Blodget’s Blog

Flickr picture

I just downloaded Flock and I’m trying it out. It looks like a nice
browser. You can connect to your Flickr account and upload images from
within Flock. I’m writing this post using Flock’s blog feature. You can right mouse click on something on a web page and choose Blog This which is what I did with the photo.

It also has a built-in RSS reader, but I prefer the Google RSS Reader. There are a lot more features to check out, but my early impression is good. Firefox goodness with easy multimedia manipulation.

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Today I experimented with getting a Flash FLV movie playlist to work. My brother, Bob, gave me access to his excellent dulcimer tutorial Quicktime movies. I converted four of his movies to FLV and created a test page which uses a XML playlist and Javascript to display and control all the movies. I like the way that you can do all this on a single page. In the Quicktime version you have to have a page for each movie. You can start and stop clips, jump forward and back between clips, and even jump to points within a clip (think chapter stops). This is a very powerful set of features for combining movies.

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I just discovered the free web service called Talkr.com which provides a MP3 recording of your blog posts. Just create a free account and point to your blog’s RSS or Atom feed. If you have a WordPress blog you can install a free Talkr plug-in. This will place a “Listen to this Post” link at the bottom of each post. People can also subscribe to your Talkr feed in iTunes. This way they can listen to all your text posts as a podcast. You can subscribe to my blog’s Talkr feed by copying this link and pasting it into the “Subscribe to Podcast” feature in the Advanced menu of iTunes.

You can listen to this post with this mp3 player:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

or click the “Listen to this post” link at the bottom of this post to link directly to the mp3 file.

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This is way cool. DreamHost.com (my hosting service) now offers a free way to convert Quicktime and other video file formats to FLV. They also offer a way to easily embed the video in a blog posting like this one. Here’s a sample.

Read Michael D. Pollock’s excellent article to learn more about how to add a FLV to your WordPress blog.

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I discovered Google Sketchup about a week ago and I had a little time this weekend to learn how to use it. I wanted to make a copy stand with two photoflood lights, a camera on a tripod, and an easel with a drawing on it. I imported some basic models, but I couldn’t find a photoflood light so I made one by cutting a sphere in half and tacking on a cylander in the back and placing a lightbulb in the center. I thought it would be neat to do a fly-by animation. The free version of Sketchup does not have an animation feature. So, I placed the model in Google Earth and used SnapZ Pro to do a screen capture as I manually zoomed in and out. I edited the movie in iMovie and converted it to Flash with the Flash Video encoder.

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Crows usually don’t hang out at our house. This morning when I got up I could hear a mob at the top of our fir trees having an arguement. I threw on a hat and coat and stepped out on our back porch with my mp3 recorder and a stereo lapel mic clipped to the front of my jacket. I made a beautiful 10 minute recording standing in the 30 degree F fresh air, but when I got back inside, I discovered that I had plugged the mic into the headphone jack. Dang. By the time I got back outside, most of the group had departed. So what you hear is a much smaller group. This recording was made at 7:30 am on Sunday, December 3, 2006.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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Splashr is a free web service that creates wonderful slideshows from your Flickr pictures. Just pick a tag and a username and a slideshow style and viola you’ve got a slideshow which you can embed or link to in your blog or web page.

This is just one example of several different styles. I also like this gallery version.

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