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show notes

-Intro song: “Pacific Shores” by Neener from the forthcoming Neener 2 LP

-Apple announces upcoming desktop OS release: OS X Mountain Lion (10.8); Jim joins in on this segment to help me discuss what that means

-iTunes Match

[I talked preliminarily about iTunes Match and Google Music in podcast 12.]

-Intermission song: “Salt Water” by Neener from the forthcoming Neener 2 LP; Jessica joins me to talk about our music and more

-e-Commerce and social networking: Gamestop, Nordstrom, and Gap have all opened and shut down storefronts on Facebook already.

-danmckeown.info update

-new version (2.0) of popular free “play anything” VLC media player for Mac, Linux and Windows

-iOS apps:

–Nebulous Notes: take notes in a simple text entry interface, and then send them to your Dropbox. [I talked about Dropbox in podcast 11 and about note-taking alternative Evernote in podcast 10.]

–Melodies Pro: play your Google Music collection on your iPhone

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show notes

I talk with Jessica about Canon (point-and-shoot sales are weak while dSLR sales are strong) and Nikon (new D800).
Then I go on a long rant about how now Twitter is like Myspace used to be, driven by crass popularity statistics and thus incentivizing pandering behavior by users as they obsess over how their tweets are received. People allow reactions from a few users to shape their sharing choices. This is not exactly self-expression. Favstar seems to offer Twitter users a place to obsess over their online image, and show off to other users how often they have been re-tweeted and favorited.

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show notes

Moving up the results: Okay but not stellar progress in making danmckeown.info the definitive site about people who use that name.

Congratulations to Jessica for winning an award from her employer for her excellent work.

Fallout continues in the file sharing world of the Megaupload.com shutdown and arrests.  Some people report losing their files.  I’ve always thought that (legitimate) file sharing should be managed at as micro a level as possible–I wrote pacificpelican.us/cms to help make it easy for anyone with web space that can run PHP can easily upload and share files on their site.

I have an ebook that you can download: Like Any Gangster: Selected Writings 2006-2011 [54 pages, PDF and iPad versions both available for free].  This first edition was made with Apple’s iBooks Author.

A discussion of the file auto-save and versioning system in Mac OS X Lion: I illustrate the change in Lion from Snow Leopard by considering the difference between iMovie 11 and GarageBand 11 (the former auto-saves, the latter uses manual saving).  In addition, I consider the different implications of the new system for text files compared to image files.

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show notes

Apple textbooks: Andy Ihnatko talks about the new software for making iPad iBooks.

Sol Republic earphones

NFL playoffs

When this podcast first mentioned Hipstamatic (an iOS camera app) in episode 3, I repeated a now-discredited marketing story they were telling at the time–namely, that there had been a small-production camera (“100″) in the 1980s that gave the name and inspiration for the app.  I personally don’t care about the myth but must admit I was dumb to be so uncritical and repeat it to listeners.  I bring this up unprompted because it took me a year before I randomly thought: Hey that story must be nonsense.

Megaupload.com faces mega international prosecution.

SOPA and PIPA protest

Paul Graham: “Kill Hollywood.”

How far will government and law enforcement go in allowing itself to be used as a tool for smashing competition and innovation for the movie and record industries?

Politico: ”Indeed, the fiery fight over how to preserve [sic] copyright on the Internet is far from over.”

Obey The Goose.

‘Smile’, the long-lost follow-up to the iconic 1960s classic ’Pet Sounds’ by The Beach Boys was finally released in a 5-disc set called ‘The Smile Sessions‘ in 2011.

A Vancouver newspaper is forced to turn photos over to police of the Stanley Cup riot last year; so they are releasing the images of people lighting fires, attacking police cars and smashing storefronts.

DJMcloud Music is now on SoundCloud.

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News Topics and Links

US Marines urinating on corpses of Afghans perfectly symbolizes the intent and reality of the American war effort.  Barack Obama was unable to cover up these images like he did previous ones.

Mitt Romney is such a scumbag talking about “saving the soul of America” and even Newt Gingrich is attacking him for his shady business dealings.

New York Times public editor, Arthur Brisbane, asking whether lies should be allowed, shows how worthless mainstream journalists still are.

Tonight I saw Apple Genius Bar employees advising my wife to go through and kill applications manually.  So despite the debate over the utility of the practice (of routinely going through and shutting down a bunch of apps rather than using the shutdown occasionally when an app is acting up) they are telling people to do that at Apple stores still apparently.

