Eitan Burcat

RentPA - The fastest way to rent in Tel-Aviv

I’m quite sure it’s possible to find my next place for rent with an investment of about 6 hours, and a month’s worth of rent. The plan is this:

• 40 minutes interview over Skype with MyRentPA ™.
• Scan through videos of appropriate appartments – ~5mins x 8 videos.
• A deeper look into the top 3 appartments: 10 mins x 2.
• ~3 meetings x 1.5 hours.

The only problem is that MyRentPA doesn’t really exist. Yet. I wish they opened a branch in Tel-Aviv already.

Do you think it’s possible for a Real Estate agent to video tape his candidate appartments, make a bit of a story out of each one, have a short interview with the owners, some easy editing, and put it all on a plain and effective website?

I think it could save everybody’s time, both the owners and the people who rent the place… It sure doesn’t sound like a big effort… Maybe it could be a nice income for a starting comedian…

I bet that if the system is tuned up properly, it’s possible to make a month’s worth of rent out of each video… Am I missing something .

Thanks, Tal, for the inspiration…

Control the access to your own data...

Some incidents that happened lately led us to think quite much about the control of our data:

• In the past couple of months, Facebook had decided to disable the accounts of a couple of friends of ours.
• In 1999, some very important files of mine were hosted on a “Free 50MB storage” service. A year later I found out that my files were taken hostage, and in order to bail them out of that company I had to pay $10.
• Censorship is another concern. I’ve given YouTube and Flickr the liberty to censor my movies and photos. Sometime in the future, they might decide to shutdown their service, clean up their servers, go bankrupt, become a racist totalitarian, or who knows what.
• Some very important accounts of mine are authenticated against my GMail. If someone somehow breaks into it – I can lose control over some Very important accounts of mine.

These are a couple scenarios that happen when we give the control over our own data, to some 3rd parties who might someday betray our trust.

Very annoying.

Very disturbing, when I came to think of it.

Giving the control over my data to some company, suddenly sounds insane. Why should I trust Facebook, Yahoo!, Amazon, Microsoft and Google – with access to my personal data? Why are we forced to trust these companies, when another, very elegant solution is now possible?

Tal Muskal has urged me to think about cloud computing in the past couple of months now. Amazon, Microsoft and Google – all started to offer some cloud storage and computing solutions. These resources are quite cheap, and always available. Together with some open-source development, these solutions can be turned into something very neat.

Imagine that you pay for some storage and CPU time in the cloud. You have full control over the data, and the APIs needed to access this data. All the code is open-source, and the data is encrypted so that you are the only one who controls who gets to see what.

With this scheme, I can control exactly who is permitted to access my pictures. I can allow my Facebook-friends access to my future events, without allowing Facebook-the company access to my list of favorite songs. I can store some audio-clips, and pay $0.17/GB/Month, without the concern that a service will sometime decide to take it down.

This approach is much healthier than the current state we’re in. It removes the need to trust 3^rd parties with some very important data. I believe that the ability to have full control over his own data is something that every heavy Internet user should strive for…

Just finished ripping a video stream of castup, and felt like sharing the knowledge – just in case somebody’ll need this sometime… Only for fair use, of course.

Step 1 – understand what’s the url of the video you’re trying to rip:

1.1. Run WireShark (previously known as Ethereal).

1.2. Add a capture filter for the TCP packets.

1.3. Play the video, until all the commercials are over, and the main stream starts to play.

1.4. Stop the capturing.

1.5. In WireShark’s list of packets – find the last HTTP GET command before the stream starts.

1.6. Easy enough, the server name and the exact url for the video are all in this single packet.

1.7. Test this url with your FireFox/Chrome – your stream starts to play. In my case it was:

http://s3awm.castup.net/server12/4779052-61.wmv?ct=IL&rg=IL&aid=206&st=1&ts=228&cu=11477B11-C8E1-4155-AE2A-C4D7A0C24987

Step 2 – Capture this stream into a file.

2.1. For a win32 compiled version of mencoder, I downloaded Goo Media Center from http://sourceforge.net/projects/goomediacenter/.

2.2. To capture the audio I used uncompressed pcm audio.

2.3. To capture the video I used a simple frame by frame copy encoder.

2.4. The final command line became:

mencoder -oac pcm -oav copy -o c:\1\filename.avi “http://s3awm.castup.net/server12/4779052-61.wmv?ct=IL&rg=IL&aid=206&st=1&ts=228&cu=11477B11-C8E1-4155-AE2A-C4D7A0C24987″

 

About an hour later – I had the stream, as a file, on my computer – waiting to be editted.

Step 3 – use your favorite video editting software to do whatever you want with this file.

Photofunia.com is indeed fun

Finally Nokia offers an easy way to share contact details,…

Check out http://mobilecodes.nokia.com/scan.htm for a QR code reader.

Create your own code here: http://mobilecodes.nokia.com/

ברגע שקיבלתי לינק לסדרת הראיונות הזו – הייתי חייב להטעין את כולה לנגן האמ-פי-שלוש שלי, ולהקשיב לפרקים אחד אחרי השני בנסיעות האוטובוס שלי לעבודה. מזה זמן רב שרציתי להפיק פודקאסט שכזה, כיוון שמניסיוני – מדובר בכלי מדהים להעברת מסרים עמוקים בצורה פשוטה וזולה. שמחתי שערן ביניימיני וגיא ווסט הרימו את הכפפה, והפיקו סדרת ראיונות קולחת ומעוררת מחשבה – עם מספר דמויות שהכרתי פחות או יותר בתנועה הסביבתית בארץ.

מצד אחד ברור לי שיש עוד פערים גדולים להתגבר עליהם לפני שפודקאסטים יהפכו לפופולאריים בישראל. אך עם זאת – ברור לי לחלוטין שבטווח הארוך – מדובר בפורמט אפקטיבי ביותר – ולכן הוא ינגוס חלק הולך וגדל מתשומת הלב של כולנו.

המון תודה, מאוד נהניתי להקשיב!

לינק להורדת הפודקאסט

כתבה שלי ב nrg על התחום

Image via Wikipedia