I’ve been watching online videos even before Youtube got popular, and I’ve seen my share of the other flash based video distribution system from other places, like the ones at Metacafe or Collegehumour. At first I thought the difference in quality that the &fmt=18 Youtube hack (now accessible on each page where higher quality is accessible) was the best thing ever, and it was only many months after that I checked out the in-house system at CollegeHumour and realized how awesome the quality was. Sure, the load times were considerably longer, but if that’s the price to pay for content that looks good full screen on a 720p TV, than I’ll wait the 5 minutes if I have to.

And after seeing both of these systems, I realized that they don’t even come close to what Vimeo has to offer. Now I know, for many Vimeo is no news, but I’ve just been introduced to the thing by the BMX industry, which uses Vimeo a lot to post up high quality web edits and teasers for bike enthousiasts to enjoy. Unlike Youtube, Vimeo works with a monthly upload limit, not a time per video limit like Youtube does, which allows them to regulate the amount of videos added, while not sacrificing any quality. Also unlike Youtube, 720p HD is fully supported! While the image quality, even in non HD mode, is tons better than on Youtube, high def is where it’s really at. You have to see it to beleive it really.  I was pleasantly surprised about the load times too: although it takes a considerable amount of time to load the video, it’s not as bad as the other systems I’ve seen featuring higher definition. A bit thing that has been hurting Youtube a lot also is very poor support of the more and more popular widescreen formats. 16:9 is the norm, yet I still get those ugly black bars on Youtube, as if the video window wasn’t small enough. Vimeo has full support of 16:9, and probably does support other cinematographic formats without wonky up your video files, although I haven’t checked. But then again, if you’re shooting in 2.35:1, your most likely to release your content on Bluray disc, not on the internet.

Apart from just raw picture quality, I think the Vimeo site is just overall better designed. Stuff like making time indications in questions like “What’s that in the corner at 1:28” into hyperlinks to that part of the video is just pure genious. I feel that the comments system is also easier to read, but that’s just me.

And also, Vimeo has this little feeling to it that you get when you use something that’s not mainstream yet, this little thing that tickles the anticonformist inside all of us. But seriously, being less mainstream means that you’re less likely to fall on shitty reposts, poorly ripped TV shows, and japanese 14 year olds waving to the camera in a hotel room in New York, and other crap of the like.

So to recapitulate, for small sub-90 second clips there’s Flickr Video, for the masses and visibility there’s Youtube, and if what you want is to distribute high quality content for display on say, your website, and don’t really care about people not finding your stuff while just browsing, Vimeo is what you want.

More original content. Higher quality. Do check it out, and use it to upload!

I found this user on Youtube about a month ago, and I thought I might share it and give him linkage, because the stuff is outstanding. If you’re into photography and the gear used in the latter, you have to check this out.

Lilkiwi87, aka Joseph Spina, is a 20 year old pro photographer currently working for the National Geographic. The dude’s packing a Master’s in Photography, and his education combined with incredible experience from working for the world’s most reknown magazine makes him a reference for anything photography. Joseph decided to make his youtube profile into a one stop source for photography tutorials and info on Nikon gear. Despite joining only 6 months ago, Joseph has posted 83+ videos containing outstanding Nikon gear reviews and in-camera how-tos, as well as more general tutorials on photography that can be applied to any camera, concerning stuff from bokeh to how to clean filters correctly. Heck, for you real photography wizzes, he also seems to enjoy giving away high end gear once in a while, making the giveaways into questionnaires that are insanely tough.

What I really like is that unlike many big Youtubers, he actually takes the time to respond to many of the comments posted on his video, given they are relevant, and what surprised me most, he gives out his EMAIL (!) on his profile, inviting beginner photographers to ask their questions directly. This guy churns out OUTSTANDING videos, both quality and content wise, yet he keeps it real and stays friendly with the photo noobs like myself.

I don’t know why he doesn’t have over 1k subscribers yet… his stuff is tight.

Check out his youtube channel, and be sure to subscribe! You also might be interested in his personal website, which contains a crapload of photography tips, tuts, and articles also.

This is the late 2000’s, the age of the new web. The mailing list is dead and gone, and now RSS is the tool that everybody and there grandmothers use to stay in touch with whatever, from the newest gadgets featured on tech sites like Engadget to serious-business news coming straight from CNN. I think RSS is great, but what it lacks is organization. I don’t like polluting my Google Reader with feeds from big blogs, because they usually bury the good content from my blogroll buddies with millions of articles concerning the newest solid gold iPhone, which I don’t really give a crap about.  For a while I used to have 35 RSS gadgets on my iGoogle page, but that lacks practicality too: load times for all those feeds is huge, and I rarely scroll to the bottom, so I end up missing some stuff most of the time.

