About Google Video - this is amazing! Google have been taking feeds of the closed caption data (which if they implement in Europe would be the page 888 teletext data) for the last year and ripping clip-frames from all the US networks. You can now search that data and see stills from the shows in question - convergence may actually happen! With this in mind you could start doing the same with DAB digital radio and many other places where meta data is generated automatically. Hmmm.

Terrablock is the SAN system that Root6 are starting to ship in numbers - I put one in at Teacher's TV last November and it is a superb solution for low-end video facilities. It starts at 3Gbytes and scales - with small numbers of clients it even supports hi-def video. It talks over 2gig fibre and appears to the client OS as a SCSI device but it has a management layer (that you can access over the network) that allows you to create and re-size volumes. At a fraction of the price of similar video-type SANs we think it has a great future - Chopper has a written a PDF you can read here.

Another SPV skin - this time based on the artwork in the Lemony Snicket books "A Series of Unfortunate Events". Again, inspired by what my kids are reading at the moment. Get it as a .cab, here.

NirSoft: freeware utilities, password recovery tools, system utilities - my colleague Saul lost his MSN password - this worked well.

UK braces for black Monday 24th | The Register - according to my fav UK IT news site Monday is going to be a killer for a record number of Brits! I can only recommend two things - go to church the day before or (with a lot more earthy language) check out Nina Gordon's version of Straight Outta Compton (the seminal N.W.A. track). If you know the origional you'll know that (like a lot of hip-hop) it ain't one for the kids.

HdTach seems like a good utility for checking the through-put on volumes (single drives & arrays) - I'm using it to test performance on an HD editing workstation.

Captain Underpants homescreen - Dan (my nine-year old) loves these books by Dave Pilkey and so we set about doing a skin for my SPV C500 mobile 'phone - I had to pull out the XML documentation and so it was an education as well. Here it is as a .cab file - you may need to application unlock your 'phone - details are here at Modaco.

Maybe Apple are no longer the choice of the rich and foolish! - with the launch of their £299 miniMac I'm interested in picking one up as a cheap and space-efficient Linux node. Apple's page on it, and what they are saying on The Register.

Jackass JoeJoe's RenameMaster utilities was a utility I came across when I had to selectively rename about six hundred HTML files within several thousand - no leading zeros on files numbers below ten. This made it a breeze and I normally pride myself on being able to do anything through a command prompt! It also has great rename options for MP3 and JPEGs (can stick in all the metadata you can discover) - a must for webmasters and folks with big music collections everywhere - and it's free!.

E to E Ltd in Leeds build OB trucks but I spent a week working with one of their engineers, Jonathon, commissioning JML's studio in Kentish Town, North London. Those guys really pushed the boat out with XDCam (see my mobile blog pictures) and an MXF workflow over gigabit. They also have a nice big 5 camera studio with play-in and transmission off Grass Valley M-Series servers (nice units - they support most protocols & compressions standards). I enjoyed a week of being a proper television engineer again!