I submitted my podcast to iTunes, but haven’t gotten confirmation back. Is there another way people can get it in iTunes?

Any show, audio or video, with an RSS feed can be manually added to iTunes. When I record a Dear Cali Show, I release them in the GeekBrief.TV feed, but I also post them on this site, so if you wanted to, you could use this method to subscribe only to the Dear Cali feed, which of course, would make me sad. ;-)

1) If the site publishes their RSS feed, copy the link and move on to Step 2. If the site doesn’t publish their RSS feed on the site, you can usually guess it if they’re using a CMS (Content Management System) like WordPress or Blogger.

For WordPress sites, just add a “/feed” (www.dearcali.com/feed). For Blogger sites, it’ll either look like this: http://pixeloo.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default or like this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/BloggerBuster

2) Once you have the feed copied, open iTunes. Click on the “Advanced” menu, then choose “Subscribe to Podcast…”

3) You’ll get a blank box. Paste the RSS feed in the box, then click on “OK”.

Let it download the first show, and enjoy!

@iphreak on Twitter asked “Have you written anything in Dear Cali about how Ustream works? I wanted to set up a streaming like you did recently.”

I’ll walk you through my Ustream setup, but first let’s look at the basics. Ustream is a live streaming service. Anyone with a webcam can sign up for a free account and “broadcast” live. You might want to do this to let your family share in how big your son is getting, or you might want to produce the best show on the planet and share it with the world. The possibilities are unlimited.

Once you sign up, connect your camera. You can use a webcam, or a camcorder that connects via Firewire or USB. Not all camcorders will function as a webcam, so you might need to do some testing on yours. Next, click on the orange “Broadcast Now” button. This will open a popout window.

Choose your camera from “Video Source”, then choose your audio from “Audio Source”. Click “Start Broadcast”, and you’re now live! You can “Start Recording” if you want to save the recording on the Ustream site.

So, that’s Ustream at its basic functionality. You can use apps like CamTwist to add visual effects. For Cali Live, our weekly live streaming show, we use Vidblaster Pro, and three cameras. Vidblaster allows you to do live camera switching, lower thirds and add in video and audio. It’s Windows only for now, so we use it on Vista.

A couple tips Once you go live, make sure you have the chatroom open so you can talk with your viewers. If you know ahead of time when you’re going to be live, you can schedule shows. That way, people know ahead of time to stop by!

Since the iPhone was released, people have asked for the ability to search their phone contacts. Contact Find does just that, and more. Instead of just searching for the name of the person you want to call, it allows you to also search the phone number, area code, email address, physical address, and any notes attached to the contact.

For me, the main value in this application is the ability to search notes and companies. When you need to contact someone at a particular company, but can’t recall their name, this allows you to find them quickly rather than scrolling through the address book.

What do you guys think? How will you use Search on your iPhone?

Cro-Mag Rally has been available on the App Store for a while. It’s been very popular, and it’s easy to see why. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a 3D racing game featuring cavemen. You can Race or you can Gather, but either way you’ve got to collect bones and other goodies. If you want a challenge, definitely pick this game up. It takes skill to do right. Even a slight movement to the left or right will send your character speeding that direction. With time, you’ll figure out how to move smoothly through the course and have the ability to pick up your bones.

Even if you don’t care about skill or a challenge, and just want the feeling of flying through the game at super fast speeds, this will do it! :)

Plus, it matches the Macs in my life! Supported Media cards include Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro, SD, xD and CF (CompactFlash).

Product Page via Gadget Lab

Is this a new MacBook Pro?

The gossip team at Valleywag found a picture on a French blog that might be a new MacBook Pro. I’m not one to embrace Apple rumors, but I’m interested in what you guys think of this photo. Rather than a track pad, it looks like there is an iPhone like multi-touch screen. Since that’s something I want Apple to do, I have my hopes up.

First question: Do you think this is real?

Second question: Do you see what I see? Is it a multi-touch screen instead of a track pad?

