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In-wall speakers. Everyone has heard about them and many can easily identify them by the hundreds of little holes in the grill on the wall or ceiling. Flush they are, but hidden they aren't. But it's better than having a huge box hanging off your wall or standing from the floor, right? No.
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The Live 8 and Post Katrina phenomenons were wonderful displays of Hollywoodism. Take Brad Pitt, for example. This ageless wonder stands on a stage and tells us why it would be a good idea to donate our money to a cause. Why don't he and his Beverly Hills pals donate their next movie paycheck entirely to a cause, instead? Why doesn't Madonna donate a year's worth of profits to something worthwhile? Why don't professional athletes donate a season to charity? Are they really going to miss their salary from 2006 when it's part of a colossal ten-year contract plus signing bonus? Did the "Friends" do charity shows when they were each pulling in $1 million per episode?
This column is dedicated to those thuggish gangstas who relocate from inner city schools to "country" schools much like mine in years past. "What up, yo!" Okay, some of these kids have roots in the city. But, we're not going to go as far as to grant them total street cred since many are from gangsta paradises such as Long Island and suburban New Jersey. Just because you move to the country from a "city" doesn't grant you the gangsta lean that you think you somehow deserve.
Those taking the "hold" approach with respect to their baseball card collections are simply kidding themselves. Think of it in this perspective. The cards that you have from the 1980s and 1990s were once considered valuable… well, according to prices that you paid for the cards and quoted prices in publications like Beckett, they were. How many of you actually sold your cards for those same quoted prices? Hey, we're not ridiculing anyone; we didn't sell one! We were net buyers of baseball cards for the better part of a decade.
Every year, I still buy two or three packs just for the heck of it, just to see who I get," says Dave Kelly, 51, a Library of Congress reference librarian who specializes in sports and recreation."
Any male that grew up in the late 1980s - early 1990s knows all about the phenomenon known as "Baseball Card Death." The problem is, he doesn't know that he knows this. And who can blame one's selective memory loss here? Think of the large percentage of your disposable income that you blew on baseball cards, which likely have little utility for you right now as they sit in your basement amongst the spiders, centipedes, and mice. Do you really want to be reminded of the colossal investment mistakes you made? Well, we will play the role of Alanis Morrisette, "and I'm here to remind you…"
Google Video, iFilm, MySpace, Current TV, YouTube and all the hundreds of similar video sites all have one thing in common - making it difficult for you to archive the movies they host on your local machine for later playback. In some cases this is by design, but mostly it's the nature of using Flash for video playback. There have always been ways to download these movies and store them for personal use later, but the methods change and some sites are more complicated than others when it comes to grabbing a movie and keeping it on your local machine. Chris pointed me to KeepVid not long ago and I've been putting it through the paces ever since. At this point in time, it's the best solution for grabbing movies from most sites on the Internet, short of actually investing in one of those apps that sniffs out movies and wholesale downloads everything on a site. I like KeepVid so much that it's the only thing I'll recommend when people ask me how to download movies from YouTube. Of course playing back Flash movies locally requires some additional software. VLC Player works in some cases, but it's still buggy in the Flash department. SWF.max is the best looking player of the bunch, with the ability to show thumbnail previews of Flash movies along with simple playback controls and the onboard ability to download Flash movies, but those averse to actually paying for software might reject the affordable $14.95 and opt for an inferior solution.
Microsoft released the beta version of Windows Media Player 11 yesterday. I've seen it go through several iterations behind the scenes and overall I'm happy with the features they are showing off so far. It's certainly stable enough to install in place of Windows Media Player 10 (although it's always smart to set a restore point). I'm running WMP11 on my main machine at home and taking MTV URGE for the 14-day test drive. So far I love it. Before you tune out because the service was built by MTV, keep in mind that it has more than just MTV tracks. They've got something like 2 million songs you can listen to and most of them have never been on MTV. [insert favorite joke about MTV never playing music here] The number one reason to download the WMP11 Beta today is the improved search functionality. Search in the new version of the player is head-and-shoulders above what we've seen in all previous versions. You get as-you-type search with super fast results by album, artist, genre, title, and a whole list of attributes you'll probably never use. I wrote up a quick list of tips for anyone who wants to do power searches in WMP11. So far there's no podcasting support built-in, but I'm hoping we'll see it before the final build ships (unless they're secreting it away for Vista, which would be stupid). URGE appears to be the only company with their store built into the beta, so if you were taking advantage of the free plays from Napster you might want to hold off on the upgrade, unless you use the Napster standalone app instead. Otherwise, download Windows Media Player 11 and dive in.
