On the edge of real and Cyberspace there is one place you can go. The Knightcast media channel. Featuring a weekly podcast "The Knightcast" and a web Tv show "KW-Tv" Both deal with the everyday adventures of a modern day technofile, filled with tips, tricks, manuals and how-to's on how to tune technology into your everyday life and let tech work for you. All this and more using Windows, Linux, and Mac computers, Web2.0 sites, services and more to upgrade from geek to cyber-citizen. Real Technology for Real life.
Its been here for over a year now, and when you measure its uptime against the rest of the systems I have , one would think its a lampshade or some fancy ornament for the living room. Yet .. its a computer none the less. Its poor and meager 350 MHz power-processor is four times slower then even the lightest computer around here .. but still this old geezer has not been sent to oblivion as most of its peers have been. So what in hells name propels me to keep this little bugger ? It doesn’t really DO anything, If it did , it would be SLOW at it .. and it isn’t even modern anymore. So why is it still here ?
Simple answer. The answer is as simple as it is baffling : Its pretty ! and for some unearthly reason I have grown fond of it. The story began over a year ago when I managed to buy two Mac G4’s. As I was loading them up in my car ,the guy says, “Well , those are the last of the working macs around here” “ Oh” , I asked “ Do you have any broken ones too ?” The guy nodded and pointed me to a dark and gloomy shed “ Still got an old G3 in there, its broken so I’m gonna take it to the scrap-heap” All of my “Save the wales, the puppy’s, the baby seals and the old computer ! “- alarms went of in my head as I said , Well , just give it to me and i’ll do that for ya too. My head was thinking: “yea ! spare parts” Next thing I know the guy pops an old bondi blue G3 in my trunk and tops it of with an old 17 inch bondi blue cinema display. “Broken too” he mumbles.
Don't tell me its broken. Now .. telling me something pretty is broken and cannot be fixed is like slapping me in the face with a leather glove. I feel challenged, compelled to prove you wrong and fix it. Wether its my God-like itch (to create life from lifelessness) or my Ferengi greed (moooore computers .. mooore !) I do not know. But 3 days later the Little G3 was up and purring. Replacing the power supply , taking apart the ENTIRE casing in order to clean it and popping in 512 megs of ram revived the little bugger. The screen miraculously healed itself and ( it drew power from the broken power-supply , so DUHUH) and I had kittens from joy. So now what ? Mac Os 10 would NOT install on it. I spent hours to get it working , tried and tried again , but to no avail. Even my expert mac geek friend gave up and said .. let it go my friend. But i was not going to quit .. Like a regular doc frankenstein I huddled back to my layor with the lifeless hulk and downloaded the one potion that would surely revive even the most simple systems. I summoned the power of ubuntu !
Running smoothly. So now i’m more than happy to report the latest distro of Ubuntu is running smoothly on this hand-me-down given-up-for-dead G3. I don”t know what makes me more happy , the fact that it looks cool and runs at a very decent speed or the simple realization that I have made something productive out of a system that would have been sent to the dump. The funny thing is I have some other way faster computers in the house , yes I remain facinated by this old G3 and keep spending time on it. As said in “broke-back” mountain : I don”t know how to quit you .. and quite frankly I don’t know why that is. But what I do know is that it not only will make a very nice linux testing system it will also be the prettiest ubuntumachine in the house.
I get some of these things in my mailbox from time to time. Use this program to call for free and so on. Almost every time it turns out to be a hoax and you have to pay some fee in order to make a crappy voice over IP phone-call to your parents next door. But I got tapped on the shoulder yesterday by one of my wife's co-workers who sent me this little link : Freecall. A free phone-service that apparently gives you five hours of free calls to landline's all over the globe including the USA (Landlines and mobiles) most countries in europe , australia, brazil and so on. So boot up your PC and here we go.
Download the client, yapp away ?
You can use either their client application (only for windows unfortunately) or make a trail call from their website. According to my source (who lives in Belgium) his wife had spent the last three hours last night testing it out and calling her family in Russia, absolutely free.
Rates.
The rates are almost the same as Skype , For a call to an Australian Cellphone using Freephone I will pay 0.13 eurocent, And with skype it will cost me € 0.19 incl. VAT. Rates vary per country but all in all it looks cheaper. Now this little tool is far from the functionality a skype client has but , to call a landline its an ideal little program. So check it out and tell us what you think about this free-call thing. Perhaps it will stick, perhaps it will fade away , but be sure you get your 5 free hours of yapp-time before the thing implodes on itself.
Don't even leave your seat for episode 35 of the Knightcast : Remote domination. We talk about the tools of the trade how to remote control every PC that you own. With tips, howto's and cool programs we turn your computerroom obsolete and let you control everything from your couch. With music from Noplasticinside its another Info- Loaded Knightcast.
