Academic Earth

I just discovered the website Academic Earth and I am completely enthralled. This is the reason the Internet exists. If you haven’t discovered it, you should see what it’s about. Academic Earth is a website that brings together videos of college lectures and courses offered by some of the top institutions in the country. I’m not in school anymore, but I still love to learn stuff. These videos are seriously cool.

A couple years ago a few schools (notably Stanford) started recording lectures and posting them online. Initially they were intended to be supplemental materials for students, but later they were made available to the public. Some of these videos have been available through iTunes as podcasts, but not all schools do that. The reason I like Academic Earth is that it pulls them all in once place so I can browse through and find the interesting topics I like.

And there are quite a few topics — the site is still growing, but it already has 60 full courses with a broad range of subjects and speakers. And these aren’t just boring old history classes. You can find those too, but many of the topics are incredibly relevant today. Want to hear Pulitzer Prize-winner Thomas Friedman talk about how the world is flat?

NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman speaks at MIT.

Wondering how the financial crisis started? Interested in studying the Old Testament? Want to know how to start your own business? Wish you knew the legal issues around copyright and file sharing? Curious about how Pluto lost its planet status? Look no further. It’s easy to find the good stuff, too. Users and editors grade the videos on an A-F scale, so you don’t get stuck watching a snoozer of a lecture.

I take my hat off to Richard Ludlow, the guy who started up Academic Earth. He apparently had trouble in a linear algebra course when he was at Yale, but found helpful video lectures online from an MIT professor. Now his site is sharing the love to the rest of us. I can definitely see myself using this site regularly. And Academic Earth lets you watch the videos in your browser or download them for later viewing on you computer or iPod.

I seriously think Academic Earth is the best thing I’ve seen online since I discovered Hulu. Check it out when you get a chance. You may get sucked in for a few hours, but unlike just about everything else online, it’s good for your brain.

Rockbox

Last September Rockbox 3.0 was released, which reminded me to post a review on this great open source project. Rockbox is an alternative firmware available for many popular portable media players, like many iPod models, Archos, iriver, and Sandisk Sansa. It seems like it would be hard to get it to work, but I found it to be surprisingly easy, and I really like the Rockbox interface. The Rockbox team released version 3.1 just before Christmas with some nice new features, so now is a great time to take your old media player and make it more useful than ever.

Using the Rockbox firmware opens up a whole new set of options for your media player, including a more robust file management system, expansive audio format support, MPEG video, and advanced sound features like an equalizer, crossfeed, advanced fade, etc. Rockbox has tons of skins, so you can make it look like anything you want. The open source community has produced hundreds of great skins, or you could create your own. With Rockbox you don’t have to use any proprietary program to load music, video, or pictures onto your player, which makes it cross-platform friendly. The project also boasts wide language support, a hallmark of open source projects.

A sample screenshot of Rockbox on an iPod Video.

Getting started with Rockbox was surprisingly easy. After downloading the most recent version I skimmed through the installation portion of the Rockbox. The manual is huge, but you only need to read a couple pages to learn how to install Rockbox on your player. The installation essentially involves moving a few files and folders to the root directory of your player, and that’s that. This process is easiliy reversible (you just delete the specific file and folder), so you can always switch back. Even better, you can boot in Rockbox or the original firmware of your player by holding down a button when you start up. This “dual-boot” feature is brilliant, and it made me feel confident in switching to Rockbox.

Once you start using Rockbox you realize that your media player is really just a small computer. When you view the files in a traditional folder view, it isn’t much different than how you would view or access files on your home computer. As if to prove the point, Rockbox can even play a mobile version of the classic first-person-shooter video game Doom. No joke!

The Rockbox project doesnt’ support every player, and it has a few weaknesses. You will get shorter battery life when using Rockbox, and in my experience the FM tuner on my Sandisk Sansa got better reception using the original firmware. Still, I liked using Rockbox immensely, and I recommend it to anyone looking to get more use out of their player. Particularly if you got a new mp3 player for Christmas, this is a good time to give Rockbox a try on your old device.

