emconsteroids

The Apple Airport Express is a very useful device. It not only allows you to surf without nasty ethernet cables, it enables you sharing printers and best of all: hooking up your stereo and listening to your iTunes music without plugging your computer in.

Now if you have a little home cinema installation, you may as well want to play movies and listen to the sound wirelessly. Particularly because in most cases, your sound system is in a different place as where your projector is. At least, this is the case with me. So instead of wiring up your whole living room with cables, I reckoned there must be a way of using the Airport Express sound feature for watching movies, too.

This is the case, as long as you use iTunes to watch movies. But you probably want to watch DivX movies and haven’t installed the necessary plugins.

Here’s how I solved this problem: first of all, you need a piece of software called “Airfoil” which allows you to use the audio output of any software and pass it on to your Airport Express. This however leads to the next problem. Due to the way the Airport Express works, the sound is always delayed by a couple of seconds. So next thing you need to do is to find a video player, that allows you to de-sync video from audio. VLC is a good choice here.

So far so good. You will immediately notice the lag of a couple of seconds if you play your movie. So you need to de-sync video from audio. The standard button to do so in VLC is “g”. However this shifts the sound backward. You want to shift the sound forward. Therefore you may have to assign a key to this action, because it is not set as standard. You can do this under the VLC preferences in the section “Interface” then “Hotkey Settings”:

I delayed my sound by around -2750 ms and it did the trick. Happy watching!

Is your country censoring the Internet? You may not even be aware of it. Find below a couple of maps developed by the OpenNet Initiative.

1.) Political content: Content that expresses views in opposition to those of the current government, or is related to human rights, freedom of expression, minority rights, and religious movements.

2.) Social content: Content related to sexuality, gambling, and illegal drugs and alcohol, as well as other topics that may be socially sensitive or perceived as offensive.

3.) Conflict & security: Content related to armed conflicts, border disputes, separatist movements, and militant groups.

4.) Internet tools: Web sites that provide e-mail, Internet hosting, search, translation, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone service, and circumvention methods.

“No data” sections display in grey. “No data” does not necessarily indicate absence of filtering practices.

Source: http://map.opennet.net/

You may already know it. If not, be warned, this is something, you will never ever forget anymore. And here it is: There’s an arrow in the FedEx logo. Can you spot it?

If you can’t see it, read how the FedEx logo came into place.

I have talked about Google Maps and how it could interface with reality before. Frank Taylor, too, has posted an interesting article on the Google Earth Blog. Compare the details between the real Alps fly-through with the one reproduced in Google Earth.

Very impressive indeed!

I thought it would be worthwhile transcripting James Nachtwey’s speech he’s given at The TED Prize in March 2007:

“As someone who spent his entire career trying to be invisible, standing in front of an audience is a cross between an outer body experience and being caught in the headlights. So please forgive me for violating one of the TED commandments by relying on words on paper – And I only hope I am not struck by lightning bolts before I’m done.

I’d like to begin by talking a bit about some of the ideas that motivated me becoming a documentary photographer.

I was a student in the Sixties. A time of social upheaval and questioning. And on the personal level, an awakening sense of idealism. The war in Vietnam was raging, the Civil Rights Movement was under way – and pictures had a powerful influence on me.

Our political and military leaders were telling us one thing, and photographers were telling us another.

I believed the photographers and so did millions of other Americans.

Their images fueled resistances to war and racism. They not only recorded history, they helped change the course of history. Their pictures became the heart of or collective consciousness, and this consciousness evolved into a shared sense of conscience. Change became not only become possible but inevitable.

I saw that the free flow of information represented by journalism, specifically visual journalism, can bring into focus what the benefits and the costs of political policies are. They can give credit to sound decision making adding momentum to success. In the phase of poor political judgement or political inaction becomes a kind of intervention assessing the damage and asking us to reassess our behavior. It puts a human face on issues which from a far can appear abstract or ideological and monumental in their global impact. What happens at ground level? Far from the wholes of power? What happens to ordinary citizens one by one?

And I understood that documentary photography has the ability to interpret the events from their point of view. It gives a voice to those who otherwise would not have a voice. And as a reaction it stimulates public opinion and gives influence to public debate thereby preventing the interested parties from totally controlling the agenda as much as they would like to.

Coming of age in those days made real the concept that the free flow of information is absolutely vital for a free and dynamic society to function properly. The press is certainly a business and in order to survive it must be a successful business. But the right balance must be found between marketing considerations and journalistic responsibilities.

Societies problems can’t be solve until they’re identified.

At a higher plan, the press is a service industry, and the service it provides is awareness.

Every story does not have to sell something. There is also a time to give. That was the tradition I wanted to follow.

Seeing the war created such incredibly high stakes for everyone involved and visual journalism can actually become a factor in conflict resolution.

I wanted to be a photographer in order to be a war photographer.

But I was driven by an inherent sense that a picture that revealed the true face of war would almost by definition be an anti war photograph.

I’d like to take you on a visual journey through some of the events and issues I have been involved in over the past 25 years.

[...]

One of the things I had to learn as a journalist is what to do with my anger. I had to use it, channel its energy, turn it into something that would clarify my vision instead of clouding it.

[...]

I am a witness. And I want my testimony to be honest and uncensored. I also want it to be powerful and eloquent and to do as much justice as possible to the experience of the people I’m photographing.

[...]

My pictures can play a supporting role to the work of NGOs by shedding light on the critical social problems they’re trying to deal with.

[...]

Photographers go to the extreme edges of human experience to show people what’s going on. Sometimes they put their lives on the line, because they think your opinions and your influence matter. They aim their pictures at your best instincts: generosity, the sense of right and wrong, the ability and willingness to identify with others, the refusal to accept the unacceptable.

[...]”

Can you contribute to James Nachtwey’s TED wish?