Google Code: Summer of Code

Google Code: Summer of Code Start coding and make money! Google is paying up to US$4500 (RM17,000) for students to work on an open source project over the summer. It's open to students from most countries. The participating organizations are : The Python Software Foundation The Perl Foundation The Apache Software Foundation Ubuntu Linux The Mono Project The Gnome Foundation The Wine Project The Subversion Project Google I wish I was a student. That amount of money is enough to pay off an entire 3-year undergraduate degree in Malaysia.

The Future of TV

The future of TV is here. Or at least, glimpses of it. IPTV - or TV programming delivered over the Internet - is taking baby steps. While the majority of the attention and content are focused on the semilegal, gray area of downloading current TV shows over BitTorrent, there are pioneers who are creating content specifically for IPTV. It will be interesting to watch their progress and development over the next few months. These early IPTV shows are episodic and (perhaps naturally) tend to focus more on the geekier side of things. It's only a matter of time before we will see more mainstream offerings. Here are 3 shows you should check out. 1. The Scene. It's a fictional story set in the peer-to-peer file trading world, which is refreshingly recursive since it's delivered over those networks. The story is very "Internet" - it's told mostly with video capture of chats (IRC, AIM, etc), which means you actually have to pay attention. Each episode is around 15-20 minutes long. 2. From the Shadows. Guided by The Screen Savers (TSS) alumni Yoshi, this show is what you would expect to see in a segment of that show, only longer and a bit more detailed. The first episode (Box 1.0) was about wireless gaming, including a wireless peer-to-peer Gameboy game while skydiving! The second episode is a bit more laid back, with an interview with a guy who creates light sabers. The third has an funny segment where Yoshi says, "Wait, I can cuss now!" and proceeds to do so. 3. Newest addition is systm, helmed by another TSS alum, Kevin Rose. Kevin recently announced that he was leaving G4 to work on this full time. The first episode was just launched last week, and it's about warspying - creating a portable solution that captures images from unsecured wireless surveillance cameras. This is probably the best thought-out show, with multiple delivery options and supporting multiple video formats . Tags: IPTV TV Video

The Next Wave in Content Syndication: Mobile RSS

MarketingStudies has a short interview with Scott Rogers about Mobile RSS. Scott is the VP of Business Development at FreeRange Communications, which develops a Java-based RSS reader and service called FreeNews for Blackberry, Sony Ericsson, PalmOne Treo smartphones, and other mobile devices.

Two small enhancements for the palmOne Lifedrive

After reading through all of the recent reviews of palmOne's new "Mobile Manager, the Lifedrive, I have come up with just two minor changes that would have made the device a lot more useful. 1. A removable battery. With a hard drive in place, plus dual wireless (Bluetooth and WiFi), the Lifedrive's battery life should be around the same as the Tungsten T3 - that is, mediocre. Making available a removable battery should have been a priority. PalmOne could have used the same 1800 mAh batteries as the Treo 650, thereby increasing sales without introducing another accessory. 2. A line-in jack. The LifeDrive has the potential to be the perfect companion for a podcaster - not only can you record your podcast, but with Wifi you can immediately upload to your server as well. While the LifeDrive has a built-in Voice Recorder, it doesn't have a separate line-in audio jack. An external microphone would have been a great accessory. The LifeDrive could easily have taken the place of the iRiver as the podcaster favourite. Now someone has to come up with a Bluetooth headset with a super mic to make this happen. However, having spent $500 for a PDA/media player, a $20 external mic would be acceptable but not necessarily a $90 Bluetooth headset. Tags: LifeDrive Palm PDA

PalmSource Mobile Summit & DevCon 2005

This year's PalmSource Mobile Summit & Developer Conference 2005 just ended. The big news include the return of plain ol' Palm, Inc - the company and the brand. The plan is for palmOne to be rebranded as Palm and for Palmsource and the Palm OS to find a new brand within the next few years. While they are at it, palmOne should also license the "Pilot" brand from the Pilot pen company, so we can legally call our PDA's PalmPilots again. That would make sense, since all PDAs since the original Palm Pilot are generally referred to as PalmPilots, right? Over at the Palmsource Devcon blog they have a number of podcasts featuring interviews with developers and even one with Ed Colligan, palmOne's CEO. If you are a developer or just an interested Palm user, you should check it out.

