Cameron Gibbs

I just read iLounge’s overview of an interview that Steve Jobs’ did with Fortune and I really liked this snippet:

After an extended period of living with the originally designed enclosure for the iPhone, Jobs concluded that he didn’t “love” the shell, an emotion that he would need to feel for what he believed was the company’s most important release ever. “[W]e pushed the reset button. We went through all of the zillions of models we’d made and ideas we’d had.” And, with too little time remaining before the device’s announcement, he challenged the designers to do better, quickly. “It was hell because we had to go to the team and say, ‘All this work you’ve [done] for the last year, we’re going to have to throw it away and start over, and we’re going to have to work twice as hard now because we don’t have enough time.’ “

Now that take guts (what Jobs did)… and hard work (what his team had to do).

If you haven’t heard of OLPC (one laptop per child) before, I think you’ll be impressed with what this company is doing to bring education to poor countries. They have manufactured a laptop that costs only $188 (which they hope will eventually only cost $100) that does just about everything a normal computer can do, and even a little more.

Dave Pogue, a tech editor for the NY Times, reviews the laptop here. I recommend checking out his video review there.

The laptop will be available for purchase for $400 for two weeks in November. It’s $400 because it’s a buy-one, give-one plan (you get one and one goes to someone else less fortunate). What a great idea. Thanks OLPC.

[via engadget]

Well, I’m back.  After posting daily for an entire month, I took a longer break than I anticipated.

Today was my first day of work at ShieldZone corp, makers of the InvisibleShield (a protective shield for your handheld devices).  The company has an incredible history despite the fact that it hasn’t even been in business for two full years yet and the future is very bright.  To read about how the company started, check out this article from connect, a Utah business magazine.

I’ve actually been surprised at how well-known the product already is.  Of everyone I’ve told about my new job, almost half of them have either heard of the InvisibileShield or have one.  Now I’ve just got to educate the other half.

Heidi and I have only one desk in our home office suitable for working at and of course, that’s where our PC lies.  I also have a laptop that I use much more frequently and I regulary sit at the desk to use it.  Anyone that uses a laptop knows that your productivity reduces dramatically when you use the laptop’s keyboard (too cramped) and touch pad (not as effective as a mouse) so whenever I’m at the desk, I unplug the keyboard and mouse from the desktop to plug it into my laptop.  You can imagine how fun that gets.  Introduce usb share switch hub.

So I bought this usb switch hub and I’m loving it.  I plugged my usb keyboard, mouse and printer into the hub and connected it to both the desktop and the laptop.  No more reaching, unplugging, plugging and getting tangled in the process.  Nope… now I just push a button and the controls are mine.  Push the button again, and the controls are back on desktop.

If I wanted to use my desktop’s monitor for both computers, I would’ve got a kvm switch but with our setup, I actually prefer to use my laptop’s monitor.

A while back I read about a site that’s able to match up pictures of your ancestors with pics that others have uploaded through face recognition software.  The site has a fun tool that tells you which celeb you look most like.  Heidi and I have had a lot of fun uploading pictures of our boys and other family members to see which celebrity we most resemble.

Though the tool doesn’t really add any value to the site’s products, it’s been incredible linkbait, improving the site’s organic rankings, driving tons of traffic and has certainly increased revenues.

Apperantly, our six-month old boy looks like Oprah.

Before I was in jr high, everyone used tapes to listen to music. But as time passed, CD’s rapidly became the preferred form of media. However, because I never owned a car with a CD player and because I didn’t really listen to music very much, I never bought CD’s. In fact, I don’t think I’ve bought more than five CD’s my entire life — I just didn’t care that much to listen to music… until now. With the popularity of digital music and mp3 players like the iPod, I’m listening to tunes of my choice everytime I hop into my car as well as listening to podcasts. So, in a way, it paid off to not embrace CD’s because had I done so, I would have a bunch of CD’s piled up that I would never use (ok, so I could rip them and put them on my iPod but it would all be old stuff that I’ve heard a million times). Anywho…

So I want to capture my wedding video so I can do some editing and create a nice finished product (so when my wife wants to watch it, we can watch a 10-minute wrap-up instead of an hour and a half of snorrreee… WHAT, WHAT… oh, sorry, I feel asleep).

To capture the video, I have two options: 1) a USB video grabber (composite out on the VCR to USB) or 2) my Hauppauge video capture card (composite out on the VCR to composite-in on the capture card). You would think that the composite to composite would work best since there is no conversion, but if you did, you thought wrong. After hours of trying to get the video capture to work better through the video capture card, I just came to the conclusion that the USB video grabber works best.

The biggest problem I had with the capture card was capturing audio. I tried using four different video capture software programs but the only way to capture the audio was through either the line-in or the microphone jacks but no option to use the white and red composite jacks on the capture card. If there is no software that captures audio through these jacks, then what purpose do they serve? My best guess is that I just need to keep looking for software that does. Fortunately, I have a composite audio to 1/8″ audio plug so I could still do the capture but the quality of the audio isn’t very good.

In conclusion, in every test I did, the video capture through the USB video grabber worked best - for both video and audio capture.

Just a quick note… I tried using a cheap TV tuner from work with MCE only to discover that it wasn’t compatible with MCE (though the quality of the image captured wasn’t too bad when I used the software included with the card). Though I think it’s lame that any TV tuner card won’t work with MCE (my limited knowledge of video capture tells me that any TV tuner hardware should work), I’m anxious to get one that does so I can try out MCE as a DVR.

Here’s a list of manufacturers of TV tuner cards that do work with MCE. From the research I’ve done on this, it sounds like Hauppauge is the one to get. Unless you’re willing to get one from ebay for $65, the best price it looks like you’re gonna find is $99 before shipping. Another option is the AverMedia TV tuner (also compatible with MCE, of course) at Tiger Direct for $65.

I’m unsure of whether I want the kit or not (the kit comes with the remote and costs another $30). We’ll see.

When I first came across the PC to TV Converter, I didn’t realize what most use it for. I figured that it would be used to browse the computer on a bigger screen. But with the popularity of video downloading services like Movielink and Vongo, it makes sense to me now why it’s so popular. As soon as I upgrade my computer, I think we may put it in the living room (if I can get my wife’s approval) where we’ll download movies, then watch them on the tube.

Sewell Direct, my employer, recently added a product that can potentially increase bandwith for your broadband connection by a factor of two. Of course, in order to increase the bandwidth you will need another broadband connection.

In the past, the only way to increase your bandwidth was to upgrade your connection, say from DSL to a T1. But with the introduction of the broadband aggregator, you can now combine two broadband connections, say two DSL lines, to increase bandwidth. By increasing bandwidth via the broadband aggregator, you can now add more computers to your network without worrying about slowing down internet speed since the aggregator automatically balances bandwidth amoung the computers connected to the internet. The aggregator is also a great tool for backup, in case one of your connections were to go down.