Jan Ole Peek

Orb MyCasting – I’ve seen the Future!

What is a MyCast from Orb? Well they have a great description and many details on their website so I won’t go into the details. But let it suffice to say that with this software, running on my home PC, I can view all of my videos, podcasts, music files, photos, and anything that’s either a video, audio, or media file, from anywhere I can access the web.

This stuff even works on my Dell Axim pocket pc. It’s somehow amazing that I was able to walk around the office, watching “The Office” in the palm of my hand, knowing it was streaming via the wireless LAN and then via the Internet, all the way from my computer at home. The current version is a little buggy, it tends to crash but it does a great job when it’s running. Streaming quality is excellent, of course dependent on your network connection, and the new flash player allows for even more flexibility than before.

I would highly recommend this for anyone who is on the go a lot and just doesn’t have enough time at home to watch their media stored on their PC.

Free Stuff

I love it when there are some benefits of this podcast we’ve been doing (Battlefield Podcast).

Got this in the mail the other day, brand new zBoard keyboards. Hooray!

Digg View

My buddy Paul just alerted to this site called Digg View that gives a very nice summary of the top stories on Digg. I tend to look at what’s happening on Digg a few times a day, usually when I’m bored. This page now gives me a quick overview of anything that I may be interested in. Good stuff!

Web 2.0

Amazing 3D Sidewalk Art Photos

These unbelievable photos are chalk drawings done by Julian Beever. Beever uses his drawings to create an amazing 3D illusion. Julian Beever is an English artist who’s famous for his art on the pavement of England, France, Germany, USA, Australia and Belgium. Most of his artwork it is impossible to tell whats real from what’s an illusion. Very cool stuff.

There’s three photos below and a lot more here.

Why do I blog?

I felt the need to state why I continue to participate in this weird exercise called blogging. Maybe I should define what blogging means first. Wikipedia defines blogging as

A blog is a website in which items are posted on a regular basis and displayed in reverse chronological order. The term blog is a shortened form of weblog or web log. Authoring a blog, maintaining a blog or adding an article to an existing blog is called “blogging”.

So why do I keep adding articles to my blog? Heck, 80% of them aren’t even mine. I probably didn’t even discover the information in them. Most likely I found them in someone else’s blog, or on a news site, or even in a podcast.  Still, I feel compelled to take the 3 minutes out of my day and copy and paste some content into a form and hit the Publish button.

I believe that my main motivation for this blog is not singular: I like to be able to go back a few months and see what was on my mind at that time. I enjoy the fact that my blog is something to tinker with. I like involving my friends who I do not see personally very often in what’s going on in my life. And finally, some things are just too cool, disgusting or weird to not write about.

Blogging also gives me something to do during my lunch hour. I have a lot of RSS feeds that I read or at least skim daily for anything that strikes my interest. So why not share it on here? Some may think it pointless, but I can’t wait to look over my posts in a few years time and see what happened then. Anything I can do to keep less stuff in my brain.

If you’re interested in blogging, I would suggest staying away from free services such as MSN spaces, Myspace, or even Blogger. Even though some are better (Blogger) than other (Myspace), I would suggest WordPress. Either run your own server and domain (you can get them free) or sign up for a free blog.

2GB Swiss Army Knife

Swissbit bumps their knives to 2GB – Engadget

Now this is a cool swiss knife. I want one. Probably pretty expensive though and just another one of those things that ends up in my nightstand drawer and then keeps me from opening it when it gets stuck behind the ledge and that really pisses me off and… well… it is shiny.

They’re including the usual scissors, knife, nail file, and screw driver on the rubyRED and retroALOX versions, while the rubyRED version — which is looking a tad chubby these days — also adds a ballpoint pen and an LED light for extra geek cred. You can even pop out the drive part for flying, since the TSA isn’t so hot on knives these days, or just make a run for it at the security gate and see how far you get.