Live from Austin!

The first video camera I ever used was the Sony HVC-2000P, with its “outstanding” 6X zoom lens. It weighed a “lightweight” 2.5kg, so you had to brace it on your shoulder and peer into the monochrome viewfinder.

That was just the camera. To actually record something, you needed the SL-3000 portable Betamax VCR. That was the size of a small suitcase, and weighed an additional 9.1kg. You wore it on a shoulder strap, on the shoulder that wasn’t supporting the camera. The proprietary cable allowed the camera to start and stop record on the VCR.

The battery was about 1kg of the weight, and was rechargeable, via a charger the size of a shoebox. The VCR didn’t include a tuner, so it wouldn’t record TV shows; if you wanted to do that, you needed another shoebox-sized box.

Once you had recovered from a couple of hours of shooting and went home to watch the result, you got 260 lines of video resolution, in color, with mono sound. There was no real way to edit it, of course, other than to have a second VCR and use the pause button a lot.

All of which reminds me of my first bit of home video editing: I ran the audio from the camcorder through my Mac, running Cubase. I manually synchronized Cubase with the video, and it mixed the soundtrack in real time according to my prearranged instructions. At the same time, I ran the video directly from the camcorder to the VCR. I then operated the pause button on the VCR according to a list of start/stop times, in order to edit out the appropriate bits of video. Audio latency was low enough that the end result looked pretty good. When I finally got hardware capable of DV editing, though, I went back and did it again that way.

Anyhow, yesterday I got yet another video camcorder. It’s about the size of a pack of (long) cigarettes, a bit bigger than a BlackBerry or iPhone. It records on an SD card, in h.264 QuickTime format, 720 line HD video. You can get about 80 minutes on a dirt cheap 4GB SDHC card, then plug in to the Mac and copy it all straight into iMovie, no tedious conversion required. It’s powered by two plain old AA cells, so you don’t need to worry about running out of power while on vacation. How far we’ve come in 30 years. And the most amazing part, to me, is the price: it’s the Kodak Zi6, which you can pick up factory refurbished for as little as $99. (That includes a pair of rechargeable batteries and a charger, but no SD card.)

Sure, it’s not a pro quality tool by today’s standards. It has no zoom lens, no image stabilizer, no exposure controls… But think about it–it shoots sharper video than the professional studio equipment used to make all those great 70s and 80s TV shows, it fits in your pocket, and it’s under a hundred bucks. At that price I can keep it kicking around in my shoulder bag, or use it on the beach and not worry too much about accidentally ruining it. I can give it to someone else to use to record me, and it’s simple enough that they’ll be able to operate it. For trivial home movies, small, cheap and simple beats big, expensive and complicated. Plus, in a couple more years an SLR upgrade will get me a still camera that shoots good video through high quality zoom lenses with image stabilization.

I gather that increasing numbers of people these days use their cell phone to tell the time, and don’t bother with a watch.

However, the watch is fighting back. Behold, the quad band GSM phone in a wristwatch, with Bluetooth (so you can pair it with a headset for phone use) and OLED display showing analog hands. Plus 1.3MP camera, kinetic battery recharge, and MP3 player.

At 13mm thick it’s still pretty bulky, but not much worse than my Casio G-Shock.

I’m by no means a survivalist crackpot–I’m entirely too reliant on modern pharmaceuticals–but the Eton FR1000 is really cool. It’s an FM, AM and GMRS radio (walkie-talkie) with vox activation. It’s an LED flashlight and emergency siren. It’ll charge your cell phone. And it can be powered by AA batteries, rechargeable NiMH, AC adaptor, or hand crank! All it’s missing is shortwave.

How would you like a digital video camera that records 15fps video in 3GP format (QuickTime-compatible) direct to flash drive, is small enough to fit in a pack of gum, and has 33 hour capacity?

It’s currently $295. In less than 10 years cameras like this will be so cheap anyone will be able to afford one. Phones will be able to upload their video live to the Internet, in case of confiscation.  The future of ubiquitous surveillance is coming, whether you like it or not.

Features required:

• Container format support: AVI, MPG, MP4.
• Video codec support: MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, XviD.
• Audio codec support: MPEG-1 layer III, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 AAC.
• Component video output.

Features desired:

• Hard disk or SD cards for storage.
• Network connection.
• H.264 codec support.

Some options I know about:

• Apple TV. Pluses: Cheapish, nice UI. Minuses: Requires unsupported hacks.
• Mvix MV-4000U. Pluses: Dirt cheap. Minuses: No H.264.
• DViCO TVIX M-4000PA. Pluses: Works as regular FTP server.

An amazing article from the Chicago Reader describes a recent incident in which an out-of-uniform police officer who was late arriving to work, shot an unarmed man in the head at point blank range, in full view of security cameras.

The officer lied and said that at the time of the shooting he was surrounded by 4 or 5 men who had threatened his life. When police discovered that the video footage existed, the story was changed to say that the victim had raised a fist and attempted to disarm the officer, and that the cop had raised his arm and accidentally shot the victim through the head.

And it gets worse from there. I encourage you to watch the footage and listen to the narration.

