TheGarage Tech Blog

I’ve been thinking about building a small photography/recording studio here in TheGarage so I can practice up on my portraiture skills and so I can have a set to film lead ins, transitions, and closings to my videos. Actually I’ve been thinking about this in depth for a couple of years now but it involves spending money so it languishes on the back burner. I could probably get a small set built on the cheap, but at a minimum I would need to buy some lighting gear, some additional audio gear, and condition the air.  What I would really like to have is a little spot in a strip center with two studio setups that I could use for my own projects and that I could also rent to others. All the infrastructure to stream to the Internet would be available of course as well as equipment for post-processing and printing.

I have a lot of ideas in this area but I don’t have the extra money laying around. The pundits are saying that for the amount of money in the “stimulus” bill and the resulting jobs, each job would cost about $260,000. Idiots. Give me $200,000 and I would create five jobs by the end of the year just with what I have going now. Notice how during the election both candidates sounded like the savior of small business and now all we hear is government spending and tax refunds to people who pay little or no taxes.

Anyway, I got off track. What I really wanted to mention in relation to the studio is that my Nikon D90 will shoot hi-def video using the new LiveView feature. That means I can shoot hi-def  with any of the lenses I have, which is a nice assortment, including a 10-20mm wide angle, a 70-300mm, and a 105mm macro.   And I suppose I could use the 50mm f1.8 at 3200 ISO in very low light conditions.  I need to record some hi-def at the extreme focal ranges, in low light,  and very close up to get an idea of just what the capabilities of the D90 are. I am not setup to do a lot of hi-def video editing, but I may need to get set up.

The Internet is Dead. So says Dallas Mavericks owner and erstwhile internet tycoon Mark Cuban.

We have reached a point of diminishing returns with today’s internet. The speed of broadband to your home wont increase much more in the next five years than it has in the last five years. That is not enough to work as a platform for new levels of applications that will require much, much higher levels of bandwidth.

I think we may have a slight case of sour grapes here and what Cuban really means is that he has come to the realization that his business efforts surrounding the Internet are dead. Ironically, later in the article we found out the Internet is about as dead as the telephone:

Answering questions by email from the Cayman Islands, where he was vacationing with his family and recovering from hip-replacement surgery, Cuban also shared his views on Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo versus Google, day-trading, his personal investment strategy, and why he won’t pull the plug on his much-criticized business journalism operation, Sharesleuth.com, in which he shorts companies that the site plans to trash-hoping to turn a tidy profit on his pre-publication insider knowledge.

Yes Mark, there are other things to do with the Internet than make Billions of dollars on a gimmick. I could have told you five years ago streaming hi def video to the home was not going to be doable any time soon. Not because I am so smart or anything, but because it is just common sense to look at the size of file that contains a full length movie and then look at the pipe available to shove it through and anyone can see that it will take forever.