Been a very busy week, live streaming keynotes and Teach Parallel interviews from the SuperComputing 09 conference (for my job/baby, Intel Software Network TV – see more at http://j.mp/ISNatSC09).

And Ignite Portland 7 is tonight! (I’m one of the founders.) Come out to the Bagdad theater or watch the livestream at http://www.igniteportland.com.

I’m going to take *such* a nap when this is all over.

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Just got the disc tonight, haven’t actually tried it out yet. It’s kind if lame that you have to insert the disc every time you want to stream something – as I understand it, it’s because they’re doing the streaming as a BD Live feature, which requires a Blu-Ray disc. A native Playstation 3 software app is supposed to be coming soon. Looking forward to that.

I’ll try it out, and let you know how it works. I can’t wait to teach my kids how to use this. We’ve been Netflix subscribers for years, but I only recently discovered the Watch Instantly streaming library. There are a *LOT* more movies and TV shows that I’d want to watch than I thought I’d find. Not a bad deal at all.

Now, if they’d just launch a Watch Instantly iPhone app…

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Hat tip to @verso on Twitter last night for pointing me to this idea (I’ll find the link and post it – want to give proper credit Here’s the original post I saw on iPhone Saviour).

It works great. Sits at a perfect angle. You’d have to cut out a little half circle to access the home button, and Matt and I were trying to figure out how to rig a dock cable, but that makes it a lot more complex.

If you have some DV tapes laying around, give it a try!

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TinyPodcast 2009-10-28.m4a (1249 KB)

I’m going to try these on a regular basis, as a way to share awesome stuff that I’ve found and want to recommend.

Today’s TinyPodcast recommendation is Cory Doctorow’s new book, Makers. Cory is my favorite scifi author, and the release of a new book from him feels like Christmas. The remarkable thing about Cory is how and why he releases his books electronically for free under Creative Commons, and what that does for his sales and popularity. He always includes a great essay on the topic at the beginning of each ebook, so don’t skip that part when you download Makers from http://craphound.com/makers.

Let me know what you think of these little podcasts – I’d really like to keep doing them, and I think I’ve got a great flow down for putting them out. Thanks for listening!

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Testing Voice Memo + Posterous.m4a (1924 KB)

You’ll have to listen to this one, but if you’re interested in using the iPhone to create and post short audio bits, and integrating them really well with your online workflow, then you and I share a common goal. Have a listen, and see what I’ve learned about Cinch, AudioBoo, TweetMic, and just plain recording a Voice Memo and emailing it to Posterous. And let me know what *you* use or recommend!

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I remember seeing the first iPhone book on the shelf a couple of year ago. Now there are tons of them.

The weird thing is, I’m no more than mildly interested in any of them. The lead times and lacks of ability to be updated make dead tree books a weird choice (for me) for information about a platform as dynamic and connected as the iPhone.

(this photo and post were created wholly on my iPhone – a few phots stiched together with Autostitch, then tweaked a little with Photoshop Mobile, and posted via email using Posterous, all while lounging in a chair at the Powell’s bookstore in question.

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If you aren’t familiar with it, Tweetie 2 is a state of the art iPhone Twitter client written by Loren Brichter (@atebits on Twitter). I’m a huge fan. It supports a wide range of photo services, like Twitpic and yfrog, but it also allows for use of a custom upload service, documented here: http://developer.atebits.com/tweetie-iphone/custom-image/.

I attach photos to my tweets all the time, and I’ve been using twitpic, but Flickr is my home for photos online, and it’s really bugged me to have to put photos in another service, when I’d really just like to keep them all in Flickr.

What I’d *love* to see is an API upload endpoint (as documented at http://developer.atebits.com/tweetie-iphone/custom-image/) that would allow users to upload a photo directly from a Twitter client like Tweetie 2 to Flickr, which then returned a flic.kr short URL for the photo (like when you tweet an existing photo from Flickr).

If such a thing existed, my online photosharing life would be *vastly* improved, the intertubes would achieve a greater state of harmony, and I’m sure a ton of people would be happier.

I realize it’s not a super simple thing to enable (authentication would seem to be the biggest hurdle, but something like OAuth should help), but it would be *awesome*. There are already third party services that are allowing this. http://gdzl.la is one I tested just this morning – it works, but I’d rather have a flic.kr short URL, not theirs, in my tweets. Call it Flickr Pride. And I’d also rather not share my Twitter login with a 3rd party service, which is just bad security practice.

So, what do you think? I’m a lousy coder, or I’d try to do this myself. Who wants to score the appreciation and adoration of the people at the intersection of Flickr and Twitter, and build this amazingly great service?

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The coolest thing I’ve seen in Layar in my first few minutes of playing with it is the number of data layers you can overlay on your reality – Wikipedia, Panoramio, Flickr, Brightkite (which returned no data for me) and a whole lot more.

I’ll need more time to play with it, but so far, Layar is the augmented reality iPhone app to beat. And best if all, it’s free.

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Back in the day, I loaded the entire text contents of Wikipedia (which at the time could fit in a 1GB SQL dump file on an SD card) into HanDBase on my old iPAQ Pocket PC, just so I could walk around and say that I had the entire contents of Wikipedia in my pocket. That pickup line didn’t work then, and I doubt it will work now.

Today, I already have one of these. It’s called my iPhone. If I’m somewhere I don’t have connectivity, I have bigger problems than not being able to get to Wikipedia. I need connectivity like I need air!

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There’s a warning that your browser isn’t supported, but you can “try it at your own peril”. The mobile version renders fine. I could see Frederic typing in real time, exactly the same as the desktop browser (I held them side by side). And I could only see the Google Map after he was done with it (not in real time).

It has some quirks. Typing doesn’t appear instantly to other participants (and I had some trouble getting it to le me type at all at first). The popup menu to reply, edit, etc. appears way at the top of the page, so you have to scroll all the way up to it, then back down to where you were. You can definitely tell why they’re not officially supporting it yet, but the potential is obvious, and it’s clear that modern mobile browsers like Mobile Safari and Android’s version of Chrome were part of the plan from the beginning.

This isn’t meant to be any kind of formal review, just some impressions after my first 20 minutes playing with Wave. There’s *SO* much here I need to learn – robots, gadgets, plugins, keyboard shortcuts, etc. Bit I’m stoked to have such a rich, exciting new technology to to wrap my head around.

Oh, and I don’t have the magical ability to grant you an invite to get in. Sorry! From what I understand, invites shoul be going out soon, so hang in there.

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