iPod – fix it yourself

Last week the sad face came up on my iPod for the first time. It had been acting a big quarkey lateley but o’no not the sad face ! I ran off to the Apple store for help. When I got there the white brick decided that it would not even show the sad face – no booting, nothing – so all they could say to me was -” it can’t be fixed, you can upgrade”  Well, I’d love to upgrade but I thought there’s gotta be a way.  I had faith that I could do something about making it function. I went online to CrunchGear and low and behold, they had instructions on how to possibly save the old white brick. I solved my problem. I did not have to take it apart – all I had to do was push in the back of the iPod so that the achilles heel (the hard disk) got pushed back into place. At least that worked for me. I’m a happy camper for the moment and I’ll wait a bit to upgrade.  For all of you who don’t know about the site go to

www.crunchgear.com and look up How to fix an ipod that won’t boot

Good Luck!

Vuzix Pushes the envelope with iWear

One company with some really great products is Vuzix (www.vuzix.com).  They showed at CES and had a large audience. If your traveling, you’ll want to bring along a pair of their iWear glasses for viewing your iPod or laptop movies, videos, or games.  You can actually squeeze a 42″ or 62″ monitors into your briefcase. Check it out!

Position of 900 Satellites

This is a NASA site that tracks over 900 Satellites currently orbiting the earth. It is an interactive Java applet.  Take a look:

http://science.nasa.gov/RealTime/JTrack/3D/JTrack3D.html

IS SIP HERE TO STAY?

Will it be SIP (Session Initiation Protocol)?  A lot of big companies use the protocol for videoconferencing, IM, push to talk, and more – so people are wondering if this will stick as TCP/IP did.  Some think it’s too early in the adoption process while others are running to assure the standard. It’s got great momentum as manufacturers enable SIP devices and Microsoft and Cisco support the protocol. There’s lots of discussion going on and I’m one who thinks it’s got legs and think that the stakeholders are betting on it being the standard.  What are your thoughts?  Check out GigaOM comments today: http://gigaom.com

Ustream.tv – very cool!

Ustream.tv, it’s a free streaming platform for casters of all kinds.  If you’re into dorkdom you’ll enjoy seeing and listening to Leo Laporte and Chris Pirillo ( http://ustream.tv/channel/leo-laporte-live, http://www.ustream.tv/channel/chris-pirillo-live) or any other subject matter that you might fancy viewing. You can start your own cast pretty simply and partner with others to broadcast together at the same time if you want – very cool!

Check it out and Happy WEBCASTERING  in 2008.

The Semantic Web

Learn about semantic search

Cisco’s Chief Development Officer Leaves for Silver Lake Partners!

Charles Giancarlo, Cisco Systems Inc.’s chief development officer and heir-apparent to CEO John Chambers, resigned Thursday to join the investment firm Silver Lake Partners. With the capabilities of IP there’s a lot happening with telephony, software and IT. Silver Lake owns Avaya, IPC Communications and a number of other interesting tech companies. They really get the big picture of where things are going in the world of IT and Telephony conversion. Seems like Charles Giancarlo liked what he heard. Your thoughts!

Anne Zelenka at GigaOm writes about using WordPress

Comments from Blogcasting news:

Anne Zelenka at GigaOm writes about using WordPress as a social networking platform – interesting comments:

“In contrast to social networking, blogging offers a person-centric way for individuals to come online. A social network like Facebook gives you your own place online, but it’s not really your own place. As Copyblogger Brian Clark recently said in a blog post, “For me, there’s really no appeal in spending a lot of time creating ‘user-generated’ content via a social networking application. That’s like remodeling the kitchen in a house you rent.”

Clark was responding to an ongoing conversation launched by blogger and cartoonist Hugh MacLeod, who proposed that blogging is far more important to him than social networking. Bloggers including Stowe Boyd and Darren Rowse seconded the idea. This growing disenchantment with social networking and return to blogging suggests that in the future we could see a migration, at least among tech bloggers, towards more distributed social networking — along the lines of what Messina envisions.”

In addition to Messina’s project, another WordPress social network project to watch is Andy Peatling’s BuddyPress. The goal for BuddyPress is to completely transform a vanilla installation of WordPress MU into a fully functional social network platform.

The idea of opening up social networking so that anyone can build a social network makes sense. Web publishing has evolved from being something only big organizations could do to something that everyone can do. Audio and video publishing are doing the same thing, evolving into things that anyone can do. It looks like building social networks will follow this path, too.