Roland Tanglao's Weblog

Wearing my Mobile Muse 3 technical evangelist and Fearless volunteer hats, I'll be riding my bicycle with Amy Walker, publisher of the fabulous Momentum magazine about all things bicycling, as part of Car Free Vancouver 2008 starting from the Fearless Mobile Booth on Commercial Drive at 12 noon Sunday June 15, 2008. We'll ride to all the other Car Free Vancouver venues (Main Street, the West End and Kitsilano) and stream video live from my bike to the internet.

Check us out at:

• Fearless's Mobile site (where we hope, tech willing, to display a stream from my bike and from a car in a sort of "car versus bike" video mashup)
• My Qik Car Free Vancouver archives which currently has our dry run videos and after the event will have the archive of my live stream
• My Nokia Sports Tracker site which shows our Car Free Vancouver dry runs (dry run June 8, dry run June 11 stream 2) on a nice zoomable Google Map

How you can help:

• Come on down and participate! It's free!
• Take photos and videos and blog about it and tag it: cfvd08

Finally for techies, here's a diagram of how the technology works!

Flickr finally added video today.Yay! Only 90 seconds and 150MB per video (and requires a pro account to upload videos) but you can tag, geo-tag, add videos to sets and use the flickr privacy system (and there will be a video upload API, yes!). Other than taking videos at conferences and events like DemoCamp and Mobile Monday, I really use video for family stuff which is on my private family flickr account (for those of you who care about my public flickr account, don't worry, i will soon have many videos of me bicycling through Vancouver :-)  to join my 36000 and counting photos!). So having flickr support video will be a great way to share videos via flickr's guess pass to my non-flickr-using family. Now if only you had access to the original video, flickr video would be complete! Feature request to the ShoZu folks: support upload to flickr once the API comes out and support the full 150MB over 3G and WiFi!

Broke my GorillaPod last week bicycling up Clark Park, aaargh. What should I do ? Buy the SLR sized GorillaPod (and use it with my N95 and N93, I wouldn't tempt fate and use with my Canon 20D) or buy a proper bicycle mount? Or hack my own mounting system (e.g. from MAKE and Mark Boyd)

Don't have much spare $ and not much mechanical aptitude so leaning towards the former!

Could somebody tell me how durable the SLR GorillaPod is?

Really stoked to be co-presenting VideoBlogging 101 with Jordan Behan and "pro-video Lab-with-Leo and man about town" Warren Frey, as part of the almost sold out Northern Voice 2008's MooseCamp (specifically Internet BootCamp, the only pre-scheduled part of MooseCamp) on Friday February 22, 2008 at UBC. Goal: get people motivated to try videoblogging. Got questions or stuff you want covered? Please add them to our Videoblogging 101 wiki page by editing the page (or email me roland AT rolandtanglao.com).

Meet Jordan and Warren on Qik.com video after the jump:

Bambuser (my archived videocasts) is another competitor to qix and flixwagon. It's out of Sweden.

Observations after a couple of 'casts:

1. Back end site is Drupal
2. You can download the flash video unlike the current versions of qix and flixwagon
3. You can select the quality and the size up to 640x480 unlike qix and flixwagon although qix supposedly will have this feature soon.
4. Does not seem to have a "stop streaming but keep uploading feature", only connect and disconnect
5. Current version seems to be slower and more jerky than the qix and flixwagon
6. It's out of Sweden

Check out my "Bambuser"-cast after the jump.

Today I tried out flixwagon, "a stream live from cellphone" competitor to Qik. I did a "Carcast" direct from my N95 (mounted on the empty passenger seat with my Gorillapod) as I drove from Gastown to the Viaduct (12 minutes). Impressive!
What Flixwagon seems better at then Qik:

1. Better buffering
2. More "Ajax-y" website

What Qik seems better at then Flixwagon:

1. Non Cheesy look and feel. I could live without the little flixwagon icon moving about before the video is shown and the "too cute" flixwagon smiley icons.
2. Higher Resolution. Qik seems to be higher resolution the flixwagon. Qik is 320x240, Flixwagon seems to be lower resolution
3. Better URLs. There seems to be no flixwagon equivalent of qik.com/roland. If it's there I couldn't find it. UPDATE: it's there! found it by URL hacking, no obvious link when logged in, my page is indeed flixwagon.com/roland
   

Anyways the proof is in the video and both Qik and Flixwagon are evolving at a rapid rate, so let the competition continue! Check out my flixwagon "CarCast":

Qik Alpha Version 0.26 appears to have solved the hanging problem when the WiFi access point is not available. Thanks Qik for the timely and very quick updates!

The current alpha (so fix it please ASAP :-) ) version of Qik hangs forever if the WiFi Access point you have configured is not available. Here's the steps to reproduce this:

1. Configure Qik to access a WiFi access point e.g. "Raincity Studios"
2. Walk out of range of the WiFi Access point
3. Start Qik
4. Voila! It hangs forever

Other than this bug, I am pretty happy with Qik. It's a great service.

The above photo shows my "bicyclecast" setup (Gorillapod + N95 + DT-22 Tripod Adapter + my bicycle). It worked for only 6 minutes of my 30 minute commute to work (bug? limited buffering capacity? EDGE too slow?). And was fun. The GorillaPod doesn't keep the camera too snug on the bike but it's low budget, cheap and cheerful. Someday I'll have the money to buy a proper bike tripod camera mount like the pros use for Tour de France videos!

Check it out: qik.com/video/13888 recorded live from my bicycle (the hardest part was fastening the tripod and the phone onto the bike, music courtesy of my N81 Musicphone)

Really looking forward to our 4th annual Northern Voice! And to some great ideas and speaker submissions!
From Northern Voice 2008:

QUOTE

The Moose is Loose in 2008!

Want to speak or lead a discussion? Then fill out the speaker submission form (speaker submissions close Monday December 10).

Got an idea for a topic or discussion but don't feel like speaking on it or leading a discussion? Then check out our Call for Ideas (we've seeded the list with two initial ideas: microblogging and mobile blogging but these are just examples!) and add your own idea and rate others' ideas!

END QUOTE