The Plex media platform appears to be an evolving "standard" for running a media server on any PC or NAS device. You can configure Plex server to serve up and collect/manage media from variety of sources and formats. You then can use Plex clients to stream and view content in your home and on the Internet. Again, you are making your own media cloud. It looks like plex clients are available on LG TVs, Android, iPhone and even AppleTV with the Firecore atv Flash extension.
It turns out the the Plex team is adding support for the Plex Media Server to even run on a variety of NAS devices which usually run Linux. For now Synology Intel-based NAS devices are support in the Labs section. Unfortuantely most lower-end Synology NAS devices are ARM-based are not yet supported. The lowest end device supported costs close to to $600 WITHOUT hard drives.
Those chip enabled bank and credit cards are not secure. And our Canadian 2012 issued passports and US passports? Also unsecure. This is worse than before when you needed physical contact -- now you can read cards wirelessly. 16x9 reports.
This company offers sleeve protection. Identity Stronghold says that if banks admit and sell these sleeves, that they'd be admitting guilt. And right they are -- better get em while you can in US. In Canada you can get them here.
These tips for creating the perfect resume are awesome! Besides making a beautiful, easy to read and understand resume, these tips will reduce the size of your resume by 50% or more without leaving any content out. These guidelines reduced mine from 6 pages to just over 2 pages without leaving any experience out! Click on the image below to read the text.
Here's the first 20 minutes of the full hour documentary you may have missed. Click here to watch full documentary on the PBS website.
Watch Steve Jobs: One Last Thing on PBS.
Excel is a very powerful product from Microsoft that helps people around the world make budgets, create forecasts and evalaute financial information of all kinds. It's also a great text processor. It turns out that Excel has a few undocumented formulas that have been deprecated, but that still work in Excel 2010 for backwards compatibility. One of them is not a function at all, but rather a macro that can be evalauted from named ranges only (aka 'names') in Excel. This macro is called EVALUATE(). You must enable macros to use it. Click below to see a full description of how this can be used to dynamically create formulas.
EVALUATE() cannot be called in a cell like =EVALUATE(...), it can only used in a Refers To: part of a named range definition.EVALUATE() is the most strange Excel function in that it lets you take a string and literally make Excel evalaute the string and convert the string to an Excel Formula. The contents of a cell referring to the named range that calls EVALUATE(...) then spits out the result of this formula.
What does this give you? The ability to dynamically create Excel formulas using a variety of rules and then evaluate the resulting formulas in Excel. You can write a formula generator based on various rules, create the formula as a text string and then use the result in Excel. Click on the screen shot below to see the full explanation.
IMPORTANT NOTE: The =Result cell above DOES not recalculate if the underlying worksheet values (2001,2002,2003) change. It only recalculates when =Result is reentered or if the dynamic formula in Sheet1!A1 is changed or just reentered. Normal Excel recalcs do not affect this because EVALUATE() is not a regular Excel formula, but rather a macro call. And you must have macros enabled for this to work.
Bizarre huh?
Watch Steve Jobs response on the problem with TV. It's "balkanized", he says due to the fact that there are contractual and technical challenges to creating a superior TV experience, internationally. It's kind of curious that he's so bearish on TV whereas he was so bullish on music, when Apple essentially created a standard for digital music distribution and gave everyone a way to legally buy music one song at a time. Pretty much all music is on iTunes and you can consume music in just about any way you want. But that surely is not the case with TV or Movies right now.
So why can't TV be treated the same way? I think it can. And what I think Apple has to do is not simple, but obvious: Apple must partner, like it did with iPhone and AT&T for mobile. Apple must partner with a telco provider that provides broadband to a large part of the US. And then it must continue partnering with other telco providers around the world, providing a strong hardware+content distribution platform.
Why?
Because the large incumbent telcos have at least 2 lines of business -- TV and broadband. They sit on both sides of the fence. If you will, a modern ILEC (incumbent telco) is the equivalent of the record label in the music industry. They sell you cable TV, subsidize the set top boxes and also sell you broadband as a hedge against their cable/satellite revenue. The telco basically has a stranglehold on the delivery of TV to your home.
People have tried to liberate themselves of the telco for many years and folks like myself have finally done it for the most part: except one very important telco-provided connection: broadband Internet.
The thing is that when you "cut the cord" you cannot cut Internet, especially ultra hispeed 20+ Mbps Internet. When your Internet connection is reliable and fast, you get used to be able to do just about anything online. Streaming video is no brainer. You don't cut the cord really, you just take all your other cords and tie them to your ethernet and wifi connection, so to speak.