I thought that it would be a wicked thing to have some kind of tool that merges feeds, with using a full featured desktop RSS reader.  After hours on hours of googling around, and Nick suggesting Yahoo Pipes which I never really got a stab at, I finally found a simple PHP script that does a wonderful job of merging RSS feeds in chronological order. There’s a version for both PHP4 and PHP5, but SimpleXML is required in the latter. It looks like a pretty underground piece of code, but it gets the job done. I’ve started compiling feeds by subject, so now my feeds are all tidily sorted.

Check out it here. I know, a .CC domain is kinda suspicious (it’s the first time I see a non spam site on those domains), but the stuff is totally legit. Mad props to the coder.

It seems like summer drives me in this sort of vegetative state: once school is over, I just go home, and it’s like I don’t know what to do of my days so I just sit around and browse some forums, work occasionally, and hang out with friends when possible. When I’m in summer mode, nothing never is critical: if I’m poor, then I just stay home or borrow, if something needs to be done it can always wait a couple more days, and even my McJob, which I usually get sick off when working over 20 hours a week, now looks like something that just happens. I do nothing at home, go to work, do the stuff I’m asked for 4, 6 ,8 hours, then go back home feeling…. well not feeling anyway specific at all. I just drone through my days, and I don’t think about much.

Totally the opposite of when I’m at school, where everything’s important. I HAVE TO finish this paper, I HAVE TO get my bike repaired, I HAVE TO update my blog once a week. I end up having sleeping disorders because of all the stuff I think about.

I kinda like summer mode. Very relaxing…

However, after a month and a half in this vegetative state, my parents mentionned something that slapped me right out of it. Next year, I’m in grade 11, and here in Quebec, that means that I have to register for CEGEP. If you’re not familiar with CEGEP, it’s basically the higher end of senior high, but in a more University-ish kind of way. This ain’t high school anymore. You get specialized classes, but you also get funky schedules(courses at 8 PM, days without any courses), and the buildings are built like Universities too: there are many buildings with many wings, and big CEGEPS usually have 5000+ students.

Now don’t get me wrong, it ain’t the chance that’s scaring me: it’s the choices I have to make. Do I move out and study in Montreal, do I complete my education here in my home town, do I move out even if I stay here, what college do I attend to, with what institutions do I apply for an educational loan? All those questions have to be answered before registrations, which will be held at the end of winter 2009, which is about 7 months away. In 8-9 months from now, I’ll be accepted somewhere, and starting my career specific eduction. In 8-9 months from now I’ll be a couple of months into my 17 years of age, and in exactly a year and a week from now, I’ll be a CEGEP freshman.

If I were to have it my way, I’d get accepted to work at a Futureshop in Montreal or it’s suburbs, and I’d complete my pre-unversity education in some English language CEGEP in Montreal in a tech-related program, where I could avoid the dreaded French mothertoungue exams, to then move on to complete my studies at the UQ’s ETS, a reknown engineering school, possibly the best one within my reach. I would then be hunted down by a headhunter who would offer my a 6 figure yearly salary to work as an IT guy in some big business. I would later return to school for some further specialized education, to then become the spokesman for whatever company, earn lots, have a sideline building kickass custom PCs, buy my dream BMW, have a girlfriend to whom I would make many babies, and live happily ever after till the day of my death.

It’s a bit early to talk about the stuff after engineering school, but the perspective of moving out to the big city has me browning my shorts. Can you imagine yours truly, fresh out of the womb at 17, barely able to remember to flush the toilet, living with two other young dudes or gals in a 4 room apartment, living off Reese Pieces and Coca Cola trying to hustle up the money to pay the landlord? No more spending all my paychecks on a computer, a new back wheel for my BMX. Beyond this point, it’s serious business: heating bills, phone bills, garage bills, parking tickets, work, more work, and less play. My parents want me to stay home and attend the local CEGEP and unversity, which are far from the best. But what do I sacrifice, the quality of my education or the quality of my lifestyle?

In a sense, it’s got me hyped, because this is where the real freedom really starts, where I get to study the stuff I want with people sharing my interests, not learning crap with a class half filled with morons. But on the other side of the medal, I know it’s gonna be a rough ride.

Scary shit. I guess I just have to think it over until it sounds right.

In this post, I explore how hard drive makers have spent too much time and effort making drives only bigger and faster, and not thinking about making more products tailored to what the consumer needs, and how there are many segments that are still open to whoever wants to take them.

The hardware industry in itself is constantly changing, but one sector that has particularly evolved over the years is the disk storage sector. Nowadays, everybody from hardcore enthusiasts like we OCN-ers to our formerly computer illiterate grandparents are now juggling around with voluminous files, music, movies, and large collections of high-resolution digital pictures, so the overall demand for bigger, faster drives just keeps growing.

