My Gadget Life

I’ve been coming across info lately about videoblogging. Cool! I’m going to try Ant as my program to subscribe to and download video:

And “mefeedia” allows you to tag video (just like Flickr). Cool!

Here’s my del.icio.us tag for videoblogs: http://del.icio.us/nic221/videoblogs

My sister has a blog called Living Better Cinematically, where she writes reviews and descriptions of “ephemeral films.” (She collects them). Here’s the subtitle of her site: Reviews of film ephemera, including such things as educational films, industrial films, military and propaganda films, tv commercials, movie trailers, shorts, experimental films, and movies made for non-mainstream audiences.

It’s pretty cool. Check it out. Many of those films are freely available to download from sites such as the Internet Archive.

This weekend I saw the movie, Born into Brothels, with my friends, Eva and Evelyn. It’s a wonderful documentary about a photographer living in the red light district of Calcutta, who gets to know a group of children of prostitutes and teaches them photography. It’s really great to see the faces of the kids light up when they have an exhibition of their work in their own city. It’s so great to see someone treat them with respect, help them develop their skills, and in spite of terrible circumstances of their lives, they get a chance to express their own artistic vision. It’s a good example of the role art can play in anyone’s life, especially as a way to deal with difficult circumstances.

Check out the Kids with Cameras web site for more infomation about the project.

Ever since I read an article in 2600 magazine about viewing movies on portable devices, I’ve been wanting to try that on my Palm. So last night I finally had a chance.

I used Kinoma Player Ex and Kinoma Producer to do it.

Now I can convert movies to a format viewable on my Palm. I’m limited a bit by storage space… currently I have a 128Mb SD card, so I’m thinking of getting a bigger one (saw a deal recently for 256 Mb for $10 after rebates).

My goal would be to watch movies that I’ve downloaded from the web of lectures or events that I missed, but are available online. One example is the Lessig video I mentioned in a previous post. It’s about an hour long and the file is about 15.1 Mb, which will just fit on the room I have left on my SD card. (I haven’t had a chance to try it yet). So I could watch it with headphones on my Palm while on the subway. It seems like a lecture or little movie would translate well to a small screen.

In addition to lectures there are a lot of free movies in the public domain available in the Internet Archive, the Prelinger Archives and other sources.

In fact there is some amazing footage of the recent Tsunami disaster available in the Internet Archive.

Last night I saw Closer with David and tonight I saw Ocean’s Twelve with Amit. Both were not as good as I’d hoped. I expected more, somehow. Closer seemed a bit shallow and Ocean’s Twelve a bit drawn out. The best movies I’ve seen in recent weeks are Kinsey and Weapons of Mass Deception.

Yes, I’ve gone so far as to create a database of movies I’ve seen on my Palm. (that is, the database is on the Palm, not the movies…. but someday!) I use SmartList To Go, which made it easy to create my own custom database. For each movie, I track title, date seen, who with, where, rating (1, 2, or 3), and category. I started keeping track on Sept. 7, 2000, and since then, I’ve seen 259 movies. Most were in theaters, but a few were on DVD, VHS, or Tivo. So now, when someone asks me what movies I’ve seen lately, I pull out the database on my Palm.