We've installed an OTA HD antenna, got An AppleTV jailbroken with Firecore's atv Flash and installed a NAS that does an amazing job of storing and streaming our digital content (music, photos and video). This solution set is as close as you can get to a replacement for anything the cable/satelitte TV guys give you. And the math looks like his:
For roughly a $1000 home improvement fee and about $80-100 per month in broadband you get the future of TV right now.
So, what should Apple do?
Partner with a national telco that provides broadband to a large swath of the US and make a new AppleTV that comes with a broadband Internet connection. Ensure that owners of that box have access to their local media ala Firecore/NAS approach (make it omnivorous, as others have stated). Continue partnering with telcos who do broadband really, really well. And partner on the content side to ensure all live and prerecorded media is available. Then make all movies rentable or buyable through iTunes as they have already started to do through the existing PPV options available through the telcos.
Once you do this, you essentially have your set top box that can be more than $100 (it could be close to $1000 from the math above). You need local storage done well with a NAS style solution. This is where Apple can make money like the always do -- on he hardware. And then the data plan for your home entertainment is like the phone plan for mobile. The telco wins as well, just like AT&T did. And the telco COULD subsidize the AppleTV solution just like they do with iPhones. Or not, it will depend on the customer possibly, but if the telco went all in they could get lots of new hi-speed broadband customers, fast.
The solution for Apple is morphing the iPhone technology (iOS) with the iTunes partnering (deals with distributors) for solving the TV dilemma. Apple will continue making hardware that is profitable and continue doing deals with telcos that provide the content as long telcos get more and more broadband customers.
I expect Apple will enter this field in 2012 in a big way. And I am not sure why they have to make a TV other than to show clean integration of the experience. Hopefully there will be a solution to retrofit existing TVs. I don't see why not.
The go to market strategy is right there, Apple. This is your way to avoid "jumping the shark" and pulling into yet another arena that you haven't been yet to continue to diversify the product lineup. It may take a few years just like it did with iTunes (5 years or so), but it is imminent and completely possible. I await eagerly.
Synology makes a few excellent presentations describing the DSM (the OS of the NAS enclosures) and the Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR). SHR allows you to maximize usage of various sized disks in a RAID array and includes data redundancy. 1 drive can fail and the RAID array continues to operate without fail.
DSM videos
Part 1
Part 2
Synology Hybrid Array webinar
A quick trip around the country of the United States of America.
I've been experimenting with a solution to back up all your media off your computers and onto a central place in the home. The main problem with media like movies, photos and music is that if they are available on a USB stick or a hard drive on a laptop or computer, then they are usually unavailable easily to any other device. If your home computing situation involves several laptops, an AppleTV or Boxee/Roku, an IPad or Android phone or tablet then you want to be able to share the media between them.
You also want to be able to backup your files and have them stored on a server somewhere hidden away in a closet, but you don't want to do too much to maintain it. It would be nice to have facility to allow streaming off the media to any other device. And hey how about ability to store home surveillance streams/pictures from your wireless IP cams? And a "download station" to download your favorite content while you sleep? Oh and yes, make it available to the Internet and run your own "private cloud" to access the content from anywhere!
Well you can build your own Network Attached Storage (NAS) device for a few hundred bucks or try out the Synology line of products. I got the DS111 device that supports just 1 drive, but Canada Computers has the new DS211j on sale for $159 after a $30 rebate. This is a terrific deal for a 2 bay device that pretty much does everything short of cook your breakfast.
The most amazing thing about this device is that after formatting your hard drive(s) it installs the latest version of what Synology calls DSM. The DSM is the operating system of your NAS and have no fear this is a full Linux kernel running a browser based operating system that allows you to install applications that extend the functionality of your NAS beyond what you get out of the box.Here is a screen shot of the DSM OS to give you an idea of how it works.
The list of applications is very impressive, although I have not tried them all. The sharing capability to setup a Windows or Mac (SMB or AFP) file server works really well. You can stream content to any device over your network. There is support for a DNLA UPnP server for Xbox360 and Playstation3. There is an FTP server, a Webserver, and even PHP supported to run your websites (!). The "download station" supports RSS feeds (use feedburner.com for the best compatibility) and can download your RSS feed contgent in the background as the RSS feed updates as per a user-configured update interval.
Finally, the new atv Flash (black) media player works really well with this NAS, which is the most important thing. There is a good discussion of preferred NAS devices at the firecore support forum. One thing I found is that my wifi router was acting up a lot, dropping connections. Once you have streaming setup from a NAS, your wifi router may start to hiccup more. To fix this, check the channel you have set for your router -- if you have lots of wifi hotspots in your area you will want to turn off "auto scan" on your router and select a channel not frequently used by default. I used channel 8, which seems to be working. Here is the screen shot from my DIR-655 router to indicate the setting. This is crucial for wifi success, because if you have a persnickety router dropping your connections your NAS will be sitting there useless because your clients won't be able to connect to it.
