It’ll be interesting to look back on this post when the elections are over to see who the winner is but right now I’m watching the Democratic National Convention in all it’s HD glory.

The video gallery for the official Democratic Convention site has been developed using Silverlight by the folks at Vertio (who also developed the Hard Rock Memorabilia site and released the open source Slide.Show project).

Working with Level3 and Move Networks they are delivering a live HD video experience (not just maxing out your bandwidth – they use adaptive streaming to balance the quality to your connection and PCs capabilities) and within minutes of a speaker finishing at the podium the clip is available for on-demand viewing as well.

The quality is pretty amazing. I look at projects like this with 6 years of experience live streaming Big Brother as a filter and a minimum bar for quality and I wish I had access to these tools back then! They take Windows Media to a whole new level (and with Silverlight they bring in back to the Intel powered Macs with the same level of fidelity). Right now Silverlight doesn’t offer a Linux solution, but with the Moonlight player we can hope the same experience isn’t that far off.

I thought I was impressed, but the folks from Online Video Watch and paidContent.org seem to back my opinion up ;)

Do you Tweet?

Do you have a Windows Mobile phone?

I do and I love TinyTwitter. It's the best mobile client for twitter bar none (try it and see) and it's now even better.

How could it get better you ask (because you already use it.... right... if not.... try it now!)

It's better in two ways...

• Picture uploads: append a picture to any tweet and it gets posted to TwitPic. You don't need to do anything, magic just happens. Click to see what I've uploaded.
• Geolocation: if you have a GPS you can tell everyone where you are. It takes the boring latitude and longitude numbers your GPS returns (built in or bluetooth connected) and can do a reverse address lookup to tell you where you are near (not close enough for stalkers to find you!) and posts it to your timeline along with a Live Maps link so people can see where you are on a map as well.

So if you want to try out the (new) goodness go to TinyTwitter.com on your PC or direct to m.ttwt.at if you are viewing this on a phone.

Oh, and there is a J2ME/Blackberry version available as well if you're not a Windows Mobile user.

Oh, and on the PC I still like Digsby for updating Twitter and checking Hotmail and Gmail...

WinXP had some power schemes, and Vista improved on the power management options for desktops and laptops. But they were all pretty geeky, you had to know what was going on and to do a good job of getting it set up right there are a bunch of places you needed to go to install things.

Steve Clayton has just reminding me that Microsoft, Climate Savers Computing Initiative and Verdiem have made available Edison as a free download.

Edison (an application we’ve been testing at home for the last 90 days) is a free installation to help you optimize power usage on your PC as we all strive for a greener computing experience.

Download it and give it a try – every little big helps :)

It must be a mid-life crisis, or the summer air, but I got a Mustang. I know it’s a gas guzzler and something that I shouldn’t do both for the planet and my wallet but it’s not going to be an every day driver (I’ll continue to ride and bus to work unless the weather is great!)

It’s a really nice car, but pretty low tech. No GPS, no leather, no electrically adjusted seats etc… but that’s all to the good as I intend to experiment over time and upgrade and update bits to make it more comfortable and environmentally friendly (maybe one day there will be a practical Hybrid conversion!)

So far the only changed have been the addition of LoJack, Sequential tail lights and a ZuneCORE adapter for music while I’m rollin’ … other minor electronic and cosmetic tweaks to come…