This is spectacularly quickly considering public availability of the phone was only on Friday so congrats and I know that I can’t wait to get ahold of the release!

It’ll be interesting once the jailbroken and unlocked software is released to see how many people write apps for the app store and how many continue to write apps for the jailbroken phone. The app store has it’s obvious advantages and I’m sure that people looking to make money will favour the app store, along with the huge audience it affords but with Apple’s strict regulations and the inability to run background services with the SDK jailbroken apps look pretty favourable right about now.

Only time will tell,

Chris

I’ve spent the last few years working towards this target personally and am finally at a stage where any of my media is accessible, anywhere, on any device; it’s all fast and compatible.

So, I thought that I would write about how to achieve this; or at least how I have, and how someone could go about replicating a completely digitally connected home.

This article will be the first of many in this ’series’, so bear with me; I may even seperate these out on to a different domain for reference if they prove popular.

Okay, so by media I mean audio, video and pictures. But that’s not all that’s required; universal accesibility of files is also important and then so is maintaining a secure network. Harder than it sounds sometimes!

So firstly, this really requires an N-spec wireless router (or hardwired cables if they’re built in to the walls etc..) and I would recommend connecting any devices that just won’t support N (except for portables) to the network with cabling. I designed my physical network topology around that; ensuring that the devices that didn’t support N were easily cable-able from the router.

Although this is not necessarily ‘required’, I went down the server route; this is a relatively inexpensive box running a cheap C2D with 2GB of RAM. The key is lots of hard disk space; 2TB of hard discs make both backing up networked computers and sharing media possible, although obviously less is okay if you have less to store/ backup/ share! This is connected via Gigabit cabling to a Gigabit router. This is mainly for future’s-sake as most of the rest of the network is either 100Mbit or N-spec wireless but it seemed pointless not to go for Gigabit given the choice; any 100Mbit router you have lying around should be fine, or use one of the ports on the back of the wireless router.

This server is running Windows Home Server. This is a fantastic server operating system that doesn’t require you to have a keyboard, mouse or screen on the server but rather use their client software to remotely access it. The software is intuitive and easy to use to set up media sharing and backup of any windows machines. This also allows you to create a VPN or Remote Desktop tunnel through to your Windows machines from the outside world, whilst maintaining security, along with sharing your files with you wherever you may be.

This server is also running both iTunes Media sharing and Windows Media Connect allowing Macs, Windows Machines and the XBOX360s access to the media. On top of that, the file directories are available over the network volumes anyway.

So I live in an appartment with one other guy. Also a Computer Scientist. We have technology all over the place. He’s a Windows guy, I’m somewhere in between Windows and Mac.

We’re both 360 users and as it turns out; the 360 is the best device to have under your TV-set by far. It easily grabs and plays all of the media from our server. We have one centralised store of music, video and audio which we both update with our music as we purchase it.

So; I have no music on my computer. No video. No pictures. And… as a plus, only I can access my pictures on the server thanks to folder protection in Windows Home server and thanks to Wireless-N, it’s as fast as if they were on my machine. (Although I do copy files locally to work on them in photoshop etc…).

So what about outside the house? Orb. Orb is fantastic. It’s a media server that can be used via a web interface, or any platform with a client. I can be at my girlfriend’s house and her, her family and I can watch a movie from my server on her TV (via a laptop).

My iPod Touch / iPhone using Wifi can play 100s of GB of music even when I’m on the other side of the world.

No need to carry a USB Thumb drive, as any computer I go to, I just log in to my home machine, or else download them to the machine right there. Added bonus… no need to update them when I get home; the new files are just there on my home screen.

Part two coming soon…

Chris

Here’s hoping that whatever new iPhone they announce will be available in Apple stores to be cracked like old 1.0 because I definitely want! Oh yeah… did I mention… I picked up an Air and it’s amazing! I’ll be sure to post more on that soon!

Finally, new Giggle screenshots of the redesign soon: watch this space!!

Chris

The search engine space hasn’t had many new large entrants in the past few years (if you exclude Microsoft’s no-brainer of Live Search) but now there seems to be a slew of new contenders. Mahalo (one of Jason Calacanis’ projects that I’ve posted about a few times),  and now Powerset; an interesting project that claims to use natural language semantics to interpret your search question and provide fast and accurate results.

Currently this is limited by its source material (wikipedia), and so the searches may only be factual in nature, so let’s take a look and figure out how well this thing does against Google (and for novelty), Mahalo.

So… some search questions. Seeing as Powerset requires factual based questions, to be fair, all will be factual in nature.

Aims:

1. How long did Queen Victoria reign over England?

2. What is the atomic weight of Boron?

3. How many different types of Swallow are there?

4. What is the largest muscle in the human body?

I think that these represent a pretty good spread of questions over various topics. Now… to see how they all sum up!

1. How Long did Queen Victoria reign over England?

Google: Varying the search text, between the first and third results contain the answer in the summary text. :)

Powerset: The very first result contains the answer (also highlighted). :)

Mahalo: Typing ‘Queen Victoria’ returns a page with the answer in the nice Guide Note box in the corner. Another win: all three seem pretty good with history!

