Ever wish you could fold t-shirts like the 8$/hr flunkie at the Gap? Me neither, thats a stupid question.
But I do fold a mean t-shirt now, thanks to the tubes.
Check this out, it works like a champ, and after practicing a few times you can even do it without much of a flat surface…
http://www.fold-your-shirt.com/
(would someone please show these guys how to encode an FLV)
I’ve decided that any candiate, for any office that I can vote for, from any politcal party, that demonstrates mastery of GTD, will get my vote.
As essentially, the management of a country boils down to… drum-roll-please… management. I prefer “next-actions” to platitudes.
GTD will ultimatley be a huge topic on this blog, but for now, why not start with WikiPedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gtd
So my migration to Mac OSX has been an interesting experience, one that I may deliniate in a later post. But for now, I’ll present you with some cool OSX video hacking tools.
Are you a video geek? Do you obsess about de-interlacing schema and resizing algorithms? Did you hack your videos to all hell on a PC? New to OSX? Pining for a Mac version of VirtualDub? Are you sick of all these questions?
If you answered yes more than no to the above questions, then check out these tools I found over the past few months:
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MPEG Stream Clip:
Awesome freeware app for converting from and too just about any video format you can imagine. Also has some good basic editing and post processing tools. I use this app a lot.
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VLC Media Player
So you need Quicktime for MOVs, the crappy Windows Media Player for WMVs, the yet-to-be-released Adobe Media Player for your FLVs, god-knows-what for your AVIs with weird codecs… right?
Nope, just go get a copy of VideoLan, plays em all beautifully, and there is a version for all platforms
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Mac the Ripper
Ok, what about ripping DVDs to editiable video formats? Not for copying mind you, who needs to copy when you have NetFlix? Try Mac the ripper. A very good and easy to use VOB ripper.
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JES Tools
This guy writes some killer video processing apps for the Mac. These most remind me of the hardcore tools I used on the PC. Specifically: JES Deinterlacer, and JES cleaner. Both are very good at what they do, and are part of my regular workflow. He also has some other interesting tools that I haven’t played with yet. Go check it out.
Big-Ups to my younger brother John, for pointing most of these out..
I’m talking analog… oldskool, for a book, not a browser.
I imagine someone has already thought of this (and posted about it somewhere) but I felt pretty clever when it occured to me in OfficeMax this afternoon…
Why was I in OfficeMax? For “pr0ductivity pr0n”. It a strange side effect of “getting” GTD, you find yourself turning off of the main thoroughfare to make a pit-stop at office supply stores… to see if they have anything “cool”.
Anyway, check this out, its a pack of those “Sign Here –>” stickies for 4 bucks at OfficeMax:
BAM! Better bokmark!
Save your page AND paragraph, they come off clean and can be reused many times. I have one in every book that I’m reading currently.
Ghost World is a great movie, put it on your NetFlix queue…
Here is the music video that is playing on the protagonists televions at the begining of the movie. It’s from the Ballywood movie “Gumnaam”… the song is called Jaan Pehechan Ho which translates to “We should get to know each other”. I need to find a copy of this and watch it, looks pretty funky…
I’m currently working on my Bioshock review, and I mention some of the best games of all time. I almost feel compelled to go back and add some of the the classic “Humongous” games, specifically “Putt-Putt Saves The ZOO“.
This is game I bought my son about 12-14 years ago for the PC, while he played my brother and I found ourselves constantly looking over our shoulders and watching. We both still love it to this day. It runs on ScummVM (or DosBOX) if your interested in trying it. I belive it’s also still for sale, along with many other kids games by “Humongous“. Still worth every penny if your looking for something smart and entertaining for your little ones to play on a PC.
Here is a particularly good cut scene that can only be invoked if you happen to click on the topiary, or hedge, creatures at the front of the zoo. Big Ups! to John, my brother, for capturing this and sending it to me…
Big news on the Flash front: native streaming of H.264 video in Flash 9.
This is a smart move by Adobe to “de-propritize” they’re video format and move to an industry standard codec and wrapper. Flash 9 will be the defacto media delivery application across all platforms, both for internet and local delivery. With more than 90% market penetration why as a developer would you reccomend anything else? This will certianly make my life allot eaiser.
Download the beta Flash 9 player
Watch some 720p high def video in a browser with Fp9
Oh Bioshock… oh my precious… you glorious specimin of threesixtydom. Oh how I adore thee… but how do I have time to write this when I’ve only owned the game for 5 hours? SImple, its my son’s turn to play. We’ve been on a 30 min rotation since about 5:30.
It’s awfully good. Evocaticve. Intense. Smart. Difficult. Is it as good as that first day with HalfLife? Almost. It’s actually more like a SystemShock 3 experience, the parallels are more than coincidental. This is a LookingGlass game through and through.
I had a friend in highschool who’s father made him read Atlas Shrugged; strange, but true story. A real Ayn Rand fan. I’d argue that Bioshock is a much more effective introduction to Objectivism. This is probably one of the smartest FPSs I’ve ever played. Extracting “Adam” from a “Little Sister” is one of the strangest game mechanics of all time, an almost psychotically inventive gaming idea..
As I write this I pause to watch my son engage a “BigDaddy” just outside of “Fountains Fishery”, its literally the most intense single player FPS action I’ve ever seen.
My turn! gotta go!
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