Episode 061 is now up. In this screencast I demonstrate how to create a pseudo-realistic looking recycle bin type object. It could be useful for someone wanting to create icons perhaps. It only took 7 or 8 objects to create and demonstrates how some subtle uses of gradients and blurs can help get the effect you want.
I also fooled around with my Flip video camera and ended up doing a fun little intro with it. Hope you like it.
Anyone who’s watched enough Trailer Park Boys may feel this recent CBC news headline produces a hefty feeling of deja vu.
Hint: Ricky’s father was once a trucker..
I was in a Wal-Mart up here in Aurora Ontario this weekend, and while sauntering by the electronics section I saw a couple of Flip Video cameras on display for sale. The price was something close to $155.00 as I recall. Up until now I think the Flip Camera was sold exclusively in the States. Good news for fellow Canucks in the mood for a relatively cheap and decent quality video capture device.
You can read my mini-review and see video samples in the post I did about my new Flip Video Ultra camera a short time ago.
It was the first night of soccer for my daughter last night. Let me give you the 3 minute rundown:
It was cold and damp (about 8C or 46F), moderately gusty and lightly raining. My dad and I were freezing. She was rosy-cheeked but kept warm with all the exercise, activity and good circulation that comes with being a six year old.
Not knowing the first thing about being goalie and being moderately afraid of the ball, of course she immediately volunteered to be goalie. (!!) We almost made it safely to halftime with only 2 or 3 goals against when of course, someone kicked a high one - stopped by my daughter’s teeth. Ouch! Needless to say she won’t be volunteering as soccer goalie for the foreseeable future. No cut lips, no broken teeth, no bruises. Just tears and a daddy who ran out to meet her halfway between the sidelines and the goal net. After 5 minutes of cuddling, kissing and reassurances that she didn’t have to play goalie anymore it was like it never happened. Gawd, kids can be resilient when they need to be.
She had a great time and was treated of course to a relatively late night donut and hot chocolate. One of the funniest things - to me anyway - was when she held up her half eaten donut (consumed outward to inward of course) and exclaimed “Look daddy, iPod!!”.
ps. Sorry for the crappy photo quality. This was taken with my recently haggled upon LG 8800 Venus phone. It’s two massively-compressed megapixels.
Here is how I know…
Two years ago, just before I went on a week long vacation, I asked our IT guy here at work to mirror my incoming work email to my personal Gmail account while I was away. I never got him to turn that off and I’m glad.
I have done nothing but wrestle a losing battle with Outlook and its horrible email archiving system. Trying to maintain a reasonably trim mailbox, I semi-regularly archive both my inbox items and my sent items in Outlook - big mistake. Trying to find an email from 18 months ago is like pulling teeth. Importing an archive file is confusing and entirely NOT straightforward. Maybe Outlook 2008 is better than 2003 (which I use), but the whole shebang is a steaming pile IMO.
Enter Gmail. For what is likely the 10th time in as many weeks, I have searched Outlook and its wretched archives for a past email item and each time I’ve thrown my hands up in frustration. I then turn to my Gmail, enter in a search term or two, and BAM! there it is. Infinitely easier, better and more useful.
The only thing I need now is to autoforward my sent items into my Gmail (I guess I could always do a bcc - maybe I could set that as a default?). Right now I only get items incoming to my work email address but not my replies.
Add to that our recent email and server problems during our office move a month ago. Gmail was a real life preserver at that time as well.
This is not to ignore the calendar functions of Outlook. They pretty much suck too. I find Google Calendar to be very functional, easy to use and love the fact that it’s available to me at home and at work. And since Gmail now handles Outlook meeting requests and nicely integrates my GCal agenda, that’s just gravy on the potatoes.
Sorry for all the G-Love in this post, but man, does Outlook ever suck.
[UPDATE: I found a way to automatically bcc an email address on every sent mail right here: http://www.outlookcode.com/article.aspx?id=72]
Browsing through the Flickr Group of You Look Nice Today (a podcast I’m a recently quite fond of), I came across a Geekiest photo pool.
If you are in need of a good and hearty laugh today, just browse that pool of photos. Especially this one posted by Chris Pirillo. Check out his dad’s ‘fro. It truly is a thing of beauty.
All I can say is thank God for flatbed scanners.
Shortly before I went to Las Vegas, I decided I’d like to buy the Flip Video Ultra camcorder while I was down there. If you don’t know what it is, here’s a short description:
It’s a handheld, solid state, 2GB capacity video capture device. It captures 640x480 video at 30fps. There is a 1.8” LCD screen on the back and it runs on 2 AA size batteries. It has a neat flip-out USB connector that allows you to plug it straight into a standard USB port. It also has an output plug and cable for direct TV output. On the bottom there is also a standard sized threaded tripod connector. There is no memory card slot, and the device holds 60 min of video. It retails for about $100.00-150.00. That’s about it.
