Category: Gadgets

Hillary support’s The INDUCE Act

I was dismayed to learn that Senator Hillary Clinton has come out and in fact co-sponsored Senator Hatch’s Induce Act. What follows is a draft of a letter that I am writing to Sen. Clinton to express my concern. I hope that others will do the same.

Here is some background material:
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c108:S.2560:
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,64315,00.html
http://techlawadvisor.com/induce/
http://www.corante.com/importance/archives/004563.html
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20040618-3906.html
http://www.futureofmusic.org/articles/INDUCEanalysis.cfm
http://action.eff.org/site/pp.asp?c=esJNJ5OWF&b=164928

Like your iPod, read this:
http://www.eff.org/IP/Apple_Complaint.php

Please comment on the letter as you see fit.

Dear Senator Clinton,

I was dismayed to learn that you have come out in support of Senator Hatch’s Induce Act. I hope that on further consideration of the issues that this bill covers that you change your stance to better reflect the opinions of your constituents and for the betterment of our society.

The Induce act as it currently is written does much to stifle free-speech, artistic and fair uses of media. Imposing legal responsibility on the makers of devices and software for illegal use such device or software will create a burden so great on manufacturers and creators of such programs that they will not develop or offer products that have potential for misuse.

I fear that by trying to curb the theft of copyrighted material you will instead be curbing the ability for individuals and groups with legitimate uses for the technology that enables such to use it. Being thoroughly immersed in an academic and artistic atmosphere, I am witness every day to fair uses of technology that would not exist today were such a law in existence. In fact I feel that the software that I am using to write this letter would not have been developed simply because it includes the ability to cut and paste text from any source into the document.

I believe that should this Bill become law that it will undo much of the progress of free-speech and alternative media creation that has been enabled by the internet, personal electronic devices, computers, tape recorders and so on. Furthermore it will be a giant step backwards and lead to increased power by the media and further relegate citizens to the role of consumer without a voice.

I hope that you will reconsider your position on this matter.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,
Shawn Van Every

Solar powered batteries, on your back..

Voltaic Backpack, Solar Backpack, Solar Bag
Now when you are out on the street and your laptop (I haven’t verified that this will power a laptop) is running out of juice, you can plug it into your back and keep on going. Looks heavy but I guess we are stuck with this type of thing until some miraculous battery technology breakthrough comes.

From the site:
The Voltaic backpack is a mobile power source, designed to charge your gadgets without tying you to a power outlet.

Thanks to Betsy for the link.

Just what I have been looking for…

MCE QuickStream DV – Portable, FireWire DV Capture Drive

This is a portable hard drive recorder that you plug directly into your camcorder and capture video to. AWESOME.
Over at unmediated.org, kenyatta says that he heard a collective shrug over the first version. I think the collective must be CRAZY. This would cut down on the “time to web” by 10 fold (at least for me). Too bad it is soo expensive. Perhaps I will make some real money again and be able to buy one :-)
From the site:
The revolutionary MCE QuickStream DV, now in its second generation, has re-engineered the entire Digital Video (DV) workflow by completely eliminating the inefficient, time consuming step of transferring (or capturing) DV footage from your DV camcorder tapes into your Mac or PC non-linear editing (NLE) system… The lightweight, portable, self-powered QuickStream DV connects directly to your DV camcorder and captures your DV footage to its miniature high performance hard drive on-the-fly, straight from your camcorder’s FireWire port, in your choice of ready-to-edit file formats (.mov, .avi, .dv, and others) while you are shooting! When done shooting, simply unplug the QuickStream DV from your camcorder’s FireWire (IEEE 1394, i.LINK, etc.) port and plug it into your computer system’s FireWire port and your DV footage is ready for editing and/or viewing… IMMEDIATELY!

PHP Library for encoding and decoding MMS messages

Hellkvist.org – Software
From the site:
mslib is a PHP library for encoding and decoding MMS:es. MMS is short for Multimedia Messaging Service. In short it is the successor of SMS (Short Message Service) with the enhancements that you can not only send text but basically any content type your phone can handle such as images, text, videos, ring signals and audio clips.

With this library you can create messages and add multimedia parts such as JPEG, GIF, AMR, MIDI and so on. Messages received from phones can also be unpacked and attachments can be extracted. The library also contains a limited MMS sending functionality that uses a HTTP service to send SMS:es. You would probably have to change the actual implementation of the SMS sending to fit your way of sending SMS:es (if it is over serial port, to a real SMSC or through some other type of HTTP service). This is all done with the three classes MMSDecoder, MMSEncoder and MMSNotifyer.

I can’t wait for the hacks

Apple – iPod Photo

Here is what I think is missing:
Bluetooth for getting images from your phone or sending to others (phones or iPods)
A mechanism for downloading photos from your camera
QuickTime Capture (from an external camera via Firewire or USB), QuickTime Playback and anything else related to QuickTime.

(How fast can it change between images, can video be simulated?)

Wouldn’t it be nice to plug in your iSight and record a video…