Matthew Rutledge's Blog Space

Net Neutrality and Freedom of Choice

mattrutledge — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 14:37:21 +0000

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New legislation proposed by Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.)could strengthen net neutrality rules and offer consumers more protection against censorship of the information and services they are able to consume. Currently, as it stands, service…

SOTU Address Responses Miss Their Marks

mattrutledge — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 14:37:18 +0000

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The simpler of the two responses was the shorter Tea Party response given by Michele Backmann. She correctly states that the unemployment rate has increased but falsely attributes this to current trends in employment. Not only has the stimulus…

State of the Union is a move to the center

mattrutledge — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 14:37:15 +0000

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Obama's State of the Union Address left one with a feeling that he was quickly trying to become the centrist president that he ran as in 2008. He laid out a plan for the future, while selling the accomplishments of the past 2 years as not…

Health Care Reform Myths

mattrutledge — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 14:37:08 +0000

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Everyone will be mandated to meet minimum coverage requirements or pay a penalty.   The idea of an individual mandate to carry minimal coverage is neither new, nor Democratic in origin. The concept looks at the core principle of how insurance…

The State of Union address tonight has lots of questions to answer

mattrutledge — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 14:37:01 +0000

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With this address to the joint session of congress, a number of likely topics will come up. Typically there is a boost in approval ratings for a president after this speech, and with the most recent Gallop Poll showing approval ratings near 50%,…

iRig and AmpliTube Rock You

Chris Pirillo — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 13:34:06 +0000

iRig and AmpliTube Rock You is a post from Chris Pirillo

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This is a guest post written by Imei Hsu.

My first band was an all-girl band that didn’t need a keyboardist (my first musical instrument of choice), just a second electric guitarist and substitute bass player. Instead of passing me over for the audition, they stuck a guitar in my hands, handed me a lyric sheet with chord progressions, and asked me to give it a go. I did, and I got the part. Good thing I knew a few standard chords on the guitar. Songwriting and practice times used to take forever, mostly because we had to haul in our own equipment (including quarter-inch cables, stomp pedals, mics and mic stands, and speakers that almost weighed as much as I did). We scratched notes on paper, made rudimentary recordings, and we didn’t even have a video camera between us. What’s a girl rocker to do? If I could, I’d climb into a time machine with iRig and AmpliTube for iPad and iPhone, and rock the living daylights out those girls.

IKMultiMedia sells an impressive family of software instruments designed for the modern musician. It takes bulky components and hacked pieces of hardware strung together with miles of chords, and streamlines your set up to not only be less cumbersome, but also less painful to the consumer’s wallet.

Ben of Ben Union spent just fifteen minutes in my art loft in Seattle playing with the iRig and Amplitube on my iPhone4 (also available on iPad), and in moments, he was playing sweet licks and grooves with very minimal set up, and no gigantor speakers and amplifiers to carry. We ran sound through my Bose speaker, and compared it to the Fender Vibrochamp amp (which I rescued from a garbage dump, and once scraped off a dried frog that had taken shelter in the back and ended up getting fried onto the metal parts). Amplitube is the mobile app of the moment for the modern guitarist and composer, allowing users to create, process, record, and amplify music seamlessly, without the burden of carting around heavy, sometimes fragile, and often expensive equipment. Users can plug in a set of headphones or external speakers into the iRig, insert the ⅛-inch plug to the iPhone, and plug a ¼-inch cable from the guitar to a port on other end.

The latest version of the killer app, AmpliTube 3, ramps user’s experience with the following elements:

160 pieces of gear, more than double the amount of other packages
51 individual stompboxes and effects
31 amplifier preamp & power sections
46 speaker cabinet models
15 high end stage and studio mics
17 post amp rack effects
Open architecture, so users can add more packages as you need them, like AmpliTube Fender™ and Ampeg® SVX
Drag and drop features, so you can locate your components where you want it

Additionally, AmpliTube 3 boasts the proprietary VRM™ (Volumetric Response Modeling) technology, allowing users to add ultra-accurate rotating speaker effects, free dual mic placement plus room ambiance and response. Translation: ever wanted to sound like you were in a different-sized room, with a variety of vintage sounds and effects at the touch of your finger on a screen? If you are a guitar, bassist, drummer, or vocalist, you should be waving your hands wildly by now, shouting, “I want!” I know Ben was having a blast with AmpliTube, and he had not even explored all the settings!

