Trap!t

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Trap.it is a site presently in closed beta that attempts to give a highly visual dimension to news discovery. A simple search gives a scrollable page of relevant links which can be collected in ‘Traps’ and then shared.

The idea is that successive searches together with the ability to thumbs up or thumbs down the results that are served up will help the system learn you preferences.

An open beta will be available in the future. For now you can submit your email and hope for an invite. Whether Trap!t becomes a standalone service or a technology that gets purchased by an existing content provider it’s a welcome alternative to existing content discovery alternatives.

Radioplayer On Demand A Minority Feature (at the moment)

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Radioplayer.co.uk is intended to bring a standard interface to web based radio streams in the UK albeit it costs the radio station a fee to participate. As yet many stations have not grasped the listen again aspect in quite the way that radio on the iPlayer works but JazzFM have mercifully put in the effort which makes access to their on-demand content a wonderfully easy experience. Here’s hoping that other radio stations step up to the plate.

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Using Audacity To Record Audio Streams And System Audio

There are various bits of software out there for recording live Internet audio streams but many people often overlook the simple free solutions already available.

Audacity is a piece of free recording software that is cross-platform and can easily be set to record from your computer internal audio. Once recorded it will offer you the choice of saving as an mp3, AAC, ogg or various uncompressed formats.

Set To Record From The Built In Input

Just make sure that Audacity is set to record from the built-in input (Audacity -preferences-devices-recording: change to built-in input).

Audacity will now record anything playing on your computer so fire up that online audio stream via a web browser or your chosen piece of audio stream player (media player, iTunes,vlc etc), adjust your system volume level and the Audacity recording level and you’re ready to record.

Windows uses may have to make some extra adjustments.

Audacity Now Has A Timer

In fact the latest version (1.3.13) adds a timer recording capability (under the Transport menu or Shift+T from your keyboard once audacity is running).

Of course when using the timer facility will inevitably require that  you’ll have to pre-start the playback of your audio stream in advance or delve into the world of software scheduling on windows, automator on OS X or gui front ends for cron jobs in linux such as gnome-schedule (perhaps I can look at these additional options another time).

Bring Your Own Radio

Recording internal audio doesn’t mean that you have to record Internet streams. You could just as easily connect an ordinary FM/AM radio, Digital radio, standalone Internet radio or satellite radio to your system input via the proper cable and set these to come on at a chosen time.

Download a PDF of this article here

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Using Microsoft’s Web-Based Office on Mac and Linux

No word wrap for pictures, clip art of tables

Microsoft’s free web version of Office has finally been opened up to computing platforms other than windows. I’ve tried it on both Mac & Linux and it worked reasonably well though on linux there’s a frequent pester box to ‘improve’ the rendering of text by installing Microsoft Silverlight which of course you can’t do in Linux. I have no idea if Moonlight , the mono Silverlight project on linux ,would work but the performance didn’t seem bad enough to proceed down that particular potential road of disappointment.

I tried the web application on Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome and despite ‘the word on the street’ saying that the web office is optimised for Firefox and IE8 only I found no problems using Google Chrome. In fact I’d say it was less sluggish on Chrome than Firefox for me.

Curiously the ability to export your online document is hidden away in the the reading view which reveals you can export in any format as long as it’s Microsoft’s proprietary .docx format.

The most glaring omission for me is the complete inability to align or justify text around an embedded picture, clip art or table in Word. For me this is a serious flaw when comparing Microsoft’s web office offering against the more established alternatives such as Google Docs, Zoho Office,ThinkFree Office or Adobe’s Buzzword.

Maybe more features become enabled if you actually own a copy of the standalone Office application but presume that the Mac & Linux versions will remain forever crippled in some very key feature departments which slightly negates the whole idea of platform neutral web based applications available in the cloud.

Microsoft’s Office for web is free to users signed up to a live.com account and is available to Facebook users too albeit still in beta form via Docs.com.

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Making choices in the dark

Microsoft has been rolling out its browser choice update to European windows users. For those that actually have Microsoft updates enabled the result has been , perhaps a bit confusing for some.

Typically many users assumed the update was malware or spam whilst another contingent sat there asking themselves ‘what’s a browser?’.

Picture by :: Wendy :: under this  specific creative commons license

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I saw SeeSaw

Arqiva’s UK based online TV content service SeeSaw started sending out beta invites today. Arqiva picked up the technology that was to power Project Kangaroo before Ofcom squashed the whole cross channel TV catch-up project as somehow uncompetitive. Obviously it’s only a beta offering so the number of available programmes is no as extensive as perhaps it will be when the service launches properly around March 2010. By then the free content will be joined by paid for items and maybe even availability via Wii or iPhone if users express enough interest.

At the moment there’s a smattering of content not available elsewhere. A token range of old school Doctor Who , Blackpool plus the entire IT Crowd and Queer as folk via the 4OD offerings.The least extensive content offerings  come from Five. A quick try out has given a good quality full screen picture quality and stable streaming for me at least.

Whether SeeSaw differentiates itself sufficiently from any independent channel on-line offering and whether it can monetise its service sufficiently to survive long term remains to be seen.

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BBC Launches Democracy Live

The BBC has launched a new web site dedicated to live and on demand coverage of the UK’s national political institutions and the European parliament. Interesting to launch at a time when our faith in political institutions is being sorely tested. Who knows maybe such sites are a flag stone on the road to a greater interaction between voters and the institutions that claim to act on their behalf.

BBC Democracy Live

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