be keeping myself occupied interviewing attendees. Depending on how my schedule goes this weekend, I might even give MediaBlab readers a sneak preview of some of the interviews. Stay tuned.

For the most part I try to keep politics out of my writing. I jokingly suggested that we might see public service commercials warning that Congress Wants to Break Your Television last month when it seemed possible that the broadcast flag wasn't completely dead yet. Not only is the broadcast flag not dead, there won't be any time for public service announcements preventing it because it's apparently being tacked on to an appropriations bill slated for passage sometime in the next 24-48 hours.

Many people in the United States are already frustrated by how difficult it is to find a legal path to making a backup copy of a DVD. If the broadcast flag passes, it will make copying DVDs, copying television shows and copying whatever the next distribution method for video content up to the discretion of the Motion Picture Association of America. In my opinion, that's a bad thing because the MPAA already made it fairly clear that copying is not acceptable, to the point where we are forced to watch propaganda in movie theaters and on DVDs. In all likelihood, passage of the broadcast flag will mean the end of Tivo and other digital video recording technologies that give us control over when and where we watch our favorite shows.

While I don't agree with everything the Electronic Frontier Foundation gets involved in, this is one area where they have my attention. The EFF is taking an active role in helping defeat the broadcast flag. If you live in one of these states: Alabama, Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, someone who represents you has input into stopping the broadcast flag. The EFF is making it easy to take action by providing a form letter automatically directed to the appropriate representative from your state. All you need to do is let your senator know you don't want the government deciding how you watch television.

I personally want more options, not less. Considering the number of questions I receive from people wanting to make copies of their DVDs or wanting to burn a DVD from a television show they recorded, so they can watch the show somewhere other than their living room, I'm guessing many of you reading this would like to have more control over your television viewing schedule, not less. The broadcast flag will put more control in the hands of the MPAA, giving them decision making power over what types of new technology are released to consumers in the United States. With about 60 seconds of your time, you can express your opinion and help make sure that doesn't happen.

Does our country have more important problems? Of course. But we won't bother to vote a politician out of office for lying to us. We expect that. If the recent interview with Cory Doctorow of the EFF over at Make holds any insight about what may be in store for worldwide recording rights, the recent victory here in the U.S. may be a boon for European Union nations as well. There's some thought that with the restrictions of the broadcast flag shot down in the United States, other countries are less likely to implement something similar.

What is it about getting an email message from a presumably trusted source that suddenly tosses all suspicion to the wind and makes many people inherently likely to take action without a second thought? In my mind this takes on two forms; one harmless and annoying, the other potentially causing personal financial damage. In both forms, the originator of the scam wants to do one thing: get the email recipient to take the requested action, whatever that action may be. The first and longest running form of email scam are those annoying messages telling you someone will give you something for nothing. The most popular form, and the one I received from someone most recently is the one saying Bill Gates will fork over $1000 of his personal fortune when the message reaches 1000 people. Another variation suggests a pyramid scheme where you get varying degrees more money depending on how many people forward the message after you forward it to them. While Mr. Gates could probably give every living person on the planet a five dollar bill and still have some change leftover, the money he gives away goes to charities that need it, not people continuing to perpetuate this myth. I've never figured out why people are so desperate to believe they can get something for nothing (which is essentially what this ruse constitutes). For the record, Bill Gates stated at the beginning of his WinHEC keynote this year that he never sent the email that started this myth. If it sounds too good to be true, assume it is and delete the email. Granted, this is fairly harmless and only really annoying to the recipient, although I'm sure there's someone plotting revenge somewhere in the world because they've never received their check. The more cunning and potentially disastrous email scam is the one where someone sends a message purporting to be your bank, PayPal or eBay and requesting you verify your personal information on a form. These scams typically want you to provide personally identifying information, including account numbers, passwords and identification data like social security numbers. I get dozens of these messages every week and occasionally puzzle over the ones saying they are from PayPal and eBay, because they do look real. So far, the "banks" I get email from are not places I've ever deposited any funds, which makes it easy to know they are fake. If you get a message from a bank asking to update your information, delete it. No bank will ever ask you by email for personal information. If you can't bring yourself to delete the message, call your bank or print it off and take it into a local branch. What confuses me in this case is the blind trust in assuming that because an email says it came from your bank it did come from your bank. The first thing that comes to mind when I see these messages is: if they need my other information, how did they magically retain my email address and no other personal data? Admittedly, the email messages do look very official and are very confusing at first glance. As I said, PayPal and eBay messages, in particular, have confused me a time or two. I know the messages are fakes, but they seem quite real. Proceed with caution no matter who sends an email message asking for your information. Type the url of your bank or service provider into the browser window and bypass the email message to login and check for information about the so-called account update. Look for the secure site padlock in the lower corner of the browser window. Use tools like FraudEliminator to verify the site you are visiting. Most of all, review any request for your personal information with a skeptic's eye. While these risks certainly make it necessary to rethink how we interact with personal information online, it hasn't stopped me from making online my preferred method of commerce. I certainly trust the idea of giving my credit card number to an encrypted form more than I trust the idea of handing the physical card to someone who may be removing it from my presence during an in person purchase at a restaurant or store. The legitimate compromises to data that happen are generally attributed to social engineering or disgruntled employees, not true hacking attempts, which means the likelihood for someone to get tricked into revealing data or maliciously giving away information isn't something easily secured against. One of the best ways to protect your personal data in online transactions is to not store the credit card for later use. Places like Amazon offer this for convenience, but it's much harder for someone to steal your credit card info from them if they aren't storing it. Sure this means you type it in each time you purchase, but there's less risk of someone else discovering your card number as a result. I bring all this up in light of a recent study suggesting people are fearful of making online transactions. In general, I feel much safer buying online from trusted sources than I do buying offline because I have greater control over the entering of personal information. After joining a companies discount program at the local retail location, I got the welcome packet with my name misspelled, which could have easily been avoided if I signed up online and typed the information in myself. I'm frequently leery of seeing cashiers swipe my credit card several times because their machine isn't functioning properly, which has more than once resulted in a double charge. Instead of living in fear of being fooled by online con artists, due diligence is the key to getting a good experience in any financial transaction and erring on the side of caution never hurts.

I'm starting to rethink my attachment to Copernic Desktop Search. The app provides great search results, but there are certain things I like better about the way the Windows Desktop Search portion of the updated MSN Search Toolbar works. For instance, I've always liked the live as-you-type results list that appears above the MSN Taskbar search box. Copernic opens all results in an application window. In the most recent release of the MSN Search Toolbar, MSN smartly added a feature to turn off indexing when my laptop is switched to battery power. If I'm using my laptop, it's almost always on battery power, so this means fewer disk write events which extends battery life. And it may be my imagination, but the MSN results seem slightly faster than Copernic in the latest version. If you use Mozilla Thunderbird or Eudora as your email client, Copernic still wins because MSN only searches mail in Microsoft mail apps. I'm a diehard Outlook guy, so I can live without the other mail options, at least until somebody makes a better app for managing my calendar, tasks, mail and contacts in one place.

Another interesting addition to the MSN Search Toolbar suite is tabbed browsing for Internet Explorer. When I first learned this was going to be part of the toolbar, I was admittedly underwhelmed. From all that I read online, the tabs were half-baked and missing many of the features I consider important for effective tabbed browsing. Installing the latest version of the MSN Toolbar changed my mind. Tabs show the favicon for each site making it easy to quickly identify individual tabs. Switching between tabs is possible by way of a keyboard shortcut. Pages can be set to load in the background on new tabs by default. There's a limited feature for saving a group of tabs to open automatically, which needs improvement but is a start.

I realize Firefox and its older cousin Mozilla supported tabs ages ago. Maxthon, the alternative IE shell also supports tabs nicely as part of the native environment. Having the tabs included as a clever add-on to the MSN Toolbar is certainly welcomed, since you need to be using IE to get benefit from the toolbar. Hopefully the native support for tabbed browsing in IE 7 will look a little more polished than the toolbar implementation. In the meantime, I'm more interested in the search performance on my desktop and consider the tabbed browsing to be a worthy bonus.

MSN is late to the game in providing auto-form filling, lagging behind the Google Toolbar by many months. Here again, I'm more interested in desktop search results and continue to have serious reservations about Google's cavalier attitude toward displaying my desktop results in a manner making them virtually indistinguishable from Web results. Google gets a nod for Blogger and Gmail users with MSN coming right back in offering a quick link to Hotmail and MSN Spaces. Overall I'm more interested in desktop search because IE toolbars all deliver equally dull experiences. At this point, if you're an Outlook user, the MSN Search Toolbar is worth a serious look for handling desktop information juggling. If you use any other mail client, my vote remains overwhelmingly Copernic. Google is still the champ of my Web search needs but comes in third for searching my desktop.

In other MSN news, MSN Music is putting some serious effort into acquiring customers. If you purchase 1 song from the service, the next 5 tracks added to your shopping cart are free, effectively pricing 6 songs for $0.99. This is good until July 10 and you have to download all free tracks by September 30. You only get one crack at the discount, so there's no chance of getting 60 songs for $9.99 unless you sign up for 10 individual accounts. These tracks are of course encumbered by Windows Media DRM, which is easily remedied by burning them to CD and re-ripping the tracks. Additionally, MSN Music announced plans to launch a subscription music service to compete with Yahoo, Napster and Real. Hopefully this means a full-fledged price war on subscription music fees.

As you may or may not have already noticed, the Britt's Bytes section of the newsletter is penned by Britt Godwin. Britt is currently pursuing his MBA and is definitely a tech enthusiast, as his writing clearly demonstrates. I strongly considered not posting his recent article, Avast and belay that Piracy specifically because it may not be in my best interests to have someone who writes for the site admitting to software piracy, even if it is now past tense. I went ahead and ran the article because he makes some very important points. I think his take on the situation isn't much different than mine was when I shed pirated apps acquired during college almost 10 years ago, realizing that using the apps without paying for them represented something much more significant than a potential violation of the law.

College was one of the primary forces behind my ever using pirated software in the first place. My first modern computer purchase was a Gateway shortly after the launch of Windows 95, which came with a full version of Office 95, Microsoft Publisher, Adobe Photoshop LE, and a handful of other apps which were all legitimately licensed to me. I also ended up with a bunch of pirated apps from a friend who worked in as a monitor in one of the computer labs on the Iowa State campus. He gave them to me on a stack of 3.5 inch floppies. At the time it didn't occur to me that using the software without paying for it was taking money out of anyone's pocket. I think this is one of the key points Britt makes in his post. While big companies like Microsoft, Adobe, Macromedia, etc. all battle piracy, many of the software apps that get cracked and are available for download are written by one or two developers who are passionate about what they do and rely on software sales to pay the rent every month. I'm not discounting the potential damage to shareholders due to piracy of commercial apps, but in general big companies derive most of their revenue from multi-license sales to other companies who use the software to make their own businesses function. Small developer shops are much more reliant on single license sales and a leak of a registration code might mean they can't pay next month's rent.

Aside from the legal ramifications associated with using software without paying for a license, the human element of knowing that someone's livelihood may be at stake certainly makes using pirated copies of software seem entirely unappealing to me. As a small business person, I'm very aware of how things that seem financially insignificant on a grand scale can have a massive negative impact to my own financial picture. As a software reviewer, I frequently have companies send me registration codes in hopes that I'll try their software and review it. While this means I could have a ton of free software at my disposal, I make a point of paying for the apps I use on a daily basis because I know that the software authors are running a business, just like I am and if an app actually makes me more productive I should be paying for that productivity increase.

Moving always brings changes both positive and negative. Prior to relocating to Seattle in December 2004, all my residential shifts were from one part of the Des Moines, Iowa metro area to another section of town. One of the biggest changes in moving from Des Moines, IA to Seattle, WA has been figuring out what to do with our cats when we go out of town. Overnight, they easily take care of themselves with food, water and a clean litter box. Leaving home for several days, as we did while visiting Iowa over the holiday weekend makes things a little more complicated.

In the past we generally relied on relatives to check on the cats, but we aren't related to anyone in Seattle (there may be a distant relative or two in the area, but not someone I'd burden with cat sitting) so the family option is out. This leaves putting the cats in a boarding facility or hiring a cat sitter as the only viable alternatives. I'm not a big fan of boarding, because the cats aren't used to being restricted to a cage. We've tried two different cat sitters since arriving and both seem quite capable. The feline dietary requirements were met and all three appear to be in good health, so I can't really ask much more.

The one thing that remains awkward about hiring a sitter is the idea of letting completely unknown people in your house with something approximating free-reign. I'm not a paranoid guy, but there's still some small part of me that doesn't particularly like the possibility that some strange person might be taking inventory of my cupboards while I'm away. And of course, taking inventory of the cupboards is the least of my worries in the grand scheme of potential hazards.

I briefly toyed with the idea of setting up motion sensitive Webcams to keep track of comings and goings while we were gone, but then realized there would be a ton of footage generated by typical cat movement and who really has time to watch a bunch of security tape anyway? Many of the more practical solutions for access control aren't viable without permission from the landlord, who likely doesn't want a bunch of security stuff set up temporarily until we move to some other home in the future. I did take a very obvious step of locking my office, which adds an additional barrier between the computer gear and unnecessary snooping.

I'd be happy with a simple logging mechanism that makes note of arrivals and departures from the house. An access control panel requiring a key code on entry and a key code on exit would give me a very clear picture of what time the cat sitters arrived, how long they stayed and when they left. I still wouldn't know what went on in the house while they were here, but at least I'd have some idea if they stayed overnight or were coming and going more times than the paper log they provide suggests. I've done a ton of research on home security automation but most of the effective solutions are designed for permanent residence, not rental living. I recently wrote about some of the basics for the Digital Lifestyle Reference Guide at InformIT.com. I'd love to hear from you if you've come up with a particularly ingenious solution for dealing with home access control.

Podcasting continues to get a lot of print mileage as being the salvation of listener choice. No more force feeding from corporate suits making summary decisions about the listening tastes of everyone who even dips their toe in a particular demographic. While this is certainly valid and some of my personal listening time is now devoted to podcasts instead of flipping stations on the car radio, it doesn't touch on the full potential of podcasting as a revolutionary idea on information distribution. Many of the people who may benefit most from the technologies underlying podcasting will have no interest in the shows being posted by podcasters.

On the flip side of that, podcasting is touted as a democratization of audio communication. A means for everyone to make their voice heard in the wide expanse of the Internet, whether they are talking about the conductive properties of a new metal alloy or introducing the new metal band from across their home town. While this is one use of podcasting, it's not the only use of podcasting and likely won't be the use with the biggest long term impact. Not everyone wants to be a DJ. Not everyone wants to be a talking head performing their take on world events. Not everyone wants to perform the online equivalent of a serialized radio drama. I highly applaud the people who do want to do these things and hope they continue to remain motivated, but they are a minority.

Something virtually everyone on the planet does want is convenient ways to communicate with friends and family. The tools that make podcasting an easy means of distributing audio performances also facilitate simplified delivery of more personal audio content. To use an example that hits close to home, take grandparents living in Des Moines, Iowa with a grandson living in Seattle, WA. The grandson really enjoys having grandma and grandpa reading him stories, but the logistics and expenses associated with making this happen in person make it impossible more than a few times each year.

For those times between visits, grandma and grandpa could record themselves reading a book, upload the recorded audio file and have it automatically download to the grandson or granddaughter's computer automatically through the magic of RSS with enclosures. This obviously isn't a replacement for reading in person because part of the fun of having a story read aloud is the human interaction, but it's a compromise for geographic separation.

I'm taking a slight leap of faith that grandma and grandpa are savvy enough to record audio files and upload them, but for many who answer to those endearing names, that's not much of a stretch. It also requires having a physical copy of the book on both ends, but that's easily coordinated. It's a way to bring a family separated by large geographic distances closer together and it works across national boundaries just as easily as it does across state lines. Bedtime stories are only one example of a possible connection.

