May 15, 2005
Forget RFID, lets have a TV Riot
Forget RFID...forget TV... now you have another reason to subscribe to ant feeds
"If you're inside a building, a GPS receiver cannot find you. But a $40 radio chip from Rosum Corporation will do it, with the help of TV signals," notes Roland Piquepaille.
The CIA-backed start-up says TV signals are 10,000 times stronger than the ones from GPS. Rosum founder James Spilker, one of the original architects of the GPS satellite... realized a synchronization feature in digital and analog television signals could be used for other purposes than to lock the vertical hold for older TVs.The engineers created a radio receiver chip that could zero in on the TV signal and get the synchronization information. Using precision timing, they figure out how far a TV signal travels before it is picked up by a device equipped with Rosum chips. Next, they compare the measurements against other data that they collect with their own listening stations and then finally calculate the device's position. Rosum's vice president of engineering, Greg Flammel, says tests of the technology show it can track someone in the basement floor of the San Francisco Public Library. It also found a person in the heart of San Francisco's financial district...
So i thought i would send possum rosum corp looking for me across multiple contintents backed by "TV Riot" from The Adored from los angles, my town of exile. This whole issue is so 5 days ago, i know, but it took me till now to get myself together and make this post.
March 20, 2005
Whats a true VJ blog?
When I looked at the statistiks of my own blog one day I saw that quite a few of my readers came to me through the search term "vj blog" on google. By now I am the first entry for "vj blog" on englisch google. That is quite cool though my main blog has "vj" only as a side topic and the term vj blog does not show up at all. So I ask myself what would people looking for a "vj blog" expect. And I figured that a true vj blog would have movies. You can get normal video blogs around the net that is nothing so new. The kind of movies I have in mind are more like vj loops. Made from everyday life material online and offline. The cool thing is that you can aggregate them into a vj set.
So the idea "life through an artificial eye" was born as a true VJ blog in addition to my normal "written words" blog.
The idea is to collect visual information through the day and post a short vj loop that incorporates personal interesting pictures and movies from the day. A longer cut up of all the week in vj loops will come on weekends.
So I have a couple of constrains. Firstly I want to make it as less time consuming as possible. I donīt want to ftp each short daily to the server and then manually put in the code to link it. The combination of the perl script in movable type and my internet providers scrip execution time allow me only to upload 2MB. This seems not much but I think its a nice constrain to work with. Put all days moving pictures in less then 2 MB together with audio. That imposes that the loops are short - very short. I will need to do some tests to tell how short and what compression. So do not expect HDTV quality vj loops off the site. The low quality is quite a common feature of todays news (be it print or tv) as news are rushed out as fast and cheap as possible to reach the broadest mass of people. Giving that thought the low resolution bad compression is a stylistic element for now.
The other constrain is obviously music. I do not want to break any copyright laws and therefore have to find "free" music. One option is to use music by enclosed audio projects. The other is to use creative commons audio sources. I will try to do both. When the local music heros provide me with good tunes then I will use those preferably - until then I will use songs found creative common share alike feasable as I am not going to get any money out of the blog.
After some testing the format will look something like this:
individual dailies
length: 5-30 seconds
Format: MPG4 ISMA (H.264 later)
Resolution: 320x240 QVGA
Data-Rate: 384 kbits/sec (Multipass w/ H.264)
Frame-Rate: 25 fps
Keyframe: every 24 frames
Audio Setting: 64kbps, 44,1kHz stereo AAC-LC
For now I have to use MPEG4 ISMA profile for encoding as there is not enough H.264 support out there. My test show that the quality will greatly improve once H.264 is out in the wild (through Quicktime 7). I will change to this codec as soon as possible as the size/quality ratio is phenomenal. I personally see this blog as something of the future and so I use the video codec of the future (at least for the next five to ten years ).
I already know that I can never fill this blog with enough content on my own to make it overly interesting. So if VJs are interested in posting their own vj blog snippets on here (with the above contrains) drop me a line!