I’ve been playing with electronic picture frames for almost two years. I started with a Ceiva frame two years ago, because it was capable of placing a phone call (modem) to pick up photos, and this frame was for a relative who doesn’t have access to any Internet services at all. It seemed like it would be perfect. It functioned well, held about a hundred photos (I bounced against its capacity, but it wasn’t annoying at all), and the only problem for me was the yearly fee for the dial-up service. But it meant that I could upload photos and within 24 hours they’d appear in the frame on the other side of the US. (If you’re like me, you write a paper letter once a year, to that rare relative who hasn’t yet gotten an email address—so sending photos electronically is a breeze compared to printing out those photos and writing a letter.) Continue reading to see what has happened in the last two years… [Read more…]
The Real-Time Web – Indeed!
Unbelievable how much time it takes to keep a “live” blog functioning properly when you’re working with new software.
It’s after 1:00am and I’ve just finished wrestling with the day’s blog entries. Reformatting them to make them look better, and making sure that the feeds of more than a dozen geeks are coming in and being handled properly. (And here and there a little bit of editorial work.)
I’m afraid this is what is known as the Real-time web. [See LeWeb] [Read more…]
Building out infrastructure for a Traveling Geeks tour
The Traveling Geeks are at it again. This time the destination is Paris for LeWeb and some other tech meetings.
Organizing a tour for 15 geeks was a nightmarish task for TG Co-Founder Renee Blodgett, who worked for weeks to put this one together – much shorter lead time than for previous tours. And her co-organizers Eliane Fiolet and Phil Jeudy, plus two web developers, did a heroic job.
The online developers were tasked with creating the new web site, but I came in for the last few weeks to preside over one of my (current) specialties – ensuring that we can mash information together in real time. Here’s what it required and what I learned: [Read more…]
All those watches! All that bandwidth?
Being on the road mid-summer, and having to watch my use of bandwidth, I noticed an uptick in the number of spam messages encouraging me to buy cheap watches; or more watches; or fabulous watches; well, you get the drift. Since I already have enough watches, I would like to ignore these messages, but rather than cause me to look at other folks’ wrists, they have caused me to look at the ticking clock of my broadband network usage.
The issue is the use of bandwidth by these messages, and for that matter, the use of bandwidth by everything else. Bandwidth, in spite of our living in the Internet age, was a recurring theme for the entire Traveling Geeks crew. We were on BT Mobile Broadband, which for the most part was reliable. I’d say that we varied between a high of 2.5mbps (mega bits per second) and a low of 4kbps (4k, yes), but if you disregard speed, we seemed to have access almost everywhere in London and Cambridge. Service winked out for a few minutes on the road between London and Cambridge, but regardless of that, there were several geeks online using their laptop computers during the entire bus journey that morning. And I used BTOpenZones, which is a commercial service provided via wi-fi in public places, cafes and hotels. We were given complementary service by BT[1] and I can see that an average (non-business) user is going to get pretty good service for £10 to £15 a month, but heavy users are going to be bumping against the account limitations and the issue for the geeks is really how much data we are pushing into the cloud. I uploaded a couple of really large videos one day, and overstepped the 4GB cap on my account without knowing it. So BT “topped-up” the account for me, but several of the geeks seem to have hit their limit more than once.
Although I travel a fair amount, I’m seeing that bandwidth is hard to find. Even with wi-fi access, I’m getting top speeds in the 100kbps to 200kbps range. I’m gathering that it is because I’m sharing the connection with others, and yes it does seem that speeds are best in the early morning when few people would be online – and that they can be pretty low when another geek in the same hotel is uploading video – so perhaps shared bandwidth is the real issue.
[1] Disclosures: BT Corporate gave the Traveling Geeks free wi-fi and broadband modem access during our trip to the UK.
Tech recap from Traveling Geeks
JD Lasica interviewed me (for socialmedia.biz) about some of the tech we used on the Traveling Geeks trip to London. Topics covered are connectivity using cellular modems (provided by BT), the FeedWordPress plug-in, Flip (Mino and Ultra) video cameras, video streaming (on Nokia n79 using kyte.com), Google Latitude…
You can download and use Google Latitude in the US, but you can’t download Google Latitude in the UK because it is “voluntarily” blocked by BT for privacy reasons (it discloses your location to others).
I just can’t say enough about how much use I get out of the little Flip MinoHD and UltraHD video cameras. I use them for all of my interviews now, and for shooting “trailers” to serve as proposals for projects.
My favorite part of the interview is when I wax poetic about the fact that the technology actually worked while we were on the road. I was really expecting much of it to fail. We really have a wired and wireless world today!