The show seems a lot like something you’d see on TV (or you would if NZ TV had any tech shows). I don’t enjoy watching those, so it’s not that surprising that I don’t like this (actually, I don’t think I watch any non-fiction on TV at all). The biggest problem probably is that it seems like it’s aimed at people reasonably unfamiliar with technology. So overall, if you do like watching TV tech shows, and you’re not all that tech-savvy, I think this would be a good show to watch.
Problems that I had with it:
It’s way, way, too long. It’s two to three times the length of CommandN, which I find too long. I just don’t have that much eye-time available.
I don’t know if it’s a deliberate style choice, or poor editing, or lack of practice, or something else, but seeing Patrick/Veronica change from looking at one camera to another is really irritating. I would much prefer either a single angle or an edit that changed angle but always had the host looking in the right direction.
Q&A style shows don’t interest me much, and it does seem to mostly be Q&A (I did only watch five of the full shows).
The quality of the shows on the iTunes feed is terrible. I’ve subscribed to the HD feed for the short shows, and that’s fine. I can see that there would be reasons to make the default a low-quality one, but it does give a bad impression first up (especially if you don’t realise that there are other options).
As above, the expected audience seems to be people much less familiar with how technology works than I am. Obviously this isn’t a problem with the show, it’s just a poor match for me.
I don’t mind commercials, but the ones they have seem extremely US-centric (do people in the US really not wear seatbelts? We learnt to “make it click” like 20 years ago!), which is annoying.
That said, I think the hosts are both good (and I do think Veronica is better here than on Mahalo Daily, although I think she’s better still when she guests on TWiT), and the intro & outro are good also (catchy music, short, reasonable graphics). The daily tips are also pretty good – most are things I already know or aren’t interested in, but they are short enough and well-done enough that I’ll watch 20 of them to get a single useful tip.
I listen to a lot of different podcasts, but watch very few (I have a lot of ear-time free, but not much eye-time).
Apple’s Quick Tip of the Week is extremely short and although I know the majority of the tips already, I can spare a minute to possibly learn something new (I don’t know why they target it at business users).
I have watched CommandN much longer than any other. It borders on being too long for my taste, and is often more mediocre than great, but it’s good enough to continue with for now (and the last couple of episodes have had much better video quality). I would drop this first.
I love Geekbrief.TV. Great host, great length, good content. I would drop this last.
MacBreak (video): The video quality is great, but the intros are really far too long. There needs to be more content than intro+outro! The really short shows that cover events are often the best. Many of the hosts are not that great – sticking with Alex and a couple of others would work fine.
Mahalo Daily: I’ve never really understood the attraction people have for Veronica Belmont. Maybe you have to be familiar with her from previous work (which I’m not) or something. The first 100 shows were a mixed bag – some good, some awful – but they were at least the right length and well produced.
The astonishing thing about Mahalo Daily is that their search for a new (co)host has produced more compelling viewing than the show itself previously was. I’m not a fan of [Country] Idol, The Bachelor, etc, but Mahalo Vlog Idol (not a great name) has been funny, entertaining, and even informative. I don’t care how long they stretch it out for (and it has been a while already!) – it’s good watching.
One of the baffling things about the contest has been the judges’ picks – my suspicion is that there are elements of the contestants that don’t show up well on camera, and the judges have so far been judging more on the live aspects of the contestants than solely watching what we the audience see. A couple of people got through that really just seemed very low quality.
The first round ([Country] Idol style), and second round (“The Batchelon”) were solely judged (as far as we know) by Jason, Alex, and Loren (who is he?). For the third round, where each contestant created their own Mahalo Daily episode, the audience has been asked to offer their opinion about how everyone did (although this clearly won’t be binding). Perhaps with the last round, there will be real voting?
FWIW, my opinions are (ranked best to worse – and you should subscribe to the show, rather than watch these crap Youtube quality versions):
Nadine would be a perfect choice for next host. She has a great look, distinct from Veronica, but still in the “Mahalo” style. She’s exceptionally attractive, and produced a great episode. Like Leah, there’s a variety of people interviewed, which helps make a more interesting episode, and there are really good popups. There were a couple of weak spots in the middle, but they didn’t detract from the episode, and generally the interviewing was good. She feels like she brings in a style already; more so than the others.
I vacillated between Leah and Nadine as #1 – they’re really equally as good. All I could come up with as a deciding factor was that Nadine is slightly ‘hotter’ than Leah (although both easily ‘hot’ enough). The episode felt a little ‘infomercialish’, but was generally good. Well produced, with good popups, but the voice-over felt stilted and ‘read’, rather than natural.