Another area I find interesting is in the realm of educational enhancement. I know there are many topics I personally find more interesting when I hear someone telling a personal story related to an event. It's not realistic to put every expert on every subject on a continuous world tour with stops at schooling environments around the globe. What if instead, each topical expert could be delivered automatically to the school in audio (or video) format? The distribution methods behind podcasting facilitate the delivery of information quite readily. Bringing engaging speakers to minds of all ages via an automated subscription system should be in the plans of every educational decision maker on the planet. It's low cost for implementation, it's low barrier to entry and the resulting enhancement to curriculum reaches far beyond the capabilities of even the best funded schools.

Don't get me wrong. The talking heads pushing podcasting forward are doing great things in helping refine the processes required. Their time invested shaping the tools to make the process easier for all skill levels will payoff beyond the current scope of available podcasts. I see greater potential for the tools lowering barriers to communication across the world.

The time has come for the world to institute an international virus elimination effort. Not some bureaucratic project rubber-stamped by governments around the world who can point to the effort and say look at this great thing we've done. I want a more organic movement. I envision a legion of geeks and Windows power users in a multilevel marketing approach to virus control. Start by scanning the computers of two of your non-geek friends or family members for viruses. Set their virus software and Windows for automatic updates and show them how to install and scan antivirus on two of their friend's computers. It wouldn't take very many people to cover all the home systems on the planet.

My little virus removal utopia will never see the light of day because relying on novices to scan and repair their friends systems is a massive weak link in an already fragile chain of events. Still, if those able bodied geeks help protect one more system the opportunity for infections around the world goes down by a tiny fraction. Offer to let people bring their systems to church for a parishioner-wide virus elimination event. Organize a school project to educate kids about virus removal.

I'm obsessing on this at the moment because I recently deleted several dozen bounce messages related to an infected system somewhere sending out junk mail in my name. This time around it's the attempted delivery of propaganda related to the 60th anniversary of the end of WWII from some extremist German groups. The effort takes advantage of a Sober worm variant, which infects systems and pumps out massive amounts of junk mail from anyone in the host machines address book. If I knew which person or persons I know are running compromised systems, I'd volunteer to get them fixed just so I stop having my inbox fill up. Instead, the bounces keep coming. I'm also the lucky recipient of some of the mailings too, which I wouldn't mind seeing come to an end.

If you're reading this, you're probably already ahead of most of the world in figuring out how to maintain your system, but you probably know someone who isn't. As you go about your day, ask the, "are you protected?" question of friends and co-workers. It's not that you necessarily want to open the Pandora's box of providing free tech support to everyone you know; it's the opportunity to potentially eliminate some of the junk from your inbox and be a small part of putting a stop to one of the more annoying plagues of the Internet. The percentage of online traffic from junk mail is astronomical, but a great deal of it could be cut down by simply encouraging uninformed computer owners to install a few patches and keep their virus definitions up to date.

Since most of the virus infections are spread via email, simply finding a free virus tool with effective email scanning will eliminate many potential problems. I use ClamWin Antivirus on many of my own systems, because I don't want the overhead and expense of something like Norton or McAfee. ClamWin provides virus definition updates almost daily. If MSN is your ISP solution, as it is for all Qwest DSL customers, McAfee is included free with your service, but you must download and install it, it doesn't appear automatically. AVG Antivirus offers a free antivirus too, but the updates are less frequent, making it acceptable but potentially a hole for new variants to slip through. Bottom line, there are effective solutions for protecting us all from the hassles of viruses, if we all pitch in and help educate the rest of the population. Until then, keep your finger on the delete key for the next round of junk delivered courtesy of someone you know.

Since the initial buzz surround podcasting back in about September 2004, I've been gathering notes on podcasting, testing out some crazy setups through our weekly radio show broadcasts and applying what I know about audio recording and RSS in an effort to figure out the easiest ways to communicate the concept of podcasting to the community at large. Over the weekend, I finished bringing all those details together culminating in the release of Podcasting Starter Kit, an ebook jam-packed with all the details you need to get started podcasting.

If you're new to the term, podcasting is a means of distributing recorded audio files via subscription. You visit a site, subscribe to their podcast feed and automatically receive audio files when they publish something new. That's the listening side of the equation. The recording and distribution side of podcasting is a little more confusing, which is where Podcasting Starter Kit comes in. The guide answers all the important questions like: What kind of microphone are you going record with? What software do you use to create a podcast? How do you edit a podcast audio file? How do people subscribe to your podcast? Where do you put the file on the Web? How do you distribute your podcast? And how do you attract listeners to your podcast?

Basically, I took many of the things I already knew about recording audio, combined them with all the trials and tribulations of launching one of the most popular podcasts online and outlined the steps required using free software tools and the most affordable solutions for recording, online file storage and distribution. If you've ever wanted to create your own personal show to share with the world, this is a fairly comprehensive way to get started. For the next 48 hours (expiring on May 21, 2005) regular visitors to the site get a 20% discount off the normal price of Podcasting Starter Kit as a special official launch promotion. To get the discount, you need to use the coupon code Q6320C29, which isn't at all memorable, so I highly recommend the copy and paste function. Of course, for a few more dollars, you could become a MediaBlab Premium member, which includes a copy of the guide and a swanky MediaBlab.com t-shirt, in addition to 8 other PDF compendiums and a year's worth of additional benefits.

It appears the recent ruling by a Federal Appeals Court shooting down the broadcast flag hasn't completely sent the idea down for the count. Apparently, the MPAA is lobbying to find congressional backing for an even more crippling version of the bill. Ernest Miller has a portion of the draft posted at Corante. In this variation, the language seeks to empower the FCC to completely regulate recording devices that take advantage of the analog hole available for recording TV with a VCR in less than the original quality in addition to making a clear distinction about what people can and can't do with digital recordings.

If there's actually a member of congress foolish enough to risk getting voted out of office, I'm envisioning a series of public service commercials aimed at voters:

Congress Wants to Break Your Television

For years, you've had the liberty to record your favorite programs and watch them when and where you want to. Now congress wants to take away that right. No more recording the football game to watch when you get home from work. You'll never see another episode of Survivor because the kids have soccer practice. It's the end of television as you know it. Call your congress person today and say NO to the Anti-television Act of 2005!

Sensationalist, yes. I'm not sure anyone in congress would touch a proposal like this. The best way to violate American trust and lose votes is to hobble our television experience. From the most run down neighborhoods in the country, where the front door may be falling off but there's still a satellite dish strapped to the side of the house, to the gated communities where every room sports an HDTV, television is the national pastime in America. Without it, we'd all lose weight, interact with our neighbors and stop buying overpriced gadgets late at night.

Does our country have more important problems? Of course. But we won't bother to vote a politician out of office for lying to us. We expect that. If the recent interview with Cory Doctorow of the EFF over at Make holds any insight about what may be in store for worldwide recording rights, the recent victory here in the U.S. may be a boon for European Union nations as well. There's some thought that with the restrictions of the broadcast flag shot down in the United States, other countries are less likely to implement something similar.

Microsoft isn't a company known for addressing the needs of creative individuals interested in making music. It's arguable that this is a hard niche to effectively market to because it's fragmented, made up of people who can either afford the moon thanks to backing from a major label or are likely to track down cracked versions of software because they can't afford to buy legit stuff. Yes, plenty of people also fall between those two groups of people, but there's considerably more money in pursuing corporate clients and the consumers who want to send email, manage their finances and play music and movies. There's also a silly perception that you need to be a Mac user to do anything creative. Despite all this, Microsoft recently made a smart decision to start engaging creative types in the electronic music space through Crossfader.

I toy around with making electronic music using rudimentary tools like Cakewalk Kinetic, synth plugins for multitrack editor and have built some very basic beats from the sample libraries shipping on the CD labeled Content paired with apps like Sonar and Adobe Audition. I'm probably not even at the hobbyist level in terms of creating electronic music, but I read many of the sites and magazines aimed at the more serious members of that audience because I'm curious. While Crossfader is still in beta, only recently launching quietly, they're already headed down the right path, in my opinion. An interesting collection of reviews from artists who use Windows to make music provides information that seems to be off the message usually associated with traditional interviews arranged by PR types. I get the sense that whoever did the interviewing is more musician than journalist because the interviewees give something more than the sterilized responses that make it to print elsewhere.

One thing Crossfader already got me to do is spend money. There's a brief walkthrough with Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid about a project he was working on for his next CD release. The project is a collaboration between he and Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo. I'm not a fan of Slayer's music; the whole how dark can we make our lyrics thing is lost on me. On the other hand, I played drums for about twelve years and Dave Lombardo happens to be a really amazing drummer. The DJ Spooky project, Drums of Death, involved using some drum tracks created by Dave Lombardo and building songs around them. After listening to the interview on Crossfader and doing some additional digging around for information about Drums of Death online, I bought the album at Easy Street Records here in Seattle following its release.

I own quite a few percussion-heavy albums of various genres, and this album fits right in with that collection. The tracks would be suitably comfortable next to offerings from Propellerheads and The Crystal Method, which should make it appealing to anyone who like the soundtracks from The Matrix trilogy. It's probably not something I'll find myself listening to all the time, but hearing what Paul Miller composed by sampling some raw drum tracks and layering on additional music components is fueling my own interest in digging further into making some electronic music compositions. As long as Crossfader continues to deliver more great information like the Paul Miller demo video, I'll be a regular visitor.

If you want more background on the site and how it got started, we got a great interview with Eric Schmidt of Microsoft and Darek Mazzone of Planet Beat posted on the radio show site.

Desktop search applications need to rethink data security. The index files created by desktop search applications provide in-the-clear paths to potentially sensitive information stored in my email, my browsing history and within files on my hard drive. Both Copernic Desktop Search and Google Desktop Search provide the means to search within history from secure Web pages, which likely means they are searching information like my credit card data. While this feature is turned off by default in Copernic and Google Desktop Search offers to turn off secure page search immediately after install, a novice user may not recognize the threat this potentially poses. All of this information is in the clear. The index files generated by desktop search apps are a road map to the information. Password protection at the operating system level doesn't improve security for reasons I mention in a recent article on securing your laptop data. It's not easy to park the indexes on an encrypted volume because they are stored in system folders that don't readily function when moved outside their expected location. When Longhorn provides full hard disk encryption for desktops, this problem may resolve itself. Over the short term, the safest course of action is to not index Web history, which in turn eliminates the possibility of maps to personal information being generated. If you send sensitive email transitions, you may be using PGP to encrypt the actual data transfer, but that doesn't prevent the contents from being indexed by way of your local Sent Items folder, which is another potential pathway to privacy or security violation. Long term, desktop search applications need a way to self police these security gaps. Encrypting the index files when the user is not authenticated would be the best mechanism for this. Yes, if someone discovers my Windows XP password, they still get access to the data, but with encryption on these indexes, no one will be able to access the index files by bypassing the operating system.

RealNetworks released the latest version of their Rhapsody service last week and I'm hearing lots of great things about it. They've done several things mostly right with the service. Support for a subscription model competing with Napster To Go is definitely a positive. I recognize not everyone is sold on the idea of renting music, but I'm perfectly content with this kind of model as a try-before-you-buy approach. It's cheaper than buying CDs that I only listen to a few times and it doesn't have the same back alley smarmy feel that's associated with traditional file sharing. A new share 25 songs with your friends option seems okay on the surface, but it only works if your friend downloads Real Player, which is a turn off because would be easy for them to use Windows Media DRM to share the files through every player that supports it. Real needs to give up on trying to sell us a player and start looking at how they can bring something else of value. Sharing 25 songs with friends to demonstrate how cool the service is would be a good start, but making me add yet another media player to my system is annoying. Harmony is back for iPod owners, at least until Apple answers back with another discordant firmware upgrade. I don't care how much cheaper the songs from Real are, it's a fool's errand to purchase from them with the expectation that tracks will play on an iPod long term.

I'd love to try the service, but after realizing I just spent $39.97 on the Real SuperPass without getting anything in return, there's no way I'll be convinced to spend another dime on their products. Back in January I activated a trial version of Real SuperPass to test a few of the features in the full version of the player. I poked around with the features I wanted to test and then promptly forgot about it. I don't remember giving them my credit card information to test SuperPass, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume I did. The only other possibility is the credit card info was transferred from a purchase I made when Harmony originally announced and I'd hate to think they took the liberty of using that data for SuperPass. Now I'm sure the fine print of the SuperPass offer warned me that it would automatically bill me after the trial period was up, but I can't find that little detail. I can sign up online, but I couldn't eliminate the service without calling. Previous attempts to cancel always seemed to fall outside the normal hours of operation. Long story short, I payed $39.97 for a service I never used. I'm guessing I'm not the only one. And despite having the SuperPass active through the remainder of the month, I'm blessed with a stupid popup ads when downloading the player to a new machine. Yes, I can play RealMedia files with Real Alternative, but I can't effectively stay informed about their services in doing so. I'm currently attempting to find out if I can get all six songs I'm entitled to for having the service active over three months or if they don't carry over month-to-month. Based on this experience, I recommend choosing Napster To Go over Rhapsody To Go because you won't get the screwy billing hassles. Napster seems to have problems remembering to remember my password when I connect to the service, but for security purposes, that's probably better anyway. So once again, Real is leading the pack with the best feature set for a digital music product and the worst marketing practices.

As a subscriber to the ITConversations newsletter, I get weekly updates from Doug Kaye about new shows added to the site, as well as his picks for all time favorite interviews. This time last year, Doug featured an interview with Bruce Schneier. Bruce is one of the world's leading experts on security, a best-selling author currently known for Beyond Fear and primary inventor of Blowfish and Twofish encryption. It's safe to Bruce Schneier a security geek. I listened to this interview last year when it originally appeared, but consider it worth a mention now because many of the things he said still hold up a year later. Some of what is talked about pertains to the state of security in the United States, some of what he says probably sounds controversial. Whether you agree or disagree with what Bruce Schneier is saying he makes some compelling arguments about security and privacy in the United States and throughout the world. Be sure to check out what is definitely one of the best interviews on ITConversations.

I'm writing a ton about Longhorn this week, because I spent several days at WinHEC seeing features that are destined to appear in the final version. I've remained rather disinterested in the feature progression until now because Microsoft successfully killed most of the features I was most enthusiastic about when I saw the earlier "concept drawings" of the software. The features demonstrated worked at the time, but either had bugs or didn't live up to stability requirements and were later cut. The real features are finally starting to emerge, not the least of which is full 64-bit Windows, which is currently available in the form of a recompiled Windows XP Pro.

You'll see a few mentions of Longhorn here this week and then I'll likely remain silent about the new OS until I see the official Beta releases containing the features. If you want blow-by-blow advancements to the next generation operating system, Longhorn Blogs is a good place to stay connected. I met Robert McLaws, the guy behind Longhorn Blogs, at WinHEC and he's definitely got his finger on the pulse of where Windows is headed. I'm looking at the operating system from a fairly selfish perspective, thinking about what changes in the OS will benefit the way I use my PC. Without question, I will upgrade my existing PCs to whatever Longhorn is officially called (probably something boring like Windows 2006), but only because I'm convinced there are plenty of functional enhancements on the way.

One area where Microsoft is doing interesting work is by rethinking the way people look for files. Currently we are fairly limited in our efforts to organize information. The best strategy is a series of folders and subfolders all destined to categorize and subcategorize documents, images, music and movies into groups that make sense. If something fits into two categories, you either store it twice, make shortcuts to the master document in multiple locations or pick a place to store a file based on the best match (that's if you don't summarily dump everything in your My Documents folder in a jumble).

