John Lagomarsino
Video · Photography · Music · Motion Graphics

The most popular post on this blog, by far, has been what I wrote about using Evernote like Instapaper. Well, time has passed, and that post is completely outdated, yet it continues to get hits. Here’s what’s different these days.

First, both Instapaper and Readability have become a lot more useful as standalone tools. Instapaper is supported in just about every reading app on every platform, mobile and web. Both Instapaper and Readbility support really rich Kindle delivery, and really nice rich formatting. And as of last week, both services are free. Personally, I’ve been using Readability to manage my reading list, and I’ve given up on Evernote.

However, I know a lot of you are still looking for a good method. The bookmarklet in my previous post linked Readability’s formatting to Evernote’s storage. Well, it turns out that Evernote has removed the middleman, and created a totally self-contained service called Clearly.

Their website does a nice job explaining it, but in a nutshell, it strips away the formatting from a page, presents it in a nice readable format, and allows you to save this unformatted article to your Evernote account. It even parses multi-page articles to present the whole thing at once. Essentially, it does what my bookmarklet did, but better.

So if you really want to use Evernote as your Read Later list, that’s the way to do it. No more janky javascript, no more hoping Readability still supports that script, and the whole thing is streamlined right into Evernote.

Last week, Netflix announced that it would be spinning off its physical disc rental business and rebranding it as “Qwikster.” A lot of pundits seem to think this is totally crazy, and anti-consumer. Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO, has said multiple times that this move is forward-thinking, and will position the company better in the future. My suspicion (and I’m surprised I haven’t heard this elsewhere) is that this will indeed purposely kill their disc rental business, but it will also bolster their streaming offering pretty drastically.

Netflix has become a behemoth of a service. Blockbuster, their closest competitor in the disc rental space, was driven to Chapter 11, and Redbox isn’t really competing much at all with their kiosks. Other than those two, can anyone even name another disc rental chain? Netflix completely dominates physical rentals, which means that the majority of rental licenses paid to film studios comes from Netflix. In a nutshell, the rental business belongs to Netflix.

I suspect many of Quikster’s subscribers will wind up there just because they were Netflix subscribers. If that service fails, I doubt many will go out and seek a new disc rental option. They’ll learn to embrace streaming instead. This leaves the lion’s share of rental customers leaving physical discs behind altogether.

Then, what do content owners do? If the whole disc rental market tanks completely, there are vast swaths of content that no one can rent. Studios will have to make more of their catalogues available through steaming in order to make any money on those properties at all.

I think Qwikster is a calculated move not just to kill Netflix’s disc rental business, but to kill disc rentals entirely. Reed Hastings is making the bet that without the old-time distraction of physical disc rentals, the studios will be forced to focus on new streaming licenses, and Netflix will be ready and waiting to negotiate them. And that’s great news for consumers.

I read the Bits section of the New York Times every day. I like that they lag behind the minute-by-minute tech news, and take the time to write what are generally “big picture” articles toward the end of a news day. However, I’m seeing more and more sloppy copy editing and generally bad journalism over there. I have to think it’s because Bits is technically a “blog” from the Times, but come on. You’re still the New York Times, and I expect a certain level of writing proficiency.

This recent article really got me going. It’s a fluff piece to begin with; oh boy, there goes that crazy Steve Jobs shooting his mouth off again. But what’s worse is the middle school-level writing. To that end (paying respectful homage to The Detritus Review) let’s read Miguel Helft’s gem together. Blue is the article, red is me.

Update: The article has been updated since I first posted this. The most egregious English errors have been corrected. Notably, “dissed” has also been replaced. This all seems to suggest that The New York Times has a “post now, edit later” policy, which still disturbs me. It disturbs me more that they hire writers who don’t know the difference between “too” and “to.”

Steve Jobs: Our Approach is Better Than Google’s

On Monday, I wrote an article about the competition between Apple’s iPhone and smartphones running Google’s Android. The article discussed some of the advantages and disadvantages of Apple’s vertically-integrated and closed approach and Android’s more open strategy.

A little biased, a few too many strung-together clauses, but I get where you’re going with this, I think.

It concluded by quoting experts and analysts saying that while Android, and perhaps other systems, are likely to do well, Apple has little reason to worry.

Apple declined to comment for the story. But on Monday, Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, took time to address the issue during the company’s fourth quarter earnings conference call.