Image Collage

2. What is the atomic weight of Boron?

Google: The first result contains the answer in the summary text.

Powerset: The first result contains the answer highlighted.

Mahalo: Not indexed on Mahalo… does give Google results though so see above.

Image Collage

3. How many different types of swallow are there?

Google: Fourth result contains the answer in the summary text.

Powerset: The first result does contain the answer, although not obviously and it does not appear in the summary text.

Mahalo: Mahalo did not have a page on the topic, however again, the Google results yielded the same as above.

Image Collage

4. What is the largest muscle in the human body?

Google: The first result contains the answer in the summary text.

Powerset: I couldn’t actually find the answer at all. I’m sure that it was in one of the pages somewhere, but not in any summary text on the first few pages of results, or ‘obviously’ within any of the first results.

Mahalo: Mahalo did not have a page on the topic but gave good Google results.

Image Collage

Okay, so how did Powersets do? Not bad at all.

I was actually pleasantly surprised; I had set out to show that it was not even as good as Google, but it seemed to pretty much equal it most of the time. With the added plus that you can type the search in natural language. Its natural language support seems limited to simple sentences with no logic (e.g. and, not…) (at least from what I could tell), but it could seem easier for a novice.

However, despite offering a useful service; I don’t see where it would fit in to my (or anyone’s?) life. It’s not a complete search engine… I couldn’t use this as my home page. I couldn’t rely on it for day to day searching. AND… honestly, if I’m looking for encyclopaedic content, why not just go to Wikipedia.org?

The only way I can imagine using this is if they say made a Sidebar gadget or widget out of it, that I could just type my search in and away I go, rather than remember another search site when Google works just as well.

What I did end up learning here though, is that Mahalo is *actually* pretty good. It seems to crash my Firefox instantly :(, I don’t know if that’s the fault of FF3B5 or the site, or (quite likely) Flash Player (don’t know if they use any flash), but it has crippled my system of late, so you’ll notice the Mahalo pics are in IE, but I really like it.

Mahalo seems to have gotten it right… I will seriously consider swapping over to using Mahalo as a home page because it accepts the fact that their own data is limited. Mahalo seems to focus more on creating its own articles in the areas of popular culture, trivia, how tos etc… This is really useful content that doesn’t really exist in a consolidated manner anywhere else. But it then provides you with outside links for things that it doesn’t have. So essentially you get added value, and don’t lose anything from what you had before.

Okay, this is getting long, but… Powersets? Does it work? Yes. Is it new? I hope not; I really thought we were at this stage a few years ago (http://www.lexxe.com http://www.msdewey.com)

Chris

I suppose I’ve been living in the past for the last year with only one moniter on my desk but now, having two… I can see why people say that two is the way forward. The only problem is I don’t know how I’m going to go about not buying a third!

It’s so much easier to do two things at once; the ability to watch an episode of a TV show, or chat on IM while working on the other screen is invaluable (saves switching) and if you’re copying data from program-to-program etc… it speeds things up no end!

In synopsis; if there’s currently one moniter on your desk; get to dell.com and buy another while I take a picture to update the blog header! :)

Chris

Today’s quite an exciting day for us; we got our first press coverage! Giggle was featured over at Neowin (here) which has resulted in a huge number of new users for us (so thank you Neowin!), and also prompted a few reviews dotted up.

Thanks to Martin of at ghacks.net who posted a review (here); we’ll be sure to let you know when we secure deals with US ticket vendors; it’s in the works… :).

I’ll keep updating this with the rest of our press coverage; thanks so much for checking Giggle out and I hope you love it as much as we do!!

We have a *long* list of features that’ll be implimented in Giggle in the coming months so.. watch this space!!

Chris

Digg Giggle!

I’ve been working on a project called ‘Giggle’. Giggle is a tool to recommend you new music based on what you listen to now, and data from every other user on our service. With any luck it can quickly help you find new music that’s tailored to you in a similar way to a friend recommending an artist to you.

It will also tell you when your favourite artists are performing and local gigs that you may like based on your music profile.

Giggle’s now open for testing and we need as many as we can get! If you want to get onboard with Giggle early, go over to www.gigglemusic.com, tell all of your friends and soon we can all be enjoying a diverse range of new music!

This is an early release, so be patient with us; we’re working really hard to try to make Giggle everything that we started out to create but it takes time; with your help we can get there and fill the whole that the ‘death of radio’ has left!

Enjoy,

Chris

Giggle Music Screenshot1 Screenshot2 Screenshot3

“…a Zillion is 1 followed by a Katrillion zeros…”

I thought that was funny!

On an unrelated note, I got my iPhone today :). Oh god is it good… loads more soon, check out my twitter and flickr for more regular posts… more iPhone-native :)
Chris

While apparently downloaders of the Eve Source utilizing torrent links are being banned, there is a MegaUpload link from which I’ve heard no such rumours.

You can find it over at: REMOVED
(hit up your favourite torrent site if you’re feeling brave)

Remember; you heard it here first! Unless CCP is asking!

Chris

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/jason-calacanis

Chris