While most of the app world is not accustomed to the cost of applications for music creation, any musician would tell you that the price of this app and hardware are well worth it. With nothing to wear out, and upgrades and additions available, this is a system no modern musician can afford to pass up, unless s/he is willing to be passed by.

B. Imei Hsu is a nurse psychotherapist, Bellydance and Bollywood dance artist, musician and vocalist, and coach for artful businesses. She creates content for her own businesses, including Hips For Hire, as well as content for other blogs, including Psycho Nurse on Lockergnome. You can drop in on her art loft in the Old Rainier Brewery in Seattle, WA, where she lives and plays with her iPad loving cat, Charles-Monet, by tuning in at Ustream.tv.

Create Slideshows with DropMocks

Chris Pirillo — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 13:25:23 +0000

Create Slideshows with DropMocks is a post from Chris Pirillo

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DropMocks is a great way to share photo slideshows online with people all over the world. Simply drag and drop your images onto the web page (or into the Google Chrome Extension of the same name) and DropMocks will do the rest.

In this video, Matthew shows you how simple it is to get started. Easily change the order of your photos by dragging them to the position you want them in, or delete with a click.

All you have to do to share the slideshow is to copy the URL. Send the link to someone and they can view your photos in an instant. Link it to your Google account so that you can save them quickly and easily.

Thanks, Matthew, for another great screencast.

Is This the Easiest way to Turn Photos into Videos?

Verizon iPhone Pre-Orders to Start February 3rd

Chris Pirillo — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 00:56:08 +0000

Verizon iPhone Pre-Orders to Start February 3rd is a post from Chris Pirillo

Verizon is offering existing customers a chance to buy the Verizon iPhone on February 3rd, a week before the general public. According to an email received by MacRumors, Verizon will begin pre-order sales at 3am Eastern on February 3rd. The email also indicates that the pre-sale inventory is limited, so when that inventory is depleted, customers will have to wait until the February 10th public launch date.

Make sure you have your My Verizon self-serve account set-up online. Orders can only be placed through your my Verizon account. On February 3rd at 3am EST, Verizon Wireless will allow our current customers to order upgrades or new lines to their accounts through your My Verizon online account (make sure you have registered before the 3rd).

Verizon is allowing certain existing AT&T customers to trade in their current iPhone for credit towards a new Verizon iPhone 4. Depending on which model you have, you could receive up to $360.00 in credits.

Are you planning to make a switch to Verizon?

Don’t forget to stop by our software center to see what’s new today.

Was Zuckerberg’s Facebook Fan Page Hacked or Not?

Chris Pirillo — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 14:44:58 +0000

Was Zuckerberg’s Facebook Fan Page Hacked or Not? is a post from Chris Pirillo

Yesterday morning, the blogosphere was abuzz with news of the “hacking” of Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook Fan Page. Experts and amateurs alike argued over whether anything was actually hacked into – and who could have done it. Reading the stories all day long proved entertaining… the conspiracy theories never fail to amuse me. According to Facebook, though, nothing was taken over or hacked at all. Instead, a simple bug was to blame. “A bug enabled status postings by unauthorised people on a handful of pages, The bug has been fixed,” an official statement read. “It was a handful of public Facebook pages and no personal user accounts were affected,” it added.

The Guardian still feels it has solved the entire case – mostly. They point to “evidence” gathered from the bit.ly link used in the mysterious posting and a Wikipedia edit. They tracked the IP address of the Wiki editor to the US Department of Defense in Williamsburg. Of course, there’s absolutely no proof that this is the same IP of the person who “hacked” the Facebook page, if such a thing had actually happened.

I’m not sure honestly which story to believe. On the one hand, The Guardian’s story sounds very plausible. Facebook claims that nothing happened beyond a strange glitch. It strikes me as odd that someone happened to figure out that this bug existed in a small number of pages and took advantage of it to talk about the Hacker Cup.

Whichever scenario holds true, Mark is likely walking about with some red in his cheeks this morning.

Android Set-Top Box

Chris Pirillo — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 14:12:43 +0000

Android Set-Top Box is a post from Chris Pirillo

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Shenzhen Geniatech Co. Ltd presents some interesting Android Powered Set-top-boxes. These could be sold for around $100 like the Apple TV or Roku box, but they just run the full Android OS including support for lots of video codecs.

While Android is not yet really optimized for use on a TV with a remote control, this type of device will support the Google TV software (in this case, without HDMI pass-through overlay features) pretty soon once Google releases that software source code.

This video was filmed by Charbax of ARMdevices at CES 2011.