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)
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?
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:
Better buffering
More "Ajax-y" website
What Qik seems better at then Flixwagon:
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.
Higher Resolution. Qik seems to be higher resolution the flixwagon. Qik is 320x240, Flixwagon seems to be lower resolution
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":
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:
Configure Qik to access a WiFi access point e.g. "Raincity Studios"
Walk out of range of the WiFi Access point
Start Qik
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)
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