There’s nary a video in sight, and — at the risking of sounding like a complete fool given its huge acquisition price — I find Mint’s 20+ pages outlining its feature set and why people should use the service to be positively daunting. Twitter’s page doesn’t include a video (though I think it badly needs one). And Facebook just says that it’s a service that “helps you connect and share with the people in your life”, which would set my bullshit meter off the charts if it appeared in any startup pitch.
Samen zijn we niet meer dan twee eigenwijze mannen met een opgeladen 06. We willen niet het grootste bedrijf van de wereld worden. We zijn gespecialiseerd in het maken van mooie producties met een intelligente toon. Dat doen we met de beste crew van Nederland
I have a mediacenter with the brilliant EyeTV sitting in the center which accumulates a lot of video. We are also collecting quite a lot of HD video material shot with our Sony HD camera. At this moment, all the content is stored at the hard disk of my iMac and space is running out. So, I thought it was time to start looking for a centralized solution for storing and sharing the multi-media content in our house.
My wish list:
Sharing of music, video and photo across devices simultaneously
Possibility to backup both Mac and Windows systems automatically
Possibility to add more hard disk memory later in the future
I was thinking about an Apple Time Capsule or another dedicated NAS system. The Time Capsule is basically a wireless router and hard disk combined in one box. The great thing about it is the ease of use and the possibility to make backups of your laptop and other machines attached to the network using Apple’s Time Machine backup system. The drawbacks are that you cannot change the hard disk setup yourself so you’re limited to the 1 or 2 TB version you buy. And that content is piling up in the meantime… Furthermore, it doesn’t work as an iTunes server, which means you cannot play music on different devices simultaneously. And this is what killed this option for me. I want to be able to attach a SONOS system to my collection of music in the near future.
After doing some research I decided to go for a Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ 4TB (thanks @owisscha!) This machine does all the stuff I want to as described above. It also works with Mac and Windows based computers at the same time. And, very nice, it is also Time Machine compatible.
One thing it led to is the need for a new wireless router. Currently I have a 5-year old Linksys WRT54G running the old 802.11g standard. I recently noticed that it choked now and then when used heavily by multiple clients. The newest routers pack the new 802.11n standard which is way faster. This comes in handy when transmitting HD video, for example. What to look for in a wireless router? Check out this article. Basically what I need is 802.11n, simultaneous dual-band, and ample 1GB ethernet ports for the different devices (modem, NAS, VOIP phone, PC and a future game machine). I went for the D-Link DIR-825.
Looking forward to the delivery of the goodies and will let you know how it works out.
Another friend of mine, the film director, David Mackenzie once quipped, “A film is only as good as the reasons for making it”. What is true for Hollywood, is also true for products and businesses. It’s not what you make, it’s what you believe in. That is what people respond to. That is where your enterprise lives or dies.
Found this video through a link to an article placed in my Gmail next to a Steely Dan newsletter I was reading this morning. Features former Dan guitarist Wayne Krantz in a documentary on French national television where he explains that in order to sound like himself he had to let go of everything he loved so much. Beautifully said. And watch drummer Keith Carlock as well, this guy rocks big time.
To start off with the conclusion: I’m back. What? Yes, I’m back. So, you wrote this longish post to convince me that Tumblr rocks etc. and now you’re quitting it in favour of WordPress? Yes.
Why? To make a long answer short, a lot of people get scared of the idea but I actually want my history to follow me. And I couldn’t fight all the Google juice my blog at WordPress has built up over the last 5 years. Google juice? Yes, the number of links from other highly influential sites to my blog causing my WordPress blog to show up high in the Google results. Something my Tumblr blog is lacking and would take a long time to built up. Quite elementary but something I overlooked when making the switch to Tumblr. My WordPress blog will live under www.ronaldcarpentier.com in a few days.
So although I really, really love Tumblr I’m killing it as soon as I find a way to import the content into WordPress – ideas anyone? this one isn’t working. The one thing I am going to miss most is the Disqus commenting system. Awesome tool.
I started blogging on a corporate blog mid 2004 when I was still at Lost Boys. We used Blogger so when I started my personal blog a few months later I chose Blogger again. I think it was around 2006 when I moved to WordPress because Blogger was not innovating it’s product anymore and WordPress really impressed me with the functionalities and ease of use. And they still do until this very day.
But yet…. I seem to view this blog and the tool used to make it – the WordPress environment – as an environment that is perfectly suited for creating long-form text-based posts. Fact is that I don’t seem to be able to find the time to create long posts on a frequent basis anymore. And that results in “a World According to Carp” that is rather dead. And it sure isn’t!
I still have ideas and stuff I like to share but I seem to have moved on to other places and tools on the Web. I am a moderate user of Twitter, photoblog using Flickr etc. but looking back the real World According to Carp has moved to Tumblr.
I already wrote about it in December 2007, and what I really like about it is the simplicity of the tool, for example the browser bookmarklet in FireFox which I often use to select text quotes that are instantly posted to my Tumblog. It supports multiple forms of content – you can post audio, video, text etc. very easily. It is also a tool which I can use in different contexts, for example on my iPhone with an app that rocks and that lets me post anything from my phone to my blog. Just last week a Tumblr app was released for Boxee which enables me to watch photo’s and listen to music from the people I follow on Tumblr. Which brings me to the last point why I love Tumblr. The community of people within Tumblr that I can follow within the Tumblr editor is awesome.
In the line of something Clay Shirky said, Tumblr lowered the costs and difficulty of publishing big time. Just look at the frequency of my posts at Tumblr compared to the frequency of posts at my WordPress blog and notice the effects it has had on me. Therefore, it is time to move the World According to Carp over to Tumblr. You can expect a lot of short-form posts, ideas, snippets and the occasional longer post like I did at WordPress. As soon as Tumblr adds the functionality to import content from other blogs I will do so and delete this blog.
I will still use WordPress for our RealMee company blog in Dutch and English – and wish the WordPress team all the best in bringing their amazing platform forward.
One final remark. The most fun part of having a blog like this are your comments. If you enjoyed reading and commenting on it as well and are using a feed reader you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed over here. I will add a commenting system to my Tumblog during the coming days.
Something I have been thinking about for quite a while now popped up again in a 12 minute interview over at Harvard Business Review with one of my favourite thinkers, Umair Haque. In the interview he talks about the Zombieconomy which is a term he coined for the economic situation we are in at the moment. He thinks the current economic crisis is for a large part the result of our inability to create sustainable value because we are focused too much on exploiting one fundamental innovation for a large period of time. This inablity is largely due to failing leadership which should push the boundaries on what is possible by asking the right questions. In his view, some examples of companies who are able to push these boundaries are Apple, Google, Tata (the Indian middle class cars), and Threadless (community powered t-shirt production). It is our inability to ask these questions which has led to the current situation.
This remark made me think of something one of my other favourite thinkers – mathematician and physicist Robbert Dijkgraaf (Dutch only) – said on the string theory. Advance in the development of this theory is not reached by researchers giving the right answers but by people who are able to ask the right questions, i.e. to think of new realities.
Makes me think about my ability to push the boundaries: am I asking the right questions?
