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.

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.

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.

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 1280x70 16:9 and then I compressed that version again to 640x360. This got it down from 272 Mb to 33 Mb.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Artpad.art.com is a free painting program. I think it's Flash based.

Once you complete your painting, you can play it back. I did this and captured the playback using SnapZ Pro on my MacBook and saved the movie as a H.264 mov file.

VCASMO.com is a free web service that provides storage and display of presentations. The unique thing about this one is that you can display video and slides side-by-side and the slides can be timed to change with the video. Most people are using this for lectures with Powerpoint slides, but as this sample shows, it can also be used for tutorials. Besides embedding the presentation on your own site (like I did above), you can link to it on their website.

I like that you can have hot-links in the slides. I also like that the player can display thumbnails of the slides and that you can navigate to a slide by clicking the thumbnail. This gives you chapter stops. (Click the little black arrow on the right of the slide window to see the thumbnails).

The full screen playback look good and they nicely provide you with embeddable versions - a small one for you blog (like the one above) and a bigger one for full page display.

The editing is very straightforward. The video is displayed above thumbnails of the slides and arrows point from each slide to a time line. You just click and drag the arrows to position each slide. You can play back the video to check your timing and position each slide based on the audio.

You can also present other file types including audio, images, and PDF files. Presentations can also have subtitles in different languages and visitors can add subtitles.

Another cool feature they have is called "Instant VCASMO". This lets you pair slideshow.net presentations with Youtube videos.

Altogether it's a great feature set. The website, however, still feels like it's in beta. Site navigation is funky. It's hard to get back to your own dashboard. Also, there is no Help. But, hey, try it out!

I opened the album on my MacBook in Firefox and used SnapZ Pro to capture the movie. I then used QuickTime Pro to trim the movie. I uploaded the H.264 file to blip.tv and embedded their code in this blog post.

You can import the clips directly from the camcorder into iMovie 6 without having to first copy the files to your hard drive. This saves time. You can then edit in iMovie and Export any way you want, even as DVD. The quality is really quite good considering that this is a $140, Flash based camcorder. It does well in low light too. I wish they had a jack for an external mic and maybe a 3X optical zoom, but all in all I love this little thing. Now, what can I shoot?

I'm using SnapZ Pro, iChat, and Painter 8 to create a whiteboard demonstration on my MacBook. I can save the movie using the H.264 codec directly in SnapZ Pro. I'm switching back and forth between iChat (for the video) and Painter (for the whiteboard) by clicking on the application icons in the dock. You can see the original file on Blip.tv.

How to find the hexadecimal numbers of a color using GIMP (the free image editing software). You can see the original file on Blip.tv.

I like the quality of the full screen mode. You can see the movie on Blip.tv to see how it differs from the embedded version. The embedded version uses the Quicktime .mov file. The one on Blip.tv uses a Flash file.

Update: I embedded this code using the embedit WordPress plug-in. Get it here.

Click the little buttons at the bottom to go to other pages or click the header to open the zipboingwow website.

I like that you can edit your projects later and the changes show up everywhere the widget is embedded.

I'm trying the Flickr Photo Album plug-in for WordPress. It makes a special page for your Flickr albums and photos right in your blog. You can see mine at http://blodget.net/blog/flickr_photos. The plug-in also adds a Photos tab in the Post entry area so you can insert a Flickr photo in your post like I've done here.

SlideOO.com offers a free web service for creating horizontal slideshows like this one using your photos from Flickr.

Merry Christmas everyone. This slideshow is done using Picasa.

SETUP - MAC
1. Make sure the document you want to use is converted to plain text and that your document is saved with the .txt extension.
1. Open Automator.
2. Add an action by searching for and dragging “Get Contents of
TextEdit Document” from the menu on the left to the blank box on the
right.
3. Add action: “Text To Audio File” and complete the fields: System Voice, Save As, and Where.
4. Add action: “Rename Finder Items (Make Finder Item Names
Sequential)”. In the first drop down box, select “Make Sequential”.
Select “Add number to existing name”. Place number “after name”, and
separated by “dash”
5. Add action: “Import Audio File”. Select “MP3 Encoder” and check the “Delete source files after encoding.”
6. Save the Automator workflow as “Text to Speech”. Go to File - Save as plug-in, and select Script Menu to save.

Now you are finished with Automator and only have a few more steps to complete. Continuing with the process:

7. Open the document in TextEdit.
8. If needed, make any modifications to the text at this time.
9. Select the Scripts menu located in your menu bar. It looks like a
scroll or curly “S” and choose the “Text to Speech” workflow.

You will see the status of the conversion at work in your menu bar.
When it’s complete, an audio file will automatically be added to your
library in iTunes.