Hitachi, Seagate, Western Digital and all the other hard drives giants are well aware of this trend, and thanks to ferocious competition amongst themselves, great milestones have been reached. A terabyte of raw storage is now something that pretty much any willing person can afford, redundant and stripped storage via RAID is now within everybody’s reach thanks to integration to many chipset solutions (think P35+ICH9R and later, nearly all Nvidia chipsets since the 5 series), drives are quieter, faster and more energy efficient than ever before, and most importantly, cost per gigabyte is rock bottom, below 0.20$/GB in many cases.

All this progress has me thrilled, however, I think that it is time to reconsider how we use our disk drives, and other means of storage on non-removable media. It seems that too much emphasis is put on making hard drives, bigger, faster, when maybe all we need to do is to think up and create mission-specific storage products, as to better suit the needs of every user and every machine, specially in these days where many people have more than one computer fulfilling more than one task.

One of my best articles this year if you ask me. Critics are more than welcome, feel free to leave your own point of vue either here (no registration required) or on the OCN blog, which requires membership to comment.

Read the entire article at my OCN hardware blog.

In the last weeks, I’ve spent lots of time optimizing my folding farm and thinking about future upgrades, and I thought I might show off my setup to the public, and show how easy and fun it can be to start folding and cure them diseases.

As illustrated in the wonderful graphic below, my folding setup is composed of mainly 5 elements.

Let’s go through the elements one by one.

1. 1. This is Annabel, my fastest folder. The particularity of this machine is that somehow, despite that it is not the most powerful machine in the house, it’s the one churning out the most points. Despite 400 less mhz, half the L2 cache and slower memory, it manages to outperform Fr0stbyte, the strongest machine in my household, by about 25%. Could it be that it’s running Linux? My guess is that the OS probably does play a huge role: At equal clocks, we could estimate that Linux SMP would probably yield 30-40% more points than Windows SMP.Annabel runs Linux SMP very close to 24/7, it’s only downtimes being reboots and component swaps. She also serves as an HTTP, FTP, SSH, Bittorrent server and NAS node, serving 2 entire hard drives as well as 3-4 other folders on the network via SMB. She runs on Fedora 9 “Sulphur” x64.
2. 2. My first ever computer, Fr0stbyte, is the second biggest folder in the house. It’s got the most elaborate cooling too, so it’s overclocked O’ plenty: the e6750 which runs stock at 2.66 mhz was given a healthy ~800 mhz boost and now runs at 3.4 ghz, all day, everyday, or almost. Fr0stbyte runs on Windows XP Pro x64, and folds with the Windows Nvidia GPU2 folding client. It used to do SMP, but at about 5000 PPD, the GPU client yeilds much more.
3. 3. Not much to say about this box… I’ve been folding on this machine ever since I started folding, but at less than 200 PPD it’s pretty much useless. It’s been folding a tad more since I swapped the 1.7 ghz Celeron for a 2.2 ghz Pentium 4, but it’s still one of the second slowest folder around my house.
4. 4. Last one is my father’s laptop. DO NOT FOLD ON A LAPTOP UNLESS IT IS COOLED CORRECTLY! This one happens to be a 17 incher, and the temps stay ok, which is the only reason while I still have a client running on it. It runs only a couple of hours per day and it sports a single core Turion, so yeild is minimal.
5. 5. My pride and joy in this whole setup is my monitoring setup. It all starts with Fr0stbyte running Fahmon, the folding at home log reader and monitor. I just run Fahmon on my main box because I had some problems solving depencies for installing it in linux, but I could very well have run it on any of my other boxes.  Fahmon happens to have an “export for web” option which generates an HTML page every time it updates, for use with a web server to display stats for the world to see. Since I have my web server on a network share on my main rig, I just configure Fahmon to shoot it’s web stuff to the web server’s network drive mount, and voila. If I see that a box is considered idle by fahmon, then I SSH to my server for some hot pinging action, and I reboot (or call a relative and tell him/her to reboot) the box in need.

Sure, I’ve seen people with way sicker farms, but I AM at rank 162 of the OCN folding team, so mine can’t possibly be that bad. Remember, you don’t need monster machines to get folding for the cure. Check out my other articles on folding, (How to fold on linux and a short rambling on how to optimize your setup), and put those spare cycles to use.

As we all know, the second gen iPhone is coming out July 11th, and this is where us igloo dwelling Canadians are finally getting the chance to get our paws on some hot 3g enabled and oh so cool iPhone. Buttt…. there’s a but.

