Ignite is a series of 5 minute talks by people about any topic they are passionate about.  The main catch is that you have 20 slides and they change every 15 seconds out of the speakers control. 

The first Ignite was held in 2006 in Seattle, Washington, and more then 50 other cities have had events.  A great way to get a cross section of idea and build community connections.  The event was standing room only and another one is schedule for October. Well worth coming out to the next one.

Quite a few twitter regulars from the area were at the event and you can review the twitter livestream to get and idea on how the evening went.

If you have automatic updates on, you will have Service Pack 3 already. For those that don’t I recommend you either turn on automatic updates or download sp3 manually and install it. Paul Thurrott has an excellent FAQ for SP3 for those interested.

Those of you running Vista and Window 7 do not have to worry as support is still active for these products.

My best recommendation is to considering upgrading a new operating system like Windows 7.

In the end we have many powerful images from the day.  The lowering price of digital imaging technology means we see more photos from all viewpoints.

The Globe and Mail has a good flickr pool with some very good photos.

Yesterday I had to send a portion of a screen shot via email to someone.  At work I use a tool called Snagit which does a fine job.  However for simple tasks Windows 7 has a great built in tool that you can use to screen capture your desk top.  Called Snipping Tool its a very easy product to use.

Simply start the program from the start menu, then click and drag the area you want to capture.  At that point you can draw on the image to hightlight a particular item. You can then copy the screen clip to the clipboard. email someone or save it as a jpeg.  Very useful tool. More info can be found at the Microsoft Windows 7 Features Section.

Apple seems to be positioning the iPad to replace netbooks and or laptop in some situations as well as making E-books and other media even easier to obtain and use. It certainly is an amazing device and when it ships in March, Apple will sell quite a few of them, however there are some things that are missing that would make the iPad a must have device.

No Multitasking

One thing the Android and Palm Pre phones have is the ability to run several apps at once. Once the iPhone it’s not that big of a deal but from time to time I do considering it a nuisance. I could see with the iPad replacing the netbook that this would become an issue much more often.

No Camera

Depending on how you look at it very surprising, I don’t think an inclusion of a camera would have raised the cost that much.

No Flash Plugin

There is no flash plugin for the iPhone version of the Safari Web browser. This seems to be the same with the iPad version. On the iPhone it’s not that big a deal, but with the larger screen of the iPad this will become very annoying, very quickly.

There are many good features about the iPad as well; the ability to read newspapers and magazines in a more traditional format will make it very appealing for some people. For most folks who already have a laptop / netbook or smart phone, I can’t see the need for it, particularly at its’s $499 base price.

This may change in version 2 of the iPad.

One of my longer term goals is to get rid of cable. Myself I watch very few ‘regular’ TV shows, I do watch a fair number of documentaries and shows from England most of which I would download and watch on the computer. Both Alicia and I enjoy Sci-fi, but can’t stand the 20 minutes of advertising per episode. As well sometimes there can be a delay of a year before a show that we have heard about in the US or Europe makes it here to Canada. In the past I would download the show and would then burn it to a DVD so we could watch it on the big TV together.

I already had a large number of shows on my NAS (Network Access Storage) that I could watch from a computer but sometimes wanted to watch on the big screen. Enter the O!Play media player. This little gem plugs into your network and outputs to your TV. I’ve read some favorable reviews about the unit playing most formats. What really excited me was that the device saw the NAS without any fuss, something that some of the other ’solutions’ could not offer.

In the past people have used X-Box or PlayStation to bridge the gap between network and TV The main problem was that most of these solutions required a PC to be on running media server software to see the files you wanted to use. I normally do not leave my computers on 24/7 but the NAS drive does stay on all the time.

I picked the unit up for slightly over $100 from the folks at Canada Computers here in London (Great store BTW). I brought it home and set it up as per the instructions. You have the option of having setting a fixed or dynamic IP address. For my initial test I had it get a DHCP address from my router which it saw right away. As soon as that was done I told the unit to search for machines on the network. It saw my NAS right away and all the shares I had setup for it. I scrolled into the TV directory and tried several different file types. All played without any problems.

I briefly tried the music sharing option and it works without too much complication, it sees all the MP3 files I have stored on the NAS, I admit I haven’t done much testing with this aspect as it’s not the primary reason I bought the unit for. There really isn’t much more to say. The unit just works and I can recommend it if you are looking for a good way to get your video from your network to your TV.

Specs from Asus

Specifications

Supported Formats
Video: MPEG1/2/4,RM/RMVB,VC-1,H.264
Video File Extension: .mp4,.mov,.xvid,.avi,.divx,.asf,.wmv,.mkv,.rm,.rmvb,.flv,.ts,.m2ts,.dat,.mpg,.vob
Audio: MP3,WAV,AAC,OGG,FLAC,AIFF,Dolby Digital AC3,Dolby Digital Plus,DTS Digital Surround
Image: JPEG,BMP,PNG,GIF,TIFF
Subtitle: SRT,SUB,SMI,SSA

I/O Port
Input:
DC Power In
1xUSB 2.0 Port
1xUSB 2.0 / eSATA Combo Port
RJ-45 LAN Port
Output:
Composite Video
Composite Audio L/R
S/PDIF Out
HDMI 1.3

Network
LAN:
TCP/IP (DHCP or Static IP Address)
10/100Mbps Wired LAN

Toronto and other larger centers went live in early October on Street View, and

Canada’s privacy commissioner had some concerns with Street View and google responded by blurring faces and license plates and having a way to request an image be removed.

More information can be found at the Street View Site.

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