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iPhone apps
-White Noise (TMSOFT)
-Grid Lens (Bucket Labs)
-Minecraft Pocket Edition (Mojang)
-Eden (Kingly Software Inc.)

pacificpelican.us/cms

download the free PHP app for uploading files, creating text documents and creating shortlinks for your web site

Tech Media News

Samsung is badly misplaying its marketing hand with the “Dude you’re a barista” commercials.

John Gruber talks about Bill Clinton on the “Back to Work” podcast: What is it with Gen X and Bill Clinton??

Music

Bush: “The Sound of Winter” from ‘The Sea of Memories’ (2011)

Teagan and Sara: “Alligator (live)” from ‘Get Along’ (2011)

Neener: “Pacific Shores” from Neener 2 (forthcoming in 2012)–exclusive preview of the track at the end of the podcast

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(This podcast was recorded live on video via Ustream. See the recorded video here.)

show notes (Dec. 17, 2011)

follow-up on the previous podcast (#19):

I mentioned GTA 5 when I clearly meant GTA 4 at one point, and I also called Star Wars Battlefront 2 “Star Wars Battlefield the original one” which makes sense as far as that being the first Star Wars Battlefront title on PSP but obviously not on all platforms. For example PS2 had the true “original” Battlefront.

Christmas videos we’ve done:

pacificpelican.us/podcast 17: Santa Claus makes a brief appearance in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park

The Christmas rainbow: When Jessica and I spent our first Christmas together in 2009, it was the kind of Christmas Day in Ohio that you could ride bikes–so we did and then we saw a rainbow.

Christmas in Chicago: In 2010 Jessica and I went to Chicago to spend the holidays with my family out there, and this video collects some clips from that season.

[the Santa photo]

Gordon Square: This year we made a video about rock music, Christmas–and not snitching.

My Notes on Hipstamatic [incomplete as 12/17/2011]

Currrent Hipstamatic version: 225 231

Films:

Black keys super grain: nice sharp black and white with small black frame, no noise

Alfred Infrared: Cool take on infrared film; can create very cool reddish images; leaky white frame; no noise

Ina’s 1969: Creates mild “60s” colors effect; has retro yellow dot border; no noise

Blanko: Offers a relatively neutral platform for the lens, with solid white border

Pistil: Creates reddish colors, uses distracting verbose alphanumeric-character-having border that says something like hpstm 269 or something

Cafe Cafenol: brownish sepia like tones with a shattered partial dark frame

Blanko noir: neutral film with black border

Float: Japanese style film yellows the image somewhat while placing a dark border with random seeming tentacles reaching into the image in some areas

AO DLX: a free Nike-sponsored film, creates slightly grainy black-and-white images within a somewhat uneven black frame which includes alphanumeric noise including “Nike”

AO BW: another free Nike-sponsored film, creates high contrast black-and-white images with a nearly even white border without alphanumeric noise

Lenses:

Hornbecker: from the Nike free pack, emphasizes realism and accuracy

Lucas AB2: creates muted, retro colors

Chunky: creates sharply focused images with light leak effects

Labatique 73: mild grainy effect: from the Cowboys and Aliens free pack

Matty ALN: causes notable light ray effects; from the Cowboys and Aliens free pack

iOS apps

[repeat app recommendation/The djmcloud.com app of the year] ProCamera: the best iOS photo app abides–does the best job with meta-data, combing photo and video, and with overall shooting.

Snappr: another entrant in the fish-eye lens effect photo app category: offers a custom shooting interface and multiple fish-eye effects but currently has the limitation that it renders photos at 1200×1200 for iPhone 4S, smaller for older phones; also of course has the limitations that any app will have compared to an optical fish-eye lens

Google Currents: another entrant in the customized news and content reading experience; sort of like Flipboard and the various Twitter apps but with its own spin: allows reader to focus on a handful of feeds more so than the firehose of content on apps like Reeder (which actually is much more of a Google Reader client than Currents, but that’s not the point I guess).

