Shirley Shor’s Art on the Celebrity Apprentice

Check out Shirley’s art on Trump’s the Celebrity Apprentice TV show. One of the two competing teams job was to sell her art and they did pretty well. The episode aired yesterday (3/6/08) on NBC. It is going to be rebroadcasted again this weekend and is available online for watching here: http://www.nbc.com/The_Celebrity_Apprentice/video/episodes.shtml (Play Episode 710).

Here’s a link to some of the art works that you can see in the episode: http://shirleyshor.com/shirley/intro.htm .
It is nice to see computer generated new media art on prime-time TV. We are already getting pretty funny emails out of the blue with questions about ‘moving canvases’ art

New contact information

If you are trying to reach me via e mail then please use aviveyal07 at gmail.

Vista Windows Explorer Tabbed Browsing

Arguably, tabbed Internet browser was the greatest innovation introduced by FireFox and ‘borrowed’ by Internet Explorer. Tabbed browsing saves us from juggling multiple browser windows around the desktop. So, why do we still need to juggle around non-Internet browser windows all day in Vista (OS X is not much better in this area)?

Most Vista users probably waste many minutes every day doing this, at least I do… Won’t tabbed browsing firefox-style in Vista be a cool thing? I was thinking about writing a tabbed-browsing add-on to Vista to solve this problem but I found an adequate free implementation that gets the job done.

The free software is called QTTabBar and as far as I can tell it is safe to use. After installing and restarting Windows Explorer, enable the CTRL+N shortcut to start a new tab. You can move between tabs by clicking CTRL+TAB. hitting Windows key+E will not start a new explorer window but will rather open ‘my computer’ as a new tab! Let’s hope MS adds tabbed browsing to Vista in SP 2 but for those of us who need to start saving time now and must use Vista, QTTabBar is a must-have Vista software. If you like QTTabBar please donate to its author. I’m not affiliated with QTTabBar in anyway.

One year flashback: Sony saves Grouper to create Crackle

From Crackle: Crackle Presents…

New Shirley & Aviv Art Projects Videos

http://www.motionbox.com/playlist/show/ec9cddb01b1ee261?order=date

The Magic of WikiPedia

It is really fun to watch how the WikiPedia Grouper Network entry is evolving.

Switching to Mac from Vista

Yes! I’ve finally made the switch back to the light side of the force. I’ve been using and writing software for Macs since the Mac Plus in 1986. I switched to use PCs when Windows 95 came out as I saw that the market for independent software developers on the Mac platform was shrinking and the PC installed base and software industry was rapidly growing. Eventually, I ended up working for Microsoft as a software developer on Windows desktop software applications in the late 90s’.

Fast forwarding to 2007…. I was getting very frustrated with Vista on several of my PCs and laptops on a daily basis to a point that I stopped enjoying working on computers. On a clean Vista Pro install with just IE, Outlook and Office on strong Dell workstations and on a Vaio laptop, I kept getting hangs and crashes left and right. I now run Vista using the excellent Parallels Desktop for Mac software. It is worth every penny. See: http://www.parallels.com/en/products/desktop/ . With 4GB of RAM on a 2.4ghz Intel core 2 duo MacBook Pro laptop, I get very decent performance from Vista running virtually in Parallels, in full-screen mode it is easy to forget that you are not running Vista natively, so if I need to use word or powerpoint I just switch back to the dark side virtually on Parallels and if Vista hangs crashes I just quickly restore the virtual machine to a previous state while I keep working on my Mac apps.

OS X works great for me so far. It is very clean, elegant and smooth and I have none of the issues I had with Vista. OS X is bringing the joy of Personal Computers back to my daily work and play. Thanks for AmitZohar for showing me the light on his last visit from Hawaii to San Francisco

DailyLit – An Internet startup with a noble cause

I’ve recently stumbled upon a new Internet service called DailyLit http://dailylit.com . Millions of people worldwide who use Computers, PDAs and Smart Phones spend way too much time on email and not enough time reading books.
DailyLit brings literature to email and to mobile devices. It allows you to subscribe to books online and have these sent in chunks to your email inbox on a daily basis for a daily dose of lit reading. Perfect for folks who use public transportation to commute and have a smart phone. This is an interesting alternative to e-book readers as it allows people to use their current mobile email devices as digital books and not carry yet another gizmo. DailyLit idea is one of those ideas that sound trivial after you hear them because it makes so much sense, but it is brilliant nevertheless in its simplicity and usefulness.
Many of the books on DailyLit come from open-content Internet book archives such as the Gutenberg that was with us from the first days of the Internet. Thousands of free classics in the public domain are available on the Internet in ascii format. The problem with these books is that it is all too easy to lose where you have stopped reading and therefore a pain to resume reading.

When I’m reading an asccii book, I enter a special text string where I stopped reading using a word processor, save the string with the text, and search for it again to find where I stopped when I want to start reading again… Needless to say that is a quite dumb and error prone method to read digital books and many people will not even bother with these kinds of hassles. DailyLit overcomes this problem by managing the book parts for readers and by pushing them to readers’ computers and phones sequentially.

I presume that DailyLit will start offering subscription plans for non-free books in the near future.

DailyList.com is also very cleverly designed. I wish more sites that I use will use its design principles: very light use of graphics, very fast to load, friendly short permanent URLs everywhere, a very clear value preposition and messaging, a nicely done books directory and search, there’s a blog and forums and very few barriers to start using the service – you can subscribe to books without creating an account with the service but you will want to create an account to participate in the forums and manage your subscriptions once you are an active user…

I didn’t have a chance to play around with DailyLit RSS books delivery method yet but I’m sure that I’m going to have fun with it soon…

It will be interesting to see how DailyList evolves in the near future. It claims 100K subscriptions on its blog – an impressive number. Good luck DailyLit – making moeny by getting people to read more books is definitely a noble cause…

It is also nice to see that there’s still innovation around books in this age of Internet video everywhere.

Beware the Tapeless Camcorder…

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/20/technology/circuits/20pogue.html

New Approaches to Video Editing

I recently came across two interesting startups in the video editing area. Kaltura http://kaltura.com  lets a group of people edit a video clip together online using web-based video editing tools using uploaded photos, videos and audio clips. StudioNow http://studionow.com lets you to have professional video editors edit a video for you. You upload your photos and videos to the web site, paid video editors create a final video clip from your media and you pay for the final video if you like it. Both concepts are interesting and each one will appeal to a different kind of people with video content. StudioNow will appeal to people who shoot videos of their friends and family and don’t want to get involved in digital video editing (desktop or web-based) and Kaltura will appeal for more active and sophisticated users who are savvy and passionate enough to use web-based video editing tools to create video projects together online. It will be interesting to see how both of these companies evolve over the next few months.