Ah, so this is an I-told-you-so. I see what you did there! You get a pat on the back for that one, Miguel!

This was unusual, as Mr. Jobs doesn’t typically participate in the company’s earnings calls. But Mr. Jobs said he couldn’t pass the opportunity to drop in for Apple’s first $20 billion quarter.

Mr. Jobs stared by pointing out that Apple sold 14.1 million iPhones during the quarter, a 91 percent surge from a year earlier. Apple sold those smartphones at an even faster pace than the overall market for smartphones.

The “even” in this sentence implies that this is unexpected. I fail to see how this is remarkable, since you’d expect any company beating its competition to fall into this category.

Then he made an impassioned attack on Android and forceful defense of Apple.

“In reality, we think the open versus closed argument is just a smokescreen to try to hide the real issue, which is what’s best for the customer: Fragmented versus integrated,” Mr. Jobs said. “We think Android is very, very fragmented and becoming more fragmented by the day.”

Mr. Jobs noted that major Android manufacturers like HTC and Motorola put their own user interfaces on their devices and that different versions of the operating system with different capabilities are built into different devices, causing headaches for both consumers and application developers. Mr. Jobs said that Android sometimes left users to be the “system integrators.”

Interesting, provocative quotation. I assume you’re going to clarify what Mr. Jobs means by that, right?

“We think this is a huge strength of our approach compared to Google’s,” Mr. Jobs said. “When selling to users who want their devices to just work, we believe integrated will trump fragmented every time.”

Oh, guess not. The “system integrators” part did sound very official and intimidating though. That must be bad for consumers.

Then he added: “We are very committed to the integrated approach, no matter how many times Google tries to characterize it as closed,” he said. “We are confident that it will triumph over Google’s fragmented approach ,[sic] no matter how many times Google tries to characterize it as open.”

Mr. Jobs wasn’t just dissing Google.

The New York Times is now accepting “dissing?”

With a bit less passion, and perhaps a touch of disdain…

So, less passionate, but more disdainful. I’m with you. I think.

With a bit less passion, and perhaps a touch of disdain, he also dismissed Research in Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry.

Oh! That’s what “dissed” means! I wouldn’t know, because I’ve never seen that word printed in the New York Times!

Mr. Jobs noted that the iPhone had beat the BlackBerry…

Clearly no need for a participle there.

Mr. Jobs noted that the iPhone had beat the BlackBerry, which sold 12.1 million handsets in the most recent quarter. “We now passed RIM and I don’t don’t’[sic]see them catching us in the foreseeable future,” he said.

Actually, he didn’t say that. Close, though.

Mr. Jobs said that RIM was now forced to move beyond its comfort zone and attempt to become a software platform.

Right, it’s not like they have their own mobile OS or anything. Sillies!

“RIM has a high mountain a head of them to climb,” he said.

The New York Times: illiterate, or sloppily using text-to-speech software to write blog posts?

Mr. Jobs also had a word about those who want to compete with the iPad in tablets.

As opposed to competing with the iPad in, say, a vat of Jell-O.

He said that while many in the media have said that…

Whoa, did you just say that they just said that some reporters just said–oh, forget it. Someone said whatever you’re about to say.

He said that while many in the media have said that an “avalanche” of tablets are [sic]expected to compete with the iPad soon, he believes only a handful of tablets will be released this year.

Maybe this is splitting hairs, but competing with the iPad and simply being released aren’t really the same thing. But I guess we’ll table that for next week and focus on basic grammar and syntax for now.

He said all are Android-based tablets and are only 7 inches,

Me talk good when talk about tablet and are good with the words.

He said all are Android-based tablets and are only 7 inches, far smaller than the iPad’s 9.7 inch size.

(But really, it’s what you do with it that counts.)

A 7-inch screen, he said, is only 45 percent as big as a 9.7-inch screen, and Apple’s user testing has shown that is too small for a usable tablet.

Uh… huh. You mean it has only 45 percent the area of a 9.7-inch screen, right? Because 7 is 72 percent of 9.7.

“The 7 inch tables are tweeners…

The tables are tweeners? Where did the tables come from? And what’s a tweener?

…to big to compete…

Probably a simple typo. We all do it.

…to big to compete with a smartphone and to small to compete with an iPad,”…

Never mind, must be idiocy after all.