Before? I had the Red Scarlet on my shopping list for 2009. Today? I took the Red Scarlet off my list. Also today Red announced a change of plans. On a post at scarletuser.com, Jim said this:

“We have changed everything about Scarlet because the market has changed and we have discovered a lot of things in the process. We have a new vision.

Wipe you minds of the past announced Scarlet. Forget the design and forget the price. It is all different now. We think you will be surprised. Glad we didn’t take any deposits… ”

We may end up with a Scarlet in the long run, but that’s the nice thing about pro equipment. You can sell what you buy without very much of a loss.

Show Notes

IFA 2008 is taking place in Germany and Philips Electronics announced enough beautifully designed products to fill a weeks worth of briefs. I picked my top three favorites:

Cinema Ones an all-in-one home theater system that includes an upscalling DVD player, CD player, an iPod dock, a five channel amplifier, six speakers and a subwoofer.

The Phillips DVD Home Theater System provides 9.1 surround from four towers, a dedicated center speaker and a subwoofer.

The NP2900 Network Music Player streams music from a PC or Internet radio stations over your home’s wireless netork.

Sony’s DSC-T500 (I always like to imagine the DSC stands for Daily Source Code) Cyber-Shot point and shoots 720p video.

Amit Goffer, an Israeli engineer created ReWalk. ReWalk is a robotic exoskeleton that makes it possible for paraplegics to walk.

Finally! Details on the Nikon D90. Same D-Movie footage is here.

Microsoft releases IE8 Beta 2.

Ubiquity is my latest favorite Firefox plug-in.

The Space Cube is the worlds smallest PC.

MXW1 wireless earphones from Sennheiser offer uncompressed CD-quality audio using Kleer wireless audio technology.

The new logo is by Prescott Perez-Fox. More info coming soon.

UPDATE: David Pogue reviews the D90 here.

Shelfari is a social network and virtual bookshelf for book lovers. Josh and Shelfari announced today that the site was acquired by Amazon.com.

Canon announced several new cameras a two new all-in-one printers today.

InsideTrip.com is a travel site that finds flights based on price and then uses a slider to adjust the price based on flight quality preferences you might have.

Panasonic has three new Plasma displays with 1TB DVRs built in.

The Navigon 7200T is the next GPS system I want to try. It looks like it has some really nice graphics.

Robotic breakthroughs are entering our lives quickly in the form of useful by-products. As scientist work to build safe, humanoid robots, the technology they discover shows up in cameras, cars, video games and more.

The final Brief for Innovation Week is a couple days late because we did a little Chicken Fried Bacon thing with Kat from RealCookN.TV and it left us feeling a little ill. It tasted great, but two slices of deep-fried battered bacon isn’t all that different than eating 50 piece fried shrimp plate.

Brief 412 is about robotics starting with information from Intel about research they’re doing on catoms (claytronic atoms). Catoms will be programmable electronic atoms that will form electronic devices and rearranged themselves to form other electronic devices. A research group at Intel is supporting The Big Trip through PaidByPixels.com and we’ll get some access to some of their research. I’m hoping we’ll get to see what they’re looking at that indicates catom technology will be available in my lifetime.

iRobot is a leader in bringing practical robots to market for consumers and military applications. They’ve sold 2.5 million floor cleaning robots to early adopters like me. It isn’t a bad number, but it also doesn’t indicate mass appeal. The Christian Science Monitor just ran a piece about how different the persception robots is between American consumers and Japanese consumers. Americans are skeptical. Japanese are optimistic. Hopefully, exposing American kids to robotic toys like Pleo will start to change all that.

Roboticists like Aaron Edsinger is working on bring robots to market that don’t require a manual. Domo is a cute little guy that adapts to his environment and has the ability to put stuff on shelves.

Even though the thought of having robots actively involved in our daily lives seems far away, it’s actually happened already. Robotics research has lead to discoveries that are already being incorporated into consumer technology. Facial focus technology in consumer cameras came from robotics research. The same is try of all kinds of technologies being used in modern cars. C-3P0 and R2-D2 may be years away, but robots are already working to make our lives better today.