As the reality distortion field begins to fade, people are starting to wake up to the iPhone’s shortcomings. I’ve been assembling a list of issues I’ve seen mentioned:

• No SDK.
• No Flash.
• No Java.
• No Bluetooth file transfer.
• No DIY MP3 or AAC ringtones.
• Although the camera takes 2 megapixel photos, the only way to get them out is to e-mail them, which resizes them to 640×480.
• No Bluetooth keyboard support.
• Need a new battery? $80 and you have to mail the phone to Apple and wait 3 business days.
• Poor talk time.
• No instant messaging.
• No modem support for using it with your laptop.
• Recessed 3-pole headphone jack doesn’t work with regular headphone plugs.
• No video support from the camera.
• No MMS (multimedia SMS).
• Glass front invites disaster.
• No unread mark support in mail (IMAP).
• No filters in mail.
• No voice dial.
• Regular SIM cards don’t work, so you can’t get an overseas SIM and avoid roaming charges.

So yeah, definitely not buying one. But I bet iPhone 2.0 in a year or so will rock.

Unearthed via Google Groups: me ranting about phone design and pondering the development of a Mac phone with easy to understand graphical push-buttons. In 1991.

But no, no iPhone for me until it’s opened up and the price is dropped. If I wanted to blow $600 on a piece of overhyped locked-down electronics, I’d get a PlayStation 3.

The Guardian:

In recent years networking sites like MySpace and Facebook have seen remarkable growth and become some of the most heavily trafficked destinations on the internet. But Danah Boyd, a researcher at the University of California and internet sociologist, says populations of different networks are now divided on a rough class basis.

Her evidence, collected through a series of interviews with US teenagers using MySpace and Facebook over the past nine months, shows there is a clear gap between the populations of each site.

“MySpace was the cool thing for high school teens and Facebook was the cool thing for college students,” she wrote in a paper available online. “The picture is now being blurred … it seems to primarily have to do with socio-economic class.”Typical Facebook users, she said, “tend to come from families who emphasise education and going to college. They are primarily white, but not exclusively”. MySpace, on the other hand, “is still home for Latino and Hispanic teens, immigrant teens” as well as “other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm”.
[...]
“A month ago, the military banned MySpace but not Facebook. This was a very interesting move because there’s a division, even in the military. Soldiers are on MySpace; officers are on Facebook.”

According to Ms Boyd, Facebook is not used by young soldiers, who are generally less well-educated and from poorer backgrounds, and there is an element of social conflict in the ban.

So, MySpace is Facebook for the uneducated?

Getting a Second Life

Imagine a world where you could create literally anything you could imagine, and explore it in 3D. What would you make?

If your answer was “strip malls and casinos”, I know a place you’ll love.

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A while back I had the unusual experience of having my employer suggest that I spend some time trying out Second Life. IBM is quite interested in the commercial possibilities of 3D shared environments, and has even set up some experimental conference spaces.

I managed to get into Second Life via the experimental Linux client build. It was slow, but did the job. It was also very good at making ATI’s buggy video drivers crash. But between crashes and bouts of net lag, I managed to explore a little.

What I found was mostly depressing.

When Linden Labs set up Second Life, they had a vision of a William Gibson style cyberspace, with people flying around in 3D conducting business. So they set up their digital world as a free market, with its own currency, exchangeable for real money. Unlike the real world, however, land in Second Life isn’t purchasable; instead, you have to rent it.

This has had an unfortunate effect on the virtual world. If you want to build any kind of building, you need land. If you want land, you need to pay for it with Linden dollars. So you need an ongoing source of Linden dollars, or you need to spend real money. Hence, about half the buildings in Second Life seem to be either strip malls or casinos.

The strip malls mostly sell clothing and other accoutrements for your virtual body. If you buy a building you need land to put it on, and most people don’t have land, so there’s not much point selling buildings.

The space not taken up by casinos and strip malls is taken up by nightclubs. My guess is that they’re mostly owned by the same people who own the adjacent strip malls, and are used as a tool to stimulate the sale of fashionable clothing.

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I don’t want to give you the impression that it’s all commercial trash, though. There are some great places in Second Life. My favorite is the International Spaceflight Museum, which has scale models of an enormous selection of real life spacecraft. There are some nice Zen Gardens in Achemon. Braunworth has a reimplementation of the town of the first Silent Hill video game which I quite like wandering around.

Sadly, the quality of 3D objects is additionally limited by the fact that everything has to be built inside the game; there are no proper 3D tools, and you can’t (say) construct something with Google’s SketchUp and import it into Second Life.

So, if 95% of the population can’t afford land, can’t work out how to make things, and eventually get bored with watching pixels dance in a nightclub, what does everyone do? Well, mostly Second Life is a giant chat system. It’s IRC with 3D graphics. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but it seems such a waste of a 3D rendering engine. And in practice, the 3D doesn’t really add much to the IRC experience.

There are also technical issues. Each patch of land has a limit on how many people can be in it, and the limit gets hit fairly regularly. IBM has resorted to buying a square of 4 patches of land, and building the conference hall where the corners meet. The client is also slow and chews CPU. Even on my brand new MacBook Pro, the frame rate drops rapidly as soon as ten people turn up in the same place.

So, is Second Life the future of the Internet? I’m going to say no, not without some pretty radical improvements. It’s an amusing place to spend a few minutes every now and again, but so far, that’s about all.