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show notes (Dec. 16, 2011)

iOS game:

Grand Theft Auto 3 (10th anniversary edition)

http://goo.gl/2vOPn

also available for Android:

http://goo.gl/gRO1D

From the intro credits music to the crazy radio stations (“Jah,” “Head Radio”) to the eccentric, boxy and gently rising street grid, which is utterly mapped to the inner synapses of the greatest minds of my generation: it’s the game that ranks as very possibly the greatest video game of all time, starting in 2001 as a PlayStation 2 game and moving eventually to Xbox and PC before living middle age as “Liberty City Stories” on early attempts to take such scale of games to mobile as on the PSP before now finally living a grand old age as the one that came first (before the wild Vice City, the brilliant San Andreas, and the imperfect but impeccably tuned GTA V, before the transcendently good Red Dead Redemption) and laid out an amazingly large amount of the formula, fully formed, onto the public.  We’re talking about the deadpan timbre of the satire in the game, the utter corruption of power, the un-deniability of the wary protagonist, the complexity of the game’s universe, and the weapons–oh the many weapons.

Limitations present in GTA III and subsequently fixed in Liberty City Stories are present again–no baseball bat damaging vehicles, no motorcycles at all–still it’s incredible to see such an advanced game from ten years ago compacted down but utterly playable on an iPhone 4S.  It doesn’t hurt that I have pleasant associations with the game, but get through the fog memory and try it yourself–you’ll probably be surprised at how good the game is even today.

The Neener Band Blog

http://blogs.sf3am.com/neener/

Our music.  More songs like “Occupy Your Mind” (as heard on this podcast) forthcoming.

Google Music:

http://music.google.com

Music “locker service that allows anyone to store up to 20,000 songs and stream them to their devices via the web.

New videos from pacificpelican.us/podcast and three new photo apps for iPhone and why I can’t be bothered sometimes to try to fix crappy CSS for someone else’s project.

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pacificpelican.us/cms: a free web app for uploading files and text documents and shortening links that you can download and use on your own web server for free

djmcloud.com podcast 18 show notes – Dec. 13, 2011

New videos from pacificpelican.us/podcast

“Gordon Square“: a video set in Cleveland and Lakewood starring Jessica and the birds (and I appear briefly at the end) with new music from Neener and an important message: “DON’T SNITCH!”

“Big Parrot Millet part 1“: a short fish-eye-lens-style video that seeks to answer the question of whether my parakeets like the type of millet sprays which are packaged for larger parrots.

“Big Parrot Millet part 2“: in this rare sequel, we conclude that the parakeets do enjoy the big bird millet.

iOS apps

Flipboard

A way to view content from numerous sites in one interface–can link to Twitter, Tumblr, Google Reader, Facebook, Flickr and more.

FishEye Toy Camera (by misskwi)

Creates circular photos with simulated fish-eye lens effect; fun to mess around with but of course doesn’t offer the type of angles and views that optical fish-eye lenses can.

Big Lens (by Reallusion Inc.)

Allows photos taken with iPhone to appear to simulate a (dSLR-style) shallow depth of field.  Includes circular or rectangular focal area highlighting tool and virtual aperture picker.

podcast intro music: “No Sleep” by Screambird

–

podcast 18 additional notes

WordPress:

new version 3.3 with new features including updated media uploader: http://goo.gl/MXe13

CSS for default Twenty-eleven theme still smushing images cross-posted via Posterous on iPhone browser: http://goo.gl/OQtpr

archiving tweets using WordPress: this update/fork to the Twitter Tools plugin allows RTs to be archived along with regular tweets: http://goo.gl/78nyK

“Republican shills?!”: No Agenda Podcast episode 363  http://363.nashownotes.com/

Green apple photo taken with “Big Lens” app: http://links.danieljmckeown.com/?r=2

From our Neener 1 album this year: Dance With The Dinosaur

06-Dance-With-The-Dinosaur.mp3 Listen on Posterous

(posted via djm blog) ]]> http://djmcloud.danieljmckeown.com/blog/2011/12/do-you-know-the-dinosaur-neenermusic/feed/ 0 http://djmcloud.danieljmckeown.com/blog/2011/12/do-you-know-the-dinosaur-neenermusic/ http://feeds2.pacificpelican.us/~r/djmblog/~3/9Ilk6flT2GM/ http://djmcloud.danieljmckeown.com/blog/2011/12/penn-state-is-insular-and-insistent/#comments Sat, 03 Dec 2011 23:12:51 +0000 podcast@danieljmckeown.com (Daniel J. McKeown) http://djmcloud.danieljmckeown.com/?p=580 Continue reading →]]>

You can tell a lot about a large university by the hat selection in its on-campus bookstore.  No this is not an occasion to discuss the ownership of many of the on-campus stores these days at many schools (just another part of the publicization of cost and the privatization of profit in the university sector really).  No I refer only to what was on offer at this store.  Specifically the type of hat one can buy at the book stores–a baseball style ball cap with such things as the school’s logo or name on it.

