I’m using SageTV to timeshift favorite TV network programing. Since I am on the road 50% of the time, I need to spaceshift this video as well. FTP will deliver the entire file to a portable device but here is an alternative solution: ORB live streams the media over the internet. You need a broadband connection and windows media player. If you have a desktop, laptop, PDA, or Smartphone you are good to go. Here is a demo if you can suffer through a home movie. No worries it’s a 6 minute short film. [On location in Maine]

A newspaper article today describes the behavior, that of using some one’s bandwidth, as akin to reading someone else’s newspaper over their shoulder. Ethical or not, WiFi makes this practice easy and many out of town road warriors have begun to depend on its availability. Experts estimate that only 30 percent of all WiFi installations have been secured. This means that most wireless access point are free (or assumed by many of us to be). Internet security does have a learning curve. An excellent source to become enlightened is Richard Gibson’s Security Now website. He features a weekly 35 minute podcast that explains the elegant design of inter networking at the same time pointing out, for example, a now obvious omission: the total absence of security on your Ethernet (LAN). The architects of the net never foresaw the need for security on your local area network. They assumed that anyone in your household or on the office LAN would be trustworthy. Read: There isNO inherant security built in, nada, zip, zilch! A WiFi access point is configured, by default (go figure), as public. It is therefore wide open and subject to eavesdropping aka man in the middle. The only way to lock down your network is to keep the unworthy out. Take an hour and become informed. Activate the WPA encryption for your router. Piggybackers know your network ID. It broadcasts the universal piggyback invitation code signal: Linksys 😉

Apple’s release of the iPod w/video created a media buzz. Now you can download selected ABC-Disney network programing via the iTunes store for a moderate fee of $1.99 per episode. Apple is providing a way for the mainstream to capture and carry it anywhere and as simply as possible.

If you don’t own the latest and greatest iPod (or wish to fork over the download fees) there is another way! The first step is to record a TV program. VHS tape is so old tech. TiVo, SageTV, or BeyondTV are great PC TV enhancement PVR choices allowing you to save your show for later viewing at your convenience. Your recording is stored on your PC’s hard drive as a file. That file, as you might imagine, is huuuuuge. The second step then is to make it portable. You could burn it to a DVD… Better still, use a utility called DivX, which will reduce the size of that file using an compression codec (much like your music files are shrunk to mp3 format). An hour long television video at 1.9 Gigibytes can be reduced in size to 112 MB. This is small enough that you don’t need to burn it to a DVD or CD. It will fit on your keychain flash memory. Step 3: Transfer your file to your handheld PDA viewer. Use this utility called Core Pocket Media Player – TCPMP which recognizes the DivX format for viewing. Done! Enjoy the show.

Legacy software applications such as the Microsoft Office are about to go obsolete. AJAX, RSS and other new programing techniques have made it possible to provide online document creation with web based applications. If you use Google’s Gmail than you’ve already experienced AJAX, which is used for spell check and contact addressing. Google Maps, another instance. Delay or lag is significantly reduced as you click and drag map objects in your browser. Internet connectivity allows for seamless publishing (public or private), the emailing of, blogging and or news feed syndication of documents. Now add the biggest plus inherent in this online scheme: collaboration. Writely is a striking feature rich adaptation handling WORD type documents. Backpack is an idea for a very slick personal organizer. You no longer have to own the desktop app or keep buying the upgrades. The traditional $oftware model is about to undergo a transformation.