I was asked by my fine friends at digg to shoot this wee little project for them. It’s in response to a lip dub that Revision3 had brought. Yeah, the lip dub meme is a bit old in Internet time, but it’s a great team building exercise and shows what you can do when you get a bunch of silly people in room together. Mark Trammell masterminded and organized the thing, and most all of the digg staff participated. This was easily one of the more fun video projects I’ve done in awhile.
The news that Bebo has acquired AOL for $850 million is amazing news! Smaller, newer and more nimble companies acquiring old slow dinosaurs is really the only way to go. Just think how less evil Microsoft would be if Netscape acquired it? I predict Digg buys out the NY Times in the next year. Congrats to Bebo’s founders, Michael and Xochi Birch, a couple of very cool cats who followed their passion to their inevitable conclusion. One of the last LunchMeet shows I did while at PodTech was with Michael and Xochi.
Irina and I went down and covered the Anonymous protests of Scientology in San Francisco. This was only one of dozens or hundreds held simultaneously around the world on Feb. 10th. Not much mainstream media coverage which is fine because our coverage rules, obviously.
I’m glad I popped by Mighty the other night for the MICROMUSICSF chiptunes party. Seriously, what a treat for the ears of this 80’s video game geek! Chiptune is music created from sound chips found in vintage video game consoles (Nintendo NES, Gameboy), computers (Atari 400/800, C64) and consumer electronics. Chiptune artists modify these devices to create their own music synthesized from these chips. A sampling of these artists who played the party are TRASH80, NULLSLEEP and STARPAUSE. Micromusic.net is also a great resource for chiptune music, videos and events.
There’s a full length documentary on the chiptunes scene called BLIP FESTIVAL: REFORMAT THE PLANET, it’s premering at SXSW this year. You know where I’ll be. Here’s the trailer:
Commodore ruled my world when I was snot nosed little dork with no life. At age 12, I got a Commodore VIC-20 for Christmas, my first home computer. With the awesome storage capacity of the datasette tape drive, I was in geek heaven. With 5k of RAM and 22 columns of text on a noisy RF connection to a crappy NTSC TV I headed down the road of geek curiosity. I remembered a couple amazing things about the VIC. One was writing and running a BBS using the 1200 VICModem. There was no auto-answer with this thing, I had to manually move the cord from the handset to the modem when the phone rang. The BBS was called Hacker’s Hideout and I programmed it using the VIC’s awesome built-in BASIC. I can’t remember what features I had or whether I had warez to trade. This was early XMODEM days, if I did, it probably took a year to download anything. My buddy Justin recalls transferring files over without CRC checks, though I’m thinking this was during our later C64 days. The other thing I remember programming on the VIC-20 was an animated intro sequence of Monty Python’s Flying Circus all in Commodore PETSCII. If I can ever pull that off tape, I will.
This brings me to next Christmas when I got the Commodore 1541 floppy disk drive. This thing was bigger, heavier, ran hotter and was just as expensive as the C64 at the time, if I recall correctly. But it ruled! I was now in the world of random access storage and what massive storage it was at 170k! I soon learned the trick of cutting a notch in the floppy and flipping it over giving me twice the capacity! Only thing is there wasn’t a lot of storage needs with the VIC, so as it turned out, my pal Justin got a Commodore 64 that same Christmas. We immediately combined forces and embarked on the path of MWA (massive warez acquisition).
The 64 was an order of magnitude better than the VIC-20. It had a whopping 64k of RAM, 40 columns of text, 16 colors, hardware sprites and the seriously awesome MOS 6581 SID sound chip. SID stood for Sound Interface Device which was quite an understatement. It used the MOS 6510 processor, a close relative to the popular MOS 6502 used in the VIC-20. The Apple I and II as well as Atari 400 and 800 computers also used the 6502 chip. Though it was Commodore that really made the 6510 shine in with the 64.
Back to MWA. With the firepower of the C64, the 1541 drive and a newly acquired 1200 baud auto-dial/auto-answer modem, we were set on our path to never leaving the house. Bulletin boards were popping up everywhere and they usually catered to the type of computer you had. So we called the Commodore ones and soon found we could download all kinds games and utilities. Transfer protocols were primitive at the time and I remember often having to try multiple times to get a file to download successfully. When we did, it was like winning the lottery. The excitement of getting a new game to run after spending hours or days downloading it was like shooting a load. Yes, it would be many years before girls would even look at us.
So fast forward 25 years to today and I find myself looking back on all this with a bit of nostalgia and dork glee. The Commodore 64 is 25 years old now and its birthday was recently celebrated at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Since I live in nearby San Francisco, it was a no brainer to go to the festivities. Commodore’s 80 year old bulldog founder and former CEO Jack Tramiel was there. So was Woz, who created the Apple I and II and co-founded Apple, and this guy Bill Lowe who apparently is known as the “father of the IBM PC”. I produce an online show called Geek Entertainment TV and this of course was a geek goldmine. I grabbed my friend Violet and we went down to Mountain View to capture the action. This video is the result. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed not having a life for the past 25 years. Damn you Tramiel! Merry Christmas. 🙂
I’m making the rounds on the Sunday morning talk shows on the tubes. Well, ok, just one show, and it was Wednesday last week on Cranky Geeks, John Dvorak’s weekly talking head geek show thing. I guested with Keith Teare, CEO of Edgeio, which does something with distributed classified ads. Josh Wolf was also a guest recently on a show dedicated to the subject of citizen journalism. Definitely recommend that one.
My insanely energetic friend Irene McGee shot a pilot episode of Microsoft’s On10 show at my place some weeks back. She brought her pal Jimmy Wales over to talk about Stephen Colbert, Wikipedia, video gaming and Wikia. What you won’t see is Irene kicking Jimmy’s ass in boxing on the Wii. For some reason, Microsoft didn’t seem to want the Wii mentioned in the piece. Hmm, I wonder why?
That is the question I asked a cross-section of freaks at the Laughing Squid Paradise Lost party. Knowing Scott Beale and the communities that he has tracked over the past 10 years, I thought it’d be fun to find out how people first crossed paths with the entity known as Laughing Squid. Some people first knew of the Squid from what was originally called the Alpha Squids mailing list, some people know it as the generous web host, some from Burning Man, others from Scott’s event photography and even some newbies only from recent parties. The answers are as varied as the people brave enough to offer them up.
Some bad news today in the fight to save Internet radio. Turns out the courts denied the stay of the royalty rate increases set by the Copyright Royalty Board. If this stands, all Internet radio stations will be out of business as of this Sunday, July 15th. Read Rusty’s analysis of the situation and then PLEASE CALL YOUR CONGRESSMAN TODAY! SERIOUSLY! This is huge and grassroots action is critical to get Congress to act.
