Muxtape is bringing back some retro-chic to the online music sharing community. It allows you to make a MP3 online ‘muxtape’ up to 12 songs at 10 MBytes each. The design and execution is dead simple but some how very appealing. It looks like someone made it in their bedroom when they were grounded by their parents. Its design is also clearly Apple inspired with its iphone-esque interface but i suspect it does not work on an iphone since the music is played via a Flash media player embedded on the site.

Take a look for yourself and I’ll be waiting to hear your very own muxtape.

Today Apple announced, among other things, a second try at the Apple TV. It is just a software upgrade but it has made the product significantly more attractive. Let me give you a quick rundown of this revision based on my initial review last year.

Last year I said:

Likes:
Small (Still the same size)
Relatively Inexpensive (Even cheaper now at $229!)
Has HDMI out (No change here)
Intuitive interface (Possible better with more feature integration)
Syncs to 40 GB local drive (Upgraded to bigger hard drives option at 160GB)
Portable (Still very portable at the same size)

Dislikes:
Needs new Airport or needs hardwire (Same)
No DVD playback (Same)
No DVR (Same, probably by design)
No native media acquisition (Much improved now without the need of a computer)
iTunes software is too bulky but required for use (No longer required)
Minor dislike, no 1080p support (Still likely no 1080p but apparently looks very good)

Overall, I think the Apple TV 2.0 is a great improvement over the first iteration. The price cut makes it even more attractive. But I think it is still too expensive for at the $229 price point. If and when it gets closer to the $99 range, I believe they will have mass adoption. For now, I am saving my money for a MacBook Air…

Journeyman is one of the new shows this last season that is facing that untimely death. I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that I will really miss not knowing where (when and who) Dan Vasser will be visiting in the non-existent future episodes. There has to be a place where good quality shows like this can live and be profitable. I don’t know if the Internet is the answer but certainly the SciFi network or some cable station should at least pick it up for us fans to continue to enjoy the show.

So please, NBC, give the writers what they want and bring back Journeyman!!!

The alpha release has a nice and polished Web 2.0 design with plenty of AJAX. As it is still a alpha release, many of the features are still not enabled. The site lets you log the time, place and details of the trips you have taken and organizes them via a visual map display or chronological drop down list. You can upload photos directly to driftr.com or link your flickr photos to their site via the flickr API.

Driftr allows you to enter places you stayed as well as places you ate at which I guess will eventually allow them to build a database of user reviews to compete with Yelp.com.

The current implementation is very basic but it has promise assuming more useful features are added. A few that come to mind are trip planning and peer recommendations. I’ve got a few more invites so let me know if you want to try it out.

Screen shots

Eforcity Universal Car Cigarette Lighter Socket Splitter

Well. I just wanted to tell you that I am NOT going to get this one.

Throughout the 43 minute show, the same 5 minute commercial played 5 times. That’s 25 minutes worth of commercials with 43 minutes of content where usually only 17 minutes would play on regular TV. The fact that you had to sit through the same 5 minutes 5 times is enough to make you want to pull that ethernet plug out of your computer. On top of that, they cut into the shows at random moments. If this is how they are going to deliver their content online, it is going to discourage a lot of viewers.

It is possible that the networks don’t really want hulu to be as successful as it promises to be due to the lucrative contract they have with satellite and cable providers. But that’s just not the way to launch a product that has so much promise just to be sabotaged by its creator.

Here is their embedded top song player which is a cool feature to discover new music. You can register, login and Jigg all directly within this embeddable player which will help them grow their userbase virally.

Although their embed link feature from the player currently is broken so I had to browse the page source to find this code. That could be a problem but should be an easy fix for them.

Here is the description of their service from their own Website:

* Store an unlimited amount of data for only 15¢ per gigabyte
* No monthly subscription fee, no startup fee, no commitment
* Your data is fully encrypted at all times
* Data is stored at multiple Amazon.com datacenters around the country for high availability
* Access files directly from Windows Explorer, Mac OSX Finder, and Linux
* Automatically back up your important files quickly and easily

A friend of mine turned me on to the service last week and I have been playing around with it for a couple of days. So far it has worked very well but it is certainly in beta status. It is essentially a front-end for Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) that makes the storage-in-a-cloud concept as transparent as possible. It literally looks like a local hard drive when it is connected. Locally cached files makes the file appear instantly on the drive while it works in the background to push it all up to Amazon’s servers without you sitting and waiting as in other services. Even if the computer crashes the service is smart enough to resume the upload when it reboots.