We already all know that Canadians are getting grossly overcharged for mobile voice and data services, but with the iPhone, things are getting worst. In comparison to what AT&T offers in the US, the iPhone plans that Fido/Rogers offer are ridiculously expensive. I was planning on getting an iPhone myself as my next phone following the announcement that Fido, a Roger’s owned subsidiary, would be offering the Jesus-phone too, but after peeking at the rates, I’ll stick to buying a cheap Nettop and carrying it around. Who the hell is going to pay over 60$ per month for a basic plan here when an unlimited plan in the states it goes for 30$?

The way I’m seeing this, either Apple, Rogers, or both are trying to screw off what they consider a small market. It’s about time that mobile carriers stop treating us like shit and give us plans that make some sense. For people like me who have been patiently waiting for a no-hacks-required iPhone in Canada, this is a giant ball of snot spat right to our faces.

I encourage you to sign the RuinediPhone.com petition for better iPhone plans, and to spread the word on your own web property. In this era where it’s all about coupling data and mobility, we have to fight back. Show some support!

Dell just pulled out the big guns and is aiming then straight at Asus, MSI, and other UMPC segment contenders. The new Dell E, and E slim, two new laptops designs, where just announced to Engadget. The E takes on the super-budget laptop segment, while the E slim takes on  the Apple Macbook Air, the IBM X300, and other ultraslim laptops.

To be honest, I don’t a flying crap about the E slim, I like my stuff normal-sized and not overpriced, but the standard E looks like the perfect UMPC to me. First off, it’s just as compact as it’s competitors, like the EEE901 and the MSI Wind, it sports the fancy new super efficient Intel Atom (no way I’m buying an underpowered M), but has features that the others don’t have. Unlike the Wind, the E has more interesting flash based storage options, not the totally useless 80 gig standard issue platter drive. If you need more storage on such a little laptop, don’t get anal about it and get yourself an 8 gig SDHC card, but nowadays, everybody should be considering network attached storage for storing their files.

Battery life is also most likely to be better, since the E ships with a 4 cell 35 Whr bat rated for about 5 hours of use. 3-cell batteries on the Wind? With a platter drive? I mean come on MSI.

Also, the E has the lowest planned MSRP yet, at a buck under 300$USD, which is just slightly more expensive than an iPod touch, but with a crapload more horsepower. Personally, I think it’s the hottest of them all too.

Since we’re dealing with Dell, I’m thinking there might be a few customization options available too. Choice of color is confirmed, but a 2 gig memory kit would make a little web-browsing bomb out of this thing. OS is also to your choice with either Dell’s very own modified Ubuntu or Windows XP.

For somebody like me who has a more powerful rig to do all the fun stuff, video and photo editing, gaming and all, this is perfect. It seems that both the MSI Wind and EEEPc are trying to make a UMPC into a functional everyday machine.. when all most consumers want (at least the geeky ones) is a stripped down machine that can surf the web, run Pidgin and hax0r teh noobs on the go. I don’t want 80 gigs of slow disk space when I have 1 terabyte of NAS and a gigabit network, but I do want a super-light notebook so I can blog live from the shitter.

The only thing I would like to see is 802.11n connectivity replacing the pretty useless 0.3 Mpixel webcam. Besides that, I’m in love: I’m grabbing one for sure on the release date set to August.

Read the original Engadget article and check out the gallery.

A friend of mine gave me his iPod the other so that I could fill it up with music while he was busy “reimporting his CDs”, but I ran into unbeleivable amounts of trouble with his iPod. I’ve owned an iPod and fixed a countless amounts of them, but his was very weirdly bugged up. iTunes would detect it, but would try to update it then automatically eject it, and Windows disallowed me disk access after a couple of tries. Heck even Yamipod couldn’t even read or write to the damned thing.

Thanks to Youtube, I learned today how to reset the iPod to it’s factory new state, at a very low-level. Kind of like force-reflashing a BIOS. Heck if this were lower level, I’d be opening the damned thing up and changing it’s CMOS. Check it out.

This is fresh off of Overclock.net. Benchmarkreviews, which apparently has a member who had access to the closed beta of the Nvidia GPU client that was planned for next week, leaked the totality of the new client files on their website. Thanks to “Bowman”, from OCN, the files are now mirror at many different locations.

I have just install the new client, and the folding power is CRAZY! My overclocked 8800 GT does 2400 PPD according to FAHmon, and that’s in addition to the 1600 PPD that the SMP client yeilds. 4000 PPD for a non-Quad-core box running Windows is simply amazing.

I’m currently testing out running two GPU clients in parallel, I’ll notify if that works out.

You can download the files here, here, and here, and share it with the world by digging it here.  Have fun!