UPDATE: Note that any hard drives you put into a Synology NAS enclosure WILL BE REFORMATTED in ext4 format. That means you will have to load up your hard disks with backups of your files. You can use a USB key or an external hard drive attached to one of the USB ports on the outside of the NAS. There is a one-button copy feature that places all the files in the "public" folder, and then you can move the files using the DSM. The upload over the network feature out of DSM is slow and probably not the way you want to go if you plan to load up the NAS with 10-several hundred GB of files at the outset. This is the only part of the process that's not ideal. MAKE BACKUPS OF EXISTING FILES FIRST!
Firecore, a small company in Colorado, recently released v1.0 of the much awaited AppleTV solution, called atv Flash (black). This "hack" allows the black AppleTV (2nd generation) device to gain several important pieces of functionality. To start and give you an idea of what is now possible with the very affordable AppleTV check out this video from firecore.
Now that you've checked it out, here are some thoughts on strategy and where Apple ought to be going. At this rate, the hacking community will turn the AppleTV into the most amazing little piece of technology to hit the TV since the remote control. You can be sure of that.
Firecore has created something that is very unusual. By providing a "jailbreak" of the AppleTV they have enabled added functionality to be added to the AppleTV WITHOUT removing the existing functionality previously available. So by installing atv Flash (black) you get to keep the out of the box experience Apple provides AS WELL AS have additional functionality.
At every firmware OS release Apple provides (currently at 4.4.3) Firecore essentially enables you to upgrade to this OS and then keep the added functionality running along side new Apple featuers. This is unprecedented. It's as if Apple has gained a kick butt developer of functionality of new AppleTV features, all for less than $30 per year of support.
The features you get are not trivial -- along side simple added features like interactive weather and RSS feed reader you get a full featured Media Player that can play videos, music and pictures off ANY shared Windows or Apple hard drive or NAS. You get a fully HTML5 compliant web browser called Couch Surfer Pro, which of course does NOT run Flash or Silverlight. But it does support HTML5 embedded video and audio. There is zero chrome on this browser -- your TV bezel is the chrome on Couch Surfer Pro.
And you get a terrific implementation of Last.fm radio. The last.fm implementation looks like it was done by Apple -- it's that good. Apple-like touches live inside of the last.fm application in atv Flash (black). When a song is playing AppleTV goes into screen saver mode and shows beautiful pictures of the artist. Last.fm may make you dump your MP3 collection for good -- it's available for use in several countries but not the whole world.
atv Flash (black) is not for the technically challenged. It does require you to "jailbreak" your AppleTV which means support from Apple is effectively gone. You will also need to apply updates should you want to update your firmware, because automatic software updates from Apple are effectively turned off. Firmware updates will have to be done using the "jailbreak" software each and every time.
Lastly if you use 4.4.x of the AppleTV OS (iOS5) you will find that rebooting (menu+down until fast blinking LED) or power cycling the AppleTV requires a "tethered" reboot. This means you have to connect your AppleTV via USB cable to a PC or Mac and "help" it reboot properly. It won't reboot on its own, as it will show an iTunes + USB cable icon. Previous 4.3.x AppleTV OSs allowed "untethered" reboots, and Firecore will most likely support this once the community has figured out how to the reboot the AppleTV without help from a PC. Sleeping (holding down play/pause until sleep) and returning from sleep mode on the AppleTV does NOT require tethering, to be sure. This is definitely the biggest draw back, as I've had to reboot several times due to unresponsiveness in the browser so far.
The final analysis is this: Apple better get cracking on an AppleTV that provides a lot more functionality than the current AppleTV. atv Flash (black) is the best $30 you will spend in 2011, that is for sure, especially if you love your AppleTV. And Firecore is just getting started. This is v1.0 of the next generation of television.
ps. Reading the forums leads you to believe that AppleTV can now run Boxee, XBMC and various other plugins. Have fun and stay safe! Remember you can always restore back to the original AppleTV OS by restoring in iTunes after you connect the AppleTV to your iTunes-enabeld PC/Mac via your microUSB cable.
No matter how you slice it or dice it, Apple is losing the smart phone market share battle. For now Apple has a huge lead in the apps space and mindshare among developers. The marketshare story though doesn't lie. If the long-term trend is towards Android as the "Windows" of the smart phone market developers will switch over very quickly. The smart money (or any money) may not be there but once the numbers are there in terms of users, you can be sure you can make money writing apps for Androids over iPhone.
