Year: 2008

Chilling in the living room.

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My wife got an itch to finally paint our apartment’s living room and hallway. On Monday and Tuesday Eliza and her mother took it upon themselves to follow-through with that and did an amazing job with our living room.  Here is a set of photos taken with Eliza’s iPhone using the Pano app. It turned…

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Taken on I-380 towards New Jersey in Pennsylvania.

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Settin’ them up, knockin’ them down.

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Dr. Nick I presume.

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For the record I jailbroke my iPhone a few days ago full well knowing that the 2.2 OS update was imminent. I thought it gave me the perfect opportunity to play around with a jailbroken iPhone, build the Qik to Viddler bridge, and still be okay to install the latest update to the iPhone without losing…

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LOST Season 5 is coming within a few months. The Season 4 DVD is scheduled to be released in December. All great news. Even better, is that there is a free episode of LOST, sorta, available on iTunes that is a promotional music video for the 5th season. The music video features The Fray’s new…

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A bug that seems to continuously create art.

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Sometimes I just can’t help myself. I’m a hacker. Not the type of hacker that wants to break into a bank’s records and steal your personal information or anything – the type of hacker that just likes to make up fun solutions to interesting problems. Viddler’s current lack of any way to record video on…

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The new version of the Google Mobile app for the iPhone has just been released with the ability to speak your search. The application also takes your currently location into consideration when doing a search. In my testing this application works very well and quickly over EDGE on an iPhone 2G. Two little niggles that…

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Versions had gone through what has to be one of the longer beta periods in recent memory, but I think it did the application a lot of good. I now only use Versions for interacting with subversion (as I’ve mentioned). Versions has now come out of beta though and is considered stable enough for sale.…

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First of all, it isn’t pretty. It isn’t all butterflies and bunny tails. But it has gotten a lot better. I wanted to jailbreak my iPhone because I was starting to get pretty tired of the relatively walled-garden that Apple has created inside the iPhone OS. When the App Store debuted I had wished it…

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When I switched to this theme in April of this year I had created two header images that would display at random on each page refresh. I had aspirations "to some day find the time to have as many as ten random header images". Later that month I had 10 total header images. As of today I have created…

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When I saw Garret Murray’s Flickr group called My Day, Yesterday it immediately struck a chord. Be sure to watch Garrett’s inaugural video that started it all. Not only did it remind me of MeToday photos and videos (which I miss doing, btw), but I simply loved the style. So I’ve procrastinated doing my own My Day,…

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It is only mid-November but I’m confident in my choices for this years "Best of 2008 as told by Colin Devroe". This isn’t a list based on popularity, consensus, or a set of rules. They are simply works that I feel should be awarded with the recognition of being the best that I’ve personally found this…

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My brother Peter just called me. "Hey, I’ve got a hot topic for your blog." So, this post is for him. Google, and more specifically Google.org, has setup an equally neat and useful system for tracking search trends regarding influenza. Apparently search trends are enough of an indicator to track actual flu activity. In other…

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Somewhat related to the Origamido Studio is Julien Vallée’s portfolio. Specifically a recent project called Raking Leaves in the Wind ((Direct link not possible due to the site using frames.)). Essentially it is art using paper but instead of Origamido’s approach, which is only using one sheet of paper, Julien uses scissors and other tools…

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That Hawaiian beat just keeps on coming! While at Podcamp Hawai’i Eliza and I met a lot of interesting people from all over the globe. One man, Richard Alexander, had a pretty exciting story to tell. You see, he’s into origami. He and his partner, Michael LaFosse, own a studio for working with handmade paper…

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Derek Steen, Viddler’s new Community Leader (djsteen), has put together a dead simple tutorial for deinterlacing videos before you upload them to video sharing sites, like Viddler.  But, before you read that, you may want to know what interlacing and deinterlacing actually is. Here is a quick excerpt from Wikipedia. If the quoted section isn’t…

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During the Social Media Club’s workshop in Hawai’i Chris Heuer mentioned IBM’s blogging policy. You see, unless you are a start up in the tech-space, having a blog is a relatively new idea. Not only that, but allowing your employees to blog on their own, is downright scary (to some companies). Some people at IBM put…

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I have been to my fair share of conferences that give away flash drives to attendees. Sometimes they come in a bag of schwag with a bunch of other worthless things. Print magazines full of ads, stickers, and pins among them. This isn’t to say that no shwag bags aren’t full of useful things. Just…

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Matt Brett, a designer with a style all his own, has joined forces with WooThemes, a company that specializes in developing premium themes (or, themes-that-you-have-to-pay-for) for WordPress and has released THiCK. THiCK is the very first premium WordPress theme that I’ve actually considered pulling my wallet out for. Not only is the structure of the…

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I’ve had my ear to the ground regarding Parkour-related things since I featured a video about Parkour in January of 2007 on the Viddler blog. Mirror’s Edge Launch Trailer uploaded by Joystiq On a recent rip to New York City my friend Jonathan Christopher mentioned Mirror’s Edge, a video game where you are doing Parkour…

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Robert Palmer, writing for TUAW, writes "Coda is $99, Versions is free (while it’s in beta), and Beanstalk starts at $15 per month (which is the plan I have). Put together, though, it’s a million-dollar solution." I couldn’t agree more. I’ve been using this solution for some time now – in fact, many of the Viddler team members have. It…

