Rodfather Mobile

Uh oh Seesmic, it looks  like some folks are using your idea.

Utterz has just added instant audio and webcam video recording to its service.

This adds a new dimension to its twitter-like social network.  You could already call in a voice message or email video attachments.  Or combine all the media, like for example, if you call in a message with your cell phone and then email a photo or video to go@utterz.com within 10 minutes, utterz will combine the two into one message. 

The variety of media you can use to microblog is nice and now using a flash interface to record straight into the browser was the next natural step.

In a few weeks, Utterz will add instant recording in the comments.

Here’s a response by ResPres on the new feature:

Here are other sites that use the same instant webcam recording`feature:

Seesmic

DailyMotion
Youtube(buggy for me)
Flixn
Hellodeo
Twango
Riffly

While looking for sites that take advantage of the web cam, I found flixn.com.

It’s a dead simple way to record and then share a webcam recording. You don’t need a login, so you can jump on over and try it right away.

Other sites worth mentioning that provide the same service are Hellodeo and Twango.

I’m still at the bowl watching football and the 8 game scratch tourney.

So I log in to tumblr, where my previous ‘lifestream’ was set up.  Looks like you can only add 5 ‘other feeds’ now.  This is a shame since the entire reason I set up a tumblelog was to have it be the place where all my crap ends up.  So I vented my frustration on twitter and received a reply from Bjorn Stromberg of Ultra Mobile Life asking if I tried soup.io.

Well, I’m switched there now. There’s no restrictions so far and the interface is great.  So if you’re a super stalker, check it out..

Rodfather’s Soup

UPDATE:
www.rodfathr.com now points to the soup/lifestream as well.

I was surprised there wasn’t much live coverage of CES.

Live Video Streaming
Justin.tv wasn’t there lifecasting.  We did get sporatic coverage from Robert Scoble using Mogulus and Qik.  Other than that, there wasn’t much effort to put out 24/7 live coverage. 

This is surprising since ‘lifecasting’ has been blowing up in the past year with ustream.tv, justin.tv, operator11.com, stickam.com, mogulus.com, and blogtv.com.  Are these sites now just being used for simple web cam chatting?  It would be great to see the cam get out of the house sometime.
For those who prefer to do live video streaming from your cell phone, there’s qik.com and comvu.com.  Both work amazingly well.  Qik is the new kid on the block and has an easy to use web 2.0′ish front end to make things easier for the end user.  At the moment, it currently only supports Nokia S60 based phones.  Comvu has been around the block for a while now and has the advantage of supporting both Symbian and Windows Mobile based phones.  If you have GPS in your phone or have a bluetooth GPS receiver paired, you can even have viewers track your location.  Unfortunutely, this is only supported with the IE browser.

Moblogging
James Kendrick of jkOnTheRun was moblogging with his HTC Advantage, but I wouldn’t call that live.  Moblogging is nothing new either so I’m also surprised more people didn’t do it.
I have been posting moblogs for some time now by taking photos with the iPhone and emailing flickr, which then updates my blog.  Lately, I’ve been micromoblogging by emailing photos to Utterz which then crossposts to twitter.
One of my favorite activities is inkmicromoblogging (!) by using Loren Heiny’s Ink Grams web app.  You ink a message staight from your web browser and have the image cross post to flickr and twitter.
Moblogging isn’t limited to photos either.  If you have a phone that can record video (Come on Apple, add video recording already!), you can email the video as an attachment to sites such as blip.tv.   Blip.tv will automatically convert your emailed video to the format of choice (Flash is the default) and you can set it up to autocrosspost the video to your blog with the embedded video in the post.

‘.. and I’m not exactly sure why.

It’s the New Year now (oh Happy New Year) and for some reason, I just don’t feel like linking to cool, new, mobile tech gadgets or news. 

Mostly, I’ve been lazy blogging by microblogging with Twitter, Utterz, and now Seesmic.  I’ve been dabbling a bit with Mogulus too but broadcasting from it  makes my U810 crawl.

I guess it could be the weather.  I tend to hibernate this time of year.

Or getting used to my new toys (I’m typing on the Fujitsu U810).

Perhaps contemplating the direction I want to take this blog.  I’ve always felt this has always used for fun.  I’m not sure if I want to be just another mobile tech news feed recycling links everyone else has been posting.  So maybe I’ll stop linking and just write more commentary.  I suppose I can still mix and match both..

Also, if I take this seriously, maybe I could try to get into CES next year.  Honestly, at this point, I can care less about bringing the news of new gadgets to readers..  I just want to meet up with all the other bloggers and tech folk as it seems CES is one of those events where most congregate.  So I can cruise to Vegas and at least go to meetups.

I’m not very confident in my writing ability.  I’ve never been a great English student.  Mostly B average.  I think my grammar is horrible.  I tend to pause a lot, reading over sentences, making sure it makes any sense.  Maybe I should just not care and accept that I will never be a great writer.  As long as the point is delivered.. good enough?

Frustrated with tools?  Sometimes it feels like a pain in the ass to set up for a blog post.  Run Live Writer.  Set categories and tags.  Make sure the post makes sense…
Maybe this is why I like microblogging so much.  It’s easy and accessible.  Ya I know my tweets will fly by in the wind so fast where most people won’t notice, but at least whatever I want to say, gets off my chest — and for the true stalkers, they can check my tumblelog at rodfathr.com which captures all the feeds I want to share.