The writing is on the wall, Apple. Apple has jumped the shark, yet again. Apple lost the PC battle for the enterprise customer between 1985 and 1995. They had every reason to build out a "Macintosh Office" in the mid 80s, and failed to do so. It took Steve Jobs to bring them back from near-death, but unfortunately he is not there to guide them now. I wonder if Google will take over the mantle of the true consumer-oriented company in the second decade of the 21st century. Let's see where this is by end of 2012.
Scary, amazing, thoughtful stories by the incredible Tracy Ann Kosa.
About Tracy Ann Kosa: Midway through a doctorate in Computer Science, developing a model to predict privacy risk on emergent technologies, Tracy Ann Kosa is a Privacy Impact Assessment Specialist with the Government of Ontario. In that capacity, Ms. Kosa works with Ministries and organizations across the broader public sector to assess and implement privacy requirements. Prior to working in government, she held various positions in ehealth privacy, largely focused on training and education initiatives. Ms. Kosa is a regular contributor to Security Matters magazine, and invited speaker at conferences and universities.
An absolute must see video. A fundamental call to action for the 21st century citizen.
This is not really a success story in my opinion, although the visualization is amazing. Check out this graph from LinkedIn on where graduates from your alma mater are working. On my U of Michigan graph, there is a disturbing trend:
Seems like since 2003 roughly, the graph has swung away from the auto company employers that dominated the Michigan economy towards the major universities themselves as the major employers in Michigan. So the major publicly funded institutions are now the top employers of university grads (who they hatched). Oy vey! That's some bubble.
2000 U of Michigan LinkedIn Stats (4 out of top 25 are public sector):
2010 U of Michigan LinedIn Stats (9 out of top 25 are public sector):
Update: I added a fake alma mater U of Toronto to my profile to check Toronto stats. They are even more startling. Look what happened to 2000 grads vs 2010 grads. They are all being concentrated as employed by U of T. Notice also that MANY less grads in 2010 are moving to the US for employment. It is startling -- the brain drain is practically gone!
2000 U of Toronto graduates:
2010 U of Toronto Graduates (more than two times as many as in 2000!)
Note I am depending on LinkedIn analytics to properly identify working vs going to school. It is possible that the idea of where they work... may mean for some where they are (continuing) going to school. It will be important to differentiate between working at an alma mater and just doing the next degree as "work".
I must say I have seen this TEDtalk now several times. It frames very much what concerns me about Western civilization. If we turn off these 6 killer apps one by one, Western civilization may very well go the way of the dodo. And others (eg Easterners) may morph these apps, nay hack them, into something very, very different. At 8:40 or so into the video Niall Ferguson discusses the 6 killer apps, which are self evident but framed and contextualized very nicely in this 20 minute video.
They seem obvious in retrospect that Western civilization leveraged these killer apps to effectively dictate to the rest of the world their terms. Notice that "democracy" and "capitalism" are not really described in any way, short of property rights. Places like China and India may very well adopt some but NOT ALL of these killer apps, and introduce some new ideas that effectively make them more competitive than Western civilization (North America and Europe). And what happens when these killer apps are hacked and the idea of "work ethic" is turned on its heads and uses child labour to power Western civilization. What happens when we stop providing modern medicine to the needy? Western civilization must continue to continue to "rev" all these killer apps to continue to compete in the 21st century. It is imperative.
UPDATE: Interesting article on the art of antenna installations and savings.
UPDATE 2: I have heard of people getting basic Rogers for $15.99/month + HST. To get HD you'd need the receiver so the best you could do is about $32/month! Also SunTV stopped HD broadcasting on November 1 2011, as Quebecor lost their over the air transmission license. We need an all day news channel to broadcast OTA - CP24 for example!
Rogers Digital Basic costs $36.01 per month. You must get an HD receiver at $12.95/month to actually GET the HD channels. So they're not really free are they as described: "Over 42 FREE HD channels and growing"? All Rogers is really doing is eliminating the physics of the physical world -- they eliminate the weird little issues that Over the Air (OTA) HD comes with (curvature of the Earth for example, and other physical obstructions like buildings).
To get OTA HD get a $20 aluminum outdoor antenna at any of the discount computer stores, or Futureshop or BestBuy. Or splurge and spend $50 for this one. The Clearstream 2 antenna for over $100 is a good bet in Northern Toronto. Of course, my friend S, tells me you will need a fairly long coax cable to plug into your coax cable plant or directly to your TV. This should cost you another $20 max. Note that many places you will find these items sold out, for good reasons, no doubt. Here are the pictures of my outdoor antenna connected to a "juliette" balcony about 50 ft off the ground. And a home made coax jack I made by stringing the coax from the antenna directly to this jack on the outside of the house. I did need to get a 12" masonry drill bit to make a hole on the outside of the house to get the coax into the jack. I also decided to ground this puppy to avoid lightning strikes killing my TV. YMMV.