GBTV Innovation Week continues and Brief 411 is all about HID. Human Interface Design is all about improving how people interact with machines.

Mice and keyboards have been useful Human Interface Devices, but there seems to be a common longing for something more natural. When we saw Tom Cruise moving images around with gestures in the movie Minority Report, lots of us wanted to be able to do the same thing. At the TED conference in 2006, Jeff Han showed us we could. Multi-touch is now accessible in iPhones and kind of accessible, depending on where you live, in the Microsoft Surface.

We want electronic devices to understand speech. It’s a massive challenge and researchers have moved us a long way, but not nearly close enough. Dealing with speech recognition engines via customer service 800 numbers works a lot of the time, but it’s the frustrating times that stand out in my memory.

Air touch is my term for multi-touch-like navigation that uses cameras or sensors to monitor gestures rather than contact with a screen. HRP.com wowed us a while back with a Web site that uses a visitor’s Web cam for navigation. It isn’t perfect, but it’s a start.

Cam Trax Technologies is writing software to take advantage of Web cams for navigation in games and other applications.

The ultimate goal in Human Interface Design has to be brain control. We want to be able to think something and watch it happen on the screen. The first company that will bring a mass-market way to do it is Emotiv. Their Emotiv EPOC headset reads brain waves and translates them into action on a computer. The headset will sell for under $300.

When Apple released the iPhone, the praise was consistent and so was the criticism. The praise was about the revolutionary interface and the criticism was about the lack of 3G, GPS and Copy and Paste. Apple made 3G and GPS happen, but they said Copy and Paste isn’t a priority. The first place we saw copy and paste for iPhone was on an application called MagicPad. The guy behind that app, Juviwhale, met a college student, Zac White. Zac White figured out how to implement copy and paste on any iPhone App without violating the iPhone SDK agreement.

Zac started a non-profit, open-source community project called OpenClip. When a developer adds the OpenClip framework to an iPhone app, that app gains copy and paste functionality. On Brief 410, I demo copy and paste on the iPhone using un-released versions of Twittelator, WordPress and MagicPad.

Apple forbids applications from running in the background because it would take up too much of the iPhone’s resources. Also, developers are not allowed to create plug-ins that make their apps work with other apps on the iPhone. Zac White’s Open Clip framework uses a shared space on the iPhone. Any application that includes Open Clip can then access the common area and write to it, and read from it, thereby enabling copy and paste between participating apps.

The key to making OpenClip work is adoption. Zac’s framework is non-profit. It’s open-source, and his project makes the iPhone even more useful. I recorded an audio interview with Zac so if you want to listen, it’s here. In our audio conversation, Zac talked about the ideal implementation and problems to be solved. Developers who are interested in finding out more can find the video here.

Cali’s Shirt Courtesy of Brew City Online
Go there.

The Discovery Channel has Shark Week. GBTV has Innovation Week. I frequently get asked to explain more about what we mean when we talk about things like Augmented Reality (AR) and Human Interface Design (HID). On Brief 409, I cover Augmented Reality.

Augmented Reality is all about added a layer (or multiple layers) of real-time data on top of what’s happening all around us. You can look at a building or a car in front of you. With augmented reality, your phone (or another device) will have software that analyzes what you’re looking at and provide information about it. You’ll be able to look through your camera and learn everything you’d want to know about when a building was constructed, who designed it, what businesses are inside, etc.

Mac Funamizu is a designer who thinks about some of the ways devices will augment reality in the future.

Microvision is adding augmenting reality for drivers by displaying information on car windshields. They’re also working on Virtual Retinal Display technology that will project HD images and text onto the retina of a viewer’s eye.

The guy in the blooper section is John P., President and CEO of Woopra.com. He wanted to read the teleprompter.

