Posts filed under “Uncategorized”
Everything old is new (again)
Cyrus has a piece up at Ars Technica about Boxfish, a search engine for closed captions scraped from broadcast television: Boxfish captures all closed-captioning information, indexes it, then makes that data searchable in a Twitter-style interface. All in real-time. If this technique sounds familiar, perhaps it’s because Google did something very similar way back in 2005: [...]
Back asswards
I don’t often get my CBC budget cut analysis from the sports section, but maybe I should. From Bruce Dowbiggin’s take on the recent cuts: CBC’s core business, its relevance to the public, would probably be in the following order: 1. News and current affairs; 2. Radio; 3. Sports; 4. Light entertainment. The problem with [...]
That time Timbuk2 replaced my 5-year old bag, for free
I love it when I experience great customer service. It seems to happen so infrequently that I feel compelled to share whenever it does. Every once in a while, you deal with people who stand behind their company or product so much that you can’t not tell people about it. For example, when the Australian Boot Company replaced my [...]
Vendredi XIII
Earlier this week, I found myself in Lyon’s 7th arrondissement, at a bar called l’Antisèche. I was there for L’UkeDunum, a new-ish monthly gathering of Lyonnais ukulele players (or, as they call themselves, ukulélistes). I’d been in touch with the organizers, Cécile and Guillaume, earlier in the week via email. In broken French, I told them I wanted [...]
GRTTWaK11
This morning, I announced Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids 11. It’s almost sold out. Avoid heartache and get your tickets now. Sorry. I warned you.
Home Recording 101 Redux
A few months ago, with the help of Tony and David, I led a workshop called “A beginner’s guide to multitrack audio recording.” The goal was to help singer-songwriters develop the skills necessary to make basic home recordings of their songs. It went really well. Not to toot my own horn or anything (toot toot!), [...]
Free DIY PVR workshop
As a follow-up to my piece, Your PVR is an insomniac, Ushnish from Free Geek Toronto email to let me know about a free workshop on building a Linux-based PVR: What: MythTV (building your own Personal Video Recorder) Course When: Thursday July 14th Time: 6:30 to 9:30 pm Location : Free Geek Toronto, Unit B, 51 [...]
The very first eBook
Yesterday, July 4, 2011, the digital book community celebrated the 40th anniversary of the eBook. According to most accounts, July 4, 1971 is the date Project Gutenberg founder Michael Hart first digitized the US Declaration of Independence. But, as I was researching the anniversary, I came across an interesting tidbit from a 2010 LA times article: Hart [...]
Physical memories, digital backups
When Jenna and I got married, we wanted copies of some family photos to have on display at our wedding parties. So we scanned in a bunch of photos from our parents’ originals, then printed out new copies and put them in frames. We still have the frames on our mantle. A fews months ago, [...]
@CBCjobs is now @workatCBC
CBC HR asked me to hand over control of the unofficial @CBCjobs Twitter account I made last July. I agreed. I plan to keep the automatic job postings going @workatCBC. More details in the update here.