In Longhorn, Microsoft is taking an approach to all files that's similar to what we are used to with music. All files can be tagged with an Author designation, which maps very closely to the concept of an Artist in most music player applications. Individual files are further flagged with keywords defined by you to designate some common relationship. For instance, if you have 10 files all pertaining to your kitchen remodeling project, maybe you add the keyword 'kitchen' to each of those 10 documents. Now, when you want to find everything on your computer related to the kitchen remodel, you search by typing in the word 'kitchen', instead of needing to worry about which folder you stuck a particular file in. This keyword concept is very similar to searching by Genre in a media player. If you have 10 albums that are all Zydeco music, if you search your media player for Zydeco, you'll return only those 10 albums. Apparently there's also a rating system for files, although I'm not sure how that makes it easier to find stuff, unless you determine that everything rated 5-stars is more relevant than a 4, 3, 2 or 1-star document.

By using third-party apps like Picasa, we can get a similar keyword solution for photos today by tagging each photo with relative terms live names of people in the photos, events that correspond with the photos or places that might be in the photos. Having a common native method for creating interrelationships between all files is certainly helpful in making document discovery easier. There is a darker side to all this - what happens when your keyword tags are made public. Maybe you post your photos on a Website and you don't want the photos to retain information like your kids names or the location of a house in a picture. Microsoft hasn't expressed how they will deal with keeping the sorting designations private. In a world where someone can cancel your credit card simply by knowing the number, it's a little discomforting to think about adding personalized information to files and then sharing them with the rest of the connected universe.

I love trying out new technologies. They don't always work perfectly the first time out and sometimes a cool vision hasn't successfully translated itself into a useful product the first time out. The SPOT watch technology from Microsoft is one of those areas with unrealized potential in a form factor I'm not quite ready to adopt. SPOT was originally conceived as an idea of receiving information in to a wrist watch via FM transmissions and is more recently expanding this concept into reception of the same information to a desk clock. Things like weather updates, horoscopes, sports scores, calendar reminders and IM messages are all sent through an online profile created at MSN to your respective watch. On the surface this has the potential to be very cool.

I've had a Suunto N3 SPOT watch for several weeks now. It came with a 3 month free trial of the MSN Direct service, which is required to access the update features. Under normal conditions, getting the basic service, which includes stock updates, weather, sports, horoscopes, downloadable watch faces, news, lottery numbers and quote-of-the-day type daily diversions require a $40 annual investment. For an additional $20, you can add the Outlook calendar sync and one-way IM updates. $5 per month for the complete package isn't a huge deal if you've got disposable income, but the current feature set doesn't deliver anything I can't easily get somewhere else. I like the at-a-glance convenience of being able to see the temperature and the horoscope and news content has a gimmicky appeal, however, the form factor seems a little redundant.

I own a Smartphone specifically because I want access to information beyond the basic ability to place and receive calls. The color interface on the phone is easier to read than the monochrome watch face, not to mention I get all the access to any Web accessible information as part of my phone plan. While not everyone has or wants a Smartphone, many phones are now providing some or all of these features through text messaging tie-ins and limited browser functionality. SPOT keeps it simple and provides an easy to navigate interface, but it doesn't do anything I couldn't get from my phone.

I suppose it's unfair to compare a watch to a phone because one is intended to be a time piece with some information add-ons and the other is a communication device with some information add-ons, but the basic premise in both cases is keeping a person better informed. If Microsoft wants SPOT technology to have any kind of longer term viability, they need to rethink where the SPOT technology goes. I already carry a phone designed to provide me with more information than I would have access to if I didn't carry that phone. Why not tie the SPOT features to my phone instead of trying to tie them to a watch. SPOT does do a better job at making the information accessible in an uncluttered way, which it could potentially do on a phone device as well.

I realize not everyone carries a cell phone. Those that do are easily replacing the primary function of a watch (telling time) because most cell phones display network time from the carrier, automatically updating to the local time zone and shifting with the hourly adjustments in spring and fall. SPOT adds this functionality to a watch if you need it, but watches are primarily fashion accessories these days and none of the SPOT designs meet anyone but the calculator watch wearing geek's idea of fashion. Robin determined the N3 is far too big for me to wear on a regular basis after seeing me wear it a few times. The N3 is svelte compared to the Palm OS watch I once owned, which appeared to be modeled after a parolee tracking bracelet.

If Microsoft plans to turn SPOT into something more than a brief blip on the technology map, they need to seriously rethink where it might be useful and what information it should deliver. Adding data like GPS and altitude, which don't necessarily require the FM transmitter would have geek appeal. A reminder system aimed at people who are dieting or need to eat on a strict schedule might be an appealing feature that would be useful to receive at regular increments. Ultimately, the mechanism for information delivery, the watch, needs to be eliminated from the equation. Integrate with a portable music player or two - many already receive FM signals. Make it easier for me to get the SPOT information by delivering it to my cell phone. Unless you can put SPOT in a high end watch, the form factor doesn't make sense.

Last week, Seattle played host to the annual Computers, Freedom & Privacy conference, which is a gathering of leading experts on privacy, encryption, anonymity, and human rights mingling with enthusiasts and novices interested in learning more about the topics. While I'm aware of issues relating to privacy and anonymity, I'm generally not thinking about them directly until something bubbles up in the news about some security breach or exploitation of information by an individual or group with malicious intent. I password protect my information but I don't lay awake nights wondering who might be trying to access it. Now that I've attended a small portion of CFP2005, it may be one conference I try to keep on my annual agenda for years to come.

Having this conference fall in the same week I invested a massive amount of time in going through my financial data to work toward completing my taxes caused more reflection on the topics of encryption and privacy than I might devote in any other week. There's a whole ton of information about me available online. It's all secured behind password protection and secure sites, but in theory it's all just a few keystrokes away. Anonymity is one of the things that's got me most intrigued at the moment. The overall likelihood of someone spying on my data is relatively small. Maybe the likelihood of someone spying on my data is slightly higher than the average person because I make myself widely available online, but it would certainly be more interesting and presumably more profitable to spy on someone like Harrison Ford. In the process of trying to determine certain details about a person's online habits, it would be infinitely easier to figure out a bank password if you know the bank where someone does their business. So my logging into Bank of Lake Washington site may be secured to the point my password is undetectable, but the fact that I'm connecting to the Bank of Lake Washington site would be more obvious. Calculated reasoning might suggest that my visiting the Bank of Lake Washington site three or four times per week is because I bank there. Now instead of trying to track down my password at any bank, someone interested in accessing my bank records would know that Bank of Lake Washington is the right place to start. Adding a layer of anonymity with an application like Tor, still allows me to connect securely to the Bank of Lake Washington site without anyone but the bank knowing it's me connecting to their site. Add that to the encryption protecting my password and the chances of anyone finding out where I bank and what my password might be are further reduced.

Encryption and anonymity aren't just about trying to keep secrets from people who may be eaves dropping on you. It's about the right to keep your private life private. While it's arguably a bad idea to put anything you might regret later in writing (this message will self-destruct, anyone?), having people see something that was none of their business in the first place is potentially a violation of your rights, depending on where you live. It can also be an effective means of validating someone is who they claim to be. Using a public key encryption mechanism, you make it quite possible to let people know you are really you when you send them a message. That's one way of making sure you aren't falsely accused of sending junk or infected messages. If you always digital sign your messages and someone receives a message from you without that signature, it's pretty easy to say if it wasn't signed then it wasn't really me; this is the digital equivalent to the Notary Public only considerably less fallible based on my experiences signing documents. Sometimes software tools that obscure our online habits are meant to provide safety - one of the key uses for tools like the recently featured Tor browser plug-in.

What about all that data we back up to blank media on a regular basis. Bank statements, credit card information and personal identification numbers are all data apps like Quicken and Microsoft Money graciously offer to store for a convenient snapshot of our financial picture. Make a backup of that data and then years later decide the disk is no longer of any use because the information is horribly out-of-date. Is the data encrypted, or could anyone dig the plastic from the trash and pull up your financial records? Old or not, the information may still point to live accounts. Of course, the obvious solution here is to destroy the disk before throwing it away, but a better idea would be to encrypt the data so when it's stored to disk.

And then there are services offering to sell your information or provide background checks. ZabaSearch turns up more information than I necessarily want to share about my previous residences and phone numbers. The president of PrivacyActivism.org got a surprise when she read through all the details about her own life provided by ChoicePoint. At least in the United States, it's getting steadily easier for anyone to find out all the gory details about anyone else. Maybe it's time to move to Montana and raise dental floss after all.

Computers, Freedom & Privacy isn't about feeding on the collective paranoia of a world gone mad with information. It's a hard core examination of the issues surrounding privacy and freedoms as they relate to computing. It's a chance to get some of the best information on the issues straight from the experts who understand them better than anyone else. Next year, it might be a chance to engage some of the decision makers who influence policy when Washington D.C. plays host to CFP2006. With any luck, I'll be there.

I talk about podcasting here quite frequently largely because it combines many of the elements of computing that I'm passionate about. I feel compelled to share my opinions about things I feel strongly about with people (hence my sharing opinions via newsletter and blog for the past 4+ years). I love music. And I'm fascinated by the process of recording, editing and distributing audio of all kinds via computer. Podcasting takes all three of these passions and combines them into a convenient mechanism of communication with a low barrier to entry.

Podcasting suffers from an odd problem. Audio editing on Windows and Mac machines is a fairly mature market at this point. I can remember seeing Cakewalk Pro Audio for the first time almost 10 years ago and getting Sound Forge on a single floppy bundled with Macromedia Director. Computer audio editing has been around even longer than that, but those are two examples of programs that ran on Windows 95 currently still evolving in the marketplace. Relatively speaking, audio editing is affordable for most people, with professional level editing applications selling in the $200 range. The podcasting "problem" comes from a whole bunch of people who know very little about audio recording wanting to create audio recordings without needing to be audio recording experts to be successful. In other words, the available tool sets are presented in a way that's confusing to non-audio geeks.

A few weeks ago, I had lunch with Dave Sampson of MixMeister, a company that makes a really amazing audio mixing program for creating things like pro-DJ dance and party mixes with beat matching and tempo shifting tools to keep an entire sequence of songs blending seamlessly together. MixMeister Express is a great example of an app that works well for people who want to do creative things but don't want to dive under the hood to tweak every setting known to man. At the time, MixMeister was thinking seriously about releasing a podcasting app designed to make it easier for people who don't want to know anything about the intricacies of podcasting to make great sounding audio tracks. While audio is one of those things at the mercy of the garbage-in-garbage-out principle, eliminating some of the complicated settings that overwhelm the average person greatly improves chances for success.

MixMeister just released their new podcasting app, Propaganda, with a set of features I consider almost perfect for the aspiring podcaster. Propaganda records spoken audio, integrates music and sound effects, layers audio tracks and outputs a professional mix of combined audio files without the overwhelming depth of features available in most two-track and mutli-track editing apps. Recording voice audio from a microphone connected to a PC is incredibly simple with Propaganda. It's got a setting that makes it difficult to distort audio. The three pane interface is great for maintaining a library of tracks, organizing a playlist of tracks and sounds to be used in a podcast, and making tweaks to the playlist through the use of the timeline. Volume adjustments are possible with a rubber band control, which is a great way to apply fades or bump up the volume in a segment of audio without impacting the entire track. If you've ever tweaked the audio in a video editing app, you know the rubber band method of volume control isn't nearly as daunting as manipulating a waveform displayed onscreen.

In short, Propaganda should appeal to two types of people. On one hand, Propaganda is very easy to use for recording voice audio and performing minor edits to those recordings. On the other hand, Propaganda offers a great set of features for combining multiple audio tracks into a comprehensive "show" of material, which is a direct result of the experience MixMeister has in the world of mixing.

Outputting a podcast from Propaganda is done one of two ways. You can export the audio as a MP3, WAV or WMA ready for upload to your favorite service or FTP site, which is fairly straightforward. The second alternative is to publish your podcast with an accompanying RSS and HTML page directly to an FTP server. This process automates the entire publishing point, other than integrating the link to the feed into an existing Web presence. Like other podcasting solutions, publishing remains the weak link of Propaganda. If you create an RSS 2.0 file for your podcast XML output, each subsequent podcast will overwrite this file rather than appending information to the file for each show. This is fine if you only want to let people access your most recent show when they subscribe, but doesn't work if you want to allow people access to past shows through the subscription mechanism. This isn't a deal breaker for me because there are more efficient ways of generating RSS feeds by using available blogging tools.

The company that ultimately wins my undying affection will figure out how to integrate a desktop recording app with the ability to make a blog entry in some of the more popular blogging tools like MovableType, Word Press, TypePad, Bloglines, etc. For instance, I personally want to publish my podcasts through MovableType. The ideal way for this to work is for me to create my audio file and step through a publishing wizard that asks for my MovableType information, creates a post to my MovableType blog based on some text I type in the wizard and automatically links my audio file to my post, ultimately generating the RSS feed with the enclosure through MovableType. Until someone creates my podcasting oasis, Propaganda is the best app I've seen for recording and creating a podcast with a group of audio files; it's the closest thing to perfect currently on the market.

The trial version of Propaganda is fully functional but inserts an audio watermark throughout published content, giving you the ability to test all the features on your own timeframe, but requiring purchase of the full version in order to publish something you'd want to share with the world.

In addition to providing what I consider to be the most consistent search results, Google does interesting things in the advertising space. You've probably noticed contextually relevant text advertising on numerous sites you visit, including mine, or maybe you don't realize you've noticed them because the advertising actually relates to the topic presented on the page. I'm sure someone geekier than me could explain in detail how Google makes their advertising work. In the end, I don't really care how it works; it just does. While I've been ignoring banner advertisements and flashing garbage for years (punch the paparazzi, anyone? Or if you've been online for at least five years, that's punch the monkey) I regularly find Google advertisements that lead me to things I either never noticed before or would not have noticed if the Google advertising weren't making a relevant match to the content on the page.

One of the best examples of this came recently when I dropped by ITConversations to download a recent Voices in Your Head interview with the authors of the book The Future of Music. I haven't read the book yet, but I'm planning on it because the interview makes it seem like a must read, for me at least. ITConversations runs Google advertising on their site and at the time I visited the page for The Future of Music interview, an ad for a book called The Dragon's Lair was running in one of the Google ad positions. The Dragon's Lair is a sci-fi adventure about a female Han Solo-type with a base of operations for her smuggling fronted by a bar on a space station (I've only read the first three chapters so far, so it's a little early to pass judgment on the book, but I like the direction it's headed). I'm not sure how that directly relates to The Future of Music, but both of the books are new releases from niche publishers, so maybe that's the tie in. It's very common for geeks to like sci-fi and the ITConversations core audience most definitely fits the 'geek' label, so the there's an additional layer of relevance.

I clicked the link over to the site promoting The Dragon's Lair, read some of the background about author, Lisa Guilfoil, and other background information about the book. I personally think they'd sell more books with a site overhaul, because the book is far more engaging than the site lets on, but I'm not their marketing team. As a direct result of this ad I clicked on , I contacted the publisher because I thought a new sci-fi book from an independent publishing house might make an interesting topic to write about. The book publisher also happens to be journalist currently doing a story about online publishers and their path of growth. In addition to my finding out more about The Dragon's Lair, she asked if I'd be willing to answer a couple questions for the story she was doing. I willingly obliged and am quoted in the article as a result. This entire chain of events is the direct result of Google Adsense, the program Google offers for online publishers like me interested in generating revenue from contextually relevant advertising.

If you currently have an online site or a blog and aren't using Google Adsense to help offset your costs and possibly generate enough money to pay your bills, I highly recommend you go sign up (I get nothing from Google for making this recommendation). Google Adsense happens to be one of the primary ways I pay the bills on a monthly basis, so I know it works. If you're currently running Google Adsense on your site and aren't making much money with it, there are some tricks to optimizing the placement of the ads in relation to other information on your site to improve ad relevance and make it easy for the readers to still read what you have to say without being overwhelmed by junk on the page. To figure out how to make Adsense work, I highly recommend ordering the Adsense Secrets ebook from Joel Comm. There are some lofty claims made on the sales page, but it's the only source of information on the topic I'm personally willing to endorse because I know it works. Using the recommendations in Adsense Secrets, my Google Adsense revenue is increasing at a rate of 30% per month or more for the last 6 months. I don't make the kind of money Joel makes, but the information he provides is the biggest reason my revenue continues to improve. I consider Adsense Secrets to be worth every penny.

