‘Nother Video

Posted on February 25, 2008

Tumblr, futurabolditalic, GoDaddy, Site5, and DNS servers are all conspiring to be a pain in my ass today, so I’m going to post this video here instead.

It’s my little sister, Samantha, torturing the dog.

I used Viddler this time to upload the video, because apparently DB wasn’t bitching about Vimeo for nothing, their processing time really does suck. There’s currently a three and a half hour wait just to start encoding video. That’s too long, even if it is high quality encoding.

I Made a Film

Posted on February 17, 2008

Well, technically, we made a film. John (one of the ones I know, anyways) was checking out my The Flip (about two posts down) and we were discussing editing software, and how I should learn to actually use some. So he took my The Flip, filmed some various shots, and challenged me to edit them into a film with a story.

I’m not sure if he intended for me to make a film about him being a French male prostitute. But c’est la vie.

L’Homme Prostitut from Joshua on Vimeo.

He did the shooting, I did the editing, J.G. Thirwell did the first half of the music and I did the second. I also did the French translations myself, without a dictionary or much working knowledge of the French language. It’s pretty good.

Nerdvana

Posted on February 10, 2008

I went to Sam’s Club today on a lark, and saw the exact same monitor that I had been eyeing at Best Buy earlier that day, for $75 cheaper. Couldn’t not pick it up. My desk is now 24″ more awesome. Watching the Front Row on it looks fantastic. I gotta say I’m happy with it.

Elsewhere… I got my Mac Classic to run. There’s not much to do on it, but maybe I should look into making it useful. It’s still pretty keen.

The banding on the screen isn’t normally visible, that’s just the camera’s image sensor picking up on the refresh rate.

Awesome Website: Instapaper

Posted on February 6, 2008

Instapaper is a sort of link depot, kind of a del.icio.us lite. It was developed by Marco Arment of Davidville, the company famous for Tumblr and Senduit. The basic idea is that in the course of reading stuff on the internet, you find websites you don’t necessarily have time to read at the moment. Instapaper lets you save them for later reading. And it’s even designed to work with the iPhone, so you can read those articles on the go.

Some may ask, why not use del.icio.us? Well, del.icio.us is more of a social site, and a site for archiving links. Go through your del.icio.us history, I bet you’ll find in the archives, upwards of 75% dead links. That’s what I got. Instapaper marks links as read when you visit them, and lets you easily delete something you’ve read.

Others might ask, why not use your browser’s bookmarks? Well, I’m a man who doesn’t like clutter. In fact, my bookmarks consist of what’s in my bookmarks bar, for sites I access frequently and thus want to get to with a quick key command, and that’s it. Nothing in the menus. And those links are only available in that browser. Not in another browser if I happen to be using it. And not on another computer, so something I save on my MacBook isn’t available on my iMac or my iPhone, or the computer at work. So Instapaper works well for me. Granted it’s not for everyone, but it’s awesome for me.

And as an added bonus, it works well with Safari’s webclips feature. I have an Instapaper widget on my dashboard for quick glance/access to my saved for later links.

All in all, it’s a simple, no nonsense web app. To use it, all you need to put in is a user name. You can put in an email address if you want. You can set a password if you want. But you don’t have to. I like it.

Review: Flip Video Ultra

Posted on February 4, 2008

DB sent me an IM last week about the Flip Video camera, saying that he was thinking about getting one. I had seen it before, and had some questions about its video quality (I’ve seen some cheap video cameras before and they put out some really shitty video), but after some searching around Youtube, we found that quality isn’t actually all that bad. I figured what’s the worse that could happen so I ordered one from Amazon. And even better, I managed to sell my old camcorder in less than 24 hours to make up for part of the hole in my checking account.

I ordered the orange 60 minute Ultra series model. It set me back $170 shipped. Amazon took its sweet time getting the camera out of the warehouse, but once it shipped it arrived swiftly. It’s a neat little device. Very compact, very simple. Just a few buttons, and no gew-gaws. In the box you get the camera, a soft pouch, a TV cable, some batteries, a wrist strap, and the documentation.

Read more

Free Music!

Posted on February 3, 2008

Not from me, I ain’t made of money. But this is just a brief post to let you know that Rykodisc is doing five free downloads a month to celebrate their 25th anniversary. I found this out in an insert in the awesome new Joe Jackson album. It looks like they haven’t updated for February yet, but January’s free downloads are five songs by various African artists, including Ali Farka Toure, Taj Mahal, Toumani Diabate, and more. They’ve got some good artists on their roster, so the offerings should be pretty good throughout the year. Go get ‘em.

And soon… A real post. Probably about my new little camcorder. Or perhaps a guest column.

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