Participate! circle Plus Real Time on Google Plus
Celebrate the Internet for 24 Hours on April 6th
April 6, 2012 By
Chat about #InternetForGood anytime.
The Internet is not only a great way to be entertained and a great way to learn. It also can unite people to make differences in lives. The first Kivathon was in March 2007 and the VoIP Users Conference started that same month.
Sign up for a FREE $25 to loan through Kiva.org
Since 2007, we’ve done nearly 400 VUC weekly conferences and the VUC Kiva lending team has made over $10,000 in loans. To celebrate both Kiva and our own VUC starting its sixth year, we’re planning a big 24-hour celebration with audio and video via Google Hangouts.
We’ll be playing the songs of Google Plus musicians and a few of them will stop by and play live too. We’ll be showing some of the great artwork and photography from Google Plus. We’ll be talking to people who make the Internet what is, both technically and content-wise. But mostly, we’ll be celebrating the Internet as a tool for good.
We Care Solar
April 5, 2012 By
About 300,000 health facilities in the developing world do not have access to reliable electricity
A lantern provided the only light at the Kofan Gayan Hospital's maternity ward in Zaria, Nigeria, before the arrival of the solar suitcase.
WE CARE Solar http://wecaresolar.org promotes safe motherhood and reduces maternal mortality in developing regions by providing health workers with reliable lighting, mobile communication, and blood bank refrigeration using solar electricity.
thx +Keith Petersen #InternetForGood
The Water Project
April 4, 2012 By
Nearly one billion people have no access to clean, safe water
The dirty water they do have makes them sick. It robs children of hope. But it doesn't have to be that way. #InternetForGood can help provide safe water for people half way across the world.
Kiva Fellows Program
April 4, 2012 By
The Kiva Fellow is an unpaid, volunteer position designed to increase Kiva’s impact and to offer participants a unique insider experience
Read about it. The deadline to apply is May 13th.
#InternetForGood
Since 2007, the Kiva Fellows Program has offered over 400 individuals a rare opportunity to put their skills to work in support of global microfinance. Applicants chosen for the program serve as Kiva&…
Kiva has grown a lot since 2007, but their mission is still the same
April 4, 2012 By
Kiva has grown a lot since 2007, but their mission is still the same
✓ Connecting people through lending to alleviate poverty
✓ Leveraging the internet and a worldwide network of microfinance institutions
✓ Individuals can lend as little as $25 to help create opportunity around the world
Meet Joe Roberts March 29 at 10 AM EDT
March 26, 2012 By
Joe Roberts, aka 1winedude hangs out with us live on Google Plus.
We talked about how he got into wine, then moved on to wine & food matches, emotions, grapes, regions and the meaning of life.
Triple play: Freebox Revolution v6
January 11, 2011 By
Triple play has arrived in our home. Here’s the description of my day yesterday. First, Internet access was cut off. Normal, since I changed ISP, but what was abnormal is that I got it back at nearly 3 times faster download speed very shortly after, when I connected our new Freebox v6. I was expecting more of a hole in the connection and had a 3G+ key ready just in case.
Unboxing
Nothing to see here! Three boxes, each with a diagram of hookup on the inside lid:
- Freebox modem, router, server.
- Freebox player (set top box)
- Power supplies for the above which also connect the two via Ethernet at 200Mbps
I opened up the boxes, plugged in the server and powered it up. It has a LED readout that enumerated the steps it was going through in powerup, connect, syncro. I went upstairs and hooked up the player to our TV, using the included HDMI cable. That alone sets the box apart from most of the gear I’ve bought. There was a second Peritel cable in case you have an older TV with no HDMI. I love HDMI for its combining of audio with the video.
Setup
As soon as the modem was plugged in, it went though its paces and I played with the Macs connected to it via Ethernet cable. It happend that the box router comes set with the same unroutable local address I use, 192.168.1 but the gateway was set to 254. I use fixed IP addresses on most of my equipment, so I had to first use DHCP on one to find the gateway. Once I did this, I could switch the computers back to manual fixed IP and set up two other important devices, our SIP phones.
Phones
Full telephony is part of the triple play, so I plugged the Siemens Gigaset S675IP in to the phone connector on the router as if it was a “normal” phone. It’s not: the Gigaset is a DECT/SIP hybrid, it connects to a phone line and has 6 SIP accounts. Our are set to providers in the USA and conference servers like ZipDX. I needed to reconfigure both the Gigaset DECT and the Polycom IP650 desk phone to talk to the new router IP. Both phones were now working.
