Blodget’s Blog

Promo for Captain Filmo’s Fantastic Flicks which aired on KVDO-TV, Ch. 3, in Salem, Oregon in 1974.

My first job out of college was at KVDO-TV, a small independent tv station in Salem, Oregon. The station was on the air from 1969 to 1975 and not much of those days survives. This clip is a promo for “Captain Filmo’s Fantastic Flicks” which aired in 1974 for about a month. I playe…d the part of the Captain (and was the manic announcer), my friend Syd Bates was my side kick, and Dave Larson played the “little person” in this promo and was the sane announcer at the end.

This piece was originally recorded on 2 inch quad tape. It was later transferred to 3/4 inch tape and then to VHS tape. I digitized the VHS version on my MacBook through an EyeTV Hybrid and did a bit of clean up in iMovie HD.

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Here’s a classic blooper video. This is the “Funny Weather” where I cracked up on live tv.

I was the weatherman on KVDO-TV in Salem, Oregon for about a year (1974-1975). I had no training and got my information off the AP Weather wire until the station (as a cost saving measure) removed the AP machine. I then got my information by walking out the back door and looking up and West. I also extrapelated from the weather section of the day before’s local newspaper. The funny part was that I think I was more accurate than the Portland stations.

As I recall, we had taped three religious shows that day and I was ready to laugh at anything. Watch for when I say “Hail in Kentucky”. At that point Syd, our cameraman gave me a “Sieg Heil” from behind the camera. Things went down hill from there.

The newsman with me was Lee jackson who later went to work for the 700 Club.

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I’m insert code to play the movie from my DreamHost site insead of Blip.tv.

I just used ftp to upload the QT movie to a folder on my website (on DreamHost). I then used the DreamHost control panel to convert the file. You just type in the folder and file name, set size and quality settings, and click the convert button. The conversion to flv is quick (only a couple of minutes). Along with the flv file (it uses H.264) they also put an html file and a poster jpg file in the folder with the original mov file. You can open the html file in a web editor like Dreamweaver to modify it which I did to add the text on the page.

I like the simple, clean player. Notice that it includes a button in the controller to show the movie full screen. It’s the black square on the right just to the left of the volume control icon. I also like that when the movie finishes playing, the player shows the poster frame again.

The quality of the Flash file is pretty good – much better than their old service. It looks to me to be similar to Blip.tv.

The DreamHost control panel also gives you the option to batch convert a bunch of movies in the same folder. I haven’t tried this yet.

By the way the original QT movie file was 33 Mb and the converted FLV file is 3 Mb.

DreamHost also offers quicktime streaming so you could offer QT versions if you wanted to for iPod or podcasting use.

The best thing about using DreamHost is the control and modification capabilities. You control access to the movies because they are on your own web site. You could password protect your movies folder for instance. Also the player is customizable and is controllable through javascript. For instance, you could tell the player to start at frame number 12345. And you don’t have to use their QT to Flash conversion method. You could use a better tool like the Flash Movie Conversion tool and upload your FLV file to DreamHost.

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This is just a little test movie to see if I can get my old Sony camcorder (which can record in 16:9) to work with iMovie HD. The trick to importing the movie was to set iMovie\’s preferences to NOT automatically letterbox. I compressed this in two steps – first to 1280×70 16:9 and then I compressed that version again to 640×360. This got it down from 272 Mb to 33 Mb.

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I’ve been using Brushes to paint on my iPod Touch. I’m very impressed with the versatility of this application.

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The week before Christmas a big snow storm came through and gave us a foot of snow – the most in 30 years. Kris thought it would be fun to try out the cross-country skis.

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I use Google’s RSS feed reader on my iPod Touch to keep up to date on what’s new. Sometimes I want to share my findings with others. A good way to do this is to email posts to a Blogger blog and use Feedburner to let people subscribe to the blog by email.

My Blogger blog is called Jim’s Findings. Feel free to subscribe by email. You’ll get a daily email with all the things I find that day.

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Here’s a little test to see if I can email a video to my blog through
Flickr. I’m attaching a short video file to the email. It’s a
Quicktime movie compressed with the H.264 codec. File size is about
500 K.

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I am loving my new Touch, but typing on it is a pain – the sound of one finger poking. I wish somebody made an external keyboard for the thing.

My 12 favorite things to do with the Touch:
1. Browse the web – it comes with the Safari browser. You can tap twice to zoom into a column of text. It’s very readable and easy to maneuver.
2. Read my RSS feeds in Google Reader. They have a mobile version which works great.
3. Read email. It comes with a Mail program. You can also access your Google mail in Safari
4. Keep a calendar. It syncs with iCal. You can also use Google calendar which is what I do because I’ve combined my office calendar with my personal calendar on Google Calendar. I love the way you can type “Meet with Loraine 1 to 2 on Thursday” and it puts it in the right time on the right day. Very cool.
5. Watch videos. You can watch YouTube videos and, of course, you can watch your movies and tv shows you’ve downloaded in iTunes. To try it out I downloaded a Pixar short “For the Birds” and two Daffy Duck cartoons. Here’s the best part. You can connect the iPod up to your TV and control it remotely with an Apple remote. Next I need to try ripping a DVD.
6. Read books. There’s a free service called Readdle which lets you store up to 20, 5 Mb files on the web which you can read in the browser. Upload Word docs, RTF, PDF, TXT files and it converts them to HTML for instant viewing. You can bookmark your place and come back to where you left off. Very handy.
7. Read Google Docs – word processing, spreadsheets, and PRESENTATIONS. Unfortunately you can’t see them on a tv. The Safari browser doesn’t show up for some reason.
8. Listen to music. Don’t forget it’s an iPod and it can store your whole music collection.
9. View photos. You can sync your iPhoto collection with the iPod and carry all your favorite photos with you to show friends and family. It even does slideshows with music.
10. Look things up. You can check the weather and there’s a mobile version of Wikipedia and the Internet Movie Database.
11. Get directions. Google maps works wonderfully.
12. Play games. Turns out there are lots of free games and puzzles that are Web based. You don’t have to download them to your iPod. You play them in the browser.

So, as you can tell, I’m having fun.

iPod Touch

Originally uploaded by jimblodget.

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Google reader just added some new features which makes it really easy to share the things you find while reading RSS feeds or visiting web sites.

First, the new Notes feature adds a button in your browser’s toolbar. Whenever you are on a web page, just highlight some text and click the Add notes button and that text and the link to the page is added to your notes in Google reader. So as an example, while I’m cruising, I find something I want to read later or save to share with friends, I click the button and bang, I’ve saved it.

The next feature is tags. As I’m reading in Google Reader I can add a tag to the item. Items can have multiple tags so the same items can be grouped multiple ways. Items with the same tag can be shared. For example I quickly added the tag “Mac” to some of the articles I found and now I have a public page with all my Mac findings. Check it out:

See my Mac shared items

The cool thing is you can tag your notes. So you can share web pages that don’t have RSS feeds.

This public page has a RSS feed so you can subscribe to my Mac links in your RSS reader or in Safari. As I add new ones, you see them in your reader.

Mac shared items feed

This makes it super easy to share findings in any topic and you can share multiple topics.

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