As part of the FourStarters relaunch we decided to broaden what we blog about, so here is a post that really has to be put in a new category to make sense on our blog.

I consume a lot of media. Books, music, news, internet radio, audio and video podcasts, movies, and most importantly: television series. I know that at least Reinier shares this interest in TV series with me (just ask him about Firefly and he won’t shut up) so I decided to give a write-up of one of the series that has kept me busy the last few weeks.

Life on Mars

Life on Mars is a 16 episode (2 seasons) BBC drama about Sam Tyler (played by John Simm), a Detective Chief Inspector for the Manchester Metropolitan Police, who has an accident and wakes up in 1973. The big question is if he is in a coma and dreaming it, if he is dead, or if he travelled through time.

Back in 1973 he joins the force as a detective inspector and finds that he has trouble fitting in. His boss, Gene Hunt (played by Philip Glenister) is an alcoholic, racist, sexist, homophobe that never learned to do an investigation by the book. This makes stuff very interesting for the viewer with Sam and Gene often either punching each other or co-punching another. Not to mention the weird hair cuts and cloths to add to the effect of the viewer wondering wether Sam really ended up on Mars.

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As I said, Reinier and I were in the Apple Store Regent Street yesterday, mainly to have a look at the Apple Store, but also to have a look at the new iPods. Apple announced a complete update to their iPod lineup last week, most notably replacing the iPod Nano with a new smaller version and introducing a new iPod Touch that is based on the iPhone interface.

Although the iPod Touch was the big announcement, it isn’t available yet in store. Still, the iPod Nano and iPod Classic (the new name for the old style iPod) have gotten a few updates that really make a difference, so we had a look at those. I didn’t bring my camera so I don’t have any photo’s, I hope to get some of the iPod Touch once it’s in store.

The iPod Nano got the biggest update as it is now comes in a way smaller form factor and is able to play video. Bringing video to the entire iPod lineup (except the shuffle) is important to Apple as well as many other players like Podcasters. When I tried the new iPod Nano, I noticed that the video playback is “just fine” as it can only be so much impressive on a 2″ screen. Yes, the resolution is sharp and the playback is smooth, but I rather watch stuff on my Macbook if I can.

The iPod Classic and iPod Nano both got a new interface update, giving them both Cover Flow and a new split screen interface for certain views. We noticed that the iPod Nano is much faster in starting up and powering down than its predecessor, but somehow sometimes felt a bit slow in navigating and especially when scrolling through a whole lot of photos. Reinier noted that scrolling through photos is much smoother on his iPod Nano 2G.

To see if this scrolling went any smoother on the new iPod Classic, I looked one up and had a play with it. It’s way faster in the menu’s and the photo viewing, and I would even enjoy watching a video on it. Still, I noticed some performance problems when playing a song and scrolling through the Cover Flow at high speed. Somehow doing these things caused the music to “skip” repeatedly, but strangely we couldn’t repeat this skipping later on when we tried some other iPod Classics. Is this posibly a hardware defect or does it have something to do with the song I played?

In the end we really liked the iPod Nano as it is cheap, very portable (may I say it is a Shuffle competitor in size?) and the new Product Red color is very nice and funky. The ability to play video’s on it might seem trivial but it opens the world of Podcasts to those people who want to have something interesting to watch on the road. I am actually thinking of getting one myself, although I still love my Shuffle.

Since Yesterday I have been able to have a quick review at Pownce (thank you Robert G.). Pownce literally has web2.0 written over it in all the bad ways: it has a weird name, it’s in Beta (or is it Alpha?), uses pastel colored themes, allows you to share stuff with your friends, is invite only, and is generally useless. Honestly, I love web2.0 technology but these guys are really pushing the hype.

As if things couldn’t get worse, they actually managed to ignore all the issues I discussed recently with Reinier: they are monetizing it even from this Alpha/Beta status, they offer something that (honestly) we don’t need, they are not really specific as you can share anything with anyone without really differentiating from let’s say an email, and it is clearly not viral. The last point might not be clear, but if you think about the fact that you almost never want to share random files with people then it makes sense. If you want to share specific things like photos or videos, you go to a site like Flickr or YouTube.

As Kevin Rose (guy behind Digg) is involved in this startup they are getting a lot of hype, but I think that’s sad as it takes focus away from the truly cool startups. In the end they did some stuff right though, as Pownce allows you to group friends and send files to individuals and groups. Additionally they launched a nice desktop application for Windows and Mac to share and get updates. Their tool uses Adobe AIR and has one problem though as SmudgyPixel noted yesterday:

All and all I think Pownce is a rubbish product in its current state, and I am already becoming pretty annoyed with all those “friends” of mine sending me “test” messages.