The bottom line here is, we live in a world where advertising comes at us from all directions. We are overloaded with billboards, television advertising, print advertising, online ads, radio ads, advertising on buses, ads on taxi cabs, and ads people post for their own businesses on the side of their own vehicles. Most of these ads aren't applicable to our lives or even to what we're doing at the moment we see the advertising. While I won't go so far as to pretend Google's contextual advertising is perfect, they've managed to something that no other advertising method has accomplished thus far - they've linked advertising to the information it supports. It's the only advertising I ever pay attention to, aside from the Super Bowl ads, which I watch for entertainment and not for the products presented.

A knock on my door this morning brought my HP Pavillion dv1000 safely into the house. So far, I love it. Besides everything I already mentioned about it, I'm finding the keyboard to be one of the most natural of a vast assortment of keyboards I've sampled throughout my years of portability. In addition to smartly putting the Windows key where it belongs, a set of arrow keys combined with 'Back' and 'Ok' buttons improve Web navigation when I'm not using an external mouse. All the media controls are backlit, which I assume improves usability in the dark, although I haven't tested that theory yet.

Before it seems like this space turned into the weekly saga of Jake's laptop misfortunes, I going somewhere with this. Getting a new computer, whether it's a laptop or desktop, always causes me to reflect on the applications I need installed. This is doubly important with a portable machine, because I may be somewhere and the install CD is back at my house or I'm disconnected from the Internet and can't get a particular feature I need.

A massive combination of freeware, shareware and commercial apps, this is pretty much everything I consider necessary in order to function on a daily basis. Believe it or not, I use every app on this list almost daily. My name is Jake and I'm a file junkie:

AccountLogon keeps track of my passwords, offers one-click access to Web sites, and locks it all down with hefty encryption.
Adobe Reader 7 is a must for reading PDF files. There are several alternative free PDF readers, but I stick with the original.
Adobe Audition is the audio editing app I use for most recording and editing functions.
Audacity is the free audio editing app I'm attempting to document to make it easier to get more people interested in making good audio.
AudibleManager gives me access to audio books where I want, when I want.
AudioShell is a slick little freeware shell extension for correcting title and artist info on MP3 and WMA files.
Blowsearch Secured Messenger unifies my instant messaging and provides encryption
Cakewalk Kinetic is the music creation app I'm currently in love with. It isn't quite GarageBand, but it does so many things very well.
Copernic Desktop Search is the ultimate desktop search application. It's free and it beats the pants off of Google and MSN.
DiskTriage helps me figure out where all my drive space went. I'm famous for going from 200GB to zero in a matter of days.
DivX Codec provides movie playback for tons of great video/
FeedDemon is my favorite news aggregator, with great support for podcasts, custom search criteria and the best customization features currently available.
FileZilla replaces SmartFTP as my client of choice. File transfer is boring but required.
Flac Frontend isn't really required, but I love all the legitimate free music available in Flac format.
Flash isn't just about the 5 minute wait with the two-second payoff.

Google Toolbar finds everything on the Web that Copernic doesn't already see on my desktop.
iTunes, is still required even though I no longer use an iPod.
Metapad is my HTML editor. I regularly overwrite notepad.exe on every Windows install with this app.
Microsoft AntiSpyware is the best free AntiSpyware app on the planet, period.
Microsoft Word is still required because OpenOffice has the worst spell check known to man.
Outlook 2003 has it's faults, but I can't live without an integrated calendar/email/contacts list.
Photoshop Elements gives me flashbacks to getting free versions of Photoshop LE with everything.
QuickTime still pretends they have exclusives on every movie trailer online.
SnagIt is the only screen capture tool I'll ever use. The editing features rock!
SySense tracks my Google Adsense stats throughout the day.
Windows Media Encoder broadcasts the radio show no matter where I am in the world.
Windows Media Player 10 is my gateway to Napster To Go and all around goto player.

It's possible I left something off this list. I'm sure I'll be cursing the next time I'm on the road and in dire need of a feature I can't access. There are a few apps I left off intentionally because I don't use them daily. Of the apps on the list above, I use every single one every day, with the exception of AudibleManager, which I use to grab new audio books and want available when I need it. Unless my counting is off from not having enough fingers and toes, that's 27 apps I won't leave home without. Is there anything you can't bear to part with when you upgrade or hit the road? What's your list of required apps when you install a new system?

Thursday, I got an email from Best Buy with notification that that my new HP Pavilion dv1000 laptop is shipping. Now at the time I filled out the paperwork for the laptop, I was given the option for 2-day shipping, which seemed reasonable, even though the estimated arrival date was something like April 8, which apparently had something to do with my laptop not even being built yet. I clicked on the email link to FedEx to check the status of the package and the arrival date showed as April 6. Now I'm not a math genius, but March 31 to April 6 seems to be a few days more than two. Then I noticed where the laptop was shipping from - Shanghai, China. Knowing that virtually all laptops are built in either China or Korea (often with competing products built on the same assembly lines), this means I really am getting a factory direct model.

To echo my opinion about the value of having a service plan for portable hardware, Mike Burda weighs in with laptop woes of his own. It seems his Dell experienced a couple of major catastrophes that were recovered, but not without the expense of time and some new parts. In general, I find replacement plans on computer parts to be a waste of money, if you are comfortable making the replacement yourself. Like any other form of insurance, you are placing a bet that something will go wrong so that you derive value from the service plan. The company issuing the service plan is playing the averages counting on selling more service plans than they need to spend on repairs related to the plans. For something that sits on your desk, the likelihood of parts going bad is minimal unless the manufacturer makes lousy products. For a laptop you inherently assume more risk because it's portable. You can put the machine in a padded case when you transport it, but it still gets jostled around in the car, on a plane or in your bag as you're walking down the street. The likelihood of something going wrong (even in more expensive units) goes up because there are more variables involved. Laptops are very hard to repair on your own, with the exception of replacing hard drives and memory. At that, you're looking at the out-of-pocket expense for the parts. Compared to the hundreds of dollars in health and automobile insurance costs we incur annually (often with no obvious return on investment), $250 over 3 years to cover potential equipment failure looks cheap.

There's a new ebook coming on Monday. For those curious about podcasting, my Podcasting Starter Kit will be available sometime before Noon Pacific time on April 4. In addition to covering some of the basics required to get started in podcasting, many of the more complex issues associated with editing audio files, dealing with hosting considerations and the many methods for improving the sound of your recording are addressed in detail in the guide. Anyone subscribed to MediaBlab Premium will receive this ebook as part of their membership benefits. I will be offering a discounted rate to newsletter and RSS subscribers for the first 48 hours the ebook is available. Of course, you can also read through many of my free articles on podcasting in the archives.

Jake Ludington's Digital Lifestyle is currently in its fifth year of existence. What started out as an idea I talked Chris Pirillo into letting me experiment with in January 2001 is something I've remained extremely passionate about through changes in format, changes in location and subtle changes in my personal interests. I enjoy the continual re-education and conveying of information associated with publishing new material every week.

Throughout this stretch advertising provided the sole means of revenue. I'm very grateful for the advertisers who support my efforts. Most of the advertisers appearing in the newsletter are products I recommend or would use if I didn't already use a competing product. I've rejected advertisements from companies that didn't seem like they had the best interests of you, the reader, in mind. I've taken some advertisers to task when readers like you inform me of customer service concerns. I hope to continue the relationships I've maintained with many advertisers throughout the changes to my publishing efforts.

There are certain compromises made in relying on advertising to support my efforts to bring you the reviews and tutorials published. You currently click through several pages to get to the sites and topics discussed in the newsletter. You also get exposed to multiple advertisements in the newsletter and RSS feed, as well as various contextually relevant advertisements on the site. I try to provide enough detail in the newsletter to make it worth clicking-thru to the site, but that's a fine line. There's also a continual negotiation process where I'm faced with deciding how much you are worth to each advertiser. This approach to advertising is necessary so I am able to meet all the expenses associated with keeping the information current, maintaining a business infrastructure and keeping a roof over my head.

Today I'm announcing a change in the status quo. The way you are reading this right now, whether it's as an email message, RSS feed or on the Web will remain unchanged. If you'd like something a little different, I'm offering a second option. I'm offering what I know is something better. In addition to the current offering, I'm adding a premium section.

What's different about the premium section? Full text of each review and tutorial, complete with the relevant links to the application, free service or topic discussed will be included in the email newsletter and RSS feed for your premium version. That translates to convenience of reading each full posting offline, without needing to visit the site. No advertisements will appear in the premium version of the email newsletter or RSS feed. As a premium subscriber you have the option to download each newsletter as a PDF, in addition to email and RSS alternatives. Quarterly PDF compilations of reviews and tutorials, organized by subject area, are a complementary bonus for premium subscribers, with a PDF annual of articles from 2004, organized by subject, available immediately upon subscription. As a premium subscriber you receive published email newsletters a full day ahead of free subscribers. Exclusive freebies and discounts will be available to you in a special section of the subscriber area.

As part of the premium subscription, each new member gets an official MediaBlab T-shirt adorned with the logo depicted here. The first 1000 people who upgrade to the premium version will be part of a random drawing for an additional free gift, selected at random, from a collection of offerings I hand picked. Among the list of available offerings:

MixMeister Express creates the perfect soundtrack or mix CD for your party or your life. Pretty Good Solitaire provides over 600 different solitaire games, which is much better than pretty good. Disk Triage helps you get a handle on what is really stored on your hard drive with the best disk information tool I've ever used. muvee autoProducer 4 automatically makes movies from your raw footage. Xilisoft DVD Ripper converts DVD movies to digital formats ready for playback on your PC or burning to disk. TextAloud converts text documents and email to audio files so you can easily listen to anything you normally read. An autographed copy of Easy Digital Home Movies will help you turn those home movies into cinematic masterpieces. The full list of potential gifts is available on the registration page along with more details about the premium subscription.

Upgrade your Digital Lifestyle with a premium subscription.

My laptop saga is almost at the point of closure. I didn't bother mentioning the latest trip to Best Buy for service. I picked up the Toshiba from the previous round of repairs on March 6 and installed a few essential apps via download almost immediately, but didn't get around to installing any of the programs I normally travel with until preparing to leave for Portland on March 14. At that point, I found out the $330 replacement DVD drive didn't work any better than its predecessor. Most CDs placed in the drive did nothing at all. The few that attempted to work would quit part way through install operations or error out while browsing in Windows Explorer, which probably has something to do with a bad connection somewhere between the drive and the motherboard. One of the USB connections seemed to be flaking too. I went with a much leaner set of applications on the Portland trip and returned the laptop to Best Buy on March 17.

For those keeping score, this would be the fourth trip for repairs, which by Best Buy repair standards qualifies the laptop as a lemon. A few days waiting for confirmation from lemon qualifying school and I found myself making lemonade as I sifted through the available options for a replacement. The brand options at Best Buy retail outlets are limited to Gateway, Sony, Toshiba and the HP/Compaq duo (which are sort of the same but different). After plenty of problems with the Toshiba and word about a class action settlement for a different Toshiba model with heat issues, I didn't want to trade for a new set of problems. I opted to try my luck with a different brand.

In addition to all the various component failures, the old Toshiba unit was a beast, weighing in at just over 8 pounds. Heavier units allow for things like large screens, faster processors and more features, which may also be part of what made my laptop prone to failure; more components mean more potential points for failure. Lighter weight eliminates a few options, but it also seems like a smart strategy for traveling. During the New York trip at the beginning of the month, I placed my backpack on the airport scales and discovered I was toting almost 20 pounds of stuff, which included the Fujitsu Tablet PC. Had I weighed in with the Toshiba, the total might have been 25 pounds.

This time, I'm giving HP a shot. I used an entry level HP laptop for about two weeks in November with reasonable success. My only complaints about that model were lack of widescreen and maximum resolution of 1024x768 (which are vital to my email consumption strategy). HP puts the Windows key where it belongs which is more important on a laptop to avoid hassling with the mouse trackpad.

Based on all available models at Best Buy, the Pavilion dv1000 won my vote for a variety of reasons. It weighs 5.5 pounds, approximately 3 pounds less than the Toshiba it replaces. The replacement option allowed me to find something with similar specs for $1999 or less. Since the purchase of that laptop things changed enough that nothing matched the specs exactly. My alternative was to choose a laptop and either eat the difference in price between a cheaper model and what I paid or pay extra if I went over budget. I clocked in at $2017 with the fully configured dv1000, which means I ended up paying $18 for what I'm sure will be a more reliable unit. The processor is a 1.7GHz Centrino, which won't be as speedy as the 2.4GHz P4 in the Toshiba, but should avoid some of the heat issues plaguing parts of the Toshiba product line (I have no proof, but am suspicious some of my issues may have been heat-related). The DVD burner in the dv1000 burns at 8x compared to the 4x of the Toshiba. Both have 60GB drives. WiFi receives a minor upgrade between the units, moving from 802.11b only to 802.11b/g combo with Bluetooth. A 14" BrightView widescreen is slightly smaller than the 15.4" widescreen on the Toshiba, but the 1280x768 max resolution is the same. The biggest change is 2GB of RAM, which should help with my tendency to open massive video and audio files. I also get a second battery, which will add some weight if I carry it with me, but might be worth having for some situations.

One of the more interesting features of the dv1000 series is the ability to play DVD movies without booting Windows, which is particularly useful for watching movies on airplanes or in other situations where battery power is a priority and boot time needs to be minimal. Smart thinking on HPs part, in my opinion; more vendors should adopt this technology.

This is a custom unit that's ordered to spec, so I won't see it for about 2 weeks, but at least there's a good chance I won't be seeing the same problems crop up repeatedly due to a faulty system. One thing I learned about the Best Buy replacement plan is once the replacement is made the product replacement plan draws to a close. I did opt for the product replacement on this new laptop because after my previous experience, I'm not confident that I won't need it again. For most products, I'd be inclined to pass, the risk of something failing, compared to the cost of the replacement plan, makes the plans seem silly. But for laptops, where everything tends to be onboard and closely linked, if one thing fails, chances are reasonably likely that something else may fail in the future. While I certainly feel like I got my $250 worth on the previous replacement plan, I'm hopeful that this new plan provides me nothing more than piece of mind.

In certain moments the Web feels just like a real world community. Sure you can't physically sit across the table of a local coffee house in the land of 1s and 0s, but little events online intertwine in a way that brings people together through commonalities just like in the physical world. It goes much farther than getting a link from your favorite online news source. The moments of Web community are equivalent to chatting with someone at work who attended the same rock show the night before and you both came away loving the show but for totally different reasons and then share your version of the event over industrial coffee before going back to your cubicle. As someone who works from home, blogs are my industrial coffee oasis from my basement cubicle.

For instance, last night I was reading Evil Genius Chronicles, noticed Dave Slusher posted a new Clambake Episode. In the show notes I caught a reference to the band Make Believe. I download virtually every EGC show because I like what Dave has to say, but I always look at the notes first to see what he's talking about that day. Dave has this knack for introducing cool bands or re-introducing me to bands I hadn't thought about in awhile, in addition to having a lucid take on whatever happens to be on his mind. I often find myself seeking out the entire catalog from bands he features because I like a particular track played in an EGC Clambake.

Seeing Make Believe listed in his show notes triggered a chain of events in my mind. First I wondered if it was the same Make Believe made up of guys I went to high school with. Sure enough, I clicked over to the record label site where the entire Make Believe catalog is available in MP3 and Real formats and it was definitely the same guys. Then I remembered Steve Robinson, who played in a band with a couple of the Make Believe guys a few years ago, recently featured a Make Believe song on Rocket Slide Radio. Could it be that Dave Slusher, a guy who I've never met but totally respect is listening to a show produced by Steve Robinson, one of my best friends ever!? Like, oh-my-gawd!

