Tag: YouTube

Categories
Geeky/Programming

The New Hipster: Going Appless

Love the iPhone, really do. But I am pretty hardcode when it comes to apps and loading things and making it “work” hard. Every once in a while some rogue app goes off the wall and starts draining battery like crazy. Usually the only thing to do is restore phone. I have had to do this, and a few other people I know have see it as well. I don’t blame the iPhone, I blame the apps. Just like windows mobile, the apps were the problem 🙂

Anyways, this time, instead of restoring my phone from backup, I just let it stay “clean”. I decided to not install any apps for as long as I can. It has been 24 hours, so that says something 🙂

But what I am doing is going back to the iPhone roots, back to 2007. Web apps. Steve Jobs himself says it is their “other”, open, unrestricted platform they support, so let’s see what it can offer.

Facebook? touch.facebook.com
Twitter? m.twitter.com
Flickr? m.flickr.com
YouTube (the HTML5 version is better than the native app!) m.youtube.com
FourSquare/Gowalla? check.in
Reeder/Google Reader? google’s mobile formatted reader site works.
Other apps? openappmkt.com
IM? meebo has a pretty good web app.

Just like regular hipsters, that drink PBR, and lose the flavor and other added benefits of drinking a less “hip” beer, you have to give some things up.. such as..

Push Notifications – not sure yet if this is a good or bad thing to give up. The current implementation just seems to annoy anyways

Background/Streaming music (Pandora/Last.fm, etc) – I did find dance.fm has a HTML5 version or something that streams directly from a web page, so I could almost say others might follow suit. I also have iPod on the device so not to worried, I don’t listen to a helluva lot of music anyways.

What else? Not sure yet, we will see how long I last. One thing I can say, there are some games that are web apps that are pretty cool, but don’t come close to the native games … yet.

Of course I will probably start installing some apps eventually, and after a while I will be back to my old app going ways 🙂

Categories
Geeky/Programming Product Reviews

How 20$ Saved Me 100$ + A Month – HDTV Antenna

I really hate TV. I don’t even watch it. It is something that you should be able to pay for what you use, not pay for everything and use a little bit of it, so here is what I did.

I went to Best Buy and picked up and HDTV Antenna.

It rocks. I just plug it in to the coax, do a search and it finds the local channels. ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, WB, PBS, and Weather Plus. Picks up the regular versions and HD versions. Since that is all that Emily wants, to see weather alerts and crap, it’s good enough for me.

I have PlayOn setup on my Vista box so I can get Hulu, YouTube and Netflix streaming to my PS3. I can rent movies, buy movies and TV shows on the PS3, Xbox 360, and AppleTV, and I can get podcasts and YoutTube on the AppleTV. What else do I need? And if I really want something, I can get it using rapidshare or whatever, or stream it on my laptop.

So, yeah, “Hello, Charter? Cancel my cable, I don’t need you anymore, kthxbye”

It’s liberating, and adds more $$ to my bottom line every month.

Categories
Uncategorized

Amazon S3 and WordPress Video Site – 2 Hour Project – What A Debacle

About a month ago, I wanted to test using Amazon’s S3 service, for storage. I couldn’t think of any quick, easy projects to use it for, then it hit me, how about video/photos?

I decided to see how long it would take for me to make a video site, with comments, views, etc, on a small budget.

My first thought was maybe to use a hosted WordPress.com blog, and just redirect the domain, which is about 10 dollars a year, and then use S3 for the video/photo hosting. That idea was nixed because hosted WordPress.com blogs can’t embed flash, javascript, or iFrames, etc.

My next idea was just getting a WordPress hosted blog at HostMySite, which is what I went with (which eventually I will move to my own server). This was 45$, and the domain was roughly 10$, so 55$ so far.

Now, to get videos working, and a cool theme. First the theme. I just searched free WordPress theme sites, and found one that looked cool. I set it up, slapped up some Google AdSense and Google Analytics, and changed the logo, rearranged a few things.

As for getting video to work. I was having issues embedding jscript (for the flash video embeds) in WordPress. It would work, but then screw up the formatting of the rest of the page, etc. I knew iFrame would work, so I went that route. Since I am a .NET dev at heart, I made a page where it will take some params on my www.stevienova.com site, and grab the file from S3 and play it. So on WordPress, I just iFrame that site with the right params. I suppose later I could make a PHP page to do the same thing and keep it all self enclosed. Probably will do that once I move it to my server.

For video I found a nice little flv embed, which has a ton of options, even can do pre and post roll ads if I want. What is nice with the setup I have is that there really isn’t and bandwidth being eaten by my webhost. Just the theme images. Everything else is on S3. The videos, thumbnails, etc.

Pricing for Amazon S3 is pretty good.

  • Storage Used: $0.15 per GB-Month of storage. This fee applies to all object data and metadata stored in buckets that you created under your account.

    It does not matter who created the objects in your buckets, so think twice before you give somebody the right to write objects to your bucket!

  • Network Data Transferred: $0.20 per GB of data transferred. This fee applies anytime data is read from or written to one of your buckets. It does not matter who is reading or writing the data, so consider this when you give public access to one of your objects that may become popular.

With the site just starting, the storage and transfer is really low. Less than a dollar.

So, in about 2 hours and less than 60 dollars later, I created a self managed Funny Video site, from the ground up. I can now use Windows Live Writer to post to it, and I use a S3 tool to upload files to S3.

I also have other people putting videos on it, so that is cool as well. I am not sure where it will, because it really was just an experiment to see how fast I could get a video site up, and for how cheap.

Not sure how funny the videos are or will be, but if you want something up, I will put it up. Once nice thing, is that I can just iFrame YouTube as well, so if there is something there that might be Copyrighted by a YouTube uploader, I don’t have to worry about that, since its just the YouTube player which you can embed legally.

Fun stuff 🙂

Check out the site.

whatadebacle

http://www.whatadebacle.com

 

Categories
Geeky/Programming

iPhone: 1.1.3 Firmware and YouTube "You must first connect to iTunes with an Internet connection to enable Youtube"

So, after I upgraded to 1.1.3 Firmware on my iPhone, I tested everything. Everything works as planned, even my voicemail works great (not visual VM, but when I hit VM when on a diff carrier it actually goes to my VM!)

But, one issue I saw: "You must first connect to iTunes with an Internet connection to enable Youtube" when I tried to use YouTube

To fix: go to Installer.App, add a source "i.unlock.no" , let it refresh, then install the YouTube Activation Fix. Restart your iPhone and it works! Brilliant!