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how to convert videos to PS3 format on a mac, using VisualHub
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Thank god.
« November 2006 | Main | January 2007 »
Here's mine (starred means more than one visit, via the big K):
McMinnville, OR (home)
San Diego, CA*
Orange County, CA*
New York City, NY
San Francisco, CA* (6 times I think)
San Carlos, CA*
Hood River, OR
Cannon Beach, OR
Kaanapali, Maui, Hawaii
Posted at 12:00 AM in travel | Permalink | Comments (7)
Gmail is the best web app there is, period. It's also my sole interface to email. It's close to perfect, but a couple things keep me from calling it as such.
I get a ton of spam, in the low thousands per day, and gmail is pretty good about most of it, but it does generate a lot of false positives. Given that say 3,000 spam messages come in every day, false markings on 3 or 4 messages is damn good percentage wise (putting gmail's filters as 99.99+% accurate), but it still sucks to miss out on legit email. I've found a couple places where Gmail is lacking:
Posted at 12:00 AM in bug reports, web development, webapps | Permalink | Comments (15)
ho ho ho hat/beard is the best wacky easter egg feature ever. Try adding it as a note to your photos.
I've had a love/hate thing going on with Threadless for a while. While I love their shirts (extra points for cutting off the tags so I don't have to), I've grown tired of the trend towards one-off visual jokes as shirt designs. I like designy, witty, and yes, amusing shirts, but it felt like for a good six months most new tees were frat boy jokes. My other beef with them is their cart/login system. Often I go through their new shirt email and click on 4-5 shirts I like the look of, and I'll toss a couple in my cart. Whenever I login to pay, my cart's empty and I have to do it all over again. At that point, the fun wears off and I just close my browser window.
Today, Threadless totally went and redeemed themselves. I got an email saying that a shirt left in my cart many visits ago was about to go away -- there was one shirt left, and it was in my size. Not only that, but it was the Pee Wee shirt. It's such a cool feature and a great shirt that I caved and bought it. I also picked up a half-dozen more I've been thinking about for the past month. So kudos, Threadless, you continue to amaze me.
I was looking through some old photos I took from 1998-2002, some using a 1 megapixel camera while the rest were from a 3 megapixel camera. I had seen these images dozens of times before, and remembered them as well-composed, sharp photos. I was really getting into photography back then and I recalled the photos as my best work. Taking a fresh look at them today, the first thing that hit me was whoa, the photo quality is terrible! There is clearly a lot of low resolution blur going on. What happened to my mind's beautiful memories of these images?
Here's one I shot at SF's MoMA. I remember thinking it was so arty and geometric and I recall it not being blurry but looking really sharp. If you look at it now, the screen over the window is a completely pixelated blur. I recall the same feeling when looking at Jason's photos from Web98. I remember when the photos were new and I thought they were great back then but looking at them now, the quality is worse than my first cameraphone. Another old photo of bloggers got this reaction from me today. Back when I first saw it 6 years ago, it was a great photo. Today, it looks awful, severely limited by the technology of the day.
With the advent of better sensors and digital SLRs, it's pretty astounding what comes out of a digital camera today. In an instant, I realized how fast and far the technology progressed in less than ten years. Could you imagine if traditional photography progressed from gelatin silver prints to medium format in less than a decade?
January 2007: Macworld Highlights includes a "Microsoft Bloggers Lounge"
January 2000: Camworld Blogger Meetup at Macworld. My photos of the event.
Posted at 12:00 AM in blogging | Permalink | Comments (0)
As a longtime fan, former employee, and husband of a Bruin, one highlight today was seeing USC's bowl championships crushed by UCLA. UCLA hasn't been doing too well in the cross-town rivalry the past few years so today was a huge upset.
I drove to the Oregon Coast today and the whole time I kept thinking about James Kim and his family. They have been missing for a week now and since there have been no phonecalls or credit card use, it's not merely getting stuck in some snow (which we had last sunday or monday). It's likely something worse, which caused me to scan the forests and embankments all the way to the coast.
I read about how they concentrated the search on the 38 highway, but if you check it out on Google Maps, there are 5 or 6 major roads (all about 60 miles long) that link the main cities along the 5 freeway with the coast. I know on my first trip to Oregon, I just randomly picked one and drove along the coast instead of the freeway. They could have certainly done the same.
I was thinking about how helpless it feels to sit at home and worry about this family, and how you could harness the power and goodwill of everyone. I've seen some pretty amazing stuff come out of MetaFilter, when people collaborate on a real world problem. Then it hit me. There are only 5 or 6 major roads to the coast, and they're not that long. Why not run a surveillance plane 500'-1000' feet above each of the roads, going slow enough that it takes maybe 20-30 minutes to follow the roads to the ocean. If the camera view could capture 100-200' north and south of the road, you could probably film all 5 or 6 major roads in a single clear day like today.
If each recording is say 30 minutes long for a road, split it into 10 equal parts, 3 minutes long, and upload all of them to youtube. Ask viewers to leave comments pointing out when they see anything strange. The Kims were in a silver Saab wagon, so it's probably something that can be seen from above. In total, there'd be 50 or 60 short clips and in a matter of hours you could have millions of people closely scan then and start pointing out the things worth looking into on the ground. If everyone says there's a silver glint in the trees on video #6 from the highway 18 group, at 1:55 in, you could send a police unit out to investigate.
Hopefully an approach like the one I described is fairly normal in the future.
I first heard about the new Parallels beta here on Dan's vox account. It's really incredible. It includes a couple cool new features, one being "Coherence" which lets you run windows intermingled with your mac. See how I have a windows taskbar below my apple menu at the top? That's Coherence running.
When it comes to computers, I've long been a tool agnostic. I started on Windows but I used to run emulators to test out how sites looked on a linux box or an old mac. I used both a mac and windows machine simultaneously for the past four years so I could use the best applications of each platform. At first it was two computers side-by-side, then I got to share a single keyboard and mouse. Eventually, I got two virtual desktops running on a single intel Mac with Parallels. With the latest Parallels beta, I can now run just the one or two windows apps I need directly on my mac desktop.
After many years of tinkering, I've finally got the ultimate web testing platform. I can edit files in a window, then just hit refresh on safari, firefox, and IE6 all next to each other to see how each browser responds to changes.
If you develop websites and have to worry about CSS differences between platforms and browsers, this is the killer tool for you: Parallels and an Intel Mac.
Posted at 12:00 AM in mac, web development, windows | Permalink | Comments (9)