The emergence of micro-tablets : Nokia 770

Nokia - Nokia 770 The big news is that Nokia will release in the fall of 2005, the 770 - a new device in micro-tablet form factor. There are two main features of note - it will be running Linux rather than Symbian OS, and it is not a mobile phone. At first glance, the 770 is quite impressive : 4-inch 800x480 screen, WiFi (802.11b/g) and Bluetooth, ample memory (64MB RAM + 64MB user accessible flash drive + RSMMC expansion slot). Since it runs on Linux, Nokia has wisely piled on the applications : web browser, email, RSS news reader, media player (plays many video formats including MPEG4, Real, AVI and 3GP), music player (Internet radio support, MP3, AAC, WAV and others). There's no mention of Calendar or other PIM (personal information management) applications. It's clearly designed to work with existing Nokia phones that has Bluetooth and GPRS/EDGE/3G, as well as direct connections to public hotspots or your own wireless LAN. The main weak point as I see it is the battery life - the Nokia 770 comes with a 1500 mAh battery, which is only good for 3 hours of browsing. Hopefully the battery is compatible with Nokia's regular phone batteries. There's already a developer community, and MobileBurn is the first with a hands-on report. This new device hits squarely at a niche in between PDAs and notebooks. Microsoft has so far been unable to make the Tablet PC a runaway success. It's high time that companies create room for complimentary devices, rather than all-in-one solutions that are touted as desktop replacement, notebook replacement, etc. The Nokia 770 and the just-released palmOne LifeDrive are healthy signs of an emerging micro-tablet market. What everyone's really waiting for is Apple's oft-rumoured tablet device - perhaps in time for Apple's WWDC (World Wide Developers Conference) to be held early next month.

Treo 650 - firmware downgrade

As mentioned earlier, my palmOne Treo 650 smartphone has been acting up since I installed the latest "unofficial" firmware, version 1.23. It got so bad that I had to reset my Treo daily. Yesterday, I downgraded the firmware to version 1.21. Since then, the Treo has been much more stable. I'm still waiting for the official firmware upgrade/fix to come - it was rumoured to be released a month ago. Hurry up and fix it, palmOne - Apple released Mac OS X 10.4.1 barely a week after the official release of Tiger. Tags: Treo Palm Smartphone

palmOne's LifeDrive Mobile Manager

The much-leaked palmOne LifeDrive is now out. In an effort to promote this, palmOne even came up with a brand new category, the Mobile Manager, to join their existing Treo, Zire and Tungsten product lines. At first glance this looks to be a winner, with a 4GB microdrive, 65MB RAM, HiRes+ (480x320) screen, Bluetooth & WiFi connectivity, and a reasonable starting price of USD$499. You can order it from Amazon now. There's already a lot of coverage about the LifeDrive on the Internet: Dave's PDA BargainPDA MobileTechReview MSNBC PocketFactory CNET PC Magazine Treonauts PalmAddict - Sammy's view PalmAddict - Professor Jonathan's view

Free Dr Who Ebooks from the BBC

BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) is a wholly government-funded organization, and thus is free to produce commercial-free programs and innovate in terms of what they distribute to the public. In celebration of the latest season of Dr. Who (Season 27!), BBC is releasing 8 Dr. Who ebooks. They are part of 61 books which were published between 1992 and 1997 under the New Adventures series. Most of the books are now out of print. Each book now comes with a whole host of extras, including brand new illustrations and detailed commentaries from the authors. One of the ebooks (The Sands of Time), is even made available for PDAs, in eReader (PalmReader), Microsoft Reader and Mobipocket formats. Tags: ebook Palm Dr. Who