When you plug the device into a Windows or Mac machine the first time, it will install some nifty software to preview the videos, transfer the videos and allow for some basic editing as well. It also shows up as a generic USB mass storage device. On Linux, this appears to be the only option. It might be possible to run the windows version of the software under Wine, but I haven’t tried it. But being able to easily pull the avi files off onto my drive is the all important functionality I was looking for.
One of the problems I found during my pre-purchase research, was that I couldn’t seem to find any full size avi samples to download and view in order to judge the quality of the video. I purchased it pretty much on blind faith, just hoping the video quality would be good. Since trying it out and viewing the video on my pc, I have to say I’m pleasantly surprised.
So in order to possibly help out others looking at this camera, I’ve decided to post a 23 second clip from the camera for people to download and view. But first a word about video formats…
The camera saves video in a format called 3ivx. It seems to be a specific type of mp4 format. The audio portion of the codec seems to be the main stumbling block for some of the video players I’ve tried.
On my Windows box at work, once I installed the proprietary software that came with the camera, the videos could be played by the proprietary player as well as Windows Media Player (I think the software installs the proper codecs for WMP to use).
On my Linux box (Ubuntu Hardy Heron), I was able to play the video with no problem using Totem, but VLC and Mplayer would only play the video and not the audio. Hmm. This is weird since Totem is usually the weakest of the three.
So for the sake of comparison, I decided to modify a couple of the scripts we use for our screencasts and converted the original 3ivx file to an mpeg4 (h264/mp3) file and also to a flash version to allow people to avoid video codec hell entirely.
So you can download the original file to see the quality the camera provides and also download the h264 version and if you have any trouble playing either, you can also view the flash version. From my relatively untrained eye, the three versions are fairly close in quality. All three are the full 640x480 resolution so you should get a much better idea of the quality than you would from YouTube or similar sites.
Note also the relative filesizes. The original avi and flash versions are 11.5MB and 18.5MB respectively, but the h264 version is a whole lot smaller. You’d expect to see a huge degradation in quality, but it actually looks very similar to me (again with my untrained eyes of course). So you be the judge:
Original AVI from the Flip Video Camera:
(640x480, 23sec, 11.5MB) VID00026.AVI
h264/mp3 file converted using mencoder:
(640x480, 23sec, 3.2MB) VID00026_h264mp3.avi
Flash version:
(640x480, 23sec, 18.5MB) Click Here to View
Have a look and give me your comments. I’d be interested in also hearing from any Mac users (ahem.. Earl Moore?)out there to see how the original and h264 versions play on your shiny Macs as well.
All in all I’m very pleased with the Flip camera. It’s simple, seems fairly rugged and is just about exactly what I was looking for.
One of the highlights of my recent Vegas vacation didn’t have anything to do with Vegas. The inimitable Dave Yates interviewed me via phone for Episode 73 of his Lottalinuxlinks podcast. This is definitely one of my favourite Linux podcasts, and that is probably all down to Dave himself. He always makes me chuckle.
It went pretty well and I don’t think I fell too flat on my face. But you be the judge. One of the things I love about Dave’s podcast is that he interviews regular linux users and the interviews are casual and conversational - no scripted question-answer format here. If you want to listen to Episode 73 or any of his past episodes, you can check them out at: http://lottalinuxlinks.com/podcast
Here is the direct link for the Episode 73 mp3 file.
Mucho thanks to Dave for the opportunity!
We arrived back from our five day sojourn to Vegas last night by way of San Francisco(!). Turns out Air Canada booked the connecting flights with not enough time overlap to satisfy United. So they had to send us back from Vegas via San Fran and then on to Toronto. Originally it was supposed to be Vegas-Denver-Toronto. Needless to say the little one was tired at the end of it all, but a good girl as always.
Having never been to San Francisco, I was hoping to at least see something interesting flying in or out, but it was boring as hell. No Golden Gate, no nothing really. The saving grace was flying over the snowy peaks of the Rockies on our way back eastward. My dad has always talked about how wonderful driving the Rockies was back in the day. I think I’ll have to put it on my Things To Do list. It was pretty spectacular from 30,000 ft, probably even more so from the ground.
I was checking out the first couple of episodes of Merlin Mann’s most recent podcast adventure You Look Nice Today. I’ve always found Merlin to be smart, quickwitted, and yet firmly planted - whatever that means. In any case, his sense of humour always seems to appeal to me. And along with his two cohorts, it comes through great in this new podcast. It’s different than anything I’ve heard. Not scripted, irreverent, but not awkward or slow. There is definitely something here.. it’s just hard to describe.
If you find that you share Merlin’s take on a lot of things, you’ll really enjoy this one (or at least the couple or three episodes I’ve listened to so far). I found it entertaining. It made me laugh. In my car. Out loud. People were staring. Maybe I need to get out more.
Also.. LonelySandwich, the one who sounds a bit like he’s talking through the end of a drainpipe, sounds a hell of a lot like Chris Brogan to me. Maybe it’s a certain type of accent. Dunno.