Pittsburgh startup YinzCam is getting a little love from Mashable. Very cool idea. It gives sports fans the ability to see different angles/replays on their mobile devices while they’re at the game.
The interesting stat is that when they first rolled it out at a Penguins game at the beginning of the 2009 season, 10 fans tuned in. More recently, 55% of the fans at the game were tuned in.
I think they’re on to something …
Forget the JumboTron — Startup YinzCam Gives Fans Control Over Replays.
Our home had become a disconnected, cacophonous jumble of music-playing gadgets that was making me crazy (or, more accurately, crazier).
We have three full stereo systems (living room, TV room, workout room), a Bose radio knockoff on the porch and an Ubuntu-driven computer playing Internet radio in the dining room.
What I wanted: A network that would allow me to play all of the music on my half-terabyte hard drive in the loft throughout the house, including Internet radio. A critical component of this is the ability to control what’s playing from anywhere in the house. That turned out to be the tough part.
I first downloaded the Rowmote app from the iTunes store. Good little app, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t allow you to pick songs, choose radio stations, etc. After searching around a bit, I stumbled across the much pricier ($24.95) Signal app. They let you try it free (the demo version is fully functional, but “please register” appears for every third title in your media library).
In installed it on the server in the loft that runs my music library. It provides an address on my local network that I can point iPhone, iPad and computer browsers to so they can control the library.
It worked really well. So well that I paid for the app and am happily using it. I’ve bookmarked the address on our phones, computers and iPad to make it easy to call up the control, which is an HTML driven interface that looks like an iPhone. Pretty easy to use. A bit kludgy at times. But coupled with a few AirPort Express Base Stations (about $99 each) I can let my iTunes media library roam the house freely. If I want to listen to something different, my phone, computer or iPad works as a remote to let me sift through my music collection and pick something new.
The main drawback: It won’t allow me to pick the speaker source in the iTunes library in the loft. I have to go up there to dictate which speakers are playing. I solved that by having iTunes play to all the speakers in the house. Since the stereos are off if I’m not listening to them, it really doesn’t matter that the music is being output to all of them. I hear it only on the stereo that’s powered up.
Better living through geekery …
Steve Silberman offers this wonderful tribute to Peter Orlovsky, who died Sunday. Orlovsky was a poet and, more prominently, Allen Ginsberg’s lover for decades. I heard Orlovsky had died but couldn’t find anything Sunday to confirm it with the exception of changes to his Wikipedia entry.
Silberman was no stranger to Ginsberg and Orlovsky, to be sure. He was an apprentice to Ginsberg at the Naropa Institute and offers this wonderful passage in his Orlovsky tribute to put it all in perspective:
“It was Allen’s belief that the best education came not from niggling over line breaks and metaphors in airless workshops, but from living with poets and seeing how their minds worked in ordinary situations. (In an old Hasidic folktale, a young man says he is making a pilgrimage to a renowned rabbi not to discuss Torah, but to watch him tie his bootlaces.)
“One virtue of this approach was that seeing a world-famous poet in his underwear in the morning, turning the pages of The New York Times, tended to strip one of exalted illusions. These Beat Generation icons sweated, gossiped, got crabby about the littlest things, schlepped to the supermarket (except when they had me do it), made clumsy passes at sexy young poets, and had enormous and very fragile egos. In short, they were a mess, but as my Buddhist poet friend Marc Olmsted puts it in his best Burroughsian drawl, ‘It’s Samsara, my dear, we’re all a mess.’”
While Orlovsky wasn’t a critical figure in the Beat movement, I expected a little more attention from the mainstream press. Perhaps the New York Times will run something this week. I guess it’s tough to compete with Gary Coleman and Dennis Hopper …