More and more these days I find just surfing the Internet to be a little dull on it’s own, I’m sure this is another symptom of the Attention Defecit Disorder that modern technology provides but I always find myself needing to do something else beyond just surfing. So what do I do? If I can get hold of one of my friends on Skype I’ll do that but sometimes if noone’s available or it’s too late at night to be talking I’ll just fire up TWiT Live and listen to Leo.
For those of you that don’t know, Leo Laporte is a broadcast journalist who has had a long career in radio and television (see his Wikipedia page for more info) and who now runs a succesful network of podcasts spearheaded by This Week in Tech (other podcasts available here). A while ago Leo started moving from podcasts to doing live video with his TWiT Live initiative allowing viewers to watch Leo live as he records his podcasts. The clever part is that it goes way beyond just watching a guy wearing headphones talking into a mic, Leo has the equipment to have double-screen video showing guests both in and out of the studio as well as graphics, lower thirds, screen casting and so on. All of this adds an extremely interesting dimension to the video and give me something else to do, although I will admit that I don’t always watch the video (and Stickam provide a facility to pause the video to save bandwidth).
written by thirtyfootscrew
\\ tags: Communications, Internet, iptv, Laporte, Leo, leo laporte, Media, podcast, This Week in Tech, twit
So, I actually bothered watching the live stream of Bill Gates’ keynote at CES – I love insomnia sometimes. All in all it was relatively interesting, I paid special attention to the Xbox 360 section which announced their IPTV service (no details and cynicism/experience tells me it’ll be US only). Some cross-platform features of Xbox Live and Vista were mentioned, I like the idea but it’ll be a while before it really catches on with PC users. I posted my live notes about the Xbox 360 portion on the forums of the GamerCast Network, if you don’t know about them please download and listen to their excellent podcasts, I listen to the Video Game Show, but they also host the extremely popular GamerTag Radio and Uncle Gamer Radio.
There was also a bit of blathering about how great everyone thinks Gears of War is, I personally wasn’t that fussed – if they made an FPS that was equally good looking I might be interested but as far as I’m concerned it looks great but plays distinctly average. I heard someone describe it as a pretty version of whack-a-mole and honestly that’s exactly what it is.
They demoed some cool features in Vista which should be good once they’ve been service-packed to hell, my favourite was the integration with the Xbox 360 controller – I’ve got to find some use for the handful of spares I have lying around. Other than that it was relatively uninspiring, they had the balls to mention both Urge and Zune even though they’re both different incompatible products trying to achieve the same aim.
written by thirtyfootscrew
\\ tags: bill gates, ces, iptv, keynote, Microsoft, podcast, vista, xbox, xbox 360