Google released thier new instant messaging service today (actually I started using it last night). So now I have one more IM account that I can ignore. I already have Adium running on my Mac, logged into my MSN, Yahoo and AIM accounts. Now I've added Google's Jabber-based service and I can start ignoring it just like I do the others. Any of the people I know who will get GTalk accounts probably already have MSN and AIM accounts. I've looked over the features Google is offering and I don't see anything to write home about. You can do voice chat. Yawn. The other players have had this for ages and none of them, including Google, can hold a candle to Skype. For instance, Google Talk doesn't seem to support conference calls. The Google Talk client is available for Windows only (just like Google Earth and Google Desktop). You can sign in with any Jabber-ready client, but I don't think that gives you the voice-chat feature. Wake me up if you find some interesting features.

New Honda ad - This Advertisement for the new Honda Accord was shot in real time with no CGI involved in the sequence. It required 606 takes and cost $6 million to shoot and took
3 months to complete.

Wow. Very impressive ad.

(via Digg.com)

Matt sent me a link to this: DTV: Internet TV, so I downloaded it and gave it a try. I think it's really promising. We've known for a while that BitTorrent and RSS can make a good way to distribute large files, but this open-source project has wrapped it all up in a nice, pretty package, so that the John Q. End-User can download the app, browse the channel guide, subscribe to a show and watch it without knowing anything about BT clients, seeding, trackers, etc. It's even got a built in media player. It's in beta for the Mac only now, but there's a Windows version coming soon.

What's more, you can install their web app called Broadcast Machine and it will help you publish your videos and enter them in the channel guide. It even provides a BitTorrent tracker and server seeding.

This will be great for indy video producers and video bloggers. I subscribed to Diggnation and watched an episode over lunch today. But I assume it could also be used for slightly more nefarious purposes. There are already people that copy TV shows into digital formats and publish them via BitTorrent. Now if someone creates an RSS feed that points to all the torrent files for that show, then you could subscribe to it in DTV and the new episodes would appear in your playlist, as if you had a TiVo on your computer.

Cable and satellite customers have been clamoring for a la carte channels for years. This would let you actually get shows a la carte. It really would be like TiVo, except without live TV. If I were a network exec, I would come to terms with the fact that there's not really any way to stop this. The pieces have been coming together for a few years, and a project like DTV is all that's been missing. I would take some initiate and start releasing shows (with commercials) online in this format. Your customer is basically offering to distribute the content for free. Sure, someone could make a rogue feed that has your file that has been stripped of ads. As the networks move more toward product placement, that will become a moot point.

At any rate, this will be a project to watch.

There's a new hybrid car that goes zero to sixty in around four seconds and can get 50 mpg. And it looks totally sweet and awesome. The most amazing thing about the Hybrid Attack, however, is that it was designed and built by a small group of high school students. Still think the big automakers are trying their hardest to reduce our dependency on oil?

(via Digg.com)

This is fun. Gvisit.com has a free service where you put a snippet of code in your web page and every hit to your site is logged on their server and plotted on a map. Before you get all Privacy Advocate on them, know that they're using information that is already public. Your IP address (which you give to every web page you connect to already) can be used to find out, roughly, where you are. Brendon explained to me that the airport code for the nearest major city can be taken from your IP, or something. Anyway, I added the code to my site and now you can see a map of who has been reading it.

(via Digg.com)

I'm cleaning up a computer for someone and this is what Adaware found. The most critical objects I had ever seen it find was around 800. Sixty-seven thousand, seven-hundred and four! Granted, most of thost are registry values that probably came from the the same piece of malware, but dang! 67,704! Notice that there weren't any processes or modules. That's because I was running in safe mode. So, once I boot it back into regular mode, I'll probably find some more crap. This computer has 256 MB of memory and when I got it was basically at a standstill. It took 5 minutes to open a program. Don't let this happen to you. Get Firefox. Better yet, get a Mac.

Now that it's been announced at b2evolution.net, I'll mention it here, too: The Brendoman.com webspace is now hosting plugins.b2evolution.net. The developers wanted to start some new subsites and have them maintained by community members. I volunteered to host the plugin repository and they took me up on the offer. Steven Cherry is helping me maintain the site. We've only got a few plugins and hacks listed so far, but I know there are more to find in the forums, and there should be a lot more created once the brand new version of b2evolution comes out within the next month. It's going to be much more extensible.

We did upgrade our web space to make sure we have plenty of space for our every-growing family of sites. Brendoman.com is an ad-free site and I hope to keep the plugin site ad-free as well. If you want to contribute to our web-hosting fund, then click on the Paypal link at Brendoman.com.

Etch-A-Sketch Technical Support

The new evoskin that I mentioned earlier has been published to the b2evolution.net skin repository. You can take a look here or download here.

Early screenshots of Starcraft - If you're a Starcraft fan like I am, then you may enjoy looking through these screenshots and descriptions from alpha and beta versions of Starcraft.

(via Digg.com)