Freyburg

Today on the Lab with Leo I did a segment about refilling ink cartridges. Throughout the course of the day magenta ink spread from my workstation to pretty much everyone and everything in the station. My hand took the brunt of the inky assault, as you can see here….

Chris Anderson, who wrote “The Long Tail,” (a great book, btw) has a new book in the works called “Free,” all about how digital goods are plummeting in cost and hence are driving the new gift economy. Wired has an excerpt from the book, along with video.

While we did our VideoBlogging 101 presentation at Northern Voice today, Jordan shot some “almost live” video on his hard-drive camcorder to show the audience how easy it is to publish video to the web. Behold!

Besides all the other stuff I’m doing, I’m also going to be co-presenting a “VideoBlogging 101” session at Northern Voice, Vancouver’s annual blogging conference. Roland Tanglao, Jordan Behan and myself will walk attendees though the basics of videoblogging, from shooting stuff on your cell phone and streaming it to the net to basic video making techniques, getting your video onto the net and my section on how to effectively prepare and plan for your shoot, as well as a bit of an overview of higher-end tools. You can also make suggestions on our wiki prior to the event.

Roland has also posted on his blog about the event, and put up a video of our recent meeting that he shot on his Nokia N95.

Some rich fella paid over $2,000 for a mint Apple //c off of eBay, and then proceeded to document the unboxing of said beast. The thing I noticed right away is that Apple has consistently had some amazing package design, even in the old days. Plus, the Apple //c just looks damned cool.

(picture by Flickr user Dansays)

Microsoft wants to spend 44 BILLION dollars to buy Yahoo. Is it just me, or does this remind anyone of the AOL-Time Warner disaster? Neither company can compete with Google, so together….they can’t compete with Google? This deal strikes me as phenomenally stupid. By the way, when this story hit Digg, the assembled wisdom of the site’s users cited it as “possibly inaccurate.” That’s right, Diggers, the BBC is questionable, while 9/11 conspiracy sites and Ron Paul advocacy rants are completely above board.

After scheduling snafus and real life intruded to keep us from recording last week, the RFS crew returned to discuss the first two episodes of Torchwood (verdict: pretty decent), speculate on the latest round of rumours, and digress as always into realms nonsensical. And for once we actually came in at under an hour. Enjoy!(feed, web, direct download)

Frontline, the always excellent PBS documentary series (which has a repository of shows available online for your viewing pleasure) is fixing its lens upon the online generation, and how growing up with the internet, instant messaging and constant connectivity as a part of everyday life affects today’s youth. It’s on television tonight, though I’ll likely watch it online, seeing as how I’m part of the 1200 baud generation and know how to do such things.

A couple of months ago, local blogging luminary and online marketing expert Darren Barefoot let me know about a promotion for the Brother HL-4070CDW color laser printer involving several local bloggers. In exchange for reviewing the printer on our blogs, we used (and in some cases presumably abused) the printer for a couple of months. My take? First off, the thing is a tank. It’s intimidatingly large and extremely heavy, and it honestly frightened the UPS guy when he delivered it to me. But what about, you know, the printing? Top notch, both in color and black and white. Never really had a problem with it….except for one time when I needed to print out the resume and the printer simply wouldn’t respond. That may have had more to do with my network connection than with the printer itself. And speaking of connections, the Brother has many, including network, wireless, and all the other standards. For a guy who generally wrestles with sub-$100 laser printers that don’t recognize anything other than their own inherent badness, it was nice to finally have a printer in the condo that actually WOULD print from whichever computer told it to, instead of retreating into spool queue hell. So all-in-all, I’d say the Brother HL-4070CDW is a decent printer, though I think it might be better suited to a big office and less for a guy who occasional prints out directions from Google Maps.

Ok, let’s get this out of the way….it ain’t worth it to get up at 3 a.m. and stagger to a lineup for a Steve Jobs keynote. But that’s just what I did this morning, since I’d never been to one of Apple’s signature shindigs before. My verdict on the new gear Apple trotted out today? Meh. Canada doesn’t have movies for purchase on the iTunes store, let alone rentals, and we also don’t have iPhones. The Macbook Air is a nice bit of engineering, but it’s nothing I pine for.

Still, getting to see a live “Macbreak Weekly” was cool, as was finally meeting Merlin Mann and Andy Inhatko. Tonight there’s a party for attendees featuring non other thanDevo, and there’s a lot of informative podcast creation sessions over the next couple of days.