I like baseball. So much in fact that one year, I signed up for the, somewhat new, MLB.tv. It offered live online streaming video of all games, along with audio, and the graphic game tracker. After about an hour of doing a little searching and playing around, I realized that you could only watch out of market games, aka games taking place outside of your state. Not terribly useful to me.

While I didn’t know it then, I recently found a site, MyP2P.eu, that hosts liks to live streams of various sport games from around the world. Great if your sport isn’t hugely popular (skiing, tennis, DTM, etc) or you just don’t have a TV in front of you. Still trying to figure out exactly how the site works, but in essence, you find the game you’re looking for, pick one of the stream links (they list quality and necessary software), and watch. I tried a few of the Adobe Flash streams, which were crappy at best. A lot of the software was also not available for a Mac, and I didn’t feel like getting Windows up and running. Veetle seemed to work for me, though, to be honest, I’m a bit sketched out with installing something that doesn’t have a clear cut way of removing it, or at the very least, tell you what it’s installing.

Either way, I did install it and the quality was great. Full HD with stereo sound. Didn’t hog bandwidth or CPU resources either, even with a few things going at once. Stream opened up in my browser, just like a YouTube video or the like.

Update (08/27/11) – It appears as if the domain name has been taken offline (.eu web address no longer points to site), meaning the site can no longer be accessed. They have a twitter account set up with regular updates, but the info is pretty sparse as of right now. Been down for a few days, hopefully it’ll be back up in time for the F1 race this weekend though.

Update #2 (09/19/11) – The site has a new address: http://myp2p.bz. There were, as I understand it, some legal issues with the old domain address (.eu), and the change had to be made.

As some of you may know, I have a bit of a love affair with Yelp. While I’ve used it for quite a while to find various hidden gems and know which places to stay away from, I only last month started sharing my opinions in the form of reviews. Yelp allows you to give a 1 to 5 star rating to almost anything you can think of (restaurants, doctors, stores, towns, etc) and attach along some text on your experience there. Should you contribute enough to the site, Yelp rewards you by selecting you for Elite; a promotion of sorts that distinguishes you as one of the more helpful contributors, granting you access to Elite only events held regularly. These events are ususally fully comped, with free drink and food, and are a great way to get out, meet new people, and try some different places.

About 3 weeks ago, I applied to become an Elite. I sent a short email to my cities manager, stating my name, a link to my profile, and a short description of why I thought I deserved it. Two weeks later, I got an email, congratulating me on my acceptance. So how did I go from a new users to Elite in record time? Read more

I too, like many, was recommended to this shop (located in Allston, MA) by a local Apple store. I had a MacBook Air (out of warranty) that needed some work done ASAP (recall on a hinge that was prone to cracking), and the Apple store wanted to send it to their repair center to get it done (taking 1+ week). I was greeted by some employe after about 5 minutes of aimlessly standing around trying to find someone to help me. I explained to him my problem, and he promised a quick turn around time with no hassle.

I got a call the next day that my laptop was ready to be picked up and did so. Again, another 5 minutes of waiting before the boy sitting at the counter could look away from his solitaire game to help me. I quickly inspected the work and went on my way. As much as I wish the story ended there, it doesn’t. Read more

Cheaper then some pieces of art paper, these portfolios provide an excellent way to showcase your work, either to a client or just to friends and family.

Available from just about any art of photography store starting at around $4 for the 6×4 model, they won’t break the bank. Sizes range from 4×6 all the way up to 18×24, with all sorts of sizes in between, some offered in both horizontal and vertical formats. Each portfolio features a polypropylene (fancy name for plastic) cover with 24 clear inserts, hard bound and non-removable. Each insert comes preloaded with a piece of black acid free paper, of which one photo can be placed on either side, allowing for 48 views. The exterior spine has a clear pocket, of which can house a piece of 9.2cm wide paper. The interior of the front page features a pocket which can easily hold several letter size pages, as well as a business card slot.

While this portfolio is certainly a deal, it does have some minor fallbacks. The clear inserts are somewhat easy to leave marks on by bending or scratching, so care should be taken while adding or removing photos. The cover isn’t very fancy like some more advanced models – looks more like a 3-ring binder folder then a luscious portfolio.

All in all, probably one of the better portfolios to deliver client prints in. Presentation is 90% of the product, and it’s important to make you’re product look good when delivering it, as word of mouth can easily make or break you. I often times include a model of these portfolios in the appropriate size with each order (pricing their costs into the first print price). It keeps prints safe in the mail and gives them a way to keep them together. I even go as far as to print out an information sheet, with contact and picture information and place it on the first view – a table of contents of sorts.

If you’ve ever wondered how those mosaic posters you see for sale are created, it’s a good chance they used this program. A free download (http://homepage.mac.com/knarf/MacOSaiX/) it has the performance and functionality of something you’d expect to pay hundreds for. You can choose your own source (Google images, your own iPhoto library, a QuickTime movie, etc), specify tile shape, frequency, match proximity, dimensions, and several other parameters.

The new version just released, v2.1, fixes several bugs and adds much needed support for multicore systems. A 20k tile mosaic takes under an half an hour using an 8-core Mac Pro at 700% CPU with 2GB of RAM used. Expect increased times with slower computers and less RAM.