Inside View from Ireland

Killing PC Line Noise

LINE NOISE PLAGUES ME and it's the single leading reason I have not uploaded podcasts during the past three months. I have to solve this problem and it's helpful to read Dennis Gray's suggestion. He was "recording analog audio from the laptop's soundcard headphone jack into a mixer. PCs use a derived ground, so ground loops are inevitable, and so you hear the hum and CPU noise. Plugging all the gear into one outlet point doesn't always fix the problem. The only good way I found of killing the trash in the audio was with a "Rolls Buzz-Off". I use the model HE18 stereo flavor". I'm looking for this connector, both in County Tipperary and around Dublin.

iPod Pron

UPDATED 18 May 2011: Changed words in the post to see if Google Adsense approved.

UPDATED on 6 November 2005: No fewer than 70 people a day hit this page in search of "iPod P*rn" so we know it's a promising market.

HELLHOUSE VIDEO now offers tracks for your iPod Photo, including This Little Piggy and Sindi's Wet and Messy Adventure. I got this tip from a comment spammer who left the information on one of my blog posts. (The spammer had used MSN Arabia in search of "practise sex with a woman" and that's a category where the "best practise" section of this blog has consistently landed in the Top 10 of those kinds of queries.) The entertainment industry--specifically Playboy and Penthouse--have noticed this rising trend. Suicide Girls, which specializes in piercing and tattoos on pinups, has put free clips of its offering on its Web site. Can the celeb sites be far behind? I imagine the first announcements are floating inside my Yahoo! mail spam folder.

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Doc Searls and Peter Kafka -- "iPorn?"
Google found 185,000 references to iP*rn. One week later, the count dropped to 159,000 entries. The dotcom address is a linkfest.

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Sony Digital Voice Editor Software

SONY PACKAGES a slick sound (they call it voice) editor with its IC recorders. This software is not available for the Mac. I've backed up 40MB of version 2.31 on my ICT workspace. That software can be used with the ICD-MX/MS/ST/SX/S/BP/BM series of IC recorders. This means it works with the ICD-SX20 digital dictaphone. For the P-series ICD recorder, version 2.43 of the software should work since it came with our P-series device.

Dublin Meeting Against Software Patents

PREVENTING SOFTWARE PATENTS in Europe is the focus of an IFSO meeting on Friday, 18 November 2005, in Dublin. MEP Proinsias De Rossa is hosting the event, covering topics such as

• Analysis of the software patent directive.
• Discussion of free software and computer security.
• Introduction to IFSO/FSFE and their work.
• Legislative obstacles to the development and distribution of software.

TV on my mobile

VIEWING TELEVISION broadcasts on a mobile phone sucks battery power faster than running WiFi on a phone. While the footage delivered over the 3 TV service is perfectly watchable, the images look shaky to me. Maybe it's because television footage is not optimised for mobile phone screens. I've seen something better--DVB-H on a Nokia N92 phone. The N92 has a DVB-H decoder built in from the factory. Nokia ran one in a Dublin demonstration a few months ago. They're part of a European roll-out next year, making it onto the Irish market by the end of summer 2006.

Google's Personalised Page

MORE PEOPLE VISIT HERE after coming from Google's personalised starting page (http://www.google.com/ig) than any other portal page. So I set mine up too, if only to see the current weather in my hometown, the front page of the NYT, and assorted bloggers' babblings, including some whose RSS feeds push nothing to Google's personal pages. The personal start page is easy to modify, faster to edit than the widgets on Yahoo! and it feels quicker to load. It definitely gets its content faster than an RSS crawler because it reads and parses page content as fast as you refresh it. Recommended.

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Web Rhetoric

FOR YEARS, internet pioneers in Ireland and beyond have attested to the rhetoric of revolution. As Bobbie Johnson says, "The web, they said, is about communication, information and freedom". But Google, Yahoo and Microsoft behave a lot differently when working with Chinese authorities for a slice of that megamarket.

Another reason to use Google API

DAVE WINER RECOMMENDS that "Microsoft clone the Google API for search, without the keys, and without the limits. When a developer's application generates a lot of traffic, buy him a plane ticket and dinner, and ask how you both can make some money off their excellent booming application of search".

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From Winer's Morning Coffee Notes.

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Irish Transport Plans

ON THE DAY the Irish government announced an ambitious EUR 34bn transport plan, the resounding public response on national radio was withering criticism of Martin Cullen, the Minister of Transport. Cullen earned his crust in developing a EUR 50m electronic voting system that does not work. He presents himself in a hard hat to announce or formally dedicate infrastructure projects that he thinks he personally paid to complete. Hey, Martin! These are taxpayer projects and big ones at that. I like the ambitious plan but I don't trust the government as the steward of the billions to be spent. How about this--give us some smaller results and deliver them promptly.

Christmas phones

MORE THAN HALF of my first year (freshmen) multimedia degree students want a new mobile phone for Christmas. Their lust helps drive the mobile phone marketplace--where more than 800m mobile phones will be sold this year. Over 500m of them will have cameras. By 2009, more than 90% of the one billion new mobile phones sold will have cameras.