The Next Web is over and it is now time to have a good look at what happened. The conference was quite a lot of fun. For me it started at 7:30 AM when I arrived to help create the bloggers-booth where bloggers had a landlines internet connection. This booth was used by some grateful bloggers to do live write-ups of the speakers. I did all this hard work together with Sjors Timmer who had prepared most of the work. He wrote a very interesting wrietup of what The Next Web is:

“The next web is wireless (not mobile), The Next Web isn’t a web, The Next Web is about being connected, The Next Web is de-central, The Next Web is about love, The Next Web is a social prison, The Next Web will be transparent”

Once this task was done at 8:30 I decided to search for Jeroen and Reinier of TipIt.to because they were given a stand in the hall. All the startups with stands were pushed in a very narrow corner of the Tuschinski Theatre which was very regretful as it was dark, warm, and narrow. They could better have used the main entry where they put Adobe and Level3 (boring!).
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I came across MyHippocampus.com in a post on the Google Widget Toolkit newsgroups. This is not your ordinary webapp - so let’s have a closer look:

The basic idea of myhippocampus is mindmapping; a way to dump everything you’ve ever seen, read, learned or thought about into a website, so that you can search through it, visualize the evolution of your experiences, yadayada. When you see or read something new, you add the info to the site, and you’ll get back related thoughts and materials you’ve entered before, to give you some perspective.

That’s a tough pill to swallow though; “everything ever seen, read, learned or thought about” covers rather a lot of material, and it’s rather a lot of work to write it all down, so the ‘payoff’ - the ability to visualize it all, has to be large to even try. With this much info its also difficult to come up with useful visualizations. Still a closed beta, but fortunately there are screencasts to gawk at.

Remember the xkcd comic with the map of web communities? That same kind of interface is what MyHippocampus uses to map your life:

Nifty, and on a technical note, impressively done without flash. You can zoom in and out as if it’s google maps; the more you zoom in, the more details appear. The basics of usability are there as well: simple full-text search at the bottom, and an index ‘glossary’ of sorts as well.

However, I wasn’t convinced this might just work until I saw the ways you can visualize your experiences. For example, I currently don’t track the books I’ve read nor the movies I’ve seen because writing it all down and coming up with interesting visualizations of the data is too much hassle. However, this timeline feature, which can handle as many ‘islands’ (like a tag, really) as you like, seems useful:

The app also tracks where and when entries are made, comes with bookmarklets (think del.icio.us but with a world map visualization representing your tags and your bookmarks), and automatically links any content you focus on by giving you ‘neighbours’ in the dimension of time, location (in real life), location (on the map), and stuff you manually linked.

It’s certainly hip, but will it catch on? I don’t know yet. The biggest problem as I see it is difficulty in importing stuff you’ve already written down; some import wizards to grab your delicious bookmarks and e.g. amazon book lists would be a big help. There’s also no social aspect to speak of; it would be interesting to browse mindmaps of friends or people with similar tastes, for example.

You can see some screencasts here.

I already did a small review of the new Nokia N95 last week, but today I will be going into some more detail about what makes the N95 “tick”. The first day I had my N95, I played around trying to get Jaiku working over GPRS, and then I installed Fring to be able to use Skype over the Wifi. Obviously all this tinkering quickly drained the battery so here is a more detailed overview of “what computers have become”.

Battery Life (+)

One complaint of some reviewers is the battery life of the N95, but both I and another N95 owner noticed that this is probably only an issue in the first week because this is when you are playing around with all the functions. Once you start using the phone as a phone, and only occasionally use the display/video/GPS/wifi capabilities, the battery life is actually very acceptable. For me, even when using a lot of wifi, the battery life ranges from 1 to 1.5 days .

GPS (+/-)

The built-in GPS receiver is what sets the N95 apart from the other Nokia N-series phones. Unfortunately the GPS receiver is of really bad quality, and the antenna is located in the keypad, so for reception you will have to slide open the screen. In the first days I couldn’t manage to get a fix, but I recently noticed that if you stand still under a blue sky, it is able to make a fix on your position within a minute or two. This isn’t quite quick enough to solve my GPS issue, but it is fun.

Amazingly though, once you do have a fix, it really manages to keep track of your position. Even in places (half inside a building for example) where you would not get an initial fix at all. I did notice some inaccuracy here and there but in the end it does it’s job. The software provided is pretty detailed and uses internet (wifi, GPRS, UMTS or other) to download your maps. I manually zoomed in to the London area once and that was enough to never again run out of cached maps. A nice addition is the built-in search engine for finding interesting places (hotels, restaurants, etc) in your current area.

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