Late to the Party

I stumbled across a headline on Daily Rotation about the article on Photosynth from Ars Technica when I was exploring different web-based RSS aggregators from this mega-list by Allyn Edmonds. I had gotten to Allyn’s site from PaulStamatiou.com, which I originally visited because he had commented on a Download Squad post about this OS X program launcher app called Todos.

Anyway, I really wanted to comment on the Photosynth program. It’s a cool application that can analyze a bunch of pictures of an area and create a 3D representation from all of those pictures. It sounds just like creating a 360-degree, virtual reality Quicktime movie from a bunch of your own pictures, but of course it’s more than just stitching all of the pictures together. And the pictures can be from all over the web, not just your own pictures on your hard drive. Just take a look at this short demo video to really get a feel for what this program can do; it’s pretty impressive, IMO.

via jkOnTheRun:

Was too busy today to check my usual cadre of RSS feeds today (figures that would happen on a Friday…psh), so this is the first time I saw news of this mysterious, possibly new UMPC to be released sometime:

JK says it seems very much like an HP TC1100. That would be really cool. I’m still waiting for the dang Asus R2H to become available, though!

Wow… I turned on my TV to check something on my Mac mini (it’s permanently hooked up to my HDTV along with the EyeTV 500, serving as my DVR and media center) and was surprised to see that an update for the EyeTV’s software was available. I went to Elgato’s site to check it out, and WOW, they now have a full-screen Front-Row-like menu for it, along with some other new features! I didn’t know that this update was coming up, and I really didn’t know that they were going to add a full-screen menu, so this was a very pleasant surprise. Here’s a teaser:

This “kiosk mode” is something that I’ve really been wanting ever since I bought the EyeTV 500 a few months ago. I know, you Windows Media Center users are probably all, “Geeze, that’s news?” Yeah, yeah, yeah… Settle down. *smirk* I have to say that even though I have limited experience with setting up a PC as a DIY DVR, especially one for recording HDTV, I think the EyeTV 500 is the easiest HD DVR device I’ve ever set up. It’s basically plug-and-play, for real. I love using it, and the recordings, even on my low-end, PowerPC Mac mini are wonderful. I have been meaning to do a full write-up for the EyeTV 500 because I think there’s precious little practical information, user-review-wise, out there right now. But now is not the time (too tired!).

Suffice it to say that I am very pleased with Elgato’s new release of the EyeTV software, and I’m looking forward to using this (HD)TV-friendly interface from now on. I’ll give a more detailed write up later.

P.S. Kevin, that means that I still watch over-the-air HDTV… *smirk* Can’t remember which exact blog post you asked this, but I do remember being irked at your mocking tone (I know you were joking).

Yuck, the floor where my cube is smells like old-style Band-Aids (you know, the kind where they used to have the little red string for you to pull to open the wrapper)… I used to kind of like the smell of those Band-Aids, but at this level of permeation it’s just bleh.

Just a few minutes ago I saw a post on Warner Crocker’s blog about how some readers took Kevin Tofel to task over his criticism of Walt Mossberg’s recent review article for the Nokia 770 (sorry for all the name-dropping!). I honestly could not believe that some people who regularly read jkOntheRun didn’t agree wholeheartedly with Kevin’s article (I sure did! I was going to post another “amen, Brotha!” entry on my blog when I first saw Kevin’s article, but procrastinated too long.) and actually berated him for ragging on Walt Mossberg. Not to be all tin-foil-hat, but those people who criticized Kevin kind of sound like Walt Mossberg cronies who troll blogs and post comments to try to keep Mossberg’s rep from being sullied. Gimme a break! Walt Mossberg’s reviews are so biased (Apple can do no wrong). If you don’t believe that, you’re kidding yourself.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I understand that Kevin was basically trying to skewer all of the tech journalists who have no clue about how mobile tech devices are useful to a significant percentage of the population. He was just using WM as an example (good one, at that). The problem is that when all of these well-known journalists like WM and David Pogue are totally dissing UMPCs (or Tablet PCs) as a whole, they are affecting a large part of the population who basically only look at these mainstream publications for their gadget research. I’ve seen and heard, time and time again, a lot of misinformation coming from these so-called experts about Tablet PC technology, like they never tried using a TPC since they were first released (before the great SP1 patch). It is so frustrating for Tablet/UMPC enthusiasts to see all of this misinformation going on, and I say good on Kevin for standing up to these dimwits.

This isn’t to say that the 1st-gen UMPCs are all perfect, and that I hate everyone who says bad things about them…far from it. I realize that there are a lot of things that can be improved, and I think that the 2nd-gen devices will be (hopefully) more in line with the “ideal” that Microsoft had in mind. The problem is, if all of the tech journalists keep ragging on the UMPC platform, nitpicking at every little thing they don’t understand, I’m worried that the companies trying to develop UMPCs will not invest in more R&D to create and release better versions. That’s why I feel that the awful reviews coming out of the tech mainstream media are not just ridiculous, but also dangerous to the survival of the UMPC platform (okay, perhaps a little melodramatic, but still, I think there’s a note of truth to this). I want TPCs and UMPCs to go beyond a niche product. We all know what’s so great about them; I just wish there were more mainstream journalists who’d get their heads out of their you-know-whats and actually talk intelligently about Tablet and UMPCs.

P.S. I just skimmed a little bit of Warner’s article before I had to stop and type up this blog entry, but I think he probably did a better job than I did of pointing out the problems with mainstream media.