Below is a grounding block connecting 2 coax wires. The black wire is grounding quality copper wire.
This picture shows the copper wire going to a 4 foot copper stake going into the ground. That's why it's called grounding!
Then make sure your HD TV has a digital tuner. Most TVs made in the last 3 years have a digital tuner, but make sure you ask before you buy your next flat screen. Here's the state of digital TV in Canada. And here are the channels you could get in Toronto.
I get 25% of the HD channels Rogers Digital Basic offers - FOR FREE. You're paying for free stuff, people. If I pointed my antenna south and mounted it properly as per tvfool.com indicates for my area, I'd get the American channels too! I'll do this soon and report back.
Here's a super deluxe installation with $200 worth of parts -- this install most likely is over $1000 to do professionally. Most people though will be fine with just $100 worth of parts and $250 worth of labour.
The 15 HD channels I get for free, in bold and red based on the Rogers HD lineup below the break...
APTN HDCBC News Network HD
CTV HD British Columbia (HCTVV)
CTV HD Toronto (CTVTO) HD
ABC Buffalo (WKBW) HD
CBC Ottawa (HDCBO)HD
CBC Toronto (CBLT) HD
CBC Vancouver (HCBCV) HD
CBS Buffalo (WIVB) HD
CHCH HD Citytv Toronto HD
FOX Buffalo (WUTV) HD
Global BC HD
Global Toronto (CIII) HD
NBC Buffalo (WGRZ) HD
OMNI.1 HD
OMNI.2 HD
Pay Per View 1 HD
Pay Per View 2 HD
PBS Buffalo (WNED) HD (+2 PBS subchannels that Rogers doesn't televise!)
Preview Channel HD
SRC Toronto (CBLFT) HD
SUN TV
NFL Network HD
OWN HD
RDI HD Rogers TV HD
Sportsnet East HD
Sportsnet Ontario HD
Sportsnet Pacific HD
Sportsnet West HD
Télé Québec HD
TFO HD
The Aquarium Channel HD
The Cottage Channel HD
The Score HD
The Shopping Channel HD
The Sunset Channel HD
TV5 HD
TVA HD
TVO HD
V HD
YTV HD (East)
ps. Here are the stations you can get across Canada now in HD, for free
| Province | Market | Mandatory Market | Transmitter | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AB | Burmis | No | CJIL-TV-2 (Ind) | Shut Down |
Full power analog station occupying channel within 52 to 69 range. |
| AB | Calgary | Yes |
CBRFT (SRC) |
Not planned to go digital |
CTV owns Access. The station is now only available through cable or satellite. |
| AB | Edmonton | Yes |
CBXFT-DT (SRC) |
On-Air |
CTV owns Access. The station is now only available through cable or satellite. |
| AB | Forestburg | No | CBXT-12 (CBC) | Reduced Analog Power |
Full power analog station occupying channel within 52 to 69 range. To stay on the same channel in analog at reduced transmission power, becoming a low power transmitter. |
| AB | Lethbridge | Yes |
CBRT-6 (CBC) |
Not planned to go digital |
|
| AB | Lloydminster | Yes |
On-Air |
On August 31, 2011, CITL-TV shut down its analog re-transmitters in Bonnyville, AB; Wainwright, AB; and Provost, AB. At the same time, CKSA is shutting down its analog transmitters in Wainwright, AB and Provost, AB. There is no regulatory requirement for those transmitters to shut down or to convert to digital. | |
| BC | Spillimacheen | No | CBUBT-6 (CBC) | Shut Down |
Full power analog station occupying channel within 52 to 69 range. |
| BC | Vancouver | Yes |
CBUFT-DT (SRC) |
On-Air |
CKVU-TV broadcasts in analog with one transmitter serving Vancouver and Victoria. In its place, two digital transmitters will broadcast, one for Vancouver and one for Victoria. |
| BC | Victoria | Yes |
CHEK-DT (Ind) |
On-Air |
CKVU-TV broadcasts in analog with one transmitter serving Vancouver and Victoria. In its place, two digital transmitters will broadcast, one for Vancouver and one for Victoria. |
| MB | Winnipeg | Yes |
CBWFT (SRC) |
Transmitter approved by CRTC |
|
| NB | Fredericton | Yes |
Not planned to go digital |
The analog transmitter covers both Saint John and Fredericton. The CBC has received permission to change CBAT's city of license to Fredericton and add a digital transmitter to serve only Fredericton. The CBC has also received permission to maintain, but lower the power of the current CBAT analog transmitter in order to serve Saint John. | |
| NB | Moncton | Yes |
CBAFT-DT (SRC) |
On-Air |
|
| NB | Saint John | Yes |
CBAFT-1 (SRC) |
Not planned to go digital |
