As a system administrator with a very large music collection, I’ve always been mildly irritated at the difficulty accessing my “master” music library while away from home.
Enter Simply Media a free, small application which does just as the name promises.
My iTunes library back home just shows up in my shared iTunes listing, regardless of where I am. No firewall hackery, nothing to configure, it just works, and works well.
I noticed in my RSS feeds recently that the new version of the Adobe Flash Player browser plug-in supports H.264/MPEG-4 AVC and AAC audio, but I didn’t think much of it at the time. As it turns out, I’m really happy that Adobe supports standard MP4 files accessible through plain HTTP, as it cuts out the proprietary Flash Video (FLV) format.
Macs are wonderful when creating rich media since they now ship with iMovie, and relatively inexpensive tools such as ProfCast are out there. This rich media derives a lot of value from being represented in standard formats such as MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) video, and AAC audio, all rolled up into the standard MP4 container. However, it turns out to be incredibly difficult to publish this standards-compliant media to a web page player that “just works” like Youtube.com.
Until now, the only viable way to embed this content in a web site was to use the quicktime plug-in, which is a bit heavy for the task. With the most recent versions of Flash Player 9, we now can directly play high quality videos, in a standard format, produced with free tools.
The code for this is relatively simple, though a bit of a pain to get formatted correctly. And by “bit” I mean, it took me hours. If I start to do more video content, I’ll definitely look into a plug-in so the blog handles these details.
The video is a conversion from a high quality Quicktime file to standard H.264/AAC video.
Hopefully we’ll start to see higher quality videos up on Youtube now. In the meantime, you’re able to do it yourself if you need to publish higher quality video in an easily accessible manner.
This is a bit less technical than my usual posts, but I’ve had the opportunity to test drive the closed beta of Grand Central, and I have to say… It’s features are quite incredible. In particular, I’ve lived without a land line phone for quite a few years now, and I have to admit; it’s been a real step backwards in terms of quality of service. The cell network just isn’t nearly as reliable as traditional copper has been.
Now, what I’m about to mention isn’t a huge leap forward in reliability, but it at least dramatically increases the chances of reaching me and holding a clear conversation. Grand Central is basically a phone de-multiplexer, giving you a new phone number and ringing all of your existing phone numbers simultaneously when it’s called. In addition, it works with Gizmo Project, similar to Skype, allowing you to receive incoming telephone calls on your computer. Toss in a cheap pair of ear bud headphones, and you’ve got yourself a decent alternative to a land line telephone and a much nicer sounding replacement to a cell phone.
Grand central has a lot of other features, like warm transferring calls between any of your extensions. I was able to transfer a live conversation from my MacBook over to my cell phone, over to my office line, and back to my MacBook, all without dropping the call. Visual voice mail, call recording, and much more make this a really convenient service.
As a system administrator with a very large music collection, I’ve always been mildly irritated at the difficulty accessing my “master” music library while away from home.
I noticed in my RSS feeds recently that the new version of the 
This is a bit less technical than my usual posts, but I’ve had the opportunity to test drive the closed beta of