WiFi
Setting up WiFi was a matter of generating a key, and might be the only daunting thing to a non-techie. However, I got through it and copied the very long string to USB. One thing I never found was a way to copy that key to the iPods,. It had to be typed in manuually; This was probably the longest operation of the day.
Media Server / Set Top Box (above)
Firing this up went through some configuration. First the screen resolution and trim, which is automatic. Then the detection of terrestrial digital TV channels. Finally I was ready with the full menu (see image below). I briefly tried terrestrial, which worked, but sucks because we don’t have an outside antenna. The digital TV over the Internet is perfect. Further, I was able to download a file at something like 15MB/s while watching TV. But then I moved to the media part.
Network Attached Storage
At first I was confused by how to connect to the server part, since there is a 250 gigabyte drive in it. Older versions used ftp, which I was ready for, but couldn’t find. It took my hours to realize that this box works as Network Attached Storage (NAS). Here’s the amazing part: it just appears as a drive automagically on Macs and even the Windows 7 laptop. I immediately copied some AVI over to it and lo and behold, it plays these better than my Macbook connected to the TV did on VLC.
Blueray / DVD
I’m not a Blueray fan, we don’t even have a full HD TV, so I didn’t try it and don’t care. However, inserting my American DVD in the unit gave me the “wrong region, fool!” error. I’ll have to look into the possibility of a hack, but I fear the region is in the firmware. Not about to mess with that. I put in a DVD I made here, which works in normal players, but it had no audio. I guess for now, we’ll have to keep the deregionalized DVD player we have.
DECT Phones
The unit has a built in DECT base. I haven’t tried this yet, I’ll be back to edit when I do. If you already have a bunch of DECT handsets, this might be a good way to go.
Remote control
It’s rubbery and a bit too much Philippe Starck (tarte à la crême du moment) for my taste, but it works.
The Internet access speeds are about 20Mb/s which is great, although I’d have liked an upload speed increase, too. It’s only a hair faster than the 768Kb/s we had before.
Musicians’ Online Visibility
January 2, 2011 By
Internet visibility.
Talent, musicianship, soul, creativity… whatever it is you want to put out there, it has to be visible on the Internet. As I look around at all my creative and talented friends, I see that very few of them are able to easily point to their work on social networks like Twitter and Facebook or even in an email. Here are a couple on concrete free suggestions to fix that. If you read what follows, there’s no excuse for not having a significant online presence.
Your tunes.
Youtube is huge, but unless you have video or a good with slide show-type presentations, it won’t be your best vector to point people to. If you’re a little geeky, you can find a free player to put on a site, like this one. However, I think the best way to go is to stick to your music and find a site that shows it off best. I have used two sites I think are excellent: AudioMicro.com and Soundcloud.com. My current favorite is Soundcloud because it has some cool extra features. For example, people can comment at a specific spot in your song. It’s social so you can actually discover new music and have other creatives discover yours. Let’s say for a moment that you take my advice and join Soundcloud.com free.
Soundcloud
After joining and adding some profile info, you’ll upload a few tunes. Each song has a lot of potential info like exact tempo, key, genre and license. You can choose from a restrictive license to “do whatever you want”. I like to use the creative commons license that specifies credit for use, but who knows if people respect that? You have to realize that there’s a huge amount of music out there and by putting it online, you’re giving some of it away.
Posterous
One dead easy way to put stuff out as an artist is Posterous.com. All you do is join the site, choose a setup and publish. You can publish by sending an email to an address they furnish. The impressive part is that if you send an email with an mp3 song attached, Posterous will publish the text of your email and add a player for the tune automatically. The site I refer to above, http://sugarcane-harris.com is on Posterous is shown.
Posterous will also automatically publish a little gallery of photos you post. If you are a performing band or artist and have gigs and photos of those, this a great way to go, it’s easy and still free. Most importantly, you do not need to pay someone to help you because anyone, even drummers, can use these sites.
There are a lot of free ways to be present online, including Facebook – which I personally abhor – but also Tumblr, WordPress.org and a zillion others for the more or less geeky.
Summing up
If I had one piece of advice, it would be this: go join Soundcloud.com, put up about three songs. That whole thing will take you about 15 minutes, cost nothing and require an average IQ. If you want to go further, get a Posterous site and post stuff there. You can post a link on Facebook to a single tune on Soundcloud.com.