After recovering from my moment of junior high valley girl Zen I decided that listening to Dave's show might be the best way to sort this all out in my mind. Sure enough, Dave mentions Steve and Rocket Slide as part of his introduction to Make Believe, who was once a band of the day on Dave's blog sometime ago. So a guy in Florida who is doing stuff I think is amazing, listens to a show created by a close friend in Iowa and ends up playing music from some guys I went to high school with as a result.

To further tie this all together, Steve Robinson will be the first artist on my Midnight Gypsy record label, which is named in memory of a band I was in 14 years ago. Midnight Gypsy (the band) once played a show with some of the guys from Make Believe when they were part of a band called Shockhead. Make Believe is no longer releasing new music, but one of the guys from the band is now the drummer in Steve's band and played a big role in getting the album recorded and mixed. It's moments like these when the Web seems like a big small town.

The album mastering on Wednesday went quite well overall. We discovered a quirk in one of the tracks that showed up during the mixing process, but that's being fixed and things are almost set for putting the final compilation together. All the tracks sound ready to sit on the store shelves next to any of the rock albums released by a major label.

I'm completely fascinated by how mastering can make a good recording sound great. I brought all the album tracks in a rough mixes with the volume and placement of various sounds where they belong in the stereo spectrum and Nick, the mastering engineer, took those rough mixes, brought out the subtleties of the recording, beefed up the bass drum sound with some EQ tricks, backed off the high-hat where it got a little to piercing in spots and gave the entire album a louder sound with out crushing the dynamic range the way so many recordings tend to sound in recent years.

Ultimately, when you listen to the recording, it will be up to you to make your own judgment about how you think it sounds. I personally like the way the tracks turned out. I like every song on the album and have a new favorite as a result of the mastering session. This is at least the 3rd time I've switched my opinion about which song I like best, which is either a sign that all the songs are good or that I'm indecisive. I'm leaning toward believing all the songs are good.

By next week I should have a better idea when the exclusive online listening party will be. I've also got a big announcement related to MediaBlab coming on Tuesday, so stay tuned. Another exclusive has been sitting on my desk for the last several days and I completely spaced including it earlier in the week. J!nx, my favorite geek apparel site, is offering everyone who reads this a 10% discount on anything in their store. You need to use the coupon code MEDIALAB to get the discount. Why are they offering the discount to you? I convinced them I'm on a mission to put an I ♥ Spyware shirt on the back of everyone who uses Internet Explorer. I'll be ordering one with the coupon shortly, along with another shirt that speaks volumes to anyone working in the online publishing space. I'm occasionally sited wearing this hat when I'm having a bad hair day.

I'm in Portland right now, preparing for a day long session mastering the first album from Stevan Robinson and The Foundation. The album is three years in the making, following a hiatus when Steve went to record the To My Surprise album with Rick Rubin. The recording has inadvertently come full circle. Tracking for this release was originally scheduled for Jackpot in Portland. Due to a variety of circumstances, the recording took place at several locations in Iowa. Here I am in Portland, with the services of Nick Moon Productions on hand to put the finishing touches on what I already think is a great sounding collection of tracks.

All this is culminating in the launch of Midnight Gypsy Records and a world tour by Stevan Robinson and The Foundation. I originally announced my plan to launch a record label back in May of 2002. Steve was always going to be the first release from the label. Plans were put on hiatus when Steve was asked to be part of To My Surprise; something I consider an opportunity of a lifetime.

The band didn't end up touring in support of the album due to various conflicts related to the Slipknot tour schedule, but it's not everyday a musician gets the chance to work on a record produced by Rick Rubin. I know if I had that chance I'd take up drumming again in a heartbeat (despite of a Rollerblade crash induced wrist pain that manifests itself when I play). I can't think of a single Rick Rubin production that doesn't sound like he extracted the absolute best work possible from the talent in the room. I don't like every album he produced, but evaluating them solely on performance and production, there's not a single release, from Slayer to the Beastie Boys to Johnny Cash to Red Hot Chili Peppers to The Mars Volta to the To My Surprise record that doesn't sound like a distinctly exceptional record.

We don't have the budget to bring Rick Rubin in as a producer for this album, but that won't stop the record from being a great release. In fact I'm sure this album is better in part because of the To My Surprise experience. I like every song on this album, in the current unmastered form. And I'm not saying that because I know Steve is reading this. I've made more than a few suggestions throughout the recording process. I'm as much a music critic as I am fan. As one of my readers, you will be invited to the pre-release online exclusive listening as soon as we get a few of the details worked out to make sure the network infrastructure is in place to handle it. There's already a sneak preview in the latest Rocket Slide Radio show.

UPDATE: AOL appears to be listening to concerns about the AIM TOS. News.com has an interview with an AOL spokesperson indicating they are working on adressing the issue.

This experience should still encourage IM users to take anything personal or sensitive to their business to an encrypted space where prying eyes can't see the conversation.

Original Report:

You may have the biggest buddy list on the planet. Your kids may talk to all their friends using AIM. Based on the current terms of service, anyone using AIM should dump the service immediately and switch to any other messaging product on the planet. Am I being alarmist? I don't think so. Read their terms of service and you'll begin to understand where I'm coming from.

From the Content You Post section of the AIM Terms of Service, relating to all users who either registered for AIM services or downloaded AIM updates or software on or after February 5, 2004, which likely means everyone using AIM:

Although you or the owner of the Content retain ownership of all right, title and interest in Content that you post to any AIM Product, AOL owns all right, title and interest in any compilation, collective work or other derivative work created by AOL using or incorporating this Content. In addition, by posting Content on an AIM Product, you grant AOL, its parent, affiliates, subsidiaries, assigns, agents and licensees the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote this Content in any medium. You waive any right to privacy. You waive any right to inspect or approve uses of the Content or to be compensated for any such uses. {Emphasis added}

Ben Stanfield, one of the guys behind MacSlash, broke this story on his blog. Unfortunately, it's not a hoax. AOL is stating very clearly anything written or shared via AIM belongs to AOL. As Ben points out, sharing any kind of sensitive information via an instant messaging client is taking an inherent risk, because it's not difficult for someone with the right software tools to eavesdrop.

This sets a frightening precedent. What this means, as far as I can tell, is that anything you say using an AIM client is usable by AOL in any capacity they see fit. If you post a creative work of any kind to an AIM affiliated product, AOL can sell that creative work, re-publish that creative work or generally use that creative work in any way they see fit. It's safe to assume they are logging every IM conversation taking place on the AIM network. Use video chat and the video clip might show up somewhere later. Share a file and the file potentially shows up somewhere else. Using AIM is wholesale forfeiture of your rights to anything taking place within AIM.

I'm not a paranoid person. For the most part, I like to assume there's too much information floating across the Internet at any one time for there to be any more likelihood that someone is paying attention to what I'm saying online than there would be offline. For the most part, I assume I'm not saying anything important enough in my IM messages for anyone to take notice. When a company paying providing a service publicly states they have the right to anything you do with their product, it's time to reassess that assumption. Chances are good that clause is there for a reason. It's high time to replace the standard IM clients with something encrypted so the companies providing service can't see what's being said.

My Toshiba laptop is back home again. According to the repair sheet, the DVD burner, hard drive and wireless card totaled almost $600 to replace. Assuming the hard drive was truly replaced the last two times it went dead and not just re-magnetized (which I what occasionally happens), the total replacement cost on parts alone is in the $1000 range for the repairs over the life of the laptop. Add some labor to that picture and somebody's losing a ton of money on a bad product. The combined parts bill is half of what I paid for the machine in the first place. I can't recommend often enough that you need to back up your data regularly, whether you've got a laptop or not. The recovery process is a hassle with a backup, without a backup, it's a nightmare.

The Fujitsu Tablet PC soldiered through like a champ while I was in New York, but having to either plug in a keyboard or laboriously write out email messages was neither convenient or enjoyable. Tablet PC evangelists like Robert Scoble swear by the Toshiba units with the convertible screen, but after my repeated bad experience with a Toshiba laptop, I simply can't bring myself to consider another Toshiba product at this point.

I'll freely admit that reading digitally on the Tablet PC is a joy (as long as there's no bright sunlight), however, most of the things I do aren't really meant for a portrait form factor. The travel case I have for the Fujitsu is perfect for propping the Tablet up easel style and reading email and RSS feeds, but doing multimedia work was a huge pain. Adobe Audition and other audio editing solutions work best in landscape mode because viewing the audio timeline is more convenient when it's extended from left to right across as much screen real estate as possible. Video editing would be equally limited. Battery life and standby mode on the Fujitsu model are outstanding. I've been able to standby the unit for several days and lose virtually none of the battery with almost instantaneous resume. There's definitely some smart work being done in the Tablet PC space, it just doesn't fit with most of my computing habits.

Figuring out how to crack Apple codecs to make them playable outside the realm of iTunes QuickTime seems to be a popular past time. The latest success in this area involves the reverse engineering of Apple's Lossless Codec, which is a direct competitor to the Windows Media Lossless format and more open formats like FLAC and Monkey's Audio. At some point it would be great if all the codec companies would learn to play nice and let us choose which player we want to listen to our audio in. This project is another example of the Linux crowd wanting access to something that the mainstream didn't bother to code for them. Ingenuity prevails and as a result, I'm betting we see a better alternative to iTunes pop up in the coming months. Possibly a new addition to the project that created Real Alternative.

Futurismic, my favorite source of short form science fiction has another round of outstanding stories available online. Some of the stories may offend you, some will make you think, all the stories are outstanding writing in the science fiction realm by authors who may just be the next Hugo or Nebula winner. Read them now so you can say I remember when...

Check your local library to see if they are offering a new audio book download service. A company called NetLibrary is making a large selection of audio available for download by library members. Unlike traditional audio books, which would be physically checked out one copy at a time, these audio books are available on demand to anyone who signs up at a participating library. The tricky part seems to be figuring out whether or not your library is participating in the program or not. For instance, I found out the Great River Region Library system in Minnesota is offering the service thanks to the Player Blog. I can find no indication that the libraries in either Seattle, WA or Des Moines, IA are currently making the service available and they don't offer a listing on the site to list all the libraries currently in the program. This may be one of those services the library patrons need to lobby for in order to get in place.

I'm used to an electronic void for the climb out of the airport, but Jet Blue takes a different approach, embedding a small screen in the back of every seat so we continue to consume the satellite television we might normally leave behind for a few hours. Giving passengers access to information about a flight being forced to make an emergency landing in Ft. Lauderdale as we taxi down the runway getting ready for our own takeoff doesn't seem like an exercise in confidence building, even though I soon put it out of my head as I flipped between MTV After Hours and a bad movie on Sci-Fi. I never quite got comfortable in my seat so I found myself fixating on the screen in front of Chris, sleeping in the seat next to me. I'd dimmed my screen in an effort to tune out and get a few hours of sleep prior to arriving in the city that never does but I couldn't achieve the calm required to nod off for any sustained period. Instead the headline news ticker rolled by in an endless loop of silent information with little or no relevance to my surroundings at that moment.

There's something unusual about taking a red eye flight at midnight Pacific Time arriving at JFK in New York shortly after sunrise to participate in the ritual rush hour traffic pouring into the city. This is my first time in New York and in my bleary-eyed state our arrival reminds me of driving into downtown Chicago (minus the drive through the tunnel under the East River). Thank someone for early check in and the opportunity to take a nap. If I weren't spending most of my time covering the Search Engine Strategies conference, I'd be more excited about our hotel location, which is mere blocks from most of the major sites.

My Toshiba laptop is off to the repair shop yet again. For anyone not anxiously awaiting the next turn of events in the continuing saga of craptacular hardware, I'll give you a brief refresher. My laptop hard drive suffered a massive failure at the beginning of September 2004. I had purchased one of those extended warranties from Best Buy when I originally got the laptop in January 2004 and exercised the repair clause in the warranty when the hard drive died in September. I documented a large chunk of the data recovery process involved in getting some critical data from the damaged drive offering some recommendations for those suffering a similar fate. After returning from the repair shop later in September, all seemed to be working for a couple of weeks until a second drive crash sent the laptop back to Best Buy for more repairs in October, just prior to a scheduled trip to Seattle.

My laptop experiences remained uneventful until last week when the wireless card started to drop packets like mad and couldn't sustain connections even within 5 feet of the access point. Yesterday morning, after several strange error messages appeared on the screen (in hindsight, I should have documented them), the laptop got stuck in an infinite loop of blue screens commonly associated with hardware driver failure. I couldn't pause the screen long enough to clearly document the blue screen message, so I booted a BartPE CD and transferred an image of the drive to a USB drive. I had been using an external WiFi card since the failure and even turned off the internal card, but the issue was forced by the additional problems. Off to Best Buy for another trip to the repair shop. I'm told another failure results in the laptop being ruled a lemon which means outright replacement with a different model. I'd settle for just having the thing not break again.

It seems these crash events always correspond with an upcoming travel event. I'm headed for SES in New York on Monday, so it only makes sense my laptop should fail just prior to the trip. Of course, that's more convenient than mid-trip. The demise of my laptop also presents an opportunity for me to become intimately familiar with my Fujitsu Tablet PC, which was previously relegated to Robin's frequent searches of food sites for interesting recipe ideas. We ran the radio show from the tablet last night and I generally found it to be just as effective as any other solution.

Back in August, after testing a Gateway Tablet PC for a series of articles I found the handwriting recognition to be outstanding but couldn't see myself ever adopting full time use of the Tablet. Considering my frequent travel schedule of late, it's either use the Tablet full time or find another laptop. I'll keep you posted on how it works out.

Open letter to the RIAA, ASCAP, and BMI:

We know DRM isn't going to stop the piracy of music. Most of the published catalog of songs in the collective archive of all RIAA member companies is already in the clear. New releases are leaked faster than they become available through the iTunes music store. Instead of swimming against the current trying to devise new ways to keep the songs from getting out recognize you already have a model that works. You have a model that's limiting and no one is complaining about. You have a model with people dying to pay more for less.

Ringtones are where the money is. The general public will fight tooth-and-nail to get a full length song for free, but they'll pay 99-cents-per-ringtone for a mere 10-15 seconds of polyphonic noise barely identifiable as a rendition of the latest joint from 50 Cent. Capitalize on that. Raise the licensing fee on ringtones and give away the full length song. Vanity knows know financial boundaries.

ASCAP and BMI, the songwriters and performers need their cut too. Get them their due the same way you always have - one public performance at a time. Cell phone companies have all kinds of tracking mechanisms built into phones already. One-way GPS systems can tell them where a customer is even when the customer doesn't know where they are. It wouldn't be hard to send a signal back to the cell phone tower indicating which rapper is dropin' 808s from an LG 6600 outside the Space Needle at 2:01 on Thursday afternoon. If 20 people in a restaurant hear that cell phone ring it constitutes a performance in my book. Assess the cell phone company a fee for each ring. They'll be sure to pass the cost along to the customer with the ringtone, adding a few extra pennies to generate a profit. Everybody makes more money in this new model and the customers won't even complain.

Run television commercials and plaster billboards with a dial *555 campaign to get the latest ringtones from the one-hit-wonder-du-jour. We'll eat it up. I recognize at least two or three feeble attempts to replicate a pop song every time I'm in a public space. But we need to be reminded so a marketing campaign is in order. Enlist that guy who reminds us not to steal movies when we go to the theater, he seems convincing.

Keep selling CDs or whatever the shiny disk of the moment happens to be. Keep licensing places like Napster and Rhapsody hand out music-on-demand. And by all means, let the legit music stores mess with ineffective DRM schemes to deliver licensed copies of tracks to consumers interested in paying for songs guaranteed free from virus infections, spyware and trojans lurking on the p2p networks. Let the podcasters play 64kbps versions of songs free and clear. These things are promotional vehicles to sell the next 15-second megahit.

Stop wasting time and money suing children and dead people. You've got the perfect money maker. Simon and Paula should be looking for the next generation of 15-second hit machines. Forget about that karaoke school dropout stuff on all the networks. The only thing you need now is a collection of tones appealing to people outside the ages of 15-25. Mom and dad need ringtones too.