Solutions come and go for easily liberating iTunes Music Store purchases from their DRM shackles. The slow and tedious brute force method continues to work, requiring you to play back individual tracks one-at-a-time and recording them with software like Audacity. Saving the resulting files in your favorite DRM-free format, like MP3, WMA or even uncompressed AIFF or WAV. If you have more than a few tracks, this is far from practical. JHymn once offered an ideal solution, automating the conversion process of iTunes tracks, but is no longer useful since the upgrade to iTunes 6.x in 2005. The other remaining alternative is to burn iTunes Music Store tracks to CD either as an MP3 CD, copying the MP3 files back to your hard drive, or to create traditional CD-Audio disks that are then ripped using iTunes or your favorite CD ripping application. If you're really clever, trick iTunes into creating an ISO by burning back to your hard drive, without ever creating a physical disk, mount the disk using something like Daemon Tools (make sure you opt out of the adware it attempts to install), and simply copy the files from your fake disk to a hard drive. I step through the process of unlocking iTune Music Store tracks in response to a recent question about switching from an iPod to another portable music player.
Related to my previous post on creating custom titles for home movies, CamcorderInfo found an awesome tool for auto generating your own church marquee. It saves all the time I took cleaning up a sign and creating a custom logo, although the downside is you don't get the personalization of using a sign associated with the venue where you shot a movie.
Adding titles to your home movies is among the most underrated components of visual storytelling. I've endured many home movies that could have easily used titles in place of a bad transition where the camera shakes as the videographer moved between rooms during a scene change from the family dinner preparation in the kitchen to the family eating dinner in the dining room. A simple cut is often good enough, but when its not, a title can go miles in filling in gaps during events. There's some good discussion about making video titles going on around the Web over the last few days. About.com Video Guide, Carl Plumer, talks about some of the ways titles can be used to impact a story. In much greater depth, Carl makes a very solid case for the proper use of titles, clearly demonstrating that titles are most definitely not just for creating opening credits sequences. Almost 9 months after I incorporated the sign at a venue where I recorded a performance by Steven Page into my own movie titles, I finally got around to stepping through the process in my latest tutorial on creating video titles with still images.
Everytime I run into Ajay Juneja, he's talking about his voice controlled car computer. This is partly because the brains behind the voice recognition happens to be technology created by Ajay's start-up company, Speak With Me. There's not much you can throw at the computer that it can't do. It's got enough logic to prompt you with questions when it misunderstands and it works well even with the windows down. The killer app for me is media playback because not having to browse for files while driving is certainly a smart way to keep your eyes on the road. I've seen several pictures of the car, most notably the ones taken by Mike Arrington of Techcrunch, but you really need to see the car in action to get a feel for what it can do. Bre Pettis of I Make Things recently did a video interview with Ajay and the car while driving around Seattle which tells the story better than any text or photo collection possible could.
People are often surprised to learn that I don't have a high-definition television system at home. Am am just not an avid TV watcher? On the contrary, I have two networked DVRs plus a Media Center TV PC. Oh, plus a portable media player. Oh, and a Slingbox. If anything, I push the limits of how much TV programming a human can watch. But there are several key reasons why I'm in no hurry to make the move to hi-def.
Benny was a really bad sport. Benny had a front porch that smelled of onions that his mother was storing for some inexplicable purpose. And his father toyed with taxidermy on the side and always had decaying animal parts in the garage. Nice place to visit, huh? Oh, and if you felt hot in the summertime and wanted to take a dip in the pool, you would be joined by a family of frogs that swam better than you did.
Every damned gym class circa 6th grade played kickball at some point. And every damned gym class had the kid who refused to give the ball a real kick and instead half stepped up to the ball and bunted.
from NFB. NFB. New: $29.50.This France-Canada co-production goes behind the scenes of the huge tobacco industry, whose economic power has been expanding for five decades at the expense of public health. A gripping investigation covering three continents, Nadia Collot's film exposes the vast conspiracy of a criminally negligent industry that conquers new markets through corruption and manipulation. To confront the tobacco cartel, anti-smoking groups are organizing and scoring points, but the fight remains fierce. With ist diverse viewpoints, shocking interviews and riveting images, The Tobacco Conspiracy deftly defines the issues in a complex situation where private interests and the public good collide. Enlightening and engrossing, this documentary is a hard-hitting critique of an industry gone mad.