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]

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Episode 045 – Snapshot Mosaic

I’ve *finally* completed a new screencast. Sorry for the long delay. This one was a fun one. It demonstrates a fairly easy way to take a single image and break it up into component ‘snapshots’. So it looks like you took several pictures of different parts of an object and reassembled them. The example I do is a pretty basic one. You could do things like adjust the lightness, contrast or saturation of each snapshot separately to really give different creative effects.

This is another example where I really think Inkscape is significantly quicker than using Gimp or Photoshop for certain photographic projects. The method is simple, very intuitive and leaves room for lots of creative ideas once you get familiar with it.

Hope you enjoy it. 🙂

Mahalo Daily Trailer – Very Sharp

I’m not sure about the idea of people-powered search. But maybe Jason Calacanis should stick to video trailer production instead. This intro video for the new Mahalo Daily video podcast was very good. The part with Alex Albrecht was genius.

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Make My Logo Bigger Cream.. and more!

Stuck with a crappy graphic designer? Say goodbye to all your worries with easy to apply “Make My Logo Bigger Cream”. Big improvements with only one application. And there are lots of other deals to be had too, like “Whitespace Eliminator Spray” and more.

This company could put many hard working designers out of business. 🙂

ps. The look on the designer’s face when confronted with “Flouresencizer” is priceless.

Check out all of these wonderful products right here.

🙂

[via boagworld]

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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. 😉

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The Personal Aspects of Space Travel and Shooting Stars

Here’s a good explanation of one of the more mundane aspects of space travel… and you’ll learn something surprising about shooting stars along the way too:

http://weirdworldstuff.blogspot.com/2007/10/where-shooting-stars-come-from-funny.html

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Young Engineers

This was very very cool and not what I expected….

Nice Idea – For more funny movies, click here

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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. 🙂