I'm headed for Vancouver, BC this weekend for the Northern Voice blogging conference. If you live in the area or close enough to drive, you should consider signing up (I think there are still spaces open). Registration is a mere $30 Canadian for a day of conversation, presentation and learning from a group of super smart people. Tim Bray, co-inventor of XML, speaks on the recipe for blogging. Robert Scoble helps us understand his blogging addiction. Stowe Boyd of Corante is part of a panel discussing citizen journalism. Marc Canter, co-founder of Macromedia, and Tod Maffin of the CBC are both on a panel discussing audio and video content for Web publishing. I'll be an attendee, armed with my Edirol R-1, recording interviews with all the smart people in the room in between sessions.

If you've got nothing but spare time on your hands, there's an easy way to make the most of the Napster-To-Go 14-day trial. With three computers, several hundred CDs, Winamp and a two week supply of No Doze, 252 albums worth of songs can be yours without needing to ever pay for the service. How does this work exactly? It's similar to the so-called analog hole allowing you to record any of the audio that passes through one of the audio output jacks on your sound card. The sound card must render the audio; therefore it can be recorded as it plays in real time. The concept is very similar to what's described in the free tutorial I just did on converting the soundtrack from a DVD to a CD. Napster responded with surprisingly lucid candor to the news.

In other news of media company insecurity a new Macrovision protection will be introduced for DVD media which claims to plug the digital hole. The Macrovision site reads like a high-tech comedy aimed at helping consumers improve their ripping experience. For instance, the front page of the site currently reads, "DVD Rip Control that is THX Verified to give consumers every bit of the original audio/video experience." Glad to see Macrovision finally sees the light. This is one consumer that would love to guarantee a ripped DVD would contain every bit of the original experience. And then of course they key in on the real problem when drilling down to the page with more detail. The RipGuard DVD product will, "Plug the digital hole, reduce ripping, prevent cannibalization of DVD retail (rip, rent, return)..." Even Macrovision realizes we want to play by the rules, pointing out anyone who rips a DVD will later rent and subsequently return the DVD to the store. Now I'm sure they have no intention of making the customer experience better but how long can it possibly take for someone to figure out a way to circumvent this copy-protection the same way previous protection schemes were broken.

We seem to be on the verge of a big breakthrough in portable entertainment similar to the emergence of so many MP3 players back in 1999-2000. This time, the breakthrough isn't yet another device to lug around weighing down pockets already overloaded with cell phones, digital cameras, iPods and other cancer-inducing battery-powered leg warmers. Instead, we are extended support for existing formats in the same old devices we've grown accustomed to fill our pants.

Several companies have tried and failed to combine digital cameras with portable music players. The latest foray in this direction being that m:robe stuff demonstrated between plays in the Super Bowl. m:robe will undoubtedly fail just like past forays because people who want device convergence are more interested in combining a bad camera with their cell phone than they are in eliminating a portable music player from their device dependence.

The convergence that succeeds will combine audio and video player with what we currently recognize as a cell phone into one unified portable entertainment hub, finally providing some justification for that $25-per-month unlimited Internet access charge. Technically, this is nothing new. Pocket PC phones and SmartPhone devices supported music playback ages ago. Most countries on the Asian continent have faster data connections in their phones than they do in their homes. Battery life has been suspect, so using the phone as an entertainment tool meant potentially sacrificing an important call before reaching the next charging opportunity. Most of the Windows Mobile devices are past the battery hurdle, although, so few of us currently use Windows Mobile phones that it's hard to pin the future on Microsoft's cell phone strategy, in spite of several seriously cool phones.

When Nokia announces improved support for Real media formats, Windows Media and Flash in the same week, it's time to take notice. Motorola and Apple just announced the first phone with onboard iTunes support too. Cell phone manufacturers are known for hardware innovation, but rarely offer compelling features on the software side. Now, instead of Microsoft pushing the envelope creating a platform to support media on the go, we've got cell phone makers embracing formats we currently love or love to hate.

With the Hawaii Five-O soundtrack heralding in version 5 of the Linspire desktop operating system, Michael Robertson introduced many of the new features aiming to take Linux from solution of choice for command line geeks and system tweakers to a system ready to be a first-class citizen in the home computing market. The UI is a major overhaul from Linspire 4.5, with great support for wireless networking and digital cameras meeting consumer expectations set by Windows and OS X. One of best features may be the Click-and-Run experience, with one click installation of almost 2,000 open source applications.

Lsongs improves the music jukebox experience for Linspire users with a slick iTunes-esqe interface complete with song library management, integration with the MP3tunes music service and the ability to share music with other Linspire PCs. MP3tunes is a new music store available via the Web for any operating system, in addition to the Lsongs integration, complete with 300,000 DRM-free MP3s available for purchase at $0.88 per download. It's a decent first version, although they're going to have a tough fight ahead of them with no major label artists in the catalog at the moment. I posted more thoughts on the store the day it was announced.

Lphoto puts a functional UI on photo management for desktop Linux. Red eye removal, cropping, color correction and a simple slide show tool are all part of the experience. Album generation and CD burning make sharing photos painless and an email photo feature is smart enough to remember your preferences between sessions. None of this is new to Windows and Mac OS X users, with tools like Picasa and iPhoto, but I'm pleasantly surprised to see the Linspire experience finally approaching parity.

Playback of streaming Windows Media, Real and QuickTime files is now a seamless experience within a Linux browser environment, although support for DRM content is still lacking (which has everything to do with Hollywood and record industry paranoia paired with Microsoft's and Apple's short-sighted strategy for content control). Windows Media support was previously available through a codec configuration of MPlayer, but is no longer a back-alley lurker in the Linux desktop experience. The RealPlayer for Linux environments is one of the more elegant, light-weight players available on any platform.

While none of this is going to move me away from Windows anytime soon, it's good to see another viable alternative in the market. The Linspire Desktop interface has finally matured to a point where I could feel comfortable suggesting it as an alternative for people on a budget or anyone who needs basic consumer functionality without the risk of virus and spyware annoyances.

The other big news is the MP3beamer, which is essentially a Linspire computer with the ability to sync all your music throughout your house. The MP3beamer collects all your music and makes it available for distribution across the Mac Rendezvous network, Windows-compatible UPNP devices, Windows XP desktops, Linux and Mac OS X. I haven't seen an official indication of support for DRM content using the MP3beamer, but I'm assuming it lacks the capacity, unless the playback device is capable of authenticating the content. The ability to stream to SmartPhone devices makes this a great tool for anyone want a plug-and-play solution for distributing your media from your home to wherever you may be.

It's a good thing all the excitement in yesterday's game happened in the second half. I was busy connecting my VoIP phone adapter to my home phone wiring between commercials. The one thing that annoyed me about the VoIP service is the lack of documentation about tying the VoIP service into the phone wiring in the house. After realizing it was a fairly simple project, I grabbed all the parts I needed at Home Depot and did a quick re-routing of the home phone lines in order to make the VoIP experience just like the landline experience. I documented the process of connecting the VoIP phone adapter to my phone lines, making ever phone jack in the house part of the VoIP system, taking breaks for Super Bowl commercials along the way. Of course, if you missed any of the commercials, iFilm has all the Super Bowl ads available online.

GoDaddy.com is getting all the advertising buzz, but I'm personally excited to see Napster finally spending money on explaining their subscription service. I've mentioned my opinions about Napster's subscription service in the past and they finally spent money on making a similar point at this year's Super Bowl. The "do the math" campaign effectively compares the cost of buying lots of songs from a download service, compared to subscribing to their entire song library on a monthly basis. The counter argument is of course that subscribing to a $15 per month service is merely renting music, where purchasing a 99 cent download represents a form of ownership. In my experience, the so-called ownership becomes more of a hassle than it's worth. My office has several plastic tubs full of CDs. About half of the CDs have been ripped to my hard drive. The other half get no attention from me. Aside from the indie music I acquired either at live shows or while booking my rock club, all those CDs represent money I spent on music at some point in the past. Assuming I spent about $11 on every CD in my collection, I could pay for years of the Napster To Go service with the same amount of money. When I get sick of a particular artist or album, instead of piling the CD in a plastic tub and buying more music, I can delete the tracks (or pile them in a folder on my hard drive) and download something else.

The music service I'm most curious about right now is Michael Robertson's MP3tunes. He hasn't disclosed much about it yet, which either means it's going to be a really big deal or that some really big deals are still being worked out and there's nothing to see just yet. Based on Robertson's ability to create disruptive companies, with MP3.com fundamentally influencing online music and Lindows Linspire grabbing the attention of Microsoft's corporate attorneys, he likely has another ace up his sleeve. We're catching up with him at the Desktop Linux Summit this week - stay tuned for further details.

The radio show is broadcasting live from the Desktop Linux Summit in San Diego next week, which is exciting for several reasons. First, we'll be interviewing Michael Robertson of Linspire about his return to the digital music business. Michael founded MP3.com several years ago before selling it off. Early reports on his current foray into digital music aren't telling much, so we should be able to get some good information at the conference. Hopefully we can also get some time with Rob Glaser to find out what Real has in store for us. They've done some great things to make multimedia a better experience for both Linux and OS X users, despite the stigma that continues to surround the Windows RealPlayer. Another speaker I'm interested in talking to is Robin Rowe, founder of LinuxMovies.com and project leader for the open source special effects app CinePaint, which was used to add digital arrows to The Last Samurai among other projects.

If you create audio or video content and need an affordable place to host your files, OurMedia.org is offering an interesting model. In partnership with the Internet Archive, they will be releasing a way to host any audio and video content you create with unlimited bandwidth for free. I'm still trying to wrap my head around how this is financially possible, but according to Marc Canter, the spokesman for OurMedia, the Internet Archive has made a commitment to making this work. One of the cool features is support for meta-tagging of the files, which basically means you'll be able to tie descriptive text to the audio and video files, making it easier for people to find them when doing a Google search. It's currently possible to do some hosting of your own media files at the Internet Archive simply by signing up for a free account.

OurMedia.org creates an interesting opportunity for anyone producing a podcast, video or music on a tight budget. One of the big concerns for media creation is figuring out how to afford the cost of serving the files once you've created them. In most cases, you can get by with a $99 per month hosting plan from one of many hosting providers, but for some, that's a price they simply cannot afford. OurMedia is hoping to level the playing field and take file hosting out of the equation in hopes of increasing the amount of audio and video content available online. I have high hopes for the service, while at the same time I'm suspicious of anything free because there are generally hidden costs that don't necessarily have a dollar value associated with them. I'm looking into setting up an account so I can report back on my experiences with the service at a later date.

One of the stranger things I saw demonstrated at CES in January is Imation's new ForceField coated CD and DVD blanks. At the booth a CD was being grated across sandpaper in an effort to prove just how scratch resistant these blanks really are. If you've ever looked at a normal blank CD (or one that you've burned) the data side of the disk always sports nasty looking scratches even with minimal handling. I have no idea whether the scratches are truly detrimental to the disks or not, but it doesn't seem like they are the best way to maintain data integrity. The new ForceField technology seems to work in all the various ways people accidentally abuse their storage media by setting them data side down on rough surfaces or accidentally droppage on the carpet. From what I can tell in comparing the sample disk I got at CES to several different brands of normal disks, including other Imation disks, the ForceField disks have either no noticeable scratches or barely noticeable scratches. I'm not sure what that means for the life of the data on the disks themselves, but I can only assume it's a good thing. With the cost only marginally higher than standard CD-R media, I'll be buying ForceField protected media for the foreseeable future.

Still no buyer's remorse for me on the decision to use Vonage as my primary phone service. The call quality remains rock solid. It's absolutely fabulous to get voice mail messages in my email inbox instead of having to dial in and listen to them. Connecting via a traditional landline phone doesn't seem to have a downside to it and I've been able to send and receive faxes without signing up for a special fax number using my Panasonic plain paper fax. The price, including long distance to Canada and the United States is under $30 per month, with no wonky charges tacked on later and in most cases you can keep your existing phone number (if you want to). I'm not specifically suggesting anyone switch from landline service to Vonage, but by all means, review my five steps for deciding whether VoIP fits your calling needs and take a look at the alternatives to landline. Inspite of increased competition, the mini-monopolies of the phone industry haven't figured out they still charge too much.

Don't touch that dial; Rocket Slide Radio is producing weekly shows for your listening pleasure. I talked my friend Steve Robinson into experimenting with the whole podcasting thing and his first show is now available for download or subscription. The first show features indie rock from RIAA-free labels with a theme centering on regret. If you're looking for great new music from artists flying below the radar of mainstream music venues, you owe it to yourself to check out Rocket Slide. And if you ask him real nice, maybe he'll even play some of his own stuff.

The 24-hour radio station isn't online yet and I'm blaming it on two people. The first is MrMic, who has me re-thinking the station management software I might use. He's got a wealth of experience with several broadcasting products and found an app he likes better than two I mentioned last week. I'm currently comparing features of StationPlaylist Creator & Studio before I finalize that part of the process.

The second person who caused me to rethink the station launch is Janine from Real. The original plan was to broadcast the radio stream using Windows Media Streaming Services, which works but doesn't have the greatest interface for managing workflow. Real's Helix Universal Server, on the other hand, has a much better interface and can output in multiple formats, including Real, QuickTime, Windows Media, and MP3. I voiced my less than positive opinion about Real's consumer side of the media business more than once in this space, but their server technologies are something I have only heard positive things about. Over the short term, the radio station is on pause while I make sure I select the right combination of applications to offer me the greatest flexibility.

As an temporary alternative, check out radio-on-demand from Staccato. We had host Matt May on the radio show this week talking about his job at the W3C, Creative Commons, the ISCA BBS and podcasting. Staccato is interesting specifically because it only features Creative Commons licensed music. Matt spends an incredible amount of time searching the Internet Archive for the best of the quickly expanding collection of tracks musicians are making available for varying degrees of public use.

Our radio show currently broadcasts live three hours a week on Thursdays. That leaves 165 hours of air time we could be filling with music, commentary and shows from other sources. To that end, I'm launching a radio station this weekend filled with music and programming I enjoy. With any luck a few listeners will like it too. I know a number of you reading this are independent musicians or aspiring radio hosts who would like to share something with the community. Please drop me a line (the email link is in the sidebar) with details about your creative venture. While I won't guarantee playback of everything submitted, I can certainly guarantee we won't play your stuff if you don't submit it. I can't promise fame and fortune. You will receive attribution for your efforts, which may lead to bigger and better things.

Throughout the process of setting up the radio station I've been testing several software packages to handle the process. I wanted something more robust than the standard Shoutcast stuff so I'm taking a serious look at both SAMS Broadcaster or DRS 2006. Both can be pushed to a Windows Media Streaming Server, which was my number one requirement. I'm currently leaning toward SAMS at the moment, because it looks to have better live interruption features, but it also is considerably more expensive. This is one of those cases where the features likely justify the price. I'll let you know what route I go once the radio station is live.

On Monday and Tuesday, I'm joining Chris Pirillo and Lenn Pryor at the Blog Business Summit for a panel discussion on Media Blogging: Podcasting and Beyond. We'll be demonstrating how to acquire podcasts, the tools required to create your own podcast, as well as ways to make money through podcasting (it is a business summit after all). I'm looking forward to meeting Lenn; he's the guy in charge of Channel 9 at Microsoft. Hopefully he'll be sharing secrets on publishing frequent video updates to a corporate Web site. If you happen to be attending the conference, be sure and look me up. If you aren't attending, I'm going to do my best to obtain rights to distribute an audio version of the panel discussion I'm on, but that's entirely up to the conference coordinators.

Tonight, during an X-Files re-run, I saw an ad for a $579 computer from Dell. This isn't unusual considering Dell regularly runs television advertising with machines priced between $399 and $699, but it caused me to pause and think about the new budget priced $499 Mac Mini from Apple. As the story goes, Apple released this phenomenally affordable machine that's going to change the adoption curve for Macs and finally increase market share for Apple computers for the first time in ages. Forget about connecting your iPod to that Windows PC, you can connect your music symbiote to a proper host device.