I was surprised by how quickly the conversion was done. It took only about 30 seconds to convert a book length text to an hour and 20 minute mp3 file. The previous way I did it required recording the file in real time using TextEdit and Audio Hijack.

Here's the book length sample mp3 file. (18Mb)
It's taken from "A Conjurer's Confessions by M. Robert-Houdin

(This list displays the top 10 results out of a possible 21 characters)

Click here to take the Star Wars Personality Test

online.



Webcam Fun

Originally uploaded by jimblodget.

This is a short recording made with the new free video streaming service ustream.tv. You can serve up live video or you can record a clip and embed it on a page as I did here.

Necessity, who is the mother of invention.
Plato, The Republic
Greek author & philosopher in Athens (427 BC - 347 BC)

I got a set of Holbein water soluble oil paints for Christmas and after looking around the house for a bit, I realized that I didn't have good tilt-able easel. I did have several good camera tripods. What I really needed was a device that held a canvas and screwed on a tripod. So, I searched through art supply catalogs and the Internet, but I couldn't find anything for sale. There are paint boxes that screw on a tripod and hold a canvas, but I didn't need a paint box. I already had a good one.

After several weeks of thinking about it and going through at least 3 different designs, I decided to build one last weekend. I had everything I needed - wood, screws, power tools and an idea. I picked the easiest one to build. It uses two 1/2 inch dowels as rails and has 3 cross pieces that slide up and down. The center one screws onto the tripod and the outer two adjust for different sized canvases.

It felt good to be working with my hands again cutting and sanding wood, drilling holes, grinding and bending metal and problem solving. When you build something from scratch, you run into all kinds unforeseen issues. For instance my original idea was to countersink a 1/4 inch nut into the center piece of wood as a tripod mount. This didn't work. It wasn't strong enough. The nut pulled out of the wood when I tightened it on to the tripod. Also the thin center piece didn't provide enough surface area to create a stable connection. What I really needed was a 3 1/2 inch square block with a metal mount in the center. I didn't have the right tools to make an inside 1/4 inch threaded mount. All lightweight tripods use a 1/4 inch bolt with 20 threads to the inch. I found I had a left over thin, galvanized metal plate with small holes drilled in a grid pattern. I wondered if I drilled a hole in the center of it that was 1/64th of an inch less than a 1/4 inch if it would screw on a standard tripod bolt. I tried it and sure enough it worked perfectly. I used a vise and a rubber mallet to bend the plate around the edges of the wood block and I used screws through the bent edges to hold it on the block.

It's a good design. It's strong and stable, lightweight, adjustable, and holds canvases up to 12x16 inches. You can substitute longer 1/2 inch dowels if you want to hold bigger canvases. You can move wet oil paintings by leaving the holder on the canvas and taking it off the tripod. This is even easier if you use a quick release. I might make several holders so I can work on multiple paintings in various stages.

A tripod head makes it easy to tilt a canvas from flat horizontal to straight vertical. You can tilt the surface into a vertical position to use a projector to trace out a composition. You can use the horizontal position to work on watercolors or to apply fine detail to an oil painting.

I'm pleased with the way it turned out. It's a very handy device. Maybe I should sell the idea.

Snap

What is Snap Preview Anywhere? Snap Preview Anywhere enables anyone visiting your site to get a glimpse of what other sites you're linking to, without having to leave your site. By rolling over any link, the user gets a visual preview of the site without having to go there, thus eliminating wasted "trips" to linked sites.

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.

]]> http://www.blodget.net/blog/blogging-with-flock/feed/ 0 http://www.blodget.net/blog/how-to-play-a-dulcimer/ http://www.blodget.net/blog/how-to-play-a-dulcimer/#comments Wed, 13 Dec 2006 04:05:48 +0000 Jim http://www.blodget.net/blog/2006/12/12/how-to-play-a-dulcimer/ 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.

You can listen to this post with this mp3 player:

Download audio file (896054.mp3)

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

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

Download audio file (crows.mp3)

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

The folks at WetPaint.com have just introduced an new free online paint program. You can use a variety of tools to create an image and you can invite others to join you to collaborate. Once the work is completed you can save it and share it in the Gallery. You can also download the image file to your own computer. It's not as robust a program as Gliffy or Imaginationcubed, but it's lots of fun.

1. Real things are unique.
2. Real things can only be used by one person at a time.
3. Real things deteriorate over time.

In the real world you couldn't own an idea. It had to be real or fixed in some way in reality. You could think of a story, even tell it to someone else, but you couldn't copyright it until it was written down. It wasn't real until it was a manuscript, something you could hold in your hand. Only then did you have something that you could own and sell. You had an original which was unique. You owned it and had a right to sell it or to sell the rights to make duplicate copies.