The analog transmitter covers both Saint John and Fredericton. The CBC has received permission to change CBAT's city of license to Fredericton and add a digital transmitter to serve only Fredericton. The CBC has also received permission to maintain, but lower the power of the current CBAT analog transmitter in order to serve Saint John. |
| NL | St. John's | Yes |
Not planned to go digital |
||
| NS | Digby | No | CBHFT-6 (SRC) |
Reduced Analog Power Reduced Analog Power |
Full power analog stations occupying channel within 52 to 69 range. Both to stay on their same channels in analog at reduced transmission power, becoming a low power transmitters. |
| NS | Halifax | Yes |
Not planned to go digital |
||
| NS | Truro | No | CBHT-8 (CBC) | Reduced Analog Power |
Full power analog station occupying channel within 52 to 69 range. To stay on the same channel in analog at reduced transmission power, becoming a low power transmitter. |
| ON | Barrie | Yes |
CBLFT-11 (SRC) |
Shut Down |
|
| ON | Belleville | No | CICO-DT-26 (TVO) | On-Air |
Full power analog station occupying channel within 52 to 69 range. Broadcasting in digital on a channel lower than 52. |
| ON | Brighton | No | CKWS-DT-1 (CBC) | On-Air |
Full power analog station occupying channel within 52 to 69 range. Broadcasting in digital on a channel lower than 52. |
| ON | Chatham | No | CBLN-TV-3 (CBC) CICO-DT-59 (TVO) |
Changed Analog Channel On-Air |
Full power analog stations occupying channel within 52 to 69 range. CBC applied to the CRTC to broadcast within the 52 to 69 range, but at low power. TVO approved to broadcast in digital on a channel lower than 52. |
| ON | Cloyne | No | CICO-DT-92 (TVO) | On-Air |
Full power analog station occupying channel within 52 to 69 range. Broadcasting in digital on a channel lower than 52. |
| ON | Fort Erie | No | CIII-TV-55 (Global) | Shut down |
Full power analog station occupying channel within 52 to 69 range. Station's Toronto transmitter will provide digital signal to area covered by this transmitter. |
| ON | Foymount | No | CBOT-1 (CBC) | Changed Analog Channel |
Full power analog station occupying channel within 52 to 69 range. Staying in analog, on a channel below channel 52. |
| ON | Hamilton | Yes |
On-Air |
||
| ON | Kitchener | Yes |
CBLFT-8 (SRC) |
Reduced Analog Power |
|
| ON | London | Yes |
CBLFT-9 (SRC) |
Reduced Analog Power |
CKXT was digital-only in London and Ottawa at the time of original construction (2008). CKXT's licences will be returned for cancellation in 2011, replaced by the cable Sun News Network (Sun shutdown HD broadcasting Nov 1 2011) |
| ON QC |
Ottawa Gatineau |
Yes |
CBOFT-DT (SRC) |
On-Air |
CFGS has received an extension until October 31, 2011. |
| ON | Peterborough | No | CFTO-DT-54 (CTV) | On-Air |
Full power analog station occupying channel within 52 to 69 range. Broadcasting in digital on a channel lower than 52. |
| ON | Sarnia | No | CBLFT-17 (SRC) | Changed Analog Channel |
Full power analog station occupying channel within 52 to 69 range. Staying in analog, on a channel below channel 52. |
| ON | Thunder Bay | Yes |
CBLFT-18 (SRC) |
Not planned to go digital |
|
| ON | Toronto | Yes |
CBLFT-DT (SRC) |
On-Air |
|
| ON | Windsor | Yes |
CBEFT (SRC) |
Changed analog channel |
|
| PE | Charlottetown | Yes |
CBAFT-5 (SRC) |
Not planned to go digital |
|
| QC | Lac-Etchemin | No | CBVT-4 (SRC) | Reduced Analog Power |
Full power analog station occupying channel within 52 to 69 range. To stay on the same channel in analog at reduced transmission power, becoming a low power transmitter. |
| QC | Montreal | Yes |
CBFT-DT (SRC) |
On-Air |
|
| QC | Quebec City | Yes |
CBVE-TV (CBC) |
Not planned to go digital |
|
| QC | Rimouski | No |
On-Air |
Rimouski is not a mandatory market. CJBR was not required to convert to digital or change its transmitter in any way by August 31, 2011. | |
| QC | Rivière-du-Loup | Yes |
On-Air |
Analog re-transmitters of CFTF-TV, CIMT-TV, CKRT-TV are all planned to be converted to digital by September 2011. Affected markets in Quebec include Baie-Comeau, Baie-St-Paul, Carleton-sur-Mer, Dégelis, Cabano, Forestville, Gaspé, Les Escoumins, St-Urbain, Sept-Iles, Rimouski, Trois-Pistoles. Affected markets in New Brunswick include Edmundston. Not all three stations are necessarily in the same markets. There is no regulatory requirement for those transmitters to shut down or convert to digital. | |