I can say for sure that Michigan State has an excellent selection of hats at the book store, ranging from golf visors to Nike on-field coaches hats to the bar caps whose popularity peaked when I was in high school in the nineties to throwback hats of different sorts.

Minnesota has an excellent selection at their book store, with lots of good hats.  Even Notre Dame gives their fans plenty of designs to choose from on campus.

Penn State’s sports hat selection was a measly embarassment.

Actually of the few hats they even had, way too many were that dated, douchy, fratty type.  And the sporty hats just did not have the right contemporary style.  As a Nike-sponsored Big Ten school like MSU, I thought PSU would be coming up big in the hat department–it’s not like a large city and its Lids stores were much of a threat there in Happy Valley.

Why was I even in State College, Pennsylvania?  Well it was the summer of 2010, and I was driving back from New York [see video from that trip in pacificpelican.us/podcast 50] when I got off the highway in Pennsylvania and stopped to use the bathroom.  Almost back on the interstate, I saw a sign for State College some 37 miles away.

As a Big Ten alumnus, I decided to add another school to the list that I had visited. Based on what I had heard, I was hoping to put Penn State on the cool side of the ledger.

Nothing in much of the eastern U.S. can approximate the isolation of the Centre County farmlands that surround Penn State for vast distances, noticeably on the Beaver Stadium side of campus, the way I entered marked by rolling mini-Appalachia until suddenly the hundred-thousand-plus seat football stadium appears alone on the horizon.

After driving onto campus, I circled around before finding parking.

At the parking garage near the book store I saw a group of summer students conducting some sort of dropping stuff and measuring it procedure, a phenomenon I nicknamed to myself the Penn State gravity experiments.  So I decided to take a little video of what was going on, and the students suddenly started acting weird and telling me to stop taking footage, which of course I declined to do.  I can’t imagine such a childish request by students in the middle of campus on a major university.  There was definitely something weird about this place; further, they could tell I was an outsider.

Then after checking out the dairy store, a good bit of the middle of campus and down back to the disappointing book store, I drove to the other edge of campus and explored the row of shops and apartments that line the edge there.  Beyond those I noticed a row of ostentatious fraternity and sorority houses claiming prime property near the edge of campus.

Isolated, hollow-tradition-obsessed, boring–these things exuded from Happy Valley more obviously and eerily than at any large school I’ve ever visited, a sort of foul stench of ossified cliquishness hung in the air more heavily than the Fabreze in a freshman dorm.  You get the impression that the smart people in Pennsylvania may well largely avoid the place, leaving it to the conformo-bots.

What my friend in San Francisco who had attended the school had said to me finally made sense now.  When she told me where she went, I was like, wow, isn’t that place beautiful, didn’t you just want to stay there?

“No.” she said.  She was from Korea.  She’d seen plenty.  It was a dumb hick town to her.  But I wonder if you asked a local, might they agree?

It’s easy to understand how such an insular place in the middle of nothing could have learned to value the institution more than its members, because after all weren’t they admired as a “grand experiment” in uncomplicated America-ness to all those commentators who would drive in for football weekends?  The keepers of such a place would see the flow of students to the college as an undifferentiated mass to be formed in the shape of men and women of “integrity” and “values”–you know, those things that lead them by the thousands to violently protest the firing of a disgraced, sanctimonious and narcissistic football coach who had let himself become the terrifying figurehead of a rootless, disturbed personality cult.

All the nasty accusations swirling around the football program, and the even worse ones against Jerry Sandusky and his “foundation” (pedophile ring more likely) are no more illuminating about this dark place perhaps than the recent news in the area about an accuser against Sandusky who came forward–he was apparently harassed and threatened by fellow students for messing with Joe Paterno’s football program and has now left his high school.

