Category: Mac

ITP End of Year Events – Thesis Presentations and End of Semester Show

ITP Spring Show 2006
A two day exhibition of interactive sight, sound and physical objects from the student artists of ITP.

This event is free and open to the public. No need to RSVP.

ITP Thesis Presentations 2006
ITP’s graduating students will be presenting a wide variety of highly creative and interactive projects that they have constructed over the course of their final project seminars.

Students have been encouraged to undertake projects that bring together the conceptual and design issues that they have engaged in during their two years of study at ITP.

Projects will include installation based work, digital video and audio pieces, interactive 3D, games and educational applications, to name only a few.

ITP will be providing a live webcast of all the thesis presentations.

My New (old) STB

This is a completion of a post that I started in March of 2006:

Then:
So.. I bought a shiny new Intel Mac Mini solely for use as a set top box. First of all, I love it! Second, a lot of work is needed for this to compete with TiVo, MyTH or even Windows Media Center.

So here is what I have, 1 Dual Core Mac Mini with SuperDrive and a great EyeTV tuner/PVR device…

Now: What makes this truly extraordinary (at least in disruption of the pattern of my life):
At some point last year, the cable was unhooked and never got hooked up again (except for about 15 minutes during the 2008 election). This isn’t to say that I don’t watch TV anymore, I do, I watch Heroes, Lost, ER and a bunch of movies. The difference is that I watch it on my terms, not the terms of the networks. I get none of this TV from regular cable, instead I watch these shows through their respective websites (NBC, ABC) or through Hulu and now NetFlix’s online on-demand service (which is soooooooo much better than DVDs via mail as I don’t know what I want to watch next week today).

No longer do I come home and zone out to reruns. No longer to I switch on the TV just to have something to do..

A couple of additional thoughts:
I am pretty sure that scheduled TV will always have a place and people will always want programming in that form. I don’t think TV will go away (at least any time soon). I do think that (if the cable industry doesn’t buy our government) that it will eventually subsumed into the internet (despite all of the fear mongering about clogging the tubes).

How Apple lost it’s Web Video mojo, and how it could get it back

Epeus’ epigone – Kevin Marks weblog
Kevin Marks, a former Apple QuickTime engineer details what happened at Apple to allow QuickTime to become a second class media player/format and how they now have a chance (thanks to podcasting and video ipods) to try again.

Let’s hope the QuickTime team is listening.