| QC | Rouyn-Noranda / Val-d'Or | Yes |
CFEM-DT (TVA) |
On-Air |
|
| QC | Saguenay | Yes |
CBJET (CBC) |
Not planned to go digital |
|
| QC | Sainte-Famille | No | CBVT-2 (SRC) | Shut Down |
Full power analog station occupying channel within 52 to 69 range. |
| QC | Sherbrooke | Yes |
CBMT-3 (CBC) |
Not planned to go digital |
|
| QC | Trois-Rivières | Yes |
CBMT-1 (CBC) |
Not planned to go digital |
|
| SK | Regina | Yes |
On-Air |
||
| SK | Saskatoon | Yes |
Not planned to go digital |
The web is a platform for millions versions of vision and innovation from all of us. And that is why it works to make the best solutions win. Not suppositions, or worse - lies. Eric's advice - "Take the long view, not the short-term."
I wish other school boards tried this approach that Los Altos has taken. And you don't need expensive Macs to use Khan Academy. It's really a revolution in education. My son has been using this site for the last few months and we've developed a reward program called "Homework Happiness" from the points he gets on Khan Academy. He can redeem the points for prizes of various levels, and he can save up for the really really big prizes too. It's clear that in our technologically immersive culture, that learning like this and having teachers use technology to help can help not only the smart kids but also kids that need help to get ahead. Khan Academy lets each child have a personalized experience, assisted by their parent(s) or teacher(s).
An absolutely marvelous short documentary on the design of a bionic bird. What are the commercial applications of such a design?
And here's why:
This man is Reid Hoffman.
His Facebook-for-Business LinkedIn.com went public today. The stock price popped to 2x on the opening day.
If a company that:
can go public, then anyone can do it! LinkedIn and Reid gives hope to all us slightly overweight, not so good looking geeks and nerds all around the world. Congrats Reid and the LinkedIn crew!
Quote: "Where in the world is Carmen San Diego was the last successful edutainment title. Back in the 80s. Since then not one educational title was successful. Why? Because parents and teachers got involved in the design of edutainment titles. Kids can smell that shit a mile away. It's not fun anymore. It's work." Agreed. ps. Gabe will be at mesh11.
I'm happy to take the lead as chair of the Democrat Abroad Canada - Toronto Chapter. We're working hard to get President Obama re-elected. If you are an American living abroad please check out www.democratsabroad.org.
Have you ever received a photograph that you thought was not original from a graphics designer? Did you pay for an original photo but wanted to check to make sure it was not just copied from stock photos? Well now you can with tineye.com -- a reverse image system.
Tineye.com has indexed over 2 billion images on the internet. You can upload an image or copy-paste a link to an image and tineye.com "robots" will attempt to match it to an existing image. If the image has an exact duplicate match or is composited with another image, tineye.com most likely will find where else the photo resides.
I am not sure if tineye.com uses face-matching algorithms or how well it does the job but here are a few very popular people and the tineye.com results.
Bill Gates image
Michael Geist image
11 TinEye Results (note some of them are black and white and composite)
Don Tapscott image
0 TinEye Results (unfortunate - probably no face recognition is done)
Illustrations don't work quite as well in terms of matching to the original face (Dan Pink is everywhere)
1 TinEye result (identical to illustration)
Obscure logos don't work so well:
Supposedly, the publication called Think Quarterly was shipped to 1500 special Google UK customers. We like it. We like it very much. This is the kind of publishing that I think needs to be done online, various formats, a beautiful HTML5 presentation. PDFs downloadable. And of course, GREAT content. This is something we'd pay for, unlke the NYTimes paywall nonsense #fail.
With incognito mode, inprivate or safe browsing, you can get around NYTimes.com paywall. This has been verified by yours truly.