…Mr. Jobs said. Lest there be any doubts about his confidence, he added: “The current crop of 7-inch tablets will be D.O.A.: Dead on arrival.”

And so was the editor, apparently.

[NOTE: This post is now woefully outdated. I've added an up-to-date method for achieving this at this post.]

I’ll come right out and say it, I’m an Evernote junkie. My brain lives in Evernote: To-dos, bookmarks, records, receipts, notes, parking space reminders, beers I like; everything. It’s really great, and runs on every computer I use, my phone, and the web. I can get to it anywhere.

I also spend a large amount of time finding things to read on the Internet, but don’t necessarily have the time to read them when I find them. And even more often, when I want to read them, I have only my iPhone, and intermittent connectivity (commuter train, subway, etc.). For a little while I was using Instapaper to save articles for offline reading, but I had to think ahead and sync the Instapaper app before going off the grid. And frankly, another bookmarking service wasn’t something I was really into at all.

Now, Instapaper does this crazy thing where it magically finds the content of an article and formats it so that sane people can read it, but that wasn’t really enough to get me to keep using it. However, I also knew of another service called Readability which essentially does the same thing, minus the read-it-later aspect. And also, I knew that Evernote comes with a web clipper that shoots the content of a web page into your cloud-brain with a single click in the bookmark bar.

How great would it be if I could reformat articles and send that stripped-down version, with only the relevent content, into Evernote to read later? I’m always syncing Evernote on my phone, and I’ve always got it open when I’m on a computer, so everything should stay in sync really well.

Well, turns out that’s possible. Thanks to some helpful articles (which I of course copied into Evernote), I made a little bookmarklet which Readability-izes the current web page, then clips it to Evernote. Just copy the code below into a new bookmark’s URL field and put it in your shortcut bar. Click it on a page you want to read later, and it’ll pull the article contents, then launch the Evernote clipper (you need to install that first), and clip it.

[codesyntax lang="javascript" lines="no"]

javascript:function%20enClip(){EN_CLIP_HOST=%27http://www.evernote.com%27;try{var%20x=document.createElement(%27SCRIPT%27);x.type=%27text/javascript%27;x.src=EN_CLIP_HOST+%27/public/bookmarkClipper.js?%27+(new%20Date().getTime()/100000);document.getElementsByTagName(%27head%27)[0].appendChild(x);}catch(e){location.href=EN_CLIP_HOST+%27/clip.action?url=%27+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+%27&title=%27+encodeURIComponent(document.title);}}(function(){readConvertLinksToFootnotes=false;readStyle='style-ebook';readSize='size-small';readMargin='margin-wide';_readability_script=document.createElement('script');_readability_script.type='text/javascript';_readability_script.src='http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/js/readability.js?x='+(Math.random());document.documentElement.appendChild(_readability_script);_readability_css=document.createElement('link');_readability_css.rel='stylesheet';_readability_css.href='http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/css/readability.css';_readability_css.type='text/css';_readability_css.media='all';document.documentElement.appendChild(_readability_css);_readability_print_css=document.createElement('link');_readability_print_css.rel='stylesheet';_readability_print_css.href='http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/css/readability-print.css';_readability_print_css.media='print';_readability_print_css.type='text/css';document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(_readability_print_css);})();function%20timedCount()%20{if(document.readyState%20==%20%27complete%27){t=setTimeout(%22enClip()%22,600);}}timedCount();

[/codesyntax]

Some caveats though: be sure to turn off the Evernote clipper’s formatting, or you’ll actually wind up with a carbon-copy of the Readability page, with no wrapping text, and some colors and fonts that won’t look so good on, say, a phone. But once you sort that out, you’ve got yourself an Instapaper alternative that integrates with everything else in Evernote.

Disclaimer: this post is geeky and technical. Turn back now if you find this off-putting.

I have lots and lots of home videos. We’re talking hundreds of hours. As time goes on, though, I’m worried that these tapes will deteriorate and I won’t be able to watch them in five or ten years. So, I’ve made it my mission recently to start archiving these things digitally, not just to preserve them, but so my family can watch them fairly easily and actually use these videos as memories.

This is harder than you might even think. My family’s videos span four formats: VHS-C (those chunky little versions of VHS that held about 20 minutes each), Analog 8mm, Digital8 (Sony’s proprietary DV format), and MiniDV.  I’m most concerned about the Digital8 tapes; Sony was the only company to produce or support them, and they’ve moved on now. This means that when the Digital8 decks of the world stop working, my tapes are useless. So, I’m using our aging Digital8 camcorder to start archiving in the mid-nineties since these seem to be the most at risk.

