jules.ca

telecom, technology and the occasional floobergeist

I’ve got an abundance of bits and pieces of canadian telecom and internet experience, and I am thrilled to be in a place in time when all is changing, technology is developing, and the status quo is being disrupted. 

Floobergeist is a word that is beginning to defy definition.  The more I roll that smooth pebble around, the more it becomes to mean. Floobergeist started out as the magic dust that turns dreams into ideas.  And then it began to encompass the zing that happens when you have conversations about those ideas. And now, it’s the whole evolution from dream to conversation, with each step improving the later and the former along the way.

Everyone aspires to good conversations. They can lead you to adventures you’ve never imagined, and to people you can twig with.

Let’s have a good conversation…

welcome.

A Roundup of Neat Technical Discoveries

January 04, 2008  /  jules kivell

So - it’s the last official day of vacation for me, and I think I’ve soaked up as much napping and reading and playing as a body officially should. :-)I’ve discovered a few nifty things this week, while playing with some of the new toys: The LL.Bean WeatherfinderThis little beauty is amazing. One neat point of note - it’s designed to synchronize it’s clock automatically with a clock signal. Wait for it…. the clock signal is a WWVB-60 signal - and if you are within 200 miles of the clock with the signal - it’s in Fort Collins Colorado, this feature will work. I giggled, thinking that Toronto, Ontario is much farther than 200 miles from anywhere in Colorado, and manually set the clock. The documentation suggests that it could take anywhere from 12 hours to 5 days for the Weatherfinder to find the signal from Fort Collins. Imagine my surprise - today the little devil found it. Turns out, it’s only 1520 miles to Fort Collins….Amazing!!!

 

The next amazing tidbit: Using Your Wii to wirelessly stream music from your PC. That’s right. What *can’t* that Wii do?In buying Winamp Pro, I realized it came with Winamp Remote, an outstanding little application that lets you stream music from your PC to anywhere in the world, including to your Wii!! This comes in handy when a significant other has just upgraded the TV sound system, and you want to impress them with quality audio playing ;-)The only thing you need to do is purchase the Internet Channel on your Wii - likely a worthy purchase for 500 Wii Points. Using the Opera Browser, you log into Winamp Remote, and voila, you can see your entire audio connection. You could even stream movies! :-) Right now, I’m sitting in my little library, but I can see all the music on my home laptop. This is going to completely fill the gap that Pandora left behind. :-)

 

 

The last bit of interest: I just finished reading *The World Without Us* by Alan Weisman. One of the amazing pieces in this book discusses information that was sent in a *time capsule* into outerspace with Voyager. Carl Sagan and Jon Lomberg put together images and music in hopes that interstellar intelligence would be suitably impressed enough to not blast us into another dimension.  You can listen to the complete 26 song recording that was shot into outerspace, on a golden record no less. You can also do a bit of reading on what was sent into space.Happy Weekend!

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