So anyway, I felt I needed to post this.  Sure I could have posted to my personal blog, but this is slowly turning in my personal blog since this is all for fun and not some serious mobile tech blog (in my mind).

Powered by ScribeFire.

I took a snapshot of the Neighborhood view using alt-1. There’s quite a few people in the mesh now.
If you just received your OLPC, here are the instructions for connecting to the xochat.org jabber server.

I’ve set up a shared Write activity called ‘3 Word Story’ since the start of the jabber server and it’s quite popular so far. XO users have been joining and submit their 3 word entry to try to form a dynamic and potentially endless story. When I set up a similar thread in the Second LIfe forums, it was very popular, so this seemed a perfect exercise in the collabortive environment of Sugar’s mesh.

Oh ya..this is officially my first blog post from the OLPC XO. I saved the snapshot to a USB stick, fired up Opera, uploaded the photo to flickr, and now writing this in the wordpress admin.
This whole process does take time since this is all running on a 433Mhz AMD Geode processor with 256MB of RAM, but hey it’s working.

Our Stories
While waiting for the OLPC to
arrive, I’ve been messing with Sugar OS on VM Ware.
One of the interesting ‘Activities’ in
development is called Our Stories.
A joint project by UNICEF, OLPC, and
Google; it strives to allow anyone-
anywhere to share their stories with
the use of an OLPC. On the main
site, there’s a Google Maps mashup
with stories that have already been
posted.
So far, it appears the activity simply
records audio and archives it for now.
It’ll be interesting to hear stories
from around the world that will
enter the ‘cloud’ with the help of
an OLPC.

—–
Here’s their welcome message presented by Queen Rania of Jordan:

I started messing with the webcam on the Fujitsu U810.  The overall quality is poor.  The framerate is much less than 15FPS and the picture quality isn’t all that great.  But hey it’s there and I can find a use for it.

First thing’s first.   The audiodg.exe process shot up 25% to 100% CPU% whenever I tried to use the cam.  This is the process in Vista that basically handles audio processing.  It ended up being bad Reaktek HD audio drivers that came preinstalled.  Whenever the mic was accessed, the audiodg.exe process would shoot up.

I ended up going to the Realtek support page and installed the updated the Vista drivers.  Now whenever the mic is accessed, the audiodg.exe process doesn’t go crazy.  The most I’ve seen it go up is around 10% now.

Software

It comes with ArcSoft’s WebCam Companion 2 software.  It’s fairly basic which does the job of capturing images and video from the webcam.  It also has a motion capture mode and the ability to edit the clips you have recorded.  It’s not the greatest piece of software but it does the job.

Online Video Sites

Ustream.tv works.  The CPU% shoots up close to 100%.  For some reason, ustream.tv performed a bit better when using IE7.

Justin.tv worked fine but there’s a very long delay of 10-20 seconds between what’s live and what is played back.

Flixn.com works great.  There’s no need to register.  You basically record a video clip from the webcam straight to the site and the end result is a webpage and links to embed the video to another site.  I can see myself using this service the most.

Viddler.com is quick and easy.  Great use of the webcam to record clips.

Youtube’s quick capture feature didn’t seem to work.  It sat there waiting for the server to respond.  I’ll try again later but doubt I’ll use it since you have to go through the process of filling in required fields before even capturing a video.

Recording a clip to ‘my library’ with Operator11.com worked fine.  I didn’t try joining a live broadcast but I’m sure there wouldn’t be too much problems.

I logged into Second Life last week.  I still have a soft spot for the metaverse since I was one of the pioneers who joined around its release in 2003.  My claim to fame was creating the Roach Coach (Taco truck vehicle) among other projects.  I even had a chance to work for Linden Labs.  Like everything else, addictions shift and I haven’t been active in the metaverse in years.

Recently, the geeky devs at Intel set up their own island to have a presence in Second Life.  Josh Bancroft was the one who told me about their presence so I went to take a look at their island.  It ends up they have really useful info and host some very informative events.  Far cry from the usual clubbing or gambling events.

Anyway, I received an email from the Intel Dev Group last week announcing Intel Technical Consulting Engineer Bob Steigerwald will be doing a presentation on techniques for creating energy efficient apps for mobile devices. 

Thursday, November 8th
4:30PM SLT - Intel Software Network
You are invited to spend an hour with Intel Technical Consulting
Engineer Bob Steigerwald who will be speaking on how to design software for
energy efficiency.  Topics will include: Demand for Mobile devices; What
is energy efficiency?; Power basics; C-States and P-States & Designing
for energy efficiency.
This event will also be available streamed live on slcn.net

They are working with slcn.tv to broadcast their events live and archive them.  Their show page is here and you can replay the entire event.  Bob will be doing a repeat event on the 15th if you want to check it out and ask more questions.

The event itself was great.  It was basically a Q&A with a PowerPoint presentation.   You could actually hear him talk and he responded to all the questions typed in the chat.  I couldn’t help myself and asked more hardware related questions concerning processors on MID’s and UMPC’s. 

If you’re interested in the Intel dev group’s presence in Second Life, check our their Intel and Second Life forum.  They list all their hosted events on that page.

I am Ironchef Cook by the way.  Shoot me an instant message if you’re in-world.  All my IM’s end up in my email so I’ll eventually get it.