I have written about I, Cringely before. I really like what he has to say about technology, and he’s entertaining to read as well. A few months ago I read something about his efforts to start build a show based around his musings about technology, computers, and opinion. It has finally some to fruition. NerdTV went live yesterday. What is NerdTV?

NerdTV is essentially Charlie Rose for geeks - a one-hour interview show with a single guest from the world of technology.

His first guest is Andy Hertzfeld, who was one of the original Macintosh systems programmers, and now a big proponent of Open Source Software. Upcoming guests include, PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, Apple Computer co-founder Steve Wozniak, Internet publisher Tim O’Reilly, and TCP/IP inventor Bob Kahn. As well as a host of others.

Andy also has a great web site, Folklore.org, that focuses on stories from the original Macintosh development team. It too is a great read. Andy has also just released a book of stories from Folklore called Revolution in The Valley.

Other nerdy aspects of the show include the fact that it is distributed on the internet in a multitude of formats, from mp4 video and audio formats for podcast including ogg vorbis, aac, mp3 and it’s also available as a straight up transcript.

It’s nerdy, and I found it very entertaining.

I, Cringely . NerdTV | PBS

Technorati Tags: Media, Nerd, Computers, PBS

From “For Your Entertainment”: The author, and fellow audio engineer, John Sibley, is my hero. In the midst of a cross country trip, returning to Vegas from a job in Detroit, decided to point his car to the south, and go to Houston instead, to assist the Red Cross with their efforts to help the hurricane victims.

I’m proud to know you…

You can read his account in his Blog:
For Your Entertainment: A Brief Departure From The Funny

OK- I like a gadget as much as the next guy, but does anyone really need this. The bulb monitors itself and when it burns out it sends a message through Powerline IP to a server which in turn sends an SMS message to your cell phone.

They may be on to something if they started making FEL, HPL and PAR bulbs…

SMS Lightbulb : Gizmodo

Wired posted an article today about the Wynn Hotel . I live in Las Vegas, but haven’t been down to that property yet. I thought it was interesting to see this in Wired.

Wired News - Move Over Pyramids, Wynns Here

BeOS, which many audio engineers are familiar with due to its use with LCS (Level Control Systems), is back. A few years ago, BeOS sold all it’s assets to Palm, and Be disappeared. With the exception of a few enthusiast web sites like BeBits, and a couple of opens source builds of Be, there was no supported version of the OS. LCS has changed its OS requirements, and development path, and now supports builds of CueStation on OSX, WinXP and Linux (first RedHat, now SuSe).

BeOS was ahead of its time. I still have 2 machines that I use for LCS that run BeOS. They boot very fast, and run reliably.

There is a really good history of BeOS and a review of Zeta on ArsTechinca.

ZETA 1.0 by yellowTAB

I was watching some episodes of Sports Night tonight, and a line stood out to me, again, so I thought I’d post it. It’s worth mentioning.

“If you’re dumb surround yourself with smart people, and if your smart, surround yourself with smart people who disagree with you”

We have to move forward, we have to think about what we’re doing. The notion is not new…

As an aside, Aaron Sorkin is great, I recommend picking up some of his writing, in the form of his television shows and movies.

Aaron Sorkin media…

The West Wing Script Book

The American President

Sports Night - The Complete Series Boxed Set

The West Wing Seasons 3 & 4: The Shooting Scripts: Eight Teleplays by Aaron Sorkin (Newmarket Shooting Script)

A couple of years ago when Stephen St. Croix wrote about iTMS in his column in Mix Magazine, The Fast Lane, he expounded on how cool it was to use this new distribution method. It offers those of us who don’t like to wait the opportunity to get a song or and album, NOW. While the lossy encoding is a drawback for pro audio applications, the quality is acceptable (for the most part) for casual listening.

What do you get for your dollar? Compressed, DRM restricted, AAC encoded computer file. You can listen to the song on your iPod or in iTunes, but only one iPod and one copy of iTunes. (although there may be more possibilities, see the ml_iPod post) One gets to see a small jpg of the album art, but not much in the way of liner notes. Let’s assume there are 12 songs on an album. iTMS generally charges $.99 per song or $9.99 for an entire album, which is a small savings if you want the whole album. One selling point is that you don’t have to buy the whole album. You can get just the songs you want, and you can get them now, but you pay a premium for this feature.

That’s great, but what about other things that can add value to the digital music experience. While low bit rate files may be ok for listening by the computer, what if I want higher bit rate versions or CD bit rates for listening on the stereo in the living room. Or even higher bit rate and word length versions for those who care. What about the liner notes, and high quality album art. How about going the extra mile that the DVD has gone, and offer the musical equivalent of “deleted scenes” or the “bloopers reel.” $.99 seem like a lot of money for restricted low bit rate, non-transferable tunes.

Perhaps Nine Inch Nails has hit on something….They are offering the song “Only” for download, as a ProTools session. This is cool. For the audio geek, professional engineer or the basement engineer, you can take their tracks and mix it yourself. Now that’s a Value Added concept. While the “Mix Your Own” concept might be more than most people want, it demonstrates an important concept in digital music distribution, the ability to offer a much wider range of “products” to a wide range of customers. It feels empowering to me. I tend to purchase CD’s. It puts the decision in my hands as to how I want to deal with the music. I can have it any way I want it, from the CD to 48kbps MP3 or anything in between. Being able to download an entire ProTools session of a piece expands the possibilities even further.

Nice work….

ProSoundNews Online Daily - Digidesign & NIN Offer Free Pro Tools Session Download of “Only”

This is from Mix Magazine. A little computer assembler named Musicxpc has created a recording workstation in a Shuttle XPC chassis.

I have a Shuttle XPC, although not from Musicxpc, and I love mine. While based on the published spec one could build one for a few hunderd dollars less than the retail price of the fully assembled machine, Musicxpc has a few items that add value. Most noteably the system recovery software. Some may not find this to be all that, but for the musician, who doesn’t want to be the IT department, it may be worth the premium.

MusicXPC Professional C3 and C4

M-Audio just released a control surface for use with GarageBand. It’s called the iControl and it looks pretty cool.

iControl gives you total tactile control over GarageBand. You get dedicated transport buttons and jog wheel, eight rotary encoders for track functions like volume or pan, or effects parameters in GarageBand’s EQ or any other AU plug-in. You also get dedicated mute, solo and record-enable buttons. Automatically recognized by GarageBand.

I don’t have a copy of GarageBand, but this caught my eye, as I am always interested in what companys are doing to interface the real world with the digital world.

In these days of digital production and digital audio consoles, and the plethora of other gadgets used in audio, interface design has become an even bigger project than it used to be. In the days of analog gear, the controls were all there because they were part of the electronic circuit. Some of the layout was “designed”, but some of it was the way it was because it had to be for the electronics to work correctly.

Now, designers of interfaces have a different set of choices to make. To take a conception of what is possible in the digital world and translate that to a useable, intelligent tactile control surface, can be maddening. Especially when a particular piece of equipment crosses between different markets and uses.

M-AUDIO:iControl

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