My interest in MythTV has also sparked my interest in TV over the Internet. Many companies offer it “secretly”, for example movies on demand from cable operators in the UK are actually streamed over the Internet and loads offer small chunks of it. But are there any companies actually transmitting top content “live” over the Internet (free or subscription)? If it’s transmitted live (i.e. everyone receives the same thing at the same time), bandwidth some of the possible bandwidth problems can be mitigated with things like IP multicasting. And if you do have something like MythTV recording it for you the problem of people not wanting to see things at the same time go away too. Well to answer the question (there was one), yes. Unfortunately for the most part they aren’t the big channels, but there are quite a few for niche areas and some countries even make their government subsidised national station available.

The first site I found for this was wwITV. They list quite a few live channels and loads of sites that offer clips. But unfortunately many of them are out of date and just return 404s. An alternative for sources of web television is tVadio. They’re newer and don’t have as much (and seem far less international) but at least the stuff they list actually exists and is of a reasonable quality (well whether you like the actual transmitted content of the channels is up to you :P). The sites listed though still only represent baby steps on the path towards true Internet television.

There’s a new blog entry about the overhauled gang system in EVE Online. It’s basically gone all hierarchical.

You can still create gangs as normal, but they no longer receive gang bonuses. To get the bonus the gang must be upgraded to a fleet. A fleet contains wings, wings contain squadrons and squadrons contain members. And each level has commanders. And all the commanders give gang bonuses (meaning a player can get a bonus from all three of his superiors).

Oh, and the first half of Kali now has a name: Revelations.

Well after taking a little break from EVE Online (damned real life getting in the way again :P), I’m back in. And although I haven’t been playing for a couple of weeks, since this is EVE Online I’ve been able to keep my skills ticking over :)

Of course when the JETA counter reaches zero (that would be Julia ETA - cute eh?) I’ll have another two week break. But I have a skill that needs 16 days to train so I’m prepared.

PayPerPost are a fairly new company offering yet another revenue stream for bloggers (although for most blogs the existing ones probably aren’t earth shattering). This one’s a lot more controversial on the surface however. You get paid to write content about something specific. And you get paid quite a lot (at least in blogging revenue terms), usually about $5 per post. It has however pissed quite a few people off.

Jason, CEO of Weblogs seems to be one of the loudest. I’m going to take the wimpy way out and simply say it’s a tool with potential, that can be abused. But in the long run that’s not a problem for the blogosphere. If you destroy your own integrity by blatantly posting ads instead of actual content you will lose out as surely as if you filled the page with conventional advertising. If you don’t annoy your readers however, you will be fine. In this case it means choosing “opportunities” (that’s what PPP call them) that are actually relevant. That’s how Google AdSense came to be accepted, remember?

Well it seems despite the massive market share (approaching monopoly status in certain markets), Microsoft are realising that working with other companies can actually be a good thing. Windows Live Messenger’s interoperability with Yahoo! Messenger is a small step, their latest announcement is much bigger.

Ron Hovsepian and Steve Ballmer take the stage together to announce a new collaborative relationship between Novell and Microsoft.

Apparently the deal involves some patent sharing, setting up a research team to work on improved virtualization and Microsoft indirectly selling Novell support to it’s customers who also have Linux servers. Read about the whole deal on Novell’s website.

I’m not entirely sure why you’d want to - I mean I can’t imagine what the controls are like for instance - but you can now get Doom for your iPod.

Unfortunately it requires you to install iPod Linux making an unsuitable option for more people. But I think it’s one of these things that more impressive than practical from the beginning…

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The following search box will return results emphasising language learning resources.

Google just launched a clever new custom search thing.

The idea is for people to create their own “custom” search engines that automatically give weight to certain sites, restrict others and silently append search terms therefore improving accuracy for niche topics. For example imagine an ornithologist searching for “a pair of great tits”.

So, I’ve created an engine for finding language learning resources. And it’s surprisingly good.

Internet Explorer 7, which will be pushed to users in an almost forced manner shortly, will use ClearType by default. ClearType essentially uses a clever technique called sub-pixel rendering to provide clearer text at low resolutions. Like anti-aliasing, another technology to achieve similar results, it can make things look blurry but on the whole it looks okay.

One of the side effects is that vertical lines get a coloured “halo” which can be a little off putting. On the whole you get used to it, but after leaving it on for a while I noticed something: the problem is essentially a side effect of using “high readability” fonts like Verdana. Verdana was designed to be readable at small sizes and such has a lot of straight lines (since curves either look dodgy or need anti-aliasing at small sizes). These straight lines (specifically vertical ones) are the ones that have the most pronounced halos. Use fancy curvy fonts (even if it’s just a little) and the problem is greatly diminished.