I think the next round should have three contestants, and so Andrea should go through. I really liked this, and she’s a good host, but the environment made it hard to really tell what she would be like in other sorts of episodes. A brave topic choice, and she’s certainly ‘hot’ enough to be the host (the criteria being ‘hotter than Veronica’, I guess!). Great rapport with the interviewee, good ‘popups’, but the questions weren’t that interesting. I’d definitely continue to watch daily with Andrea as host.
I wouldn’t be disappointed if Michelle got through to the next round, but I do think her episode wasn’t quite as good as those above. The hair-flick is annoying, the laugh is a little annoying, and the enthusiasm seemed almost fake. On the other hand, it was very well produced.
I would like to like Kristina more – there’s something appealing about her – but I just can’t rank this higher. An interesting topic, and interesting content, but the episode just didn’t ‘pop’. Her interviewing skills aren’t really up to scratch. I’d consider watching her in some other show, but she doesn’t fit Mahalo Daily, IMO.
Easily the worst. The comments talk a lot about “energy” (meaningless drivel, really). There are three problems: (1) the interviewing skills are terrible (evident in the over-editing, if nowhere else), (2) the facial expressions are off-putting, and (3) frankly, she just isn’t ‘hot’ enough – realistically, the show needs an extremely attractive host (especially if co-hosting with Lon) and while Sarah is pretty, she’s not that hot. Picking a “suck-up” topic doesn’t help.
When iTunes 7 was released, it was packaged with Apple’s software update program for Windows (looking vaguely like software update for OS X). It seemed like this meant that we could finally stop downloading a complete QuickTime + iTunes install each time there was a tiny update to iTunes.
However, iTunes 7.0.1 is out, and while iTunes can find it, Software Update can’t. So what is this application for?
On Tuesday, I was cleaning up and somehow managed to delete a fairly important folder, containing grades & teaching material that I had been working on a lot over the last month (so while some of it was backed up, it certainly wasn’t all safe).
This happened around the same time that I watched the WWDC Keynote, so I’m pretty sure that it was a jinx from those folks at Apple. I blame them entirely for the hours that I lost searching through my hard drive (positive that I had simply moved it by mistake), running disk utility (positive that it vanished through some sort of corruption with one of my recent crashes), and then finally running various undelete utilities and wading through the couple of GB that I’d deleted that day trying to find it (coming to terms with the realisation that it was actually me). (Active Undelete eventually recovered it for me).
I for one, welcome the all-knowing Time Machine that will come with Leopard (and the similar thing that Vista will have). As long as I can affordably give it enough space for the backups, this utility is something that is well overdue. If only I had them this week. I assume that this will be enabled on a per-disk basis, so those of you with things to hide can just disable it, or put sensitive information on a separate storage device, or just snap your live CD when the Feds come in.
(This problem did occur on my Windows laptop, but hopefully it’ll be an Apple laptop once Leopard is out).
Podcasting’s first professionally-produced original drama series, SHADOW FALLS tells the eerie tale of a remote Northeastern town that holds secrets some will kill to protect and others will die to expose.
“Shadow Falls” has been getting a lot of hype on the DSC recently (to be expected, since Adam Curry was involved in production), but it’s weird how both Adam and listeners are describing this as something new.
Podiobooks.com has been serving up serialised fiction via podcasts for some time now (they have a great range – check them out), not to mention Escape Pod‘s short fiction (or more radio-show-style podcasts like The Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd). Scott Sigler is on (finished? I’m a bit behind) his third original podcast novel, which is hosted by PodShow. In fact, I remember Adam mentioning Infection on the DSC (not just playing a promo, but raving about it).
It’s nice to have another story, but that’s all it is.
I’m not all that convinced about the “first professionally-produced” claim, either. What does “professionally-produced” mean? That it was done in a professional manner? That someone was paid to do it? Seems like Scott Sigler’s podcasts are professionally produced, as are some of the podiobooks.com ones. In fact, podiobooks.com offer a service where they produce the podiobook for the author. If that’s not “professionally-produced”, I don’t know what is.
I’d put a comment about this on the DSC or “Shadow Falls” pages, but you have to log in to PodShow Plus to do that, and I can’t.
PodShow Plus sounded interesting, and I listen to quite a few PodShow podcasts (probably 90% of the podcasts I listen to come from PodShow, Farpoint Media, or the TWiT network), so a few days after the opening, I created a (listener) account (tonyandrewmeyer), and created a channel with a dozen or so of the shows I listen to (mostly the PodShow and TWiT ones). I’m not really sold on the idea of channelling all my shows through a single feed (I can’t check for new episodes of an individual podcast without a web browser, and it’s a single point of failure), but thought I’d see what all the fuss was about.
