This is just a simple house-keeping post.

Today I deleted over 1000 WordPress user accounts on The Surgery.

Chances are, if your username was “buy_viagra”, “animesex” or “fdksjahgiliegdlzzq” then your account has been deleted.

If I deleted any legitimate accounts, then I apologise a thousand times over. Please re-register with my eternal gratitude.

There are 1001 blog-worthy things to blog in my blog about.

Sadly, time (lusty and blithe) is at his apogee.

In brief, I have:

• Had a shave, since the last blog post;
• Upgraded The Surgery WordPress blog from 2.8.3 to 2.9;
• Moved WordPress blog from Fedora 9 machine with crappy dynamic IP address (it was killing me) to shiny Fedora 11 machine with static IP address;
• Marveled at my ability to upgrade WordPress, SQL databases and move them across Linux machines, AND make grown-up changes to DNS zone files – am surely a guru of such things now and legend in my own lunchbox;
• Undertaken 2 of 8 Tech Talk Radio Summer Series productions, time-consuming but rewarding;
• Upgraded the HTC Dream / Google phone to the next Android operating system, very successful;
• Teetered on the brink of e-mail bankruptcy;
• Ordered a new PC for Christmas;
• Ventured inside an Apple Store for the very first time, and escaped by making only a minor purchase (a new iPod Touch); and
• Just today, assisted Mrs Dr Ron in restoring her iTunes library, after she deleted all the music files from her PC’s hard disk  - successfully achieved restoration by using a third-party app called iRip which we’ve spoken about on Tech Talk in the past (thanks JD, saviour of Dr Ron’s marriage).

I have also Tweeted mercilessly about our well-intentioned (yet incompetent, foolish and mis-informed) Senator for Communications and the Digital Economy, Stephen Conroy.  In case you hadn’t caught up with the news (which the good Senator saved until after the last live episode of Tech Talk for 2009), Australia will be ranked highly with the United Arab Emirates, Iran and China in its foolish deployment of an ISP-based Net Filter.

Adam Turner has had a lot to say about this, and made a clever analogy with a different type of infrastructure.  His blog posts here and here in The Age last week should be mandatory reading.

I’ll blog in more detail about these and other things soon.

I hope you have a great Chrissy and a safe and prosperous New Year.

It’s only taken us six months.

Have a look.

Photo: Robert Broomhead (Monday night's guest)

The WIA is the organisation which represents amateur radio operators to the Australian Communications and Media Authority, and purports to be the world’s oldest national radio society, having been founded in 1910!

The WIA AGM “Weekend Of Activities” included conference speakers, informative radio-related technical presentations and off-site activities, like a tour of the Powerworks Energy Technology and Visitors’ Centre.

Yours truly did a short presentation on Social Media and Social Networking on Saturday night.  We had a great evening, the meal was delish and fun was had by all.

Photo: Robert Broomhead

Many thanks to Robert Broomhead for inviting me to attend, and for the terrific audio-visual system which “just worked” with my Asus netbook.

(Audio here: Dr Ron’s diatribe on Social Media and Social Networking at the 2009 WIA AGM.)

http://www.wordle.net/

I always thought fancy video switching hardware was required, not to mention some big, big bucks.

But… not so!

I was perusing the Ustream.tv help centre today, and saw a topic which immediately grabbed my eye: “…quickly and easily add scrolling text, logos, RSS feeds, special guests windows, picture in picture, pre-recorded video…”

Woooa, are they serious?  It can’t be that easy, can it?

Yep, it sure is.  Straight away I clicked the link to download WebcamMax for the PC.  This is a nifty utility which gives you significantly more control over your webcam and imaging devices than the default Ustream “broadcast applet”.  My mission was to set-up a “picture in picture” video stream, and it only took a matter of minutes to get this working with WebcamMax.

Setup and installation

Download the 8 MB installer.  Setup is fairly painless and after clicking the “Try” button (you get a 30 day free trial) you’re asked to nominate which applications you want WebcamMax to control video.  I unticked all except UStream.  Then you’re presented with an intuitive GUI which displays any video source that’s currently connected to your PC.  In my case, this was video from a traditional camera, piped through an external USB device like this one.

Next, click on the ‘Sources’ button.  The ‘Main Source’ is your primary video input, and ‘Webcam’ is selected by default.  Look to the right and you’ll see that you can select any other video source simply by clicking the combo box.  Now I’ve also got an in-built webcam in the netbook, which appears as ‘USB video device’.  I switched to that and suddenly I’m looking through the eye of a different camera.  WebcamMax makes it easy to switch between cameras or video sources in this way.