I sit here in the darkness, broken only by the light of my monitor typing away the morning dawn. My fingers huddle around the warm cup of cappuccino i just made myself , to avoid cramping up in the cold. I could turn the heater on but I refuse. Outside the drizzle marches on for the fourth day in a row , Its presence only occasionally broken by an outright downpour or the faintest illusion of a clearing of the clouds. It does sound like an autumn tale .. But its actually mid August. This summer has been a truly weird one. Having frozen our preverbal behinds off in ‘the winter that would not end’ giving us the chance to fire up the boilers until may, the brief glimpse of summer we had was like looking into the exhaust of a launching space-shuttle with temperatures of 36 degrees and more for days and days straight.
Binary Weather system.
And now .. plunk : Rain-season has been bestowed on us ! Incredible but true. Its like we have a binary climate system here. Summer / autumn / summer / autumn etc etc .. Not that I mind the latter weather. I mean , OK , its drowsy and cold .. but one must admit, the drizzle brings the chisel to the geek. What better excuse to spend hours behind the computer then a never ending monsoon season outside. And thats what I have done yesterday all afternoon. With my wife (still sounds weird) having a cold in the midd of summer and feeling poorly, stretched out on the couch underneath a pile of pillows.. I was hammering away on one of the most time consuming varieties of computer use : Video editing. The down part of having 400 pictures, 2 hours of video and 3 hours of audio recorded on your wedding day .. Is the fact that you have to edit it all ! Wanting to make something special for our guests I am going with the ‘video’ approach and am pouring everything into my own ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ epic wedding video-with-more-pictures-then-actual-video. All-tough fascinatingly interesting to do, peaking all of ones creative hairs .. its actually quite amazing if you think of it. With a 1200 euro laptop and the enclosed software one is able to edit pictures, organize them, turn them into movies, arrange the movies, edit the movies, add effects to the movies, add menu’s to the movies, animate the menu’s to the movies, add titles and scores to the movies and utterly come up with a completely ready to play DVD.
99% Crap. Ok , 99 % of what people make is utter crap , (possibly including mine) but the fact is that its incredible that this kind of multimedia editing power is at the fingertips of the average computer user. Add a pinch of talent and one does get a dangerous alternative to the crap thats on TV. In the span of 5 years , from the analogue linear editing consoles to the completely computerized home video studio , a lot of power has been put into the hands of the average joe and I'm utterly fascinated at what people do with it. Where places like Youtube are piled up to the rim with crap, the occasional gem does sparkle in the form of some beautiful contribution to the meld.
We become the media. The conclusion : WE have become the media. And as the power to create is bestowed on us , I hope the big time media conglomerates are finally seeing that : Maybe they should get their act together. As PVR’s and Portable media players free us from the linear consumption of media we are no longer shackled by the bounds of ‘what’s on now’. We have become not only the kings of the realm of ‘anytime anyplace and on any device’ when it comes to consuming media .. We are also the ones that say : If its crap ? We’ll make our own.
Join us for episode 34 of the Knightcast. After a long hiatus where we took some time of for rest and relaxation (and to get married) we are back once again with an action packed show. In episode 34 : An interview with captain command line we have an in depth interview with Daniel Turner , a 16 year old Linux user extra-ordinaire. We talk about the social implications of a life in linux between peers and peers of Windows users, the open document format, the linux distribution of Daniels choice and more. With fantastic music from Delphinium Blue and some audio comments from the QCF, we top it of with his views on Vista and what the future will bring. Its full of laughs, fun and information packed. Your medicine on the edge of real and cyberspace : The Knightcast.
If I do have to point out what programs I use the most beside Firefox, its probably Skype. From what used to be a fancy Voice Over Ip novelty thing where you could talk instead of type it has evolved into a means of communication that has outgrown even my use of IM programs like MSN and all the others. By comparison : I use my cellphone for about 20 minutes a month , while my average Skype time can count up to more then 1 or even two hours a day sometimes. To the amount that what used to be a busy MSN list and an occasional Skype contact fluttering by, is now more of the opposite. The great thing is that its becoming more and more popular around the world. Not only is the amount of users steadily increasing, the third party technology is finally rising above proto-techno level and is starting to make some seriously interesting stuff.
The Headsets.
First off (of course) there where the headsets. Since the coming of Skype the most exotic headsets in all sizes and degrees of quality have popped up on the market. From the flimsy to the “Nasa mission control” style headsets have been used with Skype with various degrees of succes.Later came the handsets. Nothing more than a headset with a mike and line plug to jack into your sound-card. The only difference was that it looked like the handset of a phone. Slightly more inconvenient then a headset I personally think , but useful none the less.More advanced models used USB and the functionality of acting as an external soundcard to give more buzz to the horn. You could now dial numbers on the horn instead of using your keyboard. Since you where only 3 feet away from your keyboard anyway (the cable is just that short) there is no use in that whatsoever.So bring on the external DECT phone.
The Handsets.
