Everday Normal Guy…

Finally… a rap song aimed straight at me.. motherf!#@er…

[warning: if you didn’t get the gist.. you might find the language (or at least one word repeated many times)  in this video somewhat offensive – or just funny]

Blogged with Flock

Useful tool for downloading/converting online videos

Another quick link, (this time somewhat useful) 😉

If you want to download online streaming videos to your pc, you could try vconvert.net. A very simple (and pretty) dialog box awaits you there. You enter the URL to the video (like a youtube link) and then check off which conversion you want to download. One nice thing that I found useful is that they will provide an audio (mp3) version of a streaming video. Many times there are presentations and things that I find interesting, but I end up wanting to listen to them in the car during my commute instead of watching them. I could always do the conversion to extract the audio myself, but this might prove simpler. It appears to be free but I believe they offer up a 3x speed increase with a paid version.

The conversions available are .wmv, .mov, .mp4, .3gp, .mp3 and .flv. I tried it with a couple of our Inkscape YouTube vids and it seemed to work flawlessly – I’ve only tried the mp3 and flv conversions. But of course, as with just about everything online, you spins the wheel and takes your chances. 😉

Blogged with Flock

Screencast 35 now glitch-free and up on YouTube

I finally got around to fixing the glitchy video by re-encoding my screencast episode 35. I also managed to upload it to YouTube although with it being over 10 minutes long, I once again had to split it up into part 1 and part 2.

The workflow was still by no means painless. There are a few things I still need to streamline, but definitely mencoder is the way to go for me.

Perspective Reflections – Inkscape Screencast

I’ve uploaded my latest Inkscape screencast (Episode 35). This one describes a neat method of creating reflections using a simple black to white mask. I discovered this neat trick at Nicu’s great blog.

While I’ve made reflections using Inkscape in the past, I’ve always had two problems. First, if the group of objects to be reflected consisted of multiple colours, using a simple opacity gradient was quite a pain. Second, creating a realistic looking reflection for an object in perspective (particularly photos) was very difficult. The one that we use on the screencaster LCD monitor thumbnail (at the top of this post) is really faked with a white opacity gradient. The problem being that if I changed the background to anything but white, you’d suddenly see the retardedness of it all. 😉

So the mask method eliminates these two problems and makes creating reflections of more complex objects (including perspectives) much easier and more elegant.

Hope you enjoy it.

For those who care about the mechanics of screencasting, this was actually the first one that I created solely with recordmydesktop, mencoder, and Audacity – although I did use an ffmpeg one-liner to extract a screenshot for the thumbnail (anybody know how to do that with mencoder/mplayer?). I think the quality is better and the workflow is definitely easier and more logical. Big thanks to Heathenx for helping me out with this stuff.

But it wasn’t completely without problem. You will notice some weird artifacting that occurs about 2 or 3 seconds into my sped-up intro. This wasn’t in the original ogg capture, but occurred somewhere during the post-processing. I thought it might disappear by the end – but no such luck. 😉 I’ve decided to leave it there for the time being and will correct it and replace the files when I can.. ie. not tonight. 😉

One other thing is that I haven’t yet put this one up on YouTube. It’s about 12min long, so I’m gonna have to split it up like I did with Episode 26. I’d like to do it with mencoder as well this time, so in the next couple of days I expect to have the two-parts finished and up on YouTube as well.

Shattered Photo – Inkscape Screencast

I’ve finished another Inkscape screencast, Episode 032 to be specific. This one shows one way of creating a shattered glass effect with a photo image using Inkscape. I’ve uploaded a lower quality version to YouTube and of course you can find it in significantly higher quality, along with all of our other screencasts at: screencasters.heathenx.org

Hope you enjoy it and find it useful. 🙂

The graphic app that will change the world!!

via Digg,

Finally! Something windows users can be proud of, and Mac users can just sit and drool over:

🙂

Device Graphic – Inkscape Screencast

Amidst the quagmire heathenx and I are calling ‘Codec Hell’, I did manage to get another Inkscape screencast done. This one demonstrates the use of Inkscape’s guides, gradients and some shadow effects to come up with a decent looking 3D device graphic. This one is about 17 minutes long (my longest to date), so I had to split the YouTube version into two parts. Hopefully I won’t lose anybody at the halfway mark. With their 10min/100MB limitation it makes screencasting about something substantial a bit of a tough one. But that’s one of the reasons we started screencasters.heathenx.org. So if you want to see the whole video in one piece, and in significantly higher quality, check it out there instead.

Also, please let us know via our blog at screencasters.wordpress.com or via the comments here if you have any trouble watching the video.

SCTV Genius – courtesy of YouTube

I’m not sure if there are any SCTV fans who read this blog, but back in the day it was one of my favourite shows.

Thanks to YouTube, you can watch the classic Gerry Todd show. It gave me a good chuckle on so many levels (the DJ voice, the video effects, the commercials, it goes on and on – video bloggers take note!).

Part 1 has the start of the show and classic Gerry Todd – bring up the super.

Part 2 has a hilarious Doobie brothers carpet warehouse commercial and a Christopher Cross / Michael Mcdonald video at the end that is pure genius.

I forgot how awesome SCTV was. Thank you YouTube!

Inkscape Screencast 9 – Glass Button Redux

My 9th Inkscape screencast is up. This one shows a simple way to achieve a pretty convincing high-gloss candy look to various shapes.

This one was created in record time for me too. From the moment I fired up ffmpeg to start recording, through the intro recording, sound and music mixing, until starting the upload to YouTube took about 90 minutes. I didn’t take a lot of time creating the intro for this one (and it shows), but overall it’s still decent I think. Hopefully you like it.

I haven’t had a lot of time to spend using Inkscape lately, simply because I’m currently buried at work (which has absolutely nothing to do with Inkscape or graphics at all ;-< ). But I did read on the mailing list somewhere that the most recent builds incorporate gradient editing right on the object (not in a separate dialog). That feature would have been useful for this screencast, but no sense in demonstrating a feature that few people can use right now. Here’s the link to my other screencasts up on YouTube. You should also check out my friend heathenx’s screencasts. I’ve learned quite a few good tips from him too.