Well we were thinking of making some new video podcasts so today we stopped by the Apple
store in downtown San Francisco to get some ideas from Phillip Torrone at Make.

Actually Garrett and I were supposed be there together but Garrett and I got lost while my car
ran out of gas on the way there… (next time, we will have to take one car!)

Here’s the summary of Podcast HOWTO:

• Use GarageBand to create enhanced mp4s.
• Using an enhanced podcast allows you to do more such as putting a clickable hyperlink to your
  website.
• Make easy to navigate menus for different parts of the podcast
• Interactive PDFs can be good, such as 3D images that can only be opened with latest versions
  of Adobe reader but really cool. Check out the spud gun pdf again if haven’t yet and click
  on Explode and Implode and you can move it around like that!

We did get to show Phillip our golf POV with “makezine” on it, so hopefully we will get hands on
one of those soon and get to hack it a little. Above is picture of the Phillip’s version of the MP3
player. We are going to try to put the LCDs and some more hacks for it.

I think Phillip will have a more detailed instructions on Podcasting at Make blog…
We did get to talk about how Google ads are not really relevent anymore, maybe people need to
start using video sites such as metacafe, blip.tv, revver, etc… to make some revenue.

In all, we did learn a lot from Phillip about podcasting and plan to implement a lot of what he had
to say. Watch out for Zedomax Podcast coming soon! Hey thanks Phillip, that was great info,
something we needed to get off our slow podcast start…
We definitely need to get our hands on an ipod… maybe I can borrow my dad’s for now…

Here’s a little secret video we took which isn’t much but next time you should goto the show
if you want to learn about podcasting

Check out this tagger that will allow you to put technorati tags easily to your website or blog.
I typed in some cool words and look what I got in the above screenshot.
Thanks J for the submission!

J says,

I recently released an online tool that you and your readers might find useful.
The name of this tool is “Turbo Tagger”, and it’s a convenient all-in-one tool that allows users to instantly generate Technorati tags as they type in their chosen tag names. Users can even ping Technorati once they’re done creating their tags.

Many bloggers are unable to use plugins due to their blogging platforms, so I hope Turbo Tagger will serve as a useful alternative.

Here’s a cool search engine that searches all type of tags on the world wide web for your image,
video, audio, web, etc…etc… Thanks Veerendra for the info!~

Veerendra Shivhare says, “Tagbulb offers a mashup of search engines for tags allowing searches against just about any web 2.0 site you can think of. You can search via tag using services like Youtube, Flickr, Technorati, 43Things, and many of their competitors. “

Check out Macworld and Apple Store this week in San Francisco! We might be there to exchange
some of our DIY projects for something at the Make Store if that works…hehe…anyways,
we will make sure to take some photos if we do go! Cool, they got some stuff about rss and
podcasting so we might have to go since we are thinking about Zedomax technology video podcasts,
which are on the way… yipee!

Cool, the Macworld show is at Moscone center, my friend Markus works there, he’s probably
setting it up right now!  My favorite place for shows since it’s not too far away.
Be sure to check Make out this week and tell them Zedomax guys told them to go!

Some folks from MAKE will be at Macworld & the Apple store this week, stop by and say hi –

Apple store - San Francisco: Mark Frauenfelder, Rule The Web
Wednesday, January 10th, 2007 from 1:30 PM - 2:30 PM
Link & map.

MacWorld - O’Reilly - Booth S2112, Phillip Torrone, Podcasting
Thursday - January 11, 2007 - 5:00 pm
Link & More.

Apple store - San Francisco: Podcasting, Phillip Torrone, Podcasting
Friday - January 12, 2007 from 3:00 PM to 4:30 PM
Link & map

My talks will be on using RSS 2.0 for making and sending out: Enhanced podcasts, videos, audio, sewing patterns, magazines, PDFs, 3D models and more - along with a peek of how we produce our content @ MAKE.

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Here’s a cool binary clock DIY. Click here for Finished product and schematics.

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Here’s a cool AJAX plugin for Wordpress.
We are going to try to plug it into Zedomax today,
maybe it will speed up things a little.

If you are curious what AJAX is,
it’s:

shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is a web development technique for creating interactive web applications. The intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user makes a change. This is meant to increase the web page’s interactivity, speed, and usability.

Check out the full definition of AJAX on wikipedia.

Check out Zedomax tech blog feeds and rss aggregators.

With tech blog feeds, you can read a bunch of tech blog feeds in text in one page.

With rss aggregator, you can read each article of tech blog feeds in one page.

We are not exactly sure what to do with it, but we are spidering some sites for rss every hour!
If you want your tech blog to be added, simply email max@zedomax.com!

Notice the flags of different countries on top of our website? Yes, these buttons translate
the pages into your language. Soon, we will have up to 14 lanuages support translation.
Although the translator does not translate like a real human being, it does okay for being
a machine. Our web traffic jumped about 5 times as far as search keywords on google.
So the bottom line is, if you have a wordpress blog, we recommend this cool plugin from
Angsuman. He’s been giving us some updates and fixes every now and then which is cool.
Now 40% of our web traffic comes from all over the world.  Whereas before, it only came
from the US.  The translator doesn’t just translate your blog pages, it also does a SEO, search
engine optimization.
Check it out here

Angsuman’s Translator Plugin Pro now supports 14 languages (English, ) as base language of the blog in version 4.0 (currently in testing). Previously it supported only English as the base language of the blog. Not only that, in version 4.0, it also provides translation for each these 14 languages to 13 other languages and with choice of at most three translation engines for each languages pair and with multiple modes of translation.Note: Angsuman’s Translator Plugin Pro provides automatic machine translation of your blog in fourteen different languages - German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Dutch, Greek, Russian, Swedish and Chinese. It is search engine optimized, supports WordPress widgets, uses nice permalinks, super-fast (cacheable), scalable and lot more.

Here’s a cool server status board you can make using Triklits, which are color changing LED strings.

In September, I read a post on one of my favorite blogs about these Triklits programmable LED light strings and I instantly fell in love with them. I ordered two strands as well as the USB interface card and had a ball making these things come to life. After fiddling with them for a couple of weeks, I began to build this automated statusboard to help me monitor systems for me and my clients. The board updates every 60 seconds and displays information from several different sources including my Nagios installation, my source code repository, a bug tracking database, and a soon-to-be-implemented build server. I’m still working on the Perl scripts that I use to query the different sources, but when I’m done, I’ll post the source code here.  This was a fun one to hack at last weekend!

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