All seemed well at first. However, after a day or two, suspiciously few podcasts were coming through the channel feed. I checked, and, sure enough, the real feeds had episodes that the channel did not (strike one). (This bug has been mentioned on the DSC and is apparently fixed now).
I tried to log in to check the channel and see if I could fix the problem. However, I can’t login – it tells me that the details are wrong. The email address isn’t (or I wouldn’t have got the “welcome to podshow” email, which I did). I can’t see how the password could be wrong, but I suppose there’s a slim chance that I made the same typo twice in entering it (the password was blank in the “welcome” email – I have no idea if that is deliberate or not), so no strike for this, even though I’m 99% sure that it’s PodShow’s error and not mine. I used the “send me a new password” function (several times, now – so I have no idea what the password might be now), but have not received any such email.
Spam filters, you say? Nope, since I work on anti-spam software, I ensure that all filtering is off (apart from the gmail address, which isn’t the one I used). Anyway, the “welcome” email made it through, and I’ve grepped through all the received mail. Strike two.
Eventually giving up, I used their support contact function, explaining the problem (pretty clearly, in my opinion). That was about a week ago, and I have yet to hear anything at all (c.f. spam filters, above). Strike three (and this one is the worst).
So, while I still enjoy many PodShow podcasts, and I have no doubt that they’re trying to do something worthwhile, PodShow Plus isn’t something I’ll use or recommend. (For now, at least).
[Update (August 8th): three and a half weeks later, I got a reply to my support request. That’s just about as bad as not replying at all, in my opinion. Supposedly the problems I described have been fixed. However, I still can’t login. I’ve retried the “send me my password” link, but nothing has arrived yet.]
Weird. Seems that making your own soda (soft drink), which NZ’ers have done for years (I know SodaStream was around when I was a kid (say 20 years ago), but I don’t know about earlier than that), is just now hitting the US. Funny those things which are common for years in one country and then much later are a hit somewhere else.
A couple of scans ago, I wrote up my process for converting the VCDs we get from our ultrasounds into something that I can use in iMovie. We had our final scan today, and I finally got around to improving the process. I'm not sure that I'll need this again, but in case I do, here it is:
I used IsoBuster to convert the VCD data into an MPEG-2 (ignoring invalid data).I then used Ultra MPEG Converter to convert the extracted MPEG-2 to MPEG-1 (no resize, ensuring that the height and width are set as in the original (which is not the default)).
Quicktime is able to work with this file, and it's not overly large, but the scans have a border that I don't really want (textual information that isn't relevant, and isn't legible at low resolutions). iMovie doesn't have the ability (as far as I know) to crop an image, so I needed to do this with something else. I found an Open Source tool, VirtualDub, that handled this. I simply opened the file, turned off the audio track (since it didn't contain anything anyway), trimmed off the end of the file (I could have done that in iMovie, but doing it now saves processing that part), and did the crop.
To do the crop, I applied a "null transform" filter (a filter is necessary to crop, but I didn't actually want to apply a filter) and then cropped appropriately. I saved the file as an AVI compressed with the Cinepak codec.
I stumbled on a feature of WindowsXP (and earlier versions, for all I know) that I wasn’t aware of today: dragging a folder to the edge of the screen creates a toolbar containing that folder’s contents on that side of the screen.
I have no idea if I would ever use it, but it’s interesting to see 🙂
When my wife has an ultrasound to check that our baby is still going well, we get a copy of the imaging that the radiologist sees, which is nice (this is pretty standard, I believe). However, what we get is an SVCD. This plays fine on our DVD player (I’m not sure about the PS2), and when it’s put in a Windows machine, there’s a data track that has a player.
However, I really want this data as a video file on the mac. Going straight from the disk, nothing seemed to want to read it (which surprises me somewhat; perhaps I’m just missing how to do it).
The first scan (03/02/06) I managed to get the data out with a couple of different tools and ended up with an avi file that worked fine. However, that didn’t go so smoothly this time (17/02/06).
I then used Ultra MPEG Converter to convert the extracted MPEG (2?) to MPEG 1 (resize, preserving aspect ratio), which Quicktime (and therefore iMovie) was able to work with.
Possibly I’ll figure out a better way to do this next time (about 7 weeks away), but in case I don’t, at least I’ll be able to remember what I did this time 🙂
TonyAndrewMeyer 