As a point of comparison Dell also offers a $499 machine on their Website, which is usable right out of the box. It comes with a keyboard, mouse, and monitor (a CRT, but still a viewing screen); the Mac Mini comes with no human interface devices.

We could assume that the person most likely to be attracted to a Mac Mini already owns a PC, which would mean they also own a mouse, keyboard, and monitor. That's a big assumption in my book, but for purposes of this illustration I'll run with it. All the pre-built PCs I've encountered recently come with PS/2 mouse and keyboard connections which means they aren't Mac compatible. According to the Apple website, a mouse and keyboard combination cost an additional $58. At this point we're still competitive with the Dell machine at a total price of $557, assuming we've already got a monitor.

It's hard to compare the 1.25GHz G4 processor in the Mac Mini with the 2.8GHz P4 in the Dell, but I'm inclined to guess the Dell is slightly faster despite all the hardware optimization Mac fanatics are sure to claim. Both machines have base memory of 256MB, which is not enough if you plan on participating in the iLife of video editing with iMovie and making music in GarageBand. Upping each machine to the maximum available 1GB results in dramatically different costs. At 1GB of RAM the Dell now has a total price of $656. The Mac Mini, complete with 1GB of RAM, a keyboard, and mouse is now $982.

Both machines offer a 40GB hard drive, which is on the small side for importing home movies or making your own music. An 80GB drive in the Mac Mini bumps the total cost to $1032. Replacing the 40GB drive in the Dell with an 80GB drive increases total cost to $674.

Want to burn your movies to DVD? The price for each machine climbs a little more. The DVD burning SuperDrive in the Mac Mini brings the price to $1132. A dual-layer combination CD/DVD burner in the Dell brings the total price to $737.

In the interest of making a more accurate comparison, I'll replace the base Windows XP Home in the Dell with Windows XP Professional, which includes networking features more on par with Mac OS X, increasing the Dell price to $808. A 3GHz Hyper-threaded P4 could be added for another $18, compared with the $50 price jump from a 1.25GHz G4 to the 1.42GHz G4.

Final Specs for each machine:

Dell Dimension 3000
Processor: 3GHz P4
Hard Drive: 80GB
Optical Drive: Combo CD/DVD Burner
RAM: 1GB
Operating System: Windows XP Pro
Monitor: 17-inch CRT
Keyboard and Mouse
Total Cost: $836.00

Mac Mini
Processor: 1.42GHz G4
Hard Drive: 80GB
Optical Drive: SuperDrive
RAM: 1GB
Operating System: OS X
Monitor: None
Keyboard and Mouse
Total Cost: $1182

I'm sure Mac fans will argue that they still get a better deal for the almost $300 price difference and no monitor. They get the iLife suite with the Mac Mini, what does the Dell buyer get? All versions of Windows XP ship with Windows Movie Maker, which doesn't have an identical feature set as iMovie, but includes most of the features. Photo Story 3 is a free download for making photo slideshows. Picasa 2 is a free photo management app as good as iPhoto (maybe better). iTunes is free for Windows users too, so the only thing missing is a GarageBand replacement. You could purchase several killer audio apps for the difference in price between the two packages.

The bottom line here is Apple finally released an entry level Mac that isn't out of line with pricing available to PC buyers for years. If Apple wasn't overcharging for RAM, the prices wouldn't be quite so spread. A useful Mac (or PC) can't be purchased for $499.

You may remember my writing a tutorial on how to put podcasts on your non-iPod portable music player. If you glossed over the tutorial completely because you had either never heard of a podcast or couldn't imagine wanting to listen to one, you're probably not alone - it sounds more like an affliction than a form of entertainment. Admittedly some of the content of podcasts make an open sore more tolerable than listening to the ramblings of someone who is excited by the sight of tumbleweeds passing in front of their car on Interstate 40 (and if you've spent a few hours on I-40 you know tumbleweeds are the excitement). Network television suffers from this same pain-inducing sense of publication with bigger budgets, which is a different problem altogether.

Before you're eyes glaze over at yet another Internet buzzword, keep in mind that podcasts are simply audio recordings available for download at a variety of sites across the Internet. The magic part of the equation being applications like DopplerRadio and iPodder designed to let you subscribe to these audio downloads in a manner that puts them conveniently in your PC audio library for listening on your desktop or easy transfer to your favorite portable audio player. Of course, that's the Cliff's Notes version of what podcasting is; for the complete unabridged version, check out Podcasting: Evolution or Revolution?

The secret here, which isn't really secret, is that you don't have to subscribe to anything to listen to podcasts. When I first heard about podcasting, I subscribed to a bunch of different shows until I had more audio than I knew what to do with piled up in a folder that I never had time to listen to. So like any other form of information overload, I unsubscribed from a bunch of stuff and deleted the audio files I wasn't listening to. Easy enough.

The hard part in all of this is finding stuff you actually want to listen to. In the plethora of podcasts, who has time to find the good stuff? All those subscriptions I made weren't a complete waste of time, I did find a few gems that I still listen to with regularity. My personal favorite podcast is Evil Genius Chronicles, which combines eclectic music selections with a sort of This American Life slanted toward technology. If you like movies, Reel Reviews is worth checking out for movie commentary that come across as being genuine passion for cinematic art without the pretentiousness of cinema snobs. If gadgets are your passion, you probably already know about Engadget, but if you haven't heard their weekly podcast, you're only getting a small piece of the site's offerings. Radio drama of the pre-television sort can be found in The Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd. Of course, you can also get our weekly radio show and pre-recorded interviews as podcasts too. This is literally the tip of the iceberg. If you find something you want to subscribe to, download a free app like DopperRadio and check out the podcasting tutorial one more time.

Unless I missed the CES pavilion with stunning new technologies waiting to take on the world this year's show seemed to be more about evolutionary steps for existing products. I already mentioned the water-tight Pentax camera that remains my single favorite gadget concept from the show. I'm still anticipating what the real performance will be once they start sending out review units to press folk like me. Not a revolutionary step anymore than more megapixels would be.

The best new cell phone feature I noted on the show floor came from the Samsung booth. After prying my eyes from the 102-inch big screen my attention was drawn to cell phones with speech-to-text conversion that actually works. The loud noise of the tradeshow floor didn't prevent the possibility of dictating a memo Mr. Spacely style into a phone where the text could be emailed or text messaged off to a recipient. To me, this is a far more logical evolution of phone technology than 1-thumbing T9 text or adding a keyboard to pretend you like typing to a 2-inch screen.

In the world of automotive entertainment every manufacturer is racing to integrate with the iPod. We've previously seen a number of progressions in this direction but virtually every car audio company is racing toward full integration with iPod devices, including head unit navigation of tracks. To a lesser degree, companies are aiming for the entire portable audio space but all eyes are on capturing more dollars from the iPod crowd. This was further emphasized when Apple announced partnerships with several automakers at Mac World. Of course, Streaming Internet radio in your car might not be too far off with at least three companies offering car-mounted Satellite systems for in transit surfing.

For every car company making iPod add-ons, CES seemed to have at least two companies offering a PVR solution aimed at supplanting Tivo as the dominant time shifting solution the couch potato in us all. I want to record television and watch at my leisure, but most of the companies are still scrambling to match up to SnapStream, Media Center, and Tivo. Two bright spots exist in this space, although they only indirectly tie into the time-shift process. Tivo partnered with Microsoft to make recorded content portable from Tivo boxes to various Windows devices which is a much needed step. Orb goes further giving you access to any media content on your home PC anywhere on the planet using cell phones, PDAs, or laptops. You can even push images and audio back to your home PC.

At the end of the show, my favorite gadget remains the Edirol R-1 I brought with me. Using the recorder in combination with a Sennheiser e835 handheld microphone to interview companies at CES proved to be a great attention getter. I often had people ignoring the current booth in favor of checking out the R-1. It's already the best money I spent in 2004. Note to Edirol: You should get a booth at CES next year, consumers like your products. As part of the process to test the unit out, I talked a little about the R-1 feature set in a test recording using the on board microphones. After a few settings tweaks later recordings got much better. A better example might be this outtake on the difference between DLP and plasma screens as explained by a rep from Texas Instruments. You can catch the show live again on Thursday 13 January 2005 at 7pm Pacific.

I'm officially indoctrinated into CES 2005 after a trip to last night's Digital Experience press event. So far, I haven't seen anything revolutionary but several companies are offering interesting evolutionary improvements to previous product offerings. For instance, you'll want to check out online comparison shopping tool Shopzilla the next time you are in the market for almost anything. I'm already finding the search to be faster than Pricegrabber and CNET Shopper with a larger catalog of products. The search includes over 50,000 stores. The real kicker for me is it actually finds what I'm looking for even when I misspell the product name. For a quick comparison of the three services, check out my search for the Edirol R-1 on all three services:

Shopper search for Edirol R-1
Pricegrabber search for Edirol R-1
Shopzilla search for Edirol R-1

Digital cameras offer more megapixels from several camera makers along with the usual worthless feature enhancements like more digital zoom. The company with the most interesting camera innovation is Pentax. All the other camera makers offered a large spread of their entire product line, including some older models. Pentax attracted my attention with their OptioWP positioned squarely under a fountain of running water. The point being that the camera could be submersed and still function. I didn't get a great answer from any of the marketers manning the booth about how this actually works, but they assured me it does, in spite of obvious potential leak spots like a microphone and the opening for the card slot. I gave a demo model a quick test out of water and the 5 megapixel point-and-shoot looks to provide some nice shots on dry land too. A demo unit should be on the way so I can see what kind of pictures the camera takes when submersed. Even if you don't dive this might be a safe alternative for snapping pictures of the kids during a rainy soccer game or if you live in the Pacific Northwest.

Tivo fanatics may be happy to learn the company teamed up with Microsoft to provide mobile versions of the recorded shows. I haven't seen the service in action yet, but apparently the service will make transferring programming from your Tivo to a laptop possible, which is great for anyone who travels and wants to catch up on TV shows from the cramped confines of coach.

The radio show debuts in a matter of hours. Tune in live between 11:30am and 2:00pm Pacific Time to hear live interviews with Microsoft, Limelight Networks, Doc Searls, Sun, in addition to numerous other companies. Sun may be of particular interest because we are expecting to see a preview of the Java Desktop. If you don't catch the show today, we're on air again tomorrow, January 7, from 11:30am to 2:00pm. If you don't catch the live broadcast, archived versions will also be available for later listening.

Several people encouraged me to make predictions for what I think will happen in 2005. I'm wrong on a regular basis without providing a hit list of maybes for the coming year. Instead I'm providing three top five lists of things featured here throughout 2004. These are my personal top fives. I'm sure some of you will disagree. You can always share your favorites in the forums. I created entries to post favorite freeware apps, favorite gadgets, and favorite games; feel free to add other favorites as you see fit.

I look forward to hearing from you in the coming year. Next week I'll be broadcasting live at CES, and posting audio updates to the RSS feed on the site. Stay tuned...

Happy New Year!

Sometime in 2005, all of downtown Seattle will be connected via a wireless network from Speakeasy. Presumably other major cities will not be far behind. This isn't free wireless, like the kind $3 latte kind you get at one of the coffee shops around the city. This will be wireless you subscribe to and pay for. The service purports to simultaneously support voice over IP and data according to the press release. Big deal - there are plenty of places you can get wireless access for free. Most people already have Web access at home and at work. Cell phones fill in the gap providing voice connections when we aren't connected to the Internet.

To me, the big deal is the services a true citywide wireless service might support, assuming the government doesn't get in the way and make services impossible. Community radio stations, traditionally limited to 100W broadcasts from frequencies at the edge of the broadcast spectrum, subject to signal drop out when you go over a hill will have a new outlet for spreading their message - wireless. Unlike wireless at a coffee shop, which drops out of range when you get too far from the building, a connected city means a wireless connection doesn't drop, at least in theory. Want to know which local bands are playing at your favorite club - tune in to their online radio station and listen. Of course, you aren't limited by local content; you could listen to any of thousands of online radio stations as if they are local to your city too.

Drive time before and after work, a vital part of traditional radio listening, can be replaced with stations of your choosing by adding wireless Internet to your car for a few dollars. Yes, you can already do this by playing your own CDs, but think about having all 700 million songs in the Napster library available to your car, along with the thousands of Internet radio stations. We'll need better interfaces in the car to deal with these new networks, of course. Car manufacturers still haven't caught on to the idea of true integration between car stereo and portable music player, so it will probably be geeks coming up with an aftermarket solution.

And that doesn't even account for the video possibilities. Cable access doesn't over much beyond yoga classes and fringe religious broadcasts, so there may be no hope for local video broadcasts via the Internet. Instead of tuning into cable or satellite, some industrious locals could take over the local news beat, go on location with a video camera and immediately upload a live video stream to the Web, just like the pros do with satellite technology. Podcasting may be getting all the hype as the grassroots tool for the future media, but the killer app for grass roots media remains wireless.

I wound up with one of those radio-controlled UFOs earlier this summer, long before they became the rage on television advertising and appearing on Internet sites of all types. As silly as they look, they are actually quite fun. The hover concept isn't exactly complex, but when you get board, you could always gut it for parts to make your own robot. Good entertainment for pets or kids as long as you are careful (dogs might be inclined to chomp on the Styrofoam). If someone on your gift buying list is impossible to shop for, the UFO may seem like a silly option, but it managed to keep this geek entertained on more than one occasion.

While unpacking my boxes from the move, I ran across a copy of DVD Workshop Express that no one claimed when it was originally offered back in September. I really need to clean out my office, so it's got to go. Make a post in the forums before Monday December 20 and I'll draw your username at random from the list. DVD Workshop Express is a DVD authoring program with many pro level features for creating motion menus, titles, buttons, and all the stuff you might expect to see on a Hollywood DVD. If you're looking for a cool way to spruce up your home movies or make a professional looking slideshow, this $299 retail app just might be the solution you were looking for. 5 more copies of Easy Digital Home Movies will be given away at the end of the month to forum posters as well. If you'd like a shot at an autographed copy, make a post in the forums and you just might be one of the lucky 5. This will be the last opportunity to get a free copy of Easy Digital Home Movies - I'm all out after giving away the 5 at month's end.

Someone must be trying to force me to eat my words on Tablet PCs. Not so long ago I declared the Tablet PC neat, but not for me. I haven't changed my stance (yet). In the meantime, I managed to win a Fujitsu Stylistic ST5010, which will make an awesome portable video screen, if I don't find a better use, and offers a more portable solution at under 4 pounds, than my Toshiba laptop, which is just over 8 pounds. Unlike the Gateway flip-screen model I tested several months ago, I already like the Stylistic form factor, which truly is a tablet, offering no built-in keyboard. Heat producing hardware inside the unit seems better distributed than the Gateway too; I don't feel like my arm is overheating as I tote it around. The price (for me) was certainly right, although I'd be more excited if they could find a way to drop the price to something more in line with low end laptops.

In going through the list of options for creating access to your music throughout the house, Linda Powell reminded me of an obvious one I overlooked: adding an FM transmitter to your portable player. Just connect an FM transmitter, like the Griffin iTrip or Belkin's TuneCast, and tune in via any radio within range. You can keep the portable player in your pocket, allowing you to instantly change the currently playing tracks. I'm not a huge fan of these tuners because they seem to have trouble with dead spots in transmission, but they represent one of the cheaper solutions available. Of course, this won't work for anyone in the UK, thanks to some stupid rules that are proposed to outlaw low-powered FM transmitters like the Griffin Technology iTrip.