I am writing this using Google Docs which is an online word processor. The words on this page do not really exist anywhere except as zeros and ones stored in a magnetic medium somewhere on the planet. I really don't know where it is. As such it's a 'virtual' document. It's very much like an idea. It only exists in the memory banks of the global brain. It's not on a hand or type written page. So do I own it? How can you own something that isn't real?

In the real world you cannot have your cake and eat it too. There is only one original - one Mona Lisa painting, one sculpture of David. Everything else is a copy. Originals are worth a lot more than copies. An original typed manuscript is worth more than a photocopy, but that's because it's the first one. It's unique. All copies are never quite the same as the original, but in the virtual world originals and copies are indistinguishable. They are identical.

It could be argued therefore that in the virtual world copies are worth more than in the real world. However, in the virtual world a single original can be used by multiple people at the same time. This document can be read not only by me, but by the world and everyone can be reading it at the same time. I really don't have to make copies. Copies are redundant and are only useful if something happens to the original and it becomes unavailable.

Virtual objects are immortal. Everything in the real world eventually turns to dust, but in the virtual world things do not deteriorate over time. A digital photograph does not fade. A digital recording does not get scratched. An avatar in SecondLife does not age. As they say on the Antiques Roadshow, "Condition is everything". What does that mean in a world where your goods never wear out?

This is a real dilemma for us going into the 21st century as more and more of our society and commerce become based on things that do not exist in the real world. We are blithely moving forward assuming that these new virtual works are the same as real works. We are applying the same rules when in fact the rules where made in the first place under very different conditions. In a world where things are not unique, where people can use the same thing simultaneously and where things do not wear out do we really need to guarantee ownership? Do the old rules still apply?

I suggest they do not. We need to create new rules for the virtual world.

This document is publicly viewable at: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dg7rnzwc_4frvxtn

Jim Blodget
7:30 to 10 A.M. November 10, 2006

I like the way the player displays pictures for each recording and that when you click the picture it takes you to that recording's page. Here's a link to the podcast on Odeo.com and here's a link to my original podcast page on Zipboingwow.com.

A very special thank you to Don McAllister and his wonderful Screencastsonline.com website for information on how to produce a screencast including links to all the tools he uses. Be sure to see his Behind the Scenes screencast.

Here's the code:

<iframe id="musicPlayer" style="border: 1px solid #aaaaaa; width: 350px; height: 25px"
src="http://mail.google.com/mail/html/audio.swf?audioUrl=
http://www.yourwebsite/yourmp3file.mp3"></iframe>

I just installed the advanced- wysiwyg plug-in and I am now using it for the first time to write a post. The toolbar has lots of new options and formatting features. I'm curious to see how the image insert features work.

I just went to my Flickr pictures and picked out this daisy. I pasted the URL into the image insert field and chose align left and it worked. Not bad. I also clicked on the image and then clicked the link icon to see if I can set a link for the image. I think it worked.

Here's where I found the plug-in. Wow, that was cool. The link feature now let's me choose whether to open the link in the same window or a new one.

I hate to push this too far before publishing the post but I just have to try switching to HTML view and back and then try spell checking. Wish me luck. Cool it all works!

I've added a link to the discussion in the blog's main navigation bar. See it up there? But why not just click here.

This post is also a test to see if I can upload a photo to my Photo Gallery and use it in a post. The Photo Gallery automatically resizes photos like Flickr does to give you several files at varying sizes - a thumbnail, a midsize, and a large. I'm displaying the midsize and linking when you click on the photo to the large. I could also link to the Photo Gallery Item page.

After making a sample movie, I exported it as an MP4 file and uploaded it to Vimeo for conversion to Flash. I then downloaded the Flash version and uploaded it to my blog's server. I'm using the Wimpy WASP player to play the FLV file on a web page and this post uses an iframe tag to display the HTML page in a frame.

Check back later to see if a different photo is displayed.

Click the little white arrow to play the video.

This is Andy Frank givng a short physics demonstration. The video file is stored on the Breeze server at Chemeketa Community College and is embedded in this post using the iframe tag.

Download audio file (crickets.mp3)

Let's see if I can embed a Flash Video file stored on my own server. I'm using a Flash player called WASP that I found on Wimpyplayer.com. It cost $30, but it is worth it to be able to play FLV files from my own website. You can use it to embed files on a page or you can have it open a pop-up window. You can also create a jukebox and play several movies.

I'm hoping that this works. I'm trying to post to my WordPress blog from within Flickr. If this works, we'll eat like kings.

Well, that seems to work which is great because I really want to embed multimedia files into this blog. All I did was copy and paste the code from Vimeo into the plain text editor of WordPress and it worked - no need to install plug-ins.

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