東北地方太平洋沖地震に関連する
カナダへの一時避難について
この度の東北地方太平洋沖地震で被害に遭われた皆様に謹んでお見舞い申し上げますとともに、一日も早い復興をお祈り申し上げます。
今回の地震に関するニュースはテレビやラジオ、インターネットなどで大々的に取り上げられ、その凄まじい被害状況に私たちカナダ人も驚愕し、心を痛めています。メディアを通じ、仙台をはじめとする被災地で行き場を失った子供たちやお年寄りの姿を見て、私たち家族は考えました。何か直接できることはないかと。
そして辿り着いた答えが、「ホストファミリーになること」です。
状況が改善されるまでの数か月間、被害に遭われたご家族にカナダでの住まいを無償で提供することにしました。私たちはトロント郊外の街に住む4人家族で、家には十分なスペースがあります。もし興味がおありの方は遠慮なくご一報ください。また、興味があると思われるご家族をご存知でしたらぜひ紹介してください。トロントはたくさんの日系人や日本人 (その他アジア人) が住む国際都市で、とても暮らしやすい場所です。ぜひ私たちに協力させてください。
連絡はメールまたはスカイプでお願いします。
アレックス・シロタ (alex@newpathnetwork.org, skype:asirota)
アラ・グベンコ
アーロン・シロタ
リアナ・グベンコ・シロタ
オンタリオ州ソーンヒル (カナダ)
PS. メールは日本語でも受け付けていますのでご安心ください (Google 翻訳を使用します)。
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Hello Japan!
The citizens of Canada are astounded by the awesome natural disaster that has struck your beautiful country. Things will be back to normal sometime soon. On our television, radio and electronic media we see, hear and read about older people and children sitting in shelters in cities like Sendai and many others. This makes our hearts and minds ache -- we cannot imagine how hard it is for you in this time.
We want to help -- directly.
We are looking to host a family in need in Toronto, Canada while the situation in Japan improves. If you are a family or know a family that can use some time to recover in Canada, please let us know. We will be happy to host you, at no cost, for several months. We are a family of 4 with plenty of space in our house in the northern suburbs of Toronto. We have many people of Japanese descent (and other Asian countries) in Toronto.
We want to help. Let me know if you are interested via email or skype (asirota).
Alex Sirota
Alla Gubenko
Aaron Sirota
Liana Gubenko Sirota
Thornhill, Ontario, Canada
ps. We will use Google Translate to translate your emails into English. So don't worry!
I've been talking to Barbara Simons about the problems with electronic voting. It looks like many computer scientists are against it entirely -- under ANY circumstances. Here's a video documenting a case of problematic procedures and just plain old errors in an election in Laredo, TX in 2006.
Microsoft now has a solution for the non-profit sector called Non-Profit Solution for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The cost is as little as 9.99/month!
The Non-Profit Solution for Microsoft Dynamics CRM includes out-of-the-box CRM functionality as well as customizations for:
Here's a new twist on the Facebook application development empire. Facebook is letting phones and addresses be accessible through the Facebook API.
This was put out on Friday by the development team to little fan fare, but it has a lot of implications to that "allow this app to access your data" dialog box. There is a limited amount of space in that graphic and like many of those Terms of Service agreements that no one reads, this dialog will eventually suffer similar usability issues.
That is, it's solely your responsibility to read, parse and act appropriately when a Facebook application asks for your personal data. Eventually there will be other elements that Facebook will want to share and those elements may not be so easily described. Or maybe they will be grouped and termed as "your preferences" making the language even harder to understand.
Facebook's approach is better than applications that don't give you any details such as iPhone and Android apps. But I'd say the Blackberry approach of changing permissions is the worst. There are SO many options and none of them are plain langauge.
The methods and interfaces by which data is being made available to 3rd parties is non-standard and will continue to confuse users to the point of not caring. As users click OK to make the screens go away as fast as possible to get to the good stuff, they will be losing their privacy little by little.
So my wife screams "What's this system tool thingy? Looks like my computer is infected with a virus. Help!" And indeed somehow through no fault of her own Windows 7 premium was infected with a trojan that installed no less than 8 items in various places on the desktop including 2 registry keys. And here I thought Windows 7 Home Premium was secure. I guess not :( -- here's the software I used to delete the offending trojan called "System Tool" -- it worked well.
"Traditional office spaces are not great places to get things done," says Jason Fried of 37signals.com. Jason's thesis is that work, like sleep, is stage/phase based. We have 5 levels of sleep. And we have stages of work. Traditional work places don't allow you to visit these phases of work. The answer -- work in a place that helps you get into all the phases of work, whatever that place is. And avoid managers and meetings, at all costs. Interesting if a bit unrealistic.
And we're funneling money to the investment banks? Seems that the thing that we really need to do now is understand where all this government money has been going. Like sand through an hourglass, it seems to have "disappeared."
Simple Desktops is a website that offers the best blend of desktop pictures that are neither too beautiful nor too bland. And they are free. There's something for everyone there. Here's the tree that I am using today at work.