Using a wireless handset and a USB Dongle connected to your pc , you could now roam the house when calling on skype. Pretty cool and dandy. You could even call people on your skype list and use some models in combination with a classic landline resulting in a hybrid voip/classic phone. Only bummer ? Your Skype had to be running on your pc. It was getting better .. but not yet. So what do we realy need : Well , a kind of phone like the one mentioned above .. But without the pc . How about a phone that has Skype running inside it. Embedded so to speak. And wouldn’t it be great if that phone would use a standard wireless ethernet connection as the link? No extra devices needed ?
In-bed with Skype.
Enter the embedded skype phone. First time is was rumored was quite some time ago. Netgear was supposed to be working on their model with the program embedded and using Wifi as means of connection. But at a proposed price of 250 Euro”s it did weigh in quite heavy on the wallet. Time to call our next competitor. That one came in the form and shape of the new BELKIN skype phone . Clearly looking a tidbit more snappy then its competitor the Belkin model actually looks like a real phone. (something of a love-child between a Ericsson 610 and a bar of shoe-polish) but nice in both the functionality department (equipped with bluetooth and actively on the lookout for free wifi everywhere) and the price (at some 170 dollars US) For the moment its only available in the US but we will keep you posted when we get our hands on one. What it boils down to is that WIFI is a serious competitor for classic cellphone carrier signals, GPRS and UMTS when you start having devices like this. Possibly the greatest intrusion on the market of the classic cellphone industry can be made with devices like these. Slowly but surely the age of the pay-per-second phone billing industry is coming to an and and the landline dinosaurs have outlived the flintstone age.
The future.
But what would be even cooler ? How about an embedded camera in that phone. Now THAT would be awesome. Being able to call hands free, perch the phone on the table and there you go. But besides from a combination of existing technology into a new product this would also require a change of mentality. The age of email made way for the age of chat. The age of chat has made way for the age of talk and the age of talk will make way for the age of image. The mental upgrade you have to make is using video at any given moment as an enhancement of the communication. Either people webcam with far away family relatives or they are teenagers that are trying to undress their female peers in a futile attempt for kicks. The trick is : Tune it into your way of life. Like me and my buddy Dave for example. We just fire up the webcam as I'm cooking dinner. It might be fun at first to have somebody at the other side of the globe yell at you because your spuds are boiling over. Another cool thing to do (certainly with the built in isight) is to give your buddy a tour around the house. Like with all new technology , at first its a novelty , just playing with it long enough so it becomes natural is the trick.
Oh Right. Sometimes I think I should have become an inventor. That would have been something right up my alley. Sitting there with my think cap on, scribbling mathematical formulas on endless sheets of paper. Fretting around my Frankenstein-esque laboratory and suddenly screaming “ EUREKA “ whilst constructing some immensely complex machine. The trouble is : I’m horrible at math, even worse at constructing anything with my hands and don’t have a think cap. But I do think outside the box a lot. From time to time I come up with a question of something I want done or something I need that requires fairly recent technology. Its not that I want a food replicator, a Hyperdrive or a Colonial starfighter for my collection. Sometimes I am fretting over an problem and conclude that the solution of the problem must lie in the combination of using technology X , software Y and method Z. When I can’t do it mysellf I step up to the guyz who know about X Y and Z and propose them my solution, naively assuming that they can give me the glue to stick X Y and Z together. And then I get this blank stare. Not this look that they want to put me into a looney bin, no this look like ... “ Oh My God .. thats a brilliant Idea , better not let him know “. Erm .. they mumbel , as I see the faint glow of an idea flaring up in the back of their heads .. “ That doesn’t exist yet “ they mumble. The undertone of their voice betraying that I have just made some kind of startling discovery. “ But thats not a bad idea”
Get is often.
And I get this often. Its not that i’m asking science fiction style solutions, but that in my mind I paste technologies, methods and a lot of “outside the box” thinking together to come up with the solution of a problem that I have. I don’t have the expertise of knowing HOW to glue it all together , but I just know it will work if I combine X Y and Z. So has a great inventor been lost ? I don’t think so. I’m sure that somewhere out there there are people who thought of what little old me has thought of . But the problem with the experts is : they know their field of work very deeply. I have a broader technological knowledge ( not as deep but a little wider) so I start to fish from a bigger , but more shallow pond. Thats how I come up with these crazy “all over the board” style solutions. And I don”t need a million for my bright idea, If i would get a penny for every raised eyebrow that I have conjured up on the face of the experts .. I would be rich already. So maybe i’m a genius, or maybe i’m insane. ... I’m just hoping for a little bit of both.
Home 
Its been here for over a year now, and when you measure its uptime against the rest of the systems I have , one would think its a lampshade or some fancy ornament for the living room. Yet .. its a computer none the less. Its poor and meager 350 MHz power-processor is four times slower then even the lightest computer around here .. but still this old geezer has not been sent to oblivion as most of its peers have been. So what in hells name propels me to keep this little bugger ? It doesn’t really DO anything, If it did , it would be SLOW at it .. and it isn’t even modern anymore. So why is it still here ?
Direct link to the show:
In the beginning there was crap. 
Enter the embedded skype phone. First time is was rumored was quite some time ago. 
Oh Right.