Cory Shaw

Stream Di.fm Premium on your iPhone 3G

Published June 16th, 2009 in Audio and Awesome fun stuff on the internet. 0 Comments

This has got to be one of the top 5 coolest things you can do with an iPhone 3G. I recently payed for a year subscription to di.fm premium radio. This gets you like 30 channels of electronica, and another 30 channels of rock/reggae/everything else…all commercial free and CD quality. This is great on the computer, but I immediately wanted it on my iPhone so I could stream it in the car or through headphones on the go.

After some tinkering I figured it out, so I made this video to show how its done.

Honolulu Harbor Sunset

Published April 20th, 2009 in Photos. 0 Comments

Beautiful sunset in Honolulu Harbor the other day as I was leaving work. Lukly I had my camera on me. Not quite the perfect palm tree setting, but hey all that stuff that’s shipped to the island has to arrive somewhere right?

Taming your laptop’s fan while recording audio

Published April 20th, 2009 in Audio. 0 Comments

Every time I’m recording audio on my laptop through a mic, the fans kick in and sound like an F-16 taking off in the background. This is unacceptable for a quality recording so I started looking around for a quick remidy. Throwing the laptop on a baking tray full of ice seemed to really help.

Green Switzerland

Published February 13th, 2009 in daily life. 2 Comments

Switzerland has enlightened me. The Swiss really have their green thing going on, and there’s a few things that have me scratching my head thinking “why the hell doesn’t the US adopt this stuff?” Are we too proud to admit that another country has done something better? It’s time to swallow our pride and adopt a few of these things that the Swiss do so well:

Toilets that have two flush buttons
One small button for #1 that emits just enough water to flush’er down, another larger button that takes the kids to the water park. I can only imagine how much water this saves throughout the country!
Escalators that only run when there’s people on them
At first i thought they were broken, but as you approach them they turn on automatically. Makes sense.
Fixed temperature water faucets
These water faucets let you fix the temperature so that its always the same when you turn it on by pulling the lever out. Brilliant.
Green Transportation
The swiss railway system can take you pretty much anywhere you need to go, and once you get there you’ll see lots of energy efficient small cars, electric buses, and lots of people walking to their destination.
Organic (”Bio”) locally produced foods
Most of the produce in the stores is organic. When something is not local, they tell you where it came from.
No plastic or paper bags in grocery stores
Everyone brings their own reusable bags. You don’t even have the option for paper or plastic. This should be a law in the U.S.

With the U.S. consuming 25% of the worlds energy, and being the world’s largest single emitter of carbon dioxide, you’d think we’d be looking into what other countries are doing right to consume so little.

Avocado Burrito Recipe

Published January 4th, 2009 in Health and Recipes. 0 Comments

Ok it’s about time I did a youtube video, and I’ve been wanting to take new Flip video camera that my wife got for Xmas (thanks Dad!) for a test drive. You’ll have to forgive the amateur quality of this video, this was my first iMove experience, and I think from now on I’ll use Screenflow.

This recipe basically contains the same ingredients you’d use to make guacamole. Its just in solid burrito form

How to watch commercial-free HDTV on Demand without cable

Published November 7th, 2008 in Awesome fun stuff on the internet and daily life. 11 Comments

I have recently found a zen with my digital media setup, and would like to share this knowledge with you. The way it works is that I get notified when there are new episodes of my favorite shows available for download (sometimes before it is shown on the networks!). I then download them in HD via bit torrent during the day, and watch it on my HDTV at night.

What you will need:

Media box (like apple TV or Popcorn Hour)
A networked hard drive (could be your computer)
Bit Torrent
TVrss.net
A feed reader like Google Reader
TV (preferably HDTV)

A little background

About a year ago when I moved to Hawaii, I decided to leave the TV behind. I soon started missing some of my favorite shows like south park, and resorted to watching it on sites like South Park Zone, which has crappy video quality, and full of annoying ads (the kind of ads that force you to click them to make them stop the obnoxious blinking). This got old fast; my laptop screen is pretty small, the speakers suck, and its just not as easy as using a remote on a TV.

As a wedding present my grandfather got my wife and I an awesome flat-panel HDTV. Instead of going out and subscribing to the local HTDV cable service, I decided to explore the digital hard drive media streamers that were starting to surface on the market.

popcorn hour

The Media Box

These “media boxes” serve as the liaison between your TV and the movies/shows that are located on your local network…allowing you to control the media on your TV with a remote control, just as if it were on a TiVo or DVR.

Though the Apple TV was a decent choice (and can be hacked), it doesn’t play a lot of the formats that you’ll find from using bit torrent (hence, “commercial-free”), and is more expensive than the completely open standards box, “Popcorn Hour“. This thing will play anything you can throw at it, supports HD, and even surround sound.

