iPlayer

I’m in a state of mild shock after having a smooth experience with DRM-enabled video (at least I assume it’s DRM ‘protected’). We realized we’d missed an episode of a new show, so fired up Safari (a new version at that), loaded iPlayer, and started watching. And here’s the thing. It worked. No messages about video codecs. No ‘browser not supported’, or OS errors, not even any stuttering. The quality isn’t fantastic, but it’s closer to broadcast than YouTube – certainly watchable on a 32″ LCD.

I have seen the future, and it doesn’t involve plastic. Except to pay for the TV.

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Missile Defense

I’ve been amazed at the acclaim that the recent shooting down of a failing US satellite has met (here’s just one example, from the ironically titled American Thinker).

I’ve no doubt it was an impressive technical achievement, especially when we don’t have a system setup in advance to do this sort of thing. But it’s not even a shadow of a plausible missile defense system – the satellite was following a known trajectory, we had days of notice, it was traveling thousands of miles an hour slower than an actual missile would, it was considerably larger, and it wasn’t trying to avoid being hit. There’s 5 reasons off the top of my head why saying this proves that the missile defense system works is nonsense.

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Google Spreadsheets

I already use Google’s Docs feature, and find it very handy for lightweight spreadsheets in particular. But I’m blown away (at least the geek part of me is) by the new feature they’ve launched that lets you create forms to update a spreadsheet. Go to Daring Fireball for a sample.

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Hippos

I was out all day yesterday learning how to use a Hippotizer. It’s a machine/software combination used to control video displays at concerts, plays, TV events etc. It allows you to place filters on the video, combine sources, and route them to different displays including LED boards.

It’s an impressively clever bit of technology, but what struck me most is that almost all of the clever is hidden. The app has very few arbitrary limits on it; a lot of software stops you doing certain things for perfectly good technical reasons, but from the user’s point of view there’s no obvious reason why not. The Hippotizer doesn’t really have that; it works with a certain number of inputs and outputs, but apart from that if you can think of a way to manipulate the tools it provides it will probably let you.

The second key feature is the amount of work it can do. Recent versions can handle multiple HD feeds, applying filters to each one and to the master output. That’s a huge amount of data to be slinging around, yet it manages it while keeping lag down to just one or 2 frames (they’re currently working on a feature that isn’t yet fast enough, because it lags by 5 frames, or around 1/5th of a second – too slow). And if that’s not enough, you can network multiple units together.

Oh, in case you’re wondering, I’m not on commission.

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