The Devoted Few recently finished their latest video-clip for their single, Don’t Listen to Us (which, incidentally, you can download from their website).

The clip captures moments from their recent touring and recording activities, and looks pretty cool. The band currently doesn’t have a label deal, despite getting high-rotation airplay on Triple J, and therefore they don’t have the budget to produce a video clip. (I still don’t get this: band that consistently gets good airplay and has done some amazing live dates supporting top-line acts like Eskimo Joe hasn’t received any bites from a major label? But I digress…)

So they turned to iMovie. Barry collated a bunch of footage captured on his personal digital video camera and pulled it into iMovie, then cut it to the track. The bridge section needed a little “something else”, so a friend helped them by pulling it into Final Cut Pro to do the 16 panel sequence that fills that spot. That’s the only sequence that wasn’t done on a basic G4 iBook and the free software that comes with it.

And the result is quite compelling. Sure, it doesn’t have fancy special effects, but it does capture the tone of the band, and is compelling enough to hold its own. Compelling enough for multiple spins on Rage, and hopefully jTV - Triple J’s digital TV channel (which also appears occasionally on free-to-air ABC).

So - let’s recap. They couldn’t get a label deal so released the single on the net and got high-rotation Triple J airplay. They didn’t have funding for a video clip, so they did it themselves using a video camcorder, an iBook (recently replaced in the Apple hardware lineup by the more powerful MacBook), and a bit of creativity - posted it on YouTube, and also had it played on free-to-air television.

As I understand it they are currently working out how they might fund their next long-player themselves also. Sure, it’s a lot of hard work. Sure, it would be nice to have the funding to get other people to do the job - more time to spend on creating music. But whereas these used to be barriers that couldn’t be overcome unless you had truckloads of cash, nowadays bands can do stuff on a shoestring and pull it off.

Anyways, enough philosophising on the power of digital and social media Give them a hand and go check out the clip, download the single, request it on Triple J’s Super Request and jTV.

I went and saw Who Killed the Electric Car for a second time last night (I wrote a review after my first viewing), and again was impressed with the film. Both last night, and on first viewing, there were a few questions left unanswered for me.

The first was how much GM spent on R&D on the car. The second was how many leases were actually granted. The third was less a question, and more a hypothesis - perhaps GM couldn’t continue to service and maintain the cars for some reason, and that’s why they pulled the cars off the road (Ang mentioned this to me as well last night after seeing the film).

Today I went wandering on the net, mainly to find info on the Venturi Fétish which was briefly highlighted at the end of the film (alongside the Tesla Roadster, which has got a lot more press recently), and found this response from GM on GM’s blog.

It answers all of those questions: GM claims they spent $1 billion on developing and marketing the car. 800 vehicles were leased in a four year period. And support of the vehicle was a part of their decision making process.

GM obviously made a lot of mistakes with the EV1 - and they acknowledge they didn’t handle the recall at all well. But it is interesting to see that the technology in the EV1 has found its way into other initiatives at GM - like their hybrid and hydrogen fuel cell projects. This latter fact was mentioned by Joel Makower in his recent piece on progress in hydrogen cars. But GM also point out EV1 technology is also supporting their hybrids program.

I’m still unconvinced that hydrogen fuel cells are the way forward (all that I’ve read indicates the energy required to create hydrogen is far greater than required to charge a battery). I can’t help but think the push for hydrogen is both a delaying tactic from car manufacturers and a strategy of big oil (it requires a fuel, after all, which means they can stay in business).

And the more I read Tesla’s blog, the more I think that electric cars are the best choice moving forward. (Even though the blog is technical in nature, their arguments make a lot of sense to me.)

Even if their approach is questionable in many respects (the film does a great job of pointing out some odd decisions along the way - I won’t repeat them here), GM does deserve some credit for giving it a go. It still doesn’t explain some of their decisions (like, why the crushed the cars, rather than recycle them the way they said they would), but it is worth recognising the fact that they are the only major car manufacturer that have released an all-electric vehicle to date - and did it at a time where such things were thought nearly impossible. GM have lost the plot of late (even in Australia where Holden are now importing the Humvee) - but it seems there was a time when they recognised the need for vehicles like the EV1.

Although for a majority of the film I felt frustrated and angry, the end still lifted my spirits - but perhaps too little too late. (Although I must say that the inventor of the batteries for the EV1, Stan Ovshinsky, is a real character - he made me smile and inspired me a lot.)

The anger and frustration came from the sense that the political climate and “consumer culture” in which we live throttle so many exciting developments. I do hope we can ultimately overcome these issues, and that the electric car will become a commercial reality soon - giving us real options to fight pollution, global warming and rising fuel prices.

Despite its biases, the movie remains thought provoking and created some great conversations with friends after the film. I think I talked more about the film and had more thoughts about it than I did with An Inconvenient Truth. And if that’s all it does, I think it has served an honourable purpose. Definitely worth checking out - highly recommended.

Robert Cringley’s announcement of a new drive technology seems pretty awesome, on the surface at least. I don’t expect Robert would go out on a limb to announce vapourware - so I suspect we’ll be hearing lots more about this in due course.

Reduced cost, improved reliability, and reduced power consumption with more storage space for physical size - pretty much the holy-grail of drive technologies.