Click the combo to select your main source video device.

You can also click other items in the list, such as:

• ‘Screen’ – live-streams the desktop, by following your mouse pointer or sending the entire screen;
• ‘Movie’ – streams a movie of choice;
• ‘Picture’ – sends a JPG or other image (defaulting to your ‘My Pictures’ folder); and
• ‘Color’ – which lets you set a background colour of any desired shade.

Picture in Picture

But how good is this? Click the button at the bottom of the list control labelled ‘PinP Source 1′.  The same controls appear, duplicated, for a different video source.  Wow!  In no time at all I can display my netbook webcam as a picture inside the main picture.  No expensive video amplifiers or professional switching equipment required!

Picture-in-picture, just like that!

You can get much, much cleverer than this.  Play around with the advanced options and you can move the position of your “picture in picture”, maintain proportions or re-scale, and even have images display as a slide-show.

But wait, there’s more!

I only needed WebcamMax to do “picture in picture”, but it does heaps more than that.  By opening the ‘Effects’ dialogue you can simulate a chroma-key function with different backgrounds.  You can add lighting and shadow effects, grid lines, digital snow, scrolling text… the list goes on.  Select from local or online effects libraries.  There’s even a record feature which lets you write an AVI file to a local disk.

But how does it work with Ustream.tv?

WebcamMax emulates a video device in software.  This means that when you start the Ustream.tv broadcast applet, the WebcamMax “device” will appear in your Video Source drop-down, like this:

The Ustream.tv broadcast applet.  Note the 'Video Source' combo -
just select WebcamMax Capture and you're done.

Simply select WebcamMax as your video device and start broadcasting!

Road test

We’ll put WebcamMax through the hoops over the next few weeks at Tech Talk.  We’ll let you know how it performs, and we’ll listen to your feedback too.  One thing we’re mindful of is not becoming too distracted by the studio webcam; it is, after all, designed to supplement a radio programme, and 99% of our listeners don’t watch the webcam.  We’re hoping to change that, and we hope that using cool utilities like WebcamMax will help us along the way.

Visit the website: http://webcammax.com/

That’s my Ubuntu desktop about 15 minutes ago.  46 degrees is about 115 Fahrenheit.

Avalon in Melbourne’s west hit 47.9 degrees this afternoon.

The ABC News website says that, “Six major fire fronts are raging across Victoria and residents have described smoke so thick it blotted out the sun and huge walls of fire ripping through forests.”

The sky is certainly very orange here in town.

Melbourne’s weather is in the top-5 Twitter topics worldwide… have a look at TwitterFall and select the ‘Melbourne’ filter.

I was cleaning up the orifice over Christmas and found an old MP3 player.  It’s a 4-year-old JNC “SSF-710″-model with a mind-blowing 256MB of RAM.  It was much-loved and much-used as my primary source of mobile audio entertainment before I got my Sony Ericsson W850i, and before I sold my soul to Sony’s Disc2Phone malware.

The battery was, of course, flat, having not been used for … well, when was it last used?  I charged it up, plugged-in some earphones and pressed ‘play’.

At that point I had the opportunity of looking back 18 months, and revisiting some podcasts which I had been listening to in June 2007.

Being the techno-IT boffin that I am, all the podcasts were contemporary science and technology programmes like the BBC’s Digital Planet, Australia’s own BRAN, Leo LaPorte’s TWiT and other home-spun favourites.

So what was making news in June 2007?

• Dr Karl was very excited about the commissioning of the new Hadron Collider, and people were worried that the Earth was going to be swallowed by a man-made black hole.

• The guys on BRAN were having a good laugh about Paris Hilton being slotted for 45 days, before she found God and was released.  Paris then went on to say that she had learned a lot from her ordeal and was going to take more interest in future decisions she made for herself that would affect her personally.  Or something.

• The Federal Government was excited about the upcoming Next-Generation Broadband Network and how a private-public partnership was going to revolutionize internet access for all Australians by facilitating equity in the…  blah blah, wot’eva,… blah.

• There was unrest amongst Apple zealots as no-one was sure when, or even if, the iPhone would ever arrive in Australia.  (And let’s not even begin to speculate about a possible 3G version at this point.)  People were hopping on planes and flying to the US, just to camp-out at Apple stores to get their hands on one of the gadgets.  Also, somewhere, a new iPhone fell into a Blendtec blender.  (Will it blend? That is the question.)

• And of course, early adopters of Windows Vista were warding people off with big, big sticks.

Ahhhh… reminiscing… it’s just not what it used to be.