There's a Tiger in the house

As mentioned earlier, Apple's new operating system - Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, was launched over a week ago. That's long enough for all the major bugs and annoyances to be reported. There were no serious ones, so yesterday I installed Tiger on my iBook. The upgrade process was pretty painless - it took about 45 minutes to do, using the simple "Upgrade" method. Other options were "Archive and Install" or "Clean Install". There's really no big change that hit me - upon completion of the upgrade, it looked pretty much the same. However, there are many small changes under the hood. Probably the most noticeable user interface change is a blue magnifying glass on the top left of the screen - the new desktop search, Spotlight . It took 45 minutes for Spotlight to index all the files on my hard disk - around 20GB worth of data. After that, searching is almost instantaneous. You get a drop down list of results, sorted by document type - and top of the list is "Top Hit", which is what Spotlight thinks is the most likely thing you were looking for. The first application that I opened was Mail. It took around 20 minutes to import 5,500+ emails to the new version. The new user interface for Mail is ugly! Since I use Mail mainly as a backup for my Gmail account, it probably won't bother me much. I'll post more updates once I have had more experience with Tiger. Tags: Apple Mac+OS+X Tiger

Quicktime 7 fullscreen video - for free

There's been a lot of frustration for Quicktime 6 Pro users, because their registrations are not carried over to Quicktime 7. In fact, Apple has issued a Quicktime 6 reinstaller for those who decide that Quicktime 7 Pro is not worth another $30. One of the "pro" features of Quicktime is viewing videos in full screen. Here's a tip on how to view full screen video with Quicktime 7, without paying $30, and without breaking the law. In full screen mode, there's cool transparent control panel which lets you forward, rewind, etc the video. [via Apple-X.net]

Bloglines Mobile

For those like me who monitor dozens of websites and blogs a day, RSS feeds are a godsend. You really need a good RSS feed aggregator like Newsgator or Bloglines. For the Palm platform, there's the QuickNews reader from Stand Alone which does a pretty good job, and costs only US$15. If you have a Bloglines account, there's a Bloglines Mobile service which allows you to monitor your favourite feeds from your phone or PDA. I've been using this for a week or so, via the Blazer web browser on my palmOne Treo 650 smartphone. While lacking a lot of the functionality of the full edition of Bloglines, it's very fast and simple way to keep track of your feeds. It's free, too.

Treo slowdowns, restarts and firmware updates

Over the past few days I've been experiencing system slowdowns on my Treo650 - so much so that yesterday alone I had to do a soft reset 3 times. That's the pitfall of being an early adopter and experimenter, I guess. PalmOne is typically slow in issuing official updates - there have been 3 "unofficial" updates so far, 1.15, 1.21 and 1.23. I am currently running (beta) firmware version 1.23. If the official update should come out, you should be able to find it at the palmOne Software updates page.

Backpack Online Organizer

Backpack is a new online personal information manager/photo organizer/wiki/file organizer. You can set reminders to be sent to you via email or to your mobile. You can even export all your data to an XML-formatted file. The site has a host of examples of what you can do with Backpack, and a couple of Quicktime videos of the application in action. There are four Backpack plans, starting with free and going up to USD$19 per month. Backpack is developed by 37Signals, the people who brought you the BaseCamp project management tool.

Yahoo! Mail up to 1GB

Over the weekend, Yahoo upgraded my Yahoo Mail account to 1GB, as previously announced. Is it a case of too little, too late? With Google changing the concept of email storage from "this is your quota" to "as much as you need", this seems a copycat gesture at best. The game has changed, and Yahoo really needs to leapfrog rather than keep up. Yahoo's acquisition of the popular image hosting service Flickr is a step in the right direction, and it will be interesting to see how they will integrate it with Yahoo's blog/community service Yahoo360.