The networked hard drive

I needed a new wireless router, so I naturally gravitated to the Apple Time Capsule, which killed two birds (a fast new router, and a built in 500gb wireless hard drive). I connect the time capsule’s hard drive to the popcorn hour media box, which streams the shows on the hard drive to my TV via remote control.

Bit Torrent

Now that I had the TV, the media box, and the hard drive, it was all about getting the media to play on it. This is where bit torrent comes in. One of the most popular mediums on bit torrent right now are TV shows. The day a show comes out on the networks, it is usually rampant on bit torrent, with thousands of seeders. This allows you to download a 300mb TV show in a matter of minutes. For example, check out this list of torrents for the popular show Entourage.

These are sorted by number of seeders, and notice how it happens to be pretty much chronological order with the most recent show first (S05E06 = season 5 episode 6).

Let the shows come to you with RSS

I quickly got tired of hunting down my favorite shows, and so did the creator of TVrss.net. On this site, you can narrow down torrents by TV show, and subscribe to the results, which will notify you the second a new show is available for download via bit torrent. Then all you have to do is click a link to start the download. Just look at this list of TV shows available on bit torrent.

Lets take the show Entourage for example. On TVrss.net, I can filter down the torrents to show only 720p HDTV versions of Entourage:

Now, all you have to do is subscribe to the RSS feed for that search, and you’ll be notified in your RSS reader when there are new episodes available in 720p HDTV format. Repeat this for all of your favorite shows, and you’re now rocking out on demand commercial-free HDTV.

Random Thoughts

Published August 26th, 2008 in daily life. 0 Comments

New solutions create new problems. Are the new problems worth the solution?

Be productive while transending to the atmosphere of your choice

Published August 21st, 2008 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment

Lately I’ve noticed that my productivity goes down when i listen to music while I work. The music tends to distract me. I’ll listen to the lyrics, enjoy the pounding bass, nod my head, and jiggle my hips while I rock out to whatever iTunes decides to randomly play from my music library. Its a major distraction for me.

Problem is that when I’m not listening to music, I can get distracted by what is going on around me. ADD? Yes! Ritalin? No!

I’ve found the best solution to this problem in an iPhone app called Ambiance. For just $0.99, you can transcend yourself to a grassy knoll overlooking a river flowing through a valley of chirping birds, travel throughout Europe on a train, or work from home in your Hawaiian tin roof shack during a tropical rain storm (OK so i can really do that last one).

I’ve noticed my productivity skyrocket while using this app, because it not only drowns out external distractions, but it puts me in a great mood for working hard.

This is probably the only iPhone app worth more than it costs. Best $1 I’ve ever spent!

Cashflow

Published January 24th, 2008 in daily life. 1 Comment

I recently read the book Rich Dad / Poor Dad which was a really enlightening book. Its the unique viewpoint of a person who was raised by 2 main mentors in life. One of them was his real dad…the poor one who was all about getting the good education and good job and working hard to pay the bills. The other dad was his good friend’s dad, who was a real estate entrepreneur…teaching lessons of finance and investing. He ends up listening to his rich dad’s advise more than his real dad’s, and wrights a book on the two very different viewpoints.

One of the things mentioned in this book is a game that rich dad developed to help teach people and children these lessons of finance an investing that are not taught in schools. The game is called Cashflow 101. I caught wind that there was a “Cashflow” event going on at Dave & Busters so I decided to check it out and play the game.

Cashflow can be thought of as a more modern and realistic version Monopoly. First you choose a balance sheet which determines your occupation, your income, and your fixed expenses. The game is laid out in two parts: The rat race and the fast track. You also choose one of the many “dreams” on the fast track. Starting out in the rat race, you roll the dice landing on payday squares, opportunity squares, market squares, and doodad squares…and go round and round collecting money, having kids, paying for doodads, and investing in opportunities.

You get out of the rat race by creating a passive income that exceeds your expenses.

Once your in the fast track you focus on growing your estate by buying/selling businesses and real estate. You win by buying your dream that you choose at the beginning of the game, or increasing your passive income to more than 50k per month.

Just playing a rushed version of the game that we never finished was extremely enlightening. There were several moments where things just clicked for me. The game is brilliant and I cant wait to play it again…and also in real life!

Goodbye Jeep

Published January 22nd, 2008 in daily life. 0 Comments

Today I sold the beloved Jeep. It was not practical for our needs and we hardly drove it anymore since we got the CRV and take the bus most places. It was a damn fun Jeep though and the ultimate island explorer. It will be missed.