NBC is failing to live up to the Olympic ideal. We want what we want, where we want it, when we want it. Old media seems to behanging on. They’re using technology to inch them forward, but it’s slow going.

The PhotoFast CR-9000 offers a work-around for getting a solid state drive for under $900.

Research is getting us closer to real live invisibility cloaks. Harry Potter may be a reality soon. Okay, I’m joking…but, seriously!

Here at GBTV HQ, we’ve been tracking the Alter Ego project. It’s technology that aims to provide incredibly lifelike facial expressions by placing a bunch of dots on an actor, and those dots are interpreted by cameras. Here are several clips of their latest work.

Cali’s Shirt Courtesy of RealcookN.TV
Go there.

A UK Web site called Mobilefun is selling an iPhone case with a solar panel built in. It also works with the iPod Touch.

I got a DearCali.com question about backing up Firefox bookmarks. We use a plug-in called Foxmarks that synchronizes bookmarks for any computer you add it to.

The Chaos Computer Club created a tool for reporters and athletes traveling to China. It’s a USB drive with applications that allow travelers to override Chinese blocks.

The CamBall is a video camera and recorder packed into a black plastic sphere about the size of a ping pong ball. I kind of want one, but they’re only available in Korea.

Cue the photo of the remote controlled cow.

This episode was produced and edited by Max Murphy from MacNewsWeekly.com. Max is on a 3000 mile road trip with his dad and brother. Our apartment marks the halfway point. They’re headed to New Orleans, Atlanta and then back to New York. You can follow Max on Twitter at Twitter.com/MacNewsWeekly

this is the second attempt of my vimeo tip embed

Shownotes go here with links to the stories we talked about.

Pandora has an AIR app that give you the option to see what’s playing, pause and radio station buttons.

Finally, Starbucks is offering free WiFi for two hours. I think it’s about time.

A new study tells us the PS3 and Plasma TVs use more power than a refrigerator over the course of a year.

Canned Bacon. Uh…okay.

Small Worlds is a new site in beta. What do you think?

I’m on the skeptical side of the Remote Control Finder.

Big Trip T-Shirts

Pandora has an AIR app that give you the option to see what’s playing, pause and radio station buttons.

Finally, Starbucks is offering free WiFi for two hours. I think it’s about time.

A new study tells us the PS3 and Plasma TVs use more power than a refrigerator over the course of a year.

Canned Bacon. Uh…okay.

Small Worlds is a new site in beta. What do you think?

I’m on the skeptical side of the Remote Control Finder.

Big Trip T-Shirts

We released our first GeekBrief.TV episode December 23rd. We didn’t know what we were doing and didn’t figure an audience would come along until we got all the bugs worked out. The audience came fast and we had to learn fast. We still have tons to learn, but that’s not what this is about.

The Brief exceeded its bandwidth and was shut down by our hosting company, so we appealed to PodShow for help. They came to our rescue and we were back up and running within about a week. We also had a Plan B. We purchased some inexpensive bandwidth that would have gotten us back up for a little longer without PodShow’s help. When PodShow stepped in, we still had all that extra bandwidth.

Brian Hardin who produces The Daily Audio Bible Podcast (believe it or not, it’s very cool) was running into some bandwidth struggles of his own. Instead of being shut down, he was being charged more. He was on his way to a monthly bill of about $1000, so we donated our Plan B bandwidth to his show.

Brian was interviewed for a story in The Tennessean about the whole Godcasting phenomenon. The story made the front page and Brian mentioned GeekBrief.TV. Here’s how the paper reported it…

“But, he said, as his site’s popularity has grown, so have its expenses — he has to buy more and more Internet capacity to handle the crowd. Recently, a listener affiliated with Geek Briefs in Chicago contributed extra capacity so the service could continue.”

It’s now becoming increasingly clear that we have to go into the underwear business!

Adam and Ron PodShow Strategy Cast

BTW, we posted this here because Adam’s archive is down. You can find it a couple of other places on the Web, but since it was such an influential factor in our decision we wanted it posted here too.