Good for the environment because they use less materials and far less energy. Great for business because it reduces cost of storage devices, as well as increasing storage capacity in the same space, which reduces data center costs.

Very cool indeed…

WorldChanging have a great article on Tesla Motors, makers of the Tesla Roadster all-electric sports car.

AutoblogGreen: Not all the electric cars were killed - AutoblogGreen. Amanda Congdon (of Rocketboom fame) has a vid of a refurbished EV1. The EV1 was the “star”, so-to-speak, of Who Killed the Electric Car. V. cool.

Priscilla points to the Be the full stop campaign site. I decided to give it a whirl.

Firstly, it has to be said using Google maps to select your location is a very, very time-consuming operation. The facility they provide for non-UK residents took about 2-3 minutes just to find my location. I also got my location wrong on the first attempt, and I had to completely delete my profile to update my location.

But the biggest usability issue is this one:

Firstly, I think there are probably many users of the site that wouldn’t get the subtle distinction between these two icons.

Secondly, this type of icon/widget is used on the Mac OS (and I suspect other sites/operating systems) to signify an avatar (an icon you can use to identify yourself - usually a photo or some kind of character icon). I initially missed that it was a question about gender and thought it provided the ability for me to upload an image.

Lastly, what do you need to know my gender for?

Anyways - it’s a good cause, so worth checking out despite these flaws - just be sure to get your location right first go

I read the other day that Telstra is betting on Sensis as a way to increase their profits by becoming a “media” company. I nearly spat my coffee out.

I can find the contact details to a business or restaurant quicker using Google than I can using the Yellow or White pages websites.

I tried to list something on the Trading Post website, only to come up against an error in the site that stopped me from becoming a customer. I reported the issue. Three weeks later the issue had not been fixed and I had to phone the order in.

Directions on WhereIs are simply broken - don’t trust the times they give. And when I access the site using Camino I get a big “your browser isn’t supported” - Camino uses the Firefox rendering engine, so is virtually identical. But when I get into the site - because they use graphic buttons, I get two whopping great blank buttons beneath the address form. I’ve learnt from trial and error which one to click, but this is a simple, simple, simple thing that they could fix with a tiny change to the site.

But what prompted me to post this? The recent “upgrade” to CitySearch.

Gone are the simple tabs and navigation that have worked so well (instead replaced with some hybrid that places more importance on the weather than usability). Gone are the clean URLs (which replace this “http://sydney.citysearch.com.au/section/film” with “http://sydney.citysearch.com.au/servlet/Satellite?c=Page&cid=1119945819951&city=sydney&cityName=Sydney&pageid=1119945819951&pagename=CitySearch%2FPage%2FCSWLayout&vertical=film&verticalName=Film”) - not only that but they didn’t even have the foresight to remap the old URLs to the new crapness. Gone is the good performance (it runs as slow as a dog at home - and my connection isn’t that slow). Now when I go to the film section it asks me to install a plugin (and I have most common plugins already installed, so that’s saying something). And gone is the simple and easy way to find session times and cinemas.

I wouldn’t be so negative if I actually saw some value in the changes that they’ve made to the site - but I honestly can’t see how it’s better than the old one, so the net impression I get is that it’s a step backwards.

So I wouldn’t be counting on Sensis to be Telstra’s saving grace somehow…

Robert Cringely: Beam Me Up:

"VoIP is replacing a $20 phone with a $1,000 computer. What Apple has in mind is creating an entirely new form of computing experience, but this time — because it will take place mainly on a TV and not on a computer — many users may not think of it as a computing experience at all."

Well, not quite. I can get VoIP using my AUD$299 router, but he’s talking about Skype, and Apple’s iChat AV play. Interesting take…

On Tuesday arvo I added the David Suzuki interview to our podcast feed. I checked the iTunes store and it hadn’t appeared. I waited until the next morning and it still hadn’t appeared. So I rang Apple’s tech support. Mistake…

After an hour on the phone they pointed me to the forums for iTunes Store. Those who are familiar with my griping in the past about Apple’s lack of support will remember that those forums are not monitored or contributed to by Apple support personnel. It’s a “fend for yourselves” type of vibe.

Needless to say it wasn’t a particularly helpful or useful response. I suggested to the support person that this was an admission that Apple did not support the iTunes Store - and amazingly they agreed! I’m sure it was a slip up - but it’s a little close to the truth.

Despite pleading with the support rep to provide me with an email address to talk to a real person within Apple that might be able to help, they were unable to assist me.

So I posted to the message board. What else to do?

FTR - I didn’t receive a response on the message board. But this morning - about 36 hours later - the feed has been updated in the iTunes Store. So if you want to be notified of updates to podcasts, don’t rely on the iTunes Store to do it promptly - better to subscribe directly to the source feed.

My concern is that we submit our feeds to the iTunes Store to make it easier for people to find, subscribe and be updated easily in iTunes. And yet when there’s an issue with the feed, Apple’s support is nowhere to be found. In this case it was simply a delay of a day and a half. But what if it was a more serious issue? What then?

Just another in a long list of failures of Apple to support this customer…

At work we use the Wikka wiki for sharing information around the office. We have needed on a few occasions to post YouTube videos up on the wiki (for work - not for fun) so I whipped up a quick action extension for Wikka that enables doing so and posted it to the Wikka extension repository.