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how to convert videos to PS3 format on a mac, using VisualHub
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Thank god.
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December 2006
December 31, 2006
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December 13, 2006
December 12, 2006
December 09, 2006
December 08, 2006
December 07, 2006
December 06, 2006
18-kottke-sleeps
I found a bunch of old photos. This is my favorite one.
December 05, 2006
December 04, 2006
December 03, 2006
woot!
UCLA 13, USC 9As 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.
December 02, 2006
Distributed search of a different sort
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.
Parallels updates
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.