For XP Media Center Edition enthusiasts, another choice is a Media Center Extender. The most affordable option is the version for Xbox consoles, which turn an Xbox into a Media Center Extender for about $65. The extender lets you browse music, movies, and photos, watch live TV (assuming you've got an extra tuner connected), and schedule recording of your favorite shows. There are standalone Media Center Extenders from Linksys and D-Link, but considering the combined price of a new Xbox and the extender is the same or less than the standalone units, might as well get a gaming console too. I've got one of the Xbox extenders sitting in a box waiting for me to finally unpack the Xbox so I can test it out (all the live demos I've seen show these as working extremely well).

And while we are on the subject of unopened boxes, what's on your Christmas wish list this year? In the Rob Fleming obsessed-with-categorization tradition of top five lists, here are the top five gadgets I'd like to see under the tree:

5. XM Radio with one year subscription. Preferably one that works both in the car and in the house (although the XM subscription for XP Media Center may render the indoor subscription unnecessary).
4. Beyerdynamic DT 290 headset microphone. I want hands free voice recording with a quality microphone. Several radio pros suggested the DT 290 is the best headset on the market.
3. Panasonic PV-GS400 3CCD Digital Video Camera. This may be the best consumer grade camera on the market. 1/4-inch CCDs and a reasonably lens make this DV cam perform well in low light and broad daylight. I did a comparison with last year's model of the PV-GS120, which has 1/6-inch CCDs and a much smaller lens. It still outperforms 1CCD cameras, but doesn't offer quite as much color in low light.
2. Edirol R-1 portable audio recorder. I've had one on pre-order, so here's hoping it makes it by Christmas.
1. 40-46 inch HDTV. Sure, a bigger screen would be cool, but I'd need a bigger viewing space to go with it. Considering the rule of thumb that you need 2.5 inches of distance for every inch of diagonal size, a 40-inch screen puts the couch 8 feet 4 inches away, with 46-inch diagonal putting me 9-feet 7-inches back. The room is 12 feet wide. With the 24-inch thick TV on one wall and about 12 inches of couch thickness between the wall and your back, at most there's only 9 feet to work with, under ideal conditions.

Ultimately, I'd settle for a new couch to put in front of the old TV, but this is a wish list. Do you have a gadget or two you're longing to add to your personal collection? Add it to the wish list in the forums.

As of Friday, I'll be a Comcast cable Internet customer. PMC Movies, the free portable movie download site, is eagerly waiting the arrival of the connection, so I can add more titles to the database. The latest batch of material on the site includes several Bela Lugosi titles, some Roger Corman classics that predate his name being slapped on every low budget film disaster ever released, and the infamous Reefer Madness. The total number of movies live on the site now tops 30, with another 15 waiting for my home Internet connection to do a batch upload.

We are continuing to make little updates all over the sites associated with MediaBlab. Our new logo, which initially appeared in the newsletter from Monday, was created by Jono at Foood's Icons. Steve over at TweakXP turned me on to the Foood Icons and I'm finding them a welcome addition to my desktop. If you've never checked out his amazing collection of icon replacements for Windows XP, take a look. He's got alternatives for applications, folders, system items, file types, and just about anything else you could possibly want. For personal use, the icons cost nothing. Download and enjoy.

Top Drawer Downloads is getting a massive overhaul. I initially launched the site as sort of an ugly step sister to the newsletter, a place to find some of the downloads I mention in the newsletter without the overwhelming presence of ads on many of the other download sites. Paul is helping me clean the site up, add better information, and ultimately give it a cosmetic overhaul to make the site infinitely more useful. The software listed on Top Drawer is a blend of both shareware and freeware, with prices noted where appropriate.

And of course, the forums continue to offer an outlet to get free stuff. It's like having Christmas 12 months a year whether you celebrate it or not. The latest winners include forum members jbyers2, dbuth, sorahl, Billl, and xanarchyx. Each of them receives a free copy of Easy Digital Home Movies and 10 free songs from MSN Music. I'm giving away 5 more copies of Easy Digital Home Movies in December too. To have a shot at getting a copy, just make a post in the forums between now and the end of the month.

We survived the move from Des Moines to Seattle, although there was a period of about 90 minutes in Wyoming where I was almost positive the side-to-side swaying of the rental truck (caused by high winds) was going to result in the truck laying on the side of the road. This is definitely not the time of year to pay a visit to the Cowboy State. The high-winds were a follow up to a night in the North Platte Super 8, which is one of two hotels in that lovely town with WiFi. I'm certainly spoiled by the pervasive wireless Internet access at coffee shops and cafes across Seattle.

Things have definitely changed since my previous cross country drive back in 2001. At the time, asking a hotel desk clerk about WiFi meant either a blank stare or a comment about why I might need it. Now if I ask about Internet access, the desk clerks respond with something along the lines of, 'we don't have high speed Internet, but we have free wireless.' Uh, what exactly is the difference, from a guest's perspective? While you may be thinking, why not unplug for a few days, I'm put in the position of taking an unpaid vacation when I don't check in for a few hours everyday.

Since I don't have Internet access at home just yet, I'm currently writing this from a coffee shop in Seattle called University Zoka, which stays open until Midnight seven days a week. It's just over a mile and a half from our new house, which is in the district known as Ravenna. A few doors down from the coffee shop is world headquarters for The Omni Group, makers of several OS X apps. Rumor has it that a killer cataloging app for personal media, Delicious Library, was birthed in this coffee shop too.

Back in 2001 when 300GB hard drives were first becoming available to consumers (albeit at steep prices) I suggested that the average home user would likely never need any more storage space than that. 300GB hard drives have dropped dramatically in price, with recent holiday offers putting them under the $200 mark (I picked up another 200GB drive for $89 at a 48-hour sale). At the time I caught a ton of flack suggesting my statement was akin to the mythical Bill Gates quote about never needing more than 640k.

Over 3 years later, I'm continuing to stand by that assessment, at least for the foreseeable future. I personally have over 1,000GB of data stored on multiple hard drives, but most of that is video that would be considered commercial in nature. Looking at my personal digital video and audio collection, I'm probably still far from normal and yet I've got room to spare within the 300GB. My 500 CDs worth of music, all recorded at better than the average file sizes quoted by MP3 vendors consumes a mere 15GB of space. I can record numerous TV programs on my Media Center PC, and yet, looking at my video space consumption, I've still got over 150GB of free space, relative to what I'm using for my entertainment needs. When will I run out? Hard to say, since I tend to burn shows I want to keep on DVD and delete the ones I'm certain I never want to see again.

Am I abnormal in my consumer behaviors? Probably. How many other people actually use 4 different portable media devices every week? Am I unusual in my pattern of burning shows I want to keep, thereby never hitting the invisible 300GB ceiling (which by the way, I don't consciously avoid)? How much hard drive space do you currently use at home for movies and video? Let me know in this week's poll.

I'm surrounded by stacks of boxes filled with all the stuff we don't use on a regular basis. The everyday stuff is soon to join the cardboard mountain destined for the back of a truck bound for Seattle. I hate moving. Didn't like doing it when it was across town, dislike it just as much when it's 1800 miles across the country. The one redeeming factor in having to box up all of our worldly belongings is the opportunity to evaluate each item and determine it's relative usefulness. The stuff we don't need is destined for the dump or recycling via donation or ebay. Unfortunately, I think some of the ebay pile may need to wait until I move, because I'm running out of time to get it shipped. Top of the list of items that need to go are my Canon ZR70 camcorder, which is a decent 1CCD model that doesn't see much action ever since I bought the 2003 version of the 3CCD Panasonic PV-GS120. The other major ebay item is an HP 4155 Pocket PC, complete with the thumb keyboard attachment and a Javo edge retractable USB cable (which doubles as a charger)

Some of the stuff I need to clear out can be yours for free. I've got 5 copies of my book, Easy Digital Home Movies, each bundled with 10 free downloads from MSN Music, to 5 random people who make a post in the MediaBlab forums between today and November 30. Paul doesn't know it yet, but he will be happy to ship those to you. I'll even autograph the book for you (unless you would prefer I didn't).

In addition to the physical house keeping I'm doing, I'm also making some online improvements. PMC Movies has about 20 more free downloads available. Some are currently live as you read this. All 20 will be available by Friday 26 November at the very latest. I also did away with BitTorrent as the download solution. It's a great idea in theory, and works extremely well for content that is in high demand (like pirated TV shows and Linux distributions), but over the long term, it is still a half-baked solution. The other new feature at PMC Movies is the option to order portable movies on DVD. People without broadband connections have complained that downloading 300MB video files is impossible. I agree, so we are now shipping bundles of the movies on data DVDs to eliminate the download headache. Each DVD will contain a minimum of 10 movies for $15. Some titles, like the Wil Wheaton speech, are excluded from the DVD distribution due to licensing restrictions. Some portion of the revenue generated will be donated to the Internet Archive to help assist their project of getting public domain content out on the Web.

As of Saturday, Novemeber 20, I'm officially on my way to losing any claim to the title Iowa Geek. Robin and I signed our names to a lease agreement for a house in Ravenna, which is just north of the University district. The particular street we are moving to has tons of kids, which will be good for Wyatt. There are parks nearby and plenty of shopping within walking distance, which is something it was particularly hard to find in the Des Moines area. I like suburbia, but driving everywhere gets old, especially when you work from home and don't have many occasions to get out and enjoy the winter cold or the summer humidity. I'm personally looking forward to teh proximity to numerous indie films and live bands around the college campus 2 miles south.

Why the move to Seattle? Obviously not for the sunshine (winters in Iowa aren't much better). Technology is the primary big factor. I'm part of a tech call-in radio show set for re-launch on 5 January 2005 and rather than traveling all the time to where a large group of techies is located, it's easier to join the crowd. Besides the flying Windows hovering in the clouds on the east side of Lake Washington, there are literally hundreds of smaller tech companies here, along with plenty of people who truly enjoy technology, which is something very difficult to find in Iowa.

As part of my continuing saga with laptop performance, I'm building a checklist of features to look for to help people make the right decision when they get to the store. The checklist will be made available for free to anyone who wants to use it, in an effort to prevent the more subtle buying mistakes that aren't caught when reading the features on the product information. There are several things I like better about the HP laptop I'm using, when compared to the Toshiba that's still in the shop. There are also many features I wish I would have looked for, but never occurred to me until after the purchase was made. One of the things I really like about the HP is proper keyboard placement of the Windows key, which facilitates using numerous shortcuts. The Toshiba layout puts the Windows key up in the right corner of the keyboard, which makes it useless for one-handing most shortcuts. If your laptop is lacking any features you failed to notice at the time of purchase or if there are any great features you never thought to look for, please share them with the rest of us, so we can all make better decisions the next time around.

The feedback I'm getting from many of you is that IBM is making the most durable, consistently reliable laptops on the market, with Sony Vaio following close behind. Buzz is particularly vocal about his fabulous experience with IBM laptops. A few people still tout Dell as a solid solution, but Randy's experience has me steering clear. Randy's story isn't the first time I've heard had things about Dell's customer service, although it looks like Dell ultimately tried to make things right. I'm stuck with this HP for the moment, because I needed it for my trip. With any luck, the Toshiba will be waiting for me when I get back - I really like the Toshiba; it's too bad the hard drive is so flaky. The HP is holding up well, despite a maximum resolution of 1024x768 and the lack of a FireWire port. I'm getting by just fine on a temporary basis. I've even done some video crunching while I'm on the road and it's been invaluable in assisting our search for housing in Seattle.

My earlier post about the Creative Zen Micro completely overlooked one of the best features of the device - it supports Outlook synchronization. One of the most touted features of the iPod product line is the ability to store vCard contact info, calendar data, and to do list information. To the best of my knowledge, the Zen Micro is the first non-iPod device to offer similar support (for Outlook users only). I'm learning that the software installer that comes with the Zen Micro isn't the greatest, but once you get past the install, the Zen Micro UI is one of the more elegant options available. I honestly don't care whether you buy one or not, but it's now tied with the Rio Carbon as my favorite 5GB portable device. The Carbon wins on overall elegance, but the Zen Micro is jam-packed with excellent features and delivers a slightly better music navigation experience. Both devices offer an impressive battery life, when compared to the iPod mini.

I'm no longer convinced that LCD, DLP, and plasma are the best options for great home theater viewing. Thin rear-projection CRT units are giving the entire big screen category a run for their money. Toshiba recently produced the 46-inch 46H84 rear projection HDTV ready television at a retail price of $1400 or less. I've seen it in use in a home theater setting here in Seattle and the picture quality is absolutely amazing. The entire box is a mere 22 inches deep. Rear-projection still weighs a back-breaking 143lbs, but the image quality can't be differentiated from LCD, DLP, and plasma units of similar size. Maybe someone with some test equipment could find flaw in the CRT product, but the brightness, contrast and image quality are in many cases better than comparably sized models in other formats. A comparable 46-inch LCD is $5700 or more. DLP at 46-inches is $2000. And plasma is at least $2700 for a model I couldn't even recommend. I'm skeptical of the way any TV screen looks in the retail store, because the lights always alter the view experience.

The gods of portable computing must be angry with me. My Toshiba laptop decided to reprise its role as runner-up for flaky PC of the year on October 27 by replicating many of the same symptoms leading up to the previous drive failure. I also pointed out a quirk in the CD drive that mysteriously appeared following the previous visit to the Best Buy repair center. Two weeks later, still no solution and I leave for Redmond in under 24 hours. My hard drive crash at the beginning of September is rapidly becoming a footnote in a greater disappointment with quality control, customer service, and the entire PC laptop industry.

I cannot be without a laptop for the eight days I'm in Washington State from the 14th through the 21st. That would be the equivalent of an unpaid vacation. Off to the two retail options in Iowa to find an affordable substitute, which ultimately represents either the sixth or seventh laptop I've taken home from a store in the past eighteen months. My criteria are simple: built-in WiFi, P4 processor (preferably the mobile variety to avoid heat issues), 40GB disk space or more, and a price tag under $1200 including tax. I don't care about screen size. I don't care what the video card is. I just need something affordable to check email, work with a few Web forms, write some articles in Word, and possibly do minimal video or audio editing in a pinch.

I stopped in Best Buy to make sure they hadn't received the Toshiba and just failed to call me, which is what happened last time. No luck, which means I'm forced to shop. In asking when I might expect my laptop back, the Geek Squad drone replied that he didn't know, only that it is a WIP (work in progress) as of November 3. I asked how long it took a Toshiba repair center to replace one Toshiba hard drive with another Toshiba hard drive, which resulted in the brilliant reply, "Toshiba doesn't make hard drives." I think it's time to take someone's white shirt and black tie away and send them back out to the floor with the blue polo flunkies; Toshiba is one of the top hard drive manufacturers in the world. His attempt at saving face when I pointed out the error of his misstatement, "I don't like laptops." I guess that's one excuse for not knowing the business you are in.

Browsing available options, the only laptop matching my criteria and price point was an eMachines unit. eMachines laptops have killer features, but a previous experience with one purchased in August 2003 has me steering clear of the brand. It got high marks from reviewers all over the Internet, but as is often the case with laptops, you don't really find the flaws until you own something for several months. In my case, the laptop started developing mysterious heat issues which caused the laptop to randomly shut down. This started in November 2003 and I finally took the laptop in for repair in January 2004. The techs confirmed my assessment that yes, heat was a serious problem with my particular unit. In a brief conversation at the Best Buy repair center yesterday, I met another individual with a similar eMachines horror story. The replacement eMachines unit I traded the original for had a bad wireless chip out of the box, which is how I ended up with the Toshiba.

After briefly entertaining the idea of getting a new iBook for $999, I ultimately went with a PC laptop. A Windows laptop can serve as a portable PC for Paul (who is a Mac user) once I get the Toshiba back, which is definitely useful when he needs to test stuff in a cross-platform environment. I ultimately settled on an HP zv5235us. The specs match my needs almost exactly. It's not widescreen like the Toshiba, but it will work. Including $66 in sales tax, the zv5235us is $34.01 under budget. I have an extra 256MB of DDR RAM at home to expand the memory. In theory, this will more than get me by until I get the Toshiba back.

A few seconds into the boot process, I notice a dead pixel in the bottom right half of the scr