Where it shows as a beta product is in the feature set. Currently there is no easy way to map multiple drives using the same or different accounts. There are no privileges you can set for others to have limited access to your files or even make some of your files live on the internet via regular HTTP. Supposedly all of that will come in time at a fair price of a dollar a month or $20 a lifetime. Of course you will incur Amazon S3 charges for the storage and transfer fees but Jungle Disk isn’t seeing any of that.

Amazon S3 Pricing Structure

A typical scenario where this is extremely useful would be for someone who has a home computer as well as a work PC. You can map your Jungle Disk to both machines regardless where they are in the Internet. Files will appear in both locations just like magic. Or if you have a company with virtual employees across the world you can simply enable access to a Jungle Disk and suddenly everyone will be sharing and working on a network drive as if you are in the same network.

As a backup service it is not the cheapest around. Personally I will need close a terabyte of storage to backup my digital life and Amazon S3 will cost me around $150 a month whereas Mozy offers an unlimited backup service at $4.95/month. Where services like Mozy lacks is the transparency of file access.

I’ve been using it for just a couple of days and have been very impressed with the app. To access multiple Amazon accounts and S3 buckets I’ve even written a little script that allows me to ‘one-click’ swap between them. Let’s just hope Amazon hasn’t patented that as well…

Having waited patiently this past year to see how it will all end, last night’s series finale was brilliantly executed. and broke all the boundaries of dramatic television series finales. The HBO forums are still buzzing from last nights big event which was titled Made In America.

I’m not going to go through what has been going on in the last episodes but I have not felt so tense while watching a television show in maybe ever. David Chase, the creator of the show, wrote and directed this last episode which ended with Tony and his family in Holsten’s, a modest italian family restaurant, about to have dinner. Suspicious characters are dotted all around the room as Carmela, AJ and Meadow all showed up individually giving Tony some time to queue up the 1981 power ballad by Journey, ‘Don’t Stop Believing’ on the jukebox.

Chase has become a master at creating so much tension in a scene that makes you want to vomit. You get the same kind of feeling while watching a horror movie when you think the killer is going to jump out and scare you in any second. The last scene showed Meadow running late while struggling to parallel park her Lexus across the street from the restaurant. Without any indication, the screen cuts to black as she opens the door and enters the restaurant. No video, no audio, just a black screen that seem to have lasted forever but in reality was merely seconds. The first thing that came out of my mouth was, “You’ve got to be kidding me!”. I didn’t know what had hit me and I started to think maybe my TV died during the most anticipated scene of the series of this entire year. Of course that was not the case. David Chase had intended to end the show in darkness and silence. As the credits started rolling, a million thoughts were going through my head. What happened? Who is the suspicious looking guy at the counter? FBI? A hit man? Does he take out Tony? What’s the significance of the song? Do I like what just happened? Does Silvio survive? So many unresolved issues yet the show is over. Man, it’s over…..

As of now there are many theories and interpretations of how this show ended. The one that makes the most sense to me but not necessarily how I wanted it to end is that Tony was whacked by the suspicious guy at the counter as he exited the restroom. Their table was right next to the restroom door and as Meadow walks into the restaurant, you see Tony’s perspective and real quickly the audience’s perspective of Tony just before it all goes black and silent. In episode 78 named “Soprano Home Movies“, Tony and Bobby were sitting in the boat on the lake when Tony tells Bobby what he think it’s like when it happens. He says and I paraphrase, “I don’t think anything happens, it just all goes black.”

Obviously this show ended this way so people like myself will interpret and conspire about what we think the ending might be. I don’t think Chase will ever tell people what his intentions were or if there even were any. I can’t wait to watch it all over again…

Just a small town girl
Living in a lonely world
She took the midnight train going anywhere
Just a city boy
Born and raised in South Detroit
He took the midnight train going anywhere

CUT TO BLACK

I have been shooting a lot of footage with my SD1 and so far I am thoroughly impressed. I can’t imagine the SD3 have any noticeable image quality improvement but if you can wait 6 months maybe the a SD3 is in your future. It claims to have “Full HD 1920″ which means the SD1 achieves its 1920 frame with some kind of software trickery. That’s if you buy into the fact that it 1080 interlaced is “Full HD” versus 1080 progressive (“Fuller” HD?). It gets released in Japan on April 25th with a slightly lower price tag than then the SD1 came out (50 U.S. buckaroos) so look for it around you U.S. neighborhood probably around mid summer. I probably wouldn’t have been able to wait that long anyways to make my purchase so no regrets here. Yet.

Here are some of the photos courtesy of watch.impress.co.jp: