Libsyn Bought By Wizzard

Wow! Congratulations to Libsyn!!! According to this, they have been bought by a company called Wizzard Software. (who I havent heard of – they do voice tech stuff- they also bought switchpod recently too?)

This must be great news for mah good buddies Dave, Dave and Marty!! Those guys have such great mojo and smarts and are a hoot to hang out with!! 🙂
Well done!!! You deserve it! 🙂

Nokia N91 as a mobile podcatcher

Recently, I have been playing with the Nokia N91 – with Wifi built-in and a 4gb hard disk on board too – to test some podcast stuff I have been building. I have to say I really like it – especially as they let me plug standard headphones into the jack.

They have a neat little podcasting application on there by default, which makes it very easy to enter an OPML file url (or locally open one from the handset) for a podcast directory, or an RSS for a direct podcast subscription. I’ll do a full report on this soon.

But one very odd thing I found is that while the handset has no problems whatsoever in playing an AAC+ (.m4a) file which I copied over on the device, when I try to subscribe it to an RSS feed with .m4a audio enclosures ( audio/x-m4a ) the application tells me that the device will not play this format.

Ermm…hello??

Also, a quick note to say that this app is apparently called ‘mPodder‘ in the apps folder of the device. Hmmmm…

Take It Or Leave It

According to blogHUD user Dedric Mauriac, a version of the TV show ‘Deal Or No Deal’ has hit the metaverse, called ‘Take It Or Leave It’

Great idea!!

Dedric is also building a Wheel of Fortune (I think 😉 ) in SL too!

Building Reality

Just found this great video of a a presentation (wmv) from Linden Labs’ Cory Ondrejka (Cory Linden) and Jim Purbrick (Babbage Linden) from the Microsoft Lang.NET Conference in August – called ‘Building Reality : User-Creation and Scripting in Second Life’.

It’s mostly the slides and audio, but well worth it for the introduction into SL from Cory and lead in to the world of scripting ‘stuff’ in LSL, the Linden Scripting Language. Then Jim goes on to get very technicial, talking about how LSL will be moving over to use a more robust technology called MONO (which has a coool logo!) and will be 50-150x faster than the current system, using less than 50% of the memory!

Babbage gives a quick demo at the end (from about 70mins) to show (for the first time in public) a Second Life client running LSL AND MONO. He starts by showing script running as MONO spitting out Fibonacci numbers, which it does VERY quickly. Then he unchecks a box in the scripting editor to run it as LSL and it’s veeeery slow. Lag could be a thing of the past.

[AND, at about 38 minutes, Cory shows the blogHUD as an example! Yay to that!!! 🙂 ]

Funny. At the end, someone in the audience sees that Babbage has a special menu item and asks, “What is ‘God’?” – Babbage answers, “God is me!” 🙂 LOL.

Live From Second Life

I can’t promise this will be on all the time, as it was a quick test idea that I have thought about for a few months and got round to doing once I got more memory for the MacMini (running Windows).

Let’s see how this holds up – this blog doesn’t get many readers, so off you go! All ten eleven of ya 😉

Welcome to Second Life LIVE

Linden ATM?

I was just looking at a list of virtual worlds and games out there and was looking at Entropia Universe‘s site. It seems like they have a real world debit card available which lets their users withdraw their in world currency as real world cold hard cash from any ATM!

I think that’s a great idea and one which I think Linden Lab should look at doing with their own Linden Dollar in Second Life. How cool would that be!? 🙂 “yeah.. put in on my PrimCard” 😉

Now that’s what I call a flexi friend 😉

Second Life Profiles via the Web (tab)

UPDATE 2: Web tabs on hold until later release

UPDATE: From Linden Lab : “We are planning to release Second Life 1.12.3 on Wednesday, 25 October 2006. The grid will be closed from 7:00 AM PDT/SLT to 12:00 PM PDT/SLT, and you will need to upgrade to the newest version to login afterwards. “

This WILL include the Web tab on profiles!

Soon, on Second Life, you will be able to view small web pages in a small browser window on people’s profiles. This is what blogHUD users will be able to put on theirs once this cool feature is released from the Preview Grid. (this is a work in progress)

You’ll have to hop over to my OPML Blog to view it, as I can’t post an iframe here…

BlogHUD users will also be able to customise the feeds and image slideshows (see the small snapzilla link). Existing blogHUD users can try going to http://my.bloghud.com/yoursecondlifename/profile

Bring on the MASH!! (http://my.bloghud.com/kozfarina/profile/

Javascript and Ajax seem well supported in this small embedded Mozilla browser window. Flash too – but with no buttons! 😦 Also, secondlife:// urls for instant teleportation are not active yet. I hope they fix that.

BlogHUD in Wired

Wow! How did I miss that? Yesterday I saw the article in Wired which talked about the “Must-have Gadgets in SL” but totally managed to miss the mention of the blogHUD there! Excellent news!

Wired have a great build in Second Life, by Millions of Us, featuring a huge circuit board which you walk around. I was going to do that! Argh! 😉 Doctoe and I have always seen circuit boards like little cities.

Maybe I’ll do another SL news screen for the Wired RSS headlines? Hmmm…

Second Life really is an exciting world full of new opportunities and adventures. If you are good to it – it will be good to you and you’ll get so much more out of it. I have seen alot of newbies rolling around since the 1million registrants mark. I remember when I didn’t know how to do the simplest of things, then someone actually helped me. Showed me around. Sent me off on my way. It was great. I did hang around to help a few people when I did the ‘Descendants of Ruth‘ video – people not knowing how to get out, or fly etc. Bless ’em 😉

Also today, check out moo Money’s (that’s a Second Life name, folks) first entry to her machinima video podcast, which should get updated during her first ever trip to MOO YORK CITY!

We’ll be following her exploits over at secondlife.podcast.com and in-world around the ‘The RSS Platform’

Moo Shall Go To The Ball!!

podcast.com are proud to be sponsoring machinima mad, moo Money at this years Machinima Festival in New York – november 4th & 5th 2006

We’re strong supporters of this new ‘metizen medium’ and the great work that moo does supporting the machinima community while producing some great educational and entertaining work herself at Alt-Zoom Studios.

We hope to follow her trip and time at the festival, where she should be holding a workshop for budding machinimists to learn from., by her podcast feed via secondlife.podcast.com and varoius in world and real world pictures and posts she’s able to make.

We should be able to aggregate and mash all that up together to a page which we’ll post nearer the time.

Go moo!!!!!

And don’t forget to check out her blog at http://moomoney.wordpress.com

Cheers!

Koz

ps: for those that don’t know – In RL I am chief technical officer of podcast.com 🙂
posted by Koz Farina on Nooribeom using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

The Descendants of Ruth flock in

On the day that Second Life reached the 1 million residents mark, the interest has apparently seen around 50,000 new signups already today! I decided to get an alt and record the arrivals on one of the Orientation islands. This one is island number 32 for arrivals!

As you can see, everyone starts off as a female! People also see this strange (sometimes gender-bending) transition from a plain female avatar to their own customised version (it can be quite amusing).

The name of this avatar is ‘Ruth’. She is an early basic model from Fractal Designs’ Curious Labs’ e-frontier’s 3d character designing and animating software called Poser, which many people use to create the .bvh animation files which get embedded into ‘poseballs’ in Second Life. She is the basic form of every avatar in SL.

So, welcome!! ‘Descendants Of Ruth’!

I think that could be a great name for a band in Second Life. 😉