I had to spend a lot of time considering formats for the archive. Native DV video takes up about 14 GB/hour, and at about 300-400 hours of video, I wasn’t ready to commit that much space to the home videos (especially considering we’ll be keeping a backup copy of the data as well). Saving the video in some kind of MPEG2 DVD format seemed silly; DVD is on the way out, and there are better codecs now anyway. What I finally settled on was MP4 files encoded in H.264 (incidentally, the files should be ready to dump onto Blu-Ray without transcoding). True, H.264 is a delivery codec, not an archival or editing one, but I tested out the durability of my settings by recompressing the MP4 files as MPEG-2 for DVD, and there was very little noticeable degradation in the output. I’m happy with my footage being able to survive one generation of recompression.

I’m keeping the video in its native resolution of 720 x 480 interlaced. This presents its own problems, namely that computers and progressive-scan equipment will have to deinterlace and squish the video slightly in order to play the clips back correctly. But in the interest of flexibility in conversion years down the line, this seemed like a good compromise between space, viewability, and quality.

On the subject of audio, it turns out sync is a huge issue when capturing consumer home videos, especially from analog sources. I’m using the Digital8 deck to do the A/D conversion from 8mm, and apparently the audio is passed at 12-bit, 32 kHz. Almost all of my Digital8 and MiniDV footage was also recorded at this setting, apparently. Editing software hates this, and the audio falls out of sync with the picture almost every time. So I’m forced to let Final Cut upsample the audio before touching the captured footage at all.

From there, I’m breaking each tape into days or events (right in Compressor) and saving the MP4 files in the format “YYYY-MM-DD_DescriptionHere.mp4″. I figure even if networked playback systems can’t deal with metadata, this will at least let us sort the events chronologically, and get a vague idea of what we’re looking for.

It’ll be interesting to see if what I’m doing is actually as future-proof as I hope it is. It’s frustrating to think that digital video, perfect copies of bits and bytes, may be susceptible to obsolescence down the line. But we’ll still have the tapes as a line of last defense, and as long as I don’t kill the playback equipment over the course of the project, we’ll never have to use it (and degrade it) again. The process seems ridiculous, but it’s already paying off. As David Pogue of the NY Times coincidentally wrote recently, I’m really enjoying watching the tapes as they’re capturing. And that’s the kind of experience I hope to make possible years from now by having this archive at our fingertips.

I just got my hands on Logic Pro 9, which has all kinds of killer features. In the last 36 hours alone, I’ve been able to use almost all of them to improve tracks I’ve been working on. The most useful (and frankly, incredible) new tool is called FlexTime, and among other things, it can quantize audio. Incredible to watch.

But that’s not what I’m writing about.  No, I’m writing about what happened when I first opened the box.  Inside the packaging theres a smaller box which contains all the installation discs for the various components of Logic Studio, and the bundled bonus content.  And sitting right on top of all those discs, was one labeled “Final Cut Pro.”  I kid you not.

It’s not even like this disc looked similar.  Final Cut comes on white-colored discs, Logic on black.  It was the opposite color.  I was distressed at first, so I decided to pop it into the computer just to see how bad a mistake this was.  Confusingly, the software on the disc was indeed Logic Pro 9.  Somehow in manufacturing, they printed this disc with the Final Cut branding, apparently.  So now I’ll own a legitimate install disc that I had to label with a sharpie.

Pictures of all this after the break. (more…)

Well, well, well. If you’re reading this on johnlago.com, you’ve probably noticed the new look around here. I chose to upgrade because the old theme was really just a blog, where this site should really be more about, well, me. This design puts emphasis on the static information, and moves the blog to the periphery, where it should be. What do you think? Does it do the job? Is it as attractive as I think it is?

In other news, I’m now involved in the exciting production of Jon Fuller’s new album. I’m playing producer/engineer, and it’s quite the undertaking. So far we’ve got piano and bass, with a drum session tomorrow. Check out his site for more up-to-date blogging about the project.

Just FYI, this site may be going a little crazy for an hour or so. I’m rolling out an entirely new theme (yay!), and I’ll need to do some tweaking on the live site to make it look right. Sorry for any inconvenience!