[ExI] My animation is going to be on the History Channel thisThursday!

Fri Aug 22 03:03:32 UTC 2008

Wow Emlyn you've arrived at a rather interesting work around. I have a wii game console, which is very cool by the way. Remember years back when those VR gloves were the big deal in game play, the wii has surpassed that with it's hand held stick. If you have the fit board it's even better - you can move around on it and it knows where you are and how much pressure you are applying. You can see your movements on the screen via your 3d avatar. Very interactive. Anyway, it also has internet capabilities. If you have a wireless for your computer, the wii will detect it and you can browse the web, including YouTube. I really like it. 
By the way that tattoo show on the history channel with my dermal display is on tonight! Oh and guys, don't forget to email me about my project, it's been pretty quiet! 

Gina "Nanogirl" Miller
Nanotechnology Industries
http://www.nanoindustries.com 
Personal: http://www.nanogirl.com 
The health stuff blog: http://ginamiller.blogspot.com/ 
Animation Blog: http://maxanimation.blogspot.com/ 
Craft blog: http://nanogirlblog.blogspot.com/ 
Foresight Senior Associate http://www.foresight.org 
Nanotechnology Advisor Extropy Institute  http://www.extropy.org 
Email: nanogirl at halcyon.com 
"Nanotechnology: Solutions for the future."

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Emlyn 
  To: ExI chat list 
  Sent: Sunday, August 17, 2008 6:06 PM
  Subject: Re: [ExI] My animation is going to be on the History Channel thisThursday!

  2008/8/17 MB <mbb386 at main.nc.us>:
  > Hooray for our Nanogirl! :)  Now you make me wish I had a TV..   ;)

  On a tangent, a quick rant about TV...

  There's *so* much online video to watch these days (Youtube is just
  the start...), but it has this problem that you watch this stuff on a
  PC. Sitting at your desk is no place to watch a movie, and even a
  laptop makes it a fairly solitary experience (two people can watch on
  a laptop, after that it gets hard), plus the screen is small and the
  sound is poor. You really want to be able to watch a lot of stuff in
  your living room, on the big screen.

  Along these lines, I recently got rid of my old CRT TV, and put an old
  PC in the livingroom. It's an Athlon 2000, 500 mb ram, circa 2001
  vintage? It was one of my kid's machines, but too long in the tooth
  for kid's stuff (games need good equipment). The point is, it's old
  and crappy, but does this job remarkably well.

  The machine is already on the wireless lan, but I added in a TV card
  for digital TV (actually it's a usb based device, not an internal
  card, can't recommend that enough). I'm in Australia so I had to get
  something suitable for Aussie digital TV, which uses an obscure and
  poorly supported standard (dvb-t), but you can still get something
  economical. Just for completeness, the actual piece of hardware is the
  USB TinyTwin from DigitalNow, a tiny aussie company. Nice hardware,
  decent viewing software and drivers, but interoperating with other
  stuff is a pain in the butt, and the doco is dreadful but
  non-existant, much as you'd expect from that kind of company. It's
  here: http://www.digitalnow.com.au/product_pages/TinyTwin.html . Cost
  me about $130.

  The TinyTwin plugged straight into my old antenna cable, no antenna
  mods required, and gives far better reception. Digital TV is great.

  So, that replaced our TV, with the addition that we now get the HD
  free to air channels. Lovely. And I can record TV for the first time
  in years. But wait, there's more...

  We can now watch youtube on the "tv" just by pulling up a browser. The
  machine is running straight XP, and it's now got a wireless mouse and
  keyboard (cost maybe $30?), but even with large fonts the machine can
  be a pain in the butt to operate; I have to go up close with the mouse
  and keyb so I can see properly. I can live with that for now though.

  The machine also runs Azureus, for bittorrent. Essential.  'Nuff said.
  Although I think Miro might be able to do its job, must investigate...

  Which brings me to Miro. http://www.getmiro.com/ . About 5000 channels
  of free content. It's what community tv always needed. Most channels
  are ridiculous, but there's some excellent stuff there; check out Free
  Culture TV (a bit brown bread but ok), or for excellence, Citizen
  Engineer (which to be fair is also on their own site
  http://www.citizenengineer.com/ or youtube). Hardware hacking as a tv
  show, really fabulous stuff. Anyway, the nice thing about Miro is that
  it's like a video podcast model, but uses (modified?) bittorrent for
  distribution, which means waiting for downloads, but some decent video
  quality.

  Another recent discovery for me was http://www.hulu.com/, lots of
  major network US tv shows. You can't watch it if you don't have a US
  ip address unfortunately. On a totally unrelated note, however, has
  anyone seen Hotspot Shield? It's a free vpn that encrypts your traffic
  up to the point where it comes out of their servers. It's meant for
  protecting you in open wireless hotspots, but can be useful for other
  things. Sounds complicated, but it's easy; on windows, you just
  install it, run it, and then say "connect" when you want to use it,
  and voila. It does have the side effect of giving you a US ip address,
  for what that's worth. Did I forget to mention that it's free, and
  that I can't notice any performance impact on streaming video?

  And there's the Aussie government broadcaster ABC, with its online
  service "iView", here: http://www.abc.net.au/tv/iview/. No ip address
  checks, good programming.

  And all this is without mentioning dodgy Chinese based sites that show
  all kinds of awesome shows directly in the browser, because there's no
  way good law abiding extros would use those.

  There's more every day. I can't imagine that I'll ever subscribe to
  pay tv with the amount of interesting stuff that's online now, and the
  free to air broadcast tv becomes increasingly less attractive. I don't
  rent DVDs any more either, and I tried Quickflix (aussie clone of
  Netflix), but dumped it; removable media is so last week people.

  So for peanuts, I have this multimedia extravaganza in the living
  room, and I increasingly can't remember what was good about broadcast
  TV.

  Emlyn

  http://emlynoregan.com
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