Schools Kill Creativity

I was at work today and none of my usual friends/co-workers were available for lunch so I decided to sit in my office with the headphones on and watch one of the TED talks on my laptop. 

If you haven’t heard of TED before you are seriously missing out on some incredible conferences on Technology, Entertainment, and Design.  You can read more about TED on their website, but here is a quick quote from their site…

TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with the annual TED Conference in Long Beach, California, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK, TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Program, the new TEDx community program, this year's TEDIndia Conference and the annual TED Prize.

The main reason for this post is the fact that the particular talk that I listened to today was by Sir Ken Robinson who is a creativity expert and led the British government's 1998 advisory committee on creative and cultural education.  He was even knighted in 2003 for his achievements.  There is more about him on the TED website, but his talk titled “Schools Kill Creativity” was really amazing.  He is an excellent speaker, very intelligent and an extremely funny man with his dry British sense of humor.

This particular talk by Sir Robinson brings to light some very interesting ideas in that education throughout the years teaches people to focus on only the left side of their brain under the common misconception that you can never get a good job or make any real money unless you get a degree or even better a master’s degree or a PHD.  Think about it, the way it works out is that the “A” students end up teaching the “B” students to work for “C” students.  Your laughing right now aren’t you, because it is so true.  I hope you can spare the time to listen to the entire talk as people really need to open their eyes and change the way they look at education.  Without creativity we can’t solve the world’s most complex problems.  We have all heard the term “Thinking outside of the box”, and really what that means is to use some creativity to solve the problem.

Technorati Tags: TED,Art,Digital,Enlightenment,Positive Thinking,Technology,Creativity,Design

A Kick Butt Personal Video Recorder (PVR)

Well I have been using my own home grown PVR for a number of years now to record TV shows.  You see, I just don’t have time to sit down and watch TV and I have no patience for the frequent repetition of commercials during my favorite shows.  Really, what are they thinking when they have the same commercial play 15 times during an episode of LOST?  I wasn’t considering buying your crap anyways, and now that you pissed me off by showing me your lame commercial over and over a hundred times, the chances of anyone I know buying your product are very slim if I have my way.

Anyways, enough of my rant.  I have found the PERFECT solution that blows away anything that I have seen out there yet.  It is so simple and relatively inexpensive, it will blow you away.

First, you can buy a computer case from Antec that matches your stereo equipment, and doesn’t even look like a computer case. 

Next, make sure you get a decent motherboard.  It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, but it should be fairly new so you can support the new fangled video cards on the market.

One thing that I learned a couple days ago was that if you get a combination TV Tuner Card / Video card then things can get a bit funky when you are trying to watch a recorded show while recording another show.  In all fairness, there might have been something weird with one of my previous incarnations of this system, but now that I have a TV Tuner card and a separate video card everything is working AMAZINGLY well.

One of the most important things to look for in the video card is an HDMI connector with both video and audio output (see the little black slot in the middle of the video card I linked above).  This gives you an incredibly sharp and clean signal to your big screen TV.

Now, the most important part of the system!!!  Don’t even think about going with Microsoft’s media centre operating system.  Just install Windows XP and purchase Snapstream Media’s Beyond TV software.  This product is by far the most amazing TV recording software on the market.  Gone are the days where you try and figure out what channel to record on and for how long.  Then what happens if your favorite show is pushed out because of a baseball game or some news broadcast.  With Beyond TV you can search for a program you want to record by keywords or by title.  Then when you find what you want to record, you can tell it to record:

• Just one episode
• Just NEW episodes
• All episodes

Even better, you can tell it to record your show on a specific channel, or to record the show from ANY channel.  If your show is pushed off for a sports program, don’t worry, Beyond TV will catch it when it comes on.  It also has the ability to record on a specific channel at a specific time if your into doing it the old fashioned way.

Sounds awesome doesn’t it… well wait… hold onto your hat because it gets better.  You can record shows in many different formats and even auto compress them for download to your iPod.  In addition to that you can burn a DVD directly from Beyond TV if you have a DVD burner in your PC.  That’s not all… one of my favorite features is a sister product called Beyond TV Link which allows you to connect and control Beyond TV from any computer on your home network.  You can even watch recorded shows or Live TV from any computer in your house that has Beyond TV Link installed.  Pretty freakin cool eh?

Well I hope that provides you enough information and inspiration to go out there and set up your own PVR.  I can tell you that once you have tried it, you will never go back to just sitting down in front of the boob tube again.  Now your TV watching has meaning and purpose.  Oh… and did I not mention that Beyond TV has a feature called Smart Skip that automatically finds the commercials so you don’t have to watch them anymore?  Ah yes, this is true paradise!

Technorati Tags: HD TV,Hauppage,Sapphire Radeon HD 4550,Beyond TV,Tuner,Computer,DIY

Very very very very Impressive Technology

As a web developer myself, I find it a little awkward to be recommending Square Space to people because it pretty much puts me out of work for basic website development projects.  Luckily if the client needs a web-based application they still have to come to people like me to design from the ground up. 

Customizable

Square Space is an amazing technology that provides a very intuitive and incredibly flexible user interface for building web sites.  It has templates that are almost infinitely customizable, and easy too, with no coding at all.  It makes full use of CSS so if you want to get your hands dirty, you can really change things around.  If you don’t know CSS that is no problem because there are easy-to-use interfaces to allow you to pick colors and size columns, and change various aspects of the look, layout and feel of the site.

Modularity

If you want a forum, or a photo gallery, or a blog, you just create a new page and specify the type from the exhaustive list of options.  A few clicks of your mouse and you have a fully functional web form that you can use to request information from your site visitors.  A file storage component lets you easily upload and maintain a file structure that you can share through an authenticated user interface. Detailed analytics allow you to monitor site traffic and other details about your visitors.

Scalability

The grid-based architecture behind the scenes ensures that your site can handle ANY traffic load from 1 visitor to millions of visitors a day.  All with no headaches for you.

In my humble opinion, this solution is the only solution for people who want to put up a very professional, feature-rich web presence without investing a lot of time or money.  It is powerful, flexible, and very affordable.  Damn, I wish I was getting paid for this, but in reality I am just so impressed I had to tell everyone.

Technorati Tags: web,hosting,development,css,style sheets,websites,blogging,forums,gallery

My Digital Life

I only have a couple episodes left of the TWiP podcast and then I will have listened to every single one. One of the things that I have learned on TWiP is that Scott Bourne is a very experienced photographer who is quite technical for an old fella!

Recently Scott has created yet another blog called My Digital Life (found at MYDL.ME). This is, in my humble opinion, an excellent resource for... well lets use Scotts words: "The My Digital Life Podcast & Blog is your destination for information on how to deal with all the electronic stuff you accumulate during your daily life."

Check it out, and be sure to subscribe to the podcasts on iTunes.