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A panoramic view of the 5th Ave. Apple Store in New York City. The iPhone’s camera has been one of its least regarded features. The built-in camera is only 2.1 megapixels, performs poorly in low-light, and has a very limited field of view. All of that being said, you can pour through Flickr’s global tag…

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So you use Windows. I’m ok with that I guess. Oh, you also browse the Internet with Internet Explorer? Version 6? Well, I just can’t live with that. In fact, I doubt you and I would get along at parties. But, such as it is you are here, reading something on my site, and so…

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During our stay on Oahu for the Social Media Club Workshop, Podcamp and Wordcamp Hawai’i, and a little leisure time – Eliza and I stayed at the Wyland Waikiki hotel. This modern hotel showcases some of Wyland’s (whose name is Robert Wyland, by the way) artwork on nearly every surface available. Wall-sized paintings, sculptures, surf…

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Is anyone else experiencing this? When I first load Google Reader, and I use Fluid to do so, it is showing me the latest post from my subscriptions (see screenshot) in the All Items list.  Even though I have it set to sort the order from oldest to newest. To correct this issue, I only…

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Well, this sucks. I’ve only written about Michael Crichton, or his work, [a few times](http://cdevroe.com/?s=michael crichton) – but let me be the first to say that I am a huge fan of everything he had done professionally.  When Kyle linked me to this article I admit that I was immediately saddened by the news. Michael…

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[ad#Adsense: Horiz 468] Finally! I’ve been looking for an iPhone application that allowed me to quickly share my contact information with other iPhone (or iPod touch) owners. What’s more, is that if I have someone else’s contact information I can share that with others too. Over the past year and a half I can not…

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Me, speaking at Podcamp Hawai’i. Credit: Eliza Devroe I have an awful lot of writing to do. I figured one of the easiest things to start off with, and hopefully get the ball rolling with everything else that I need to write about, would be the photos, videos, tweets, and much more from both Podcamp…

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Speaking of photographs from Hawai’i. I have been thumbing through the over 2,000 photos that Eliza and I took during our stay on the Pacific island of Oahu and found some pretty nice gems (I’ll post those soon). But, immediately after that, while going through my feeds from the last few weeks I ran across…

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This morning in Waikiki I lead a session at Podcamp Hawaii called "Using video to build community".  Since only about 125 people were able to make it into room 304B (out of the 500 or so attendees), I thought I’d share the thoughts of the group on the Podcamp Hawaii web site, as well as…

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Pickles helps out. Circa January 2007. Viddler’s player is, in my incredibly biased opinion, the best Flash video player available. Especially if you’re of the sort that likes to engage in conversation or put an incredible amount of metadata in your videos. Using Viddler’s API for various projects has always resulted in some sort of…

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I have always enjoyed Michael Crichton’s writing style. He tends to write in blocks of thoughts and actions, uses new lines to emphasize something that the character feels is important, and jams just enough raw data into his books to make them real, but not enough to turn off most readers. Airframe was written very…

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While in Salter Path, North Carolina on vacation we saw this grasshopper, which was already dead, being carried away by countless ants.  You can’t tell from this photo alone but there was a line of thousands upon thousands of ants leading from the grasshopper back to the ant hill. The speed at which the ants…

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[ad#Adsense: Horiz 468] Charlie Haden is one of the most respected jazz bassists and jazz composers today. He grew up part of a musical family through the 30s, 40s, and 50s. He sang until he was 15 years old when he was struck with polio which affected his vocal chords.  This is when he picked…

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I have a goal to get to London next year, so this list will come in handy when that happens. For that reason, and because I think everyone visiting London should take a look at this, I’m sharing it here. Simon Willison put this Google Map together and I think it is a fantastic list…

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The other day I featured one of Shane’s claymation videos on the Viddler blog.  Then, his video ended up on the Viddler front page.  Today, Shane shows his love by doing a new animation with Wall-E spelling Viddler! I thought this was far too great not to mention it here.

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And, cubism.

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Getting some things done at Panera Bread with my homey Chris.

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After watching Heroes last night (since we went on vacation we had two episodes to catch up on) I thought about the actor who plays Sylar, Zachary Quinto, who is also going to be playing young Spock in the upcoming Star Trek film by J.J. Abrams and Co. Turns out the official site has some…

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Even though I read State of Fear a few months ago, I thought I’d jot down my overall thoughts of the book. As you might notice, I read nearly all of Crichton’s works, so even though the subject matter for this book isn’t particularly interesting to me, I read it because Crichton wrote it. I’m…

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Date taken: September 30, 2008 Eliza wanted to test out her new waterproof camera. Andrew and I helped her out. All photos credit: Eliza Devroe.

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There are tons of crabs on the beach here on Indian Beach in Salter Path, NC.

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Lady Chancery trolls by our "secret" cove where Andrew and I did some snorkeling. Today we had planned to head out either Sand Dollar Island or Shackleford Banks to do some snorkeling, shell finding, or seeing if we could locate some wild horses. Instead we ended up snorkeling off of Radio Island. When we arrived…

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Weather has been good so far. Nearly empty beach. Perfect.

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Upon my return from the New Media Expo in Las Vegas I said that I regretted not mentioning that I was going to the event beforehand. So I thought I’d look at the next few months of activities and jot them down here. In October Eliza and I will be heading to Oahu, Hawaii for…

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Eliza trapped him in the office due to bad behaviour. He made the best of it by watching birds out the window.

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