Songbird 1.0

Recently the cross-platform music player Songbird released its milestone version 1.0.  Songbird’s aim is to provide a complete music experience. It boasts a built-in browser (based on Mozilla technology), a media-focused download manager, a library importer (handy for iTunes libraries), ShouCast and Last.fm scrobbling integration, and support for almost every audio format. Best of all, as an open-source project, Songbird is freely extensible, so you can install add-ons that add new functionality, like iPod support, album art management, Hype Machine integration, skins, etc. I’ve been following the project for a couple years now, and Songbird 1.0 is definitely worth a look.

Songbird takes a similar approach to media functionality as iTunes, throwing in as many features as they could manage. The layout and format are reminiscent of iTunes, which most users will appreciate. It is designed to be your one-stop shop to find, listen to, and manage your music. But Songbird’s open principles are a far cry from Apple’s proprietary media philosophy.

Using Songbird is pretty easy. It’s a snap to create smart playlists, add album art, or edit tags. But where Songbird excels is finding new music. For example, you can integrate the SeeqPod music search engine into the program, letting you search for and download tunes from the web with just a couple clicks. Several other music search engines (like Skreemr) are also included in the search bar. The many Songbird add-ons also provide great album art management, song lyrics, artist bios, YouTube videos, and concert ticket information.

The Songbird project is still relatively new. Version 1.0 represents a much more mature program, with better memory management, file support, and stability.  This is due in part to the use of GStreamer on the back end. Users should be warned, however, that Songbird can still be a memory hog. It has gotten a lot better since the previous 0.7 release, but in my opinion this is where Songbird has the most room for improvement.

New add-ons for Songbird 1.0 are constantly released by the community, so the program will only become more useful. Even if you don’t use it as your primary music player, you should give Songbird’s complete music experience a try.

Songbird 1.0 – http://www.getsongbird.com/

Dropbox

In mid-September the file sync-and-store service Dropbox came out of private beta, boasting smooth file synchronization between computers and across platforms. I gave it a try on Windows and Ubuntu Linux, and I was quite impressed by what I found.

Dropbox is part online storage, part data back-up, part file-sharing, and part data synchronization. After you install the free program, the Dropbox icon appears in your system tray. Click on the icon to open the “My Dropbox” folder. All the contents of this folder are automatically synchronized with the Dropbox servers and any other computer you have Dropbox installed. The files in that folder are then available on your other computers or through the Dropbox website. The folder acts like any other folder on your computer, and it also shows up in your My Documents or Home folder.

As soon as you drag and drop a file to the Dropbox folder, it will show up on your other computer or online with a loading icon next to it, indicating that the sync is in process. As soon as the green check mark appears beside the file, it is all synchronized. I tried this syncing process out with a few dozen files, both small and big, and it worked seamlessly. Even very large files transferred quickly and smoothly, both on my Windows machine and on my Linux computer.

The free Dropbox service syncs up to 2GB of data, and the company plans on offering larger storage for a fee. There is no limit to file size in the Dropbox client, although files transferred through the web are capped at 350MB.

Dropbox supports version history

Dropbox is more than simple online storage, however. If you accidentally alter or delete a file, you can recover previous versions because it tracks all the changes made to the files. Dropbox also has some file-sharing capabilities: if you create a folder and share it with another Dropbox user, all the files in that folder are synced to all the users. You determine which files stay private and which can be shared. You can also make files publicly available by putting them in the public folder in My Dropbox. There is also a special Photos folder in My Dropbox that displays photos in a gallery. You can send a link to anyone so they can see that gallery on the Dropbox website.

Overall, I am quite impressed with Dropbox. It might not be the best data back-up solution for everyone because you have to keep all the files in the My Dropbox folder. But it has some great sharing features, and being able to sync files across Windows, Mac, and Linux is huge. For people who have multiple computers with different operating system, Dropbox might be just the thing for you.