Jim offers his thoughts on his new Kindle Fire tablet

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show notes for episode #17, Nov. 20, 2011

Jim’s review of the Kindle Fire

Kindle Fire reviews by Marco Arment and Engadget

DJay app for iPad

Evernote in the Amazon app store

Nov. 2011 by Jessica
[cross-posted to danmckeown.info]

Occupy Movements raided across the country, GarageBand comes to iPhone, video sharing, ads in Twitter, iOS photo apps including Photogene2, LensLight, and Pocket Camera PRO–the intersection of apps and activism

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show notes for episode #16, Nov. 15, 2011

iOS/iPhone apps

Photogene2: a new app for editing, cropping, filtering, and even adding text on photos

http://goo.gl/HJOvi

Pocket Camera PRO by Punicasoft: a point-and-shoot camera simulator, down to the left-right up-down button activated menu

http://goo.gl/D8ThH

LensLight: like LensFlare [covered on podcast #14], but with different light and color patterns to place atop your iPhone photos

http://goo.gl/ZSeh3

The Amazing Type-Writer: App that simulates using a type-writer; can export writings (in type-writer style and font) as images

http://goo.gl/StBrw

GarageBand for iOS: The very cool mini DAW music creation software for iOS is now universal, meaning it can run on recent iPhones (and iPod Touches) as well as iPads now.

http://goo.gl/YfNvJ

Wall of Sound: an app that plays music and allows you to explore your collection using album art

http://goo.gl/f408W

in other news

new bug fix version of free and open source pacificpelican.us/cms (0.0.9.9.3) now available

http://goo.gl/DDnRx

ads in Twitter stream

Instagr.am grows; will it add video?

Youtube vs. Vimeo

big road wins in college football: Oregon beats Stanford; Michigan State beats Iowa

Occupy Wall Street #ows

Global Revolution live stream

We Are The Other 99 live stream

Paul Krugman on the raid of Zucotti Park in New York City.

Instagr.am blog with photos from the New York raid

BBC News on the Occupy Oakland raid

#oo

The first half (roughly) of this podcast was broadcast live via Ustream, and is archived on that site.

Thanks to Jim for the music in this episode.

Nov. 14, 2011

Michigan State football video, GTA V, new web feature requests, Ubuntu 11.10, iOS vs. Android

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Oct. 29, 2011

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show notes

new intro music: an unfinished track by Screambird

http://screambird.djmcloud.com/

I was at the game and took a video of the stunning “Rocket” play that won the game for Michigan State over Wisconsin in East Lansing earlier this month.

http://y.djmcloud.com/vjAWCW

“The public will be able to carry guns into most parts of the [Wisconsin] state Capitol, under a policy being developed by Gov. Scott Walker.”

http://goo.gl/bUoH9

Grand Theft Auto V announcement forthcoming

http://y.djmcloud.com/tiPXfL

Republican Herman Cain’s campaign creates ad with tightly wound staffer spouting a junior high level stream of right-wing political consciousness–while smoking a cigarette.  At the end Herman Cain himself makes a weird look into the camera for like 8 seconds before it melts into a strange smile.

http://goo.gl/UtX5v

“What feature would improve the web? « Paul Irish”

http://y.djmcloud.com/uy708D

Ubuntu [GNU/Linux operating system]: trying out the “Unity 2D” interface which is the default for older PCs on Ubuntu 11.10 (Unity 3D is on new machines but my Linux box is an old single-core machine)

iOS and Android: why I picked an Apple iPhone 4S over a Samsung Galaxy S II.

Thanks to Jessica for the outro music!

link: view the video on Youtube

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Hosted by DJM (@pacificpelican) and Jessica (@JessicaMcKeown)

Oct. 17-18, 2011

show notes

Michigan State beats Michigan in football for the fourth year in a row:

http://goo.gl/CXjEl

Occupy #OWS

Wall Street:

http://goo.gl/BLveQ

Tucson:

http://goo.gl/RnC5C

Gameday:

http://goo.gl/xJQc5

My writings over the last few years about America’s troubled economic system:

http://goo.gl/RZ2Sj

Jose Reyes is the 2011 NL batting champion–the first Mets player to win that distinction

http://goo.gl/sJR9a

OS X Lion

Launchpad application launcher & other iOS-style tweaks

iOS 5

syncing improvements

iPhone 4S

Siri, better camera

iOS apps

Flashlight by i4software:

http://goo.gl/82Kkq

LensFlare:

http://goo.gl/mlMif

@mostlylisa (a developer of the Camera+ iPhone app) says “Dramatic improvement of lens flare with the iPhone 4S. No more red dots!” [But commenters say: "I kind of digged the red dots."]: http://campl.us/geLY

baseball playoffs: Cardinals over Brewers in NL; Rangers over Tigers in AL