February 23, 2007

My five things

My buddy Steve Wilson tagged me with the 5 things meme game. So, here’s my entry, obviously I had to accept the challenge and make mine video too. My tagees? I think I’m suppose to have 5, but didn’t get a rulebook. Paul Vixie – A buddy since high school Brian Berliner – An amazingly cool guy I got to work with for a while at Cassatt James Urquhart – A colleague at my old company, Cassatt, who’s doing a great job getting folks there blogging!

February 14, 2007

Gadget of the day - Roomba

I know Roomba’s are old news, and are well covered elsewhere, but heck I just got one, so I get to review it too. I waited until Woot had a price I couldn’t refuse, $150, 50% off retail. My problem with them had always been, if I’m spending $300 on a vacuum, I want it to clean my entire house, on it’s own. Not one room with virtual walls, I didn’t want to walk the vacuum around and set it up in other spaces.

February 8, 2007

Ken reads to the camera, ick

http://www.kencasting.com/Movies/FirstVideocue.mov Kaydub here I’m casting today from lovely Northern California. I’m trying out various technologies, and tossing ’em on line as sort of an Evolutionary record. Today’s test is Videocue Pro, which Geekbrief TV turned me on to. Forgive the parallax though, I have an older iSight sitting 2 inches above the built-in teleprompter But, there’s a 30 second limit for the demo version, so that’s it for now!

February 1, 2007

Today’s second cool tool: snipshot

If you check out the mashable comments to picnik, you’ll note a recommendation for snipshot. It’s also quite cool, didn’t like it’s auto-enhancement output as much, but it offers an easy to use interface to send it a file, and get it back enhanced and resized. It doesn’t detail what happens when you resize a photo. Tried uploading a NEF Raw file to see what the conversion would be like, but the site failed when I tried that, so I converted it to TIFF, but it didn’t like that either.

February 1, 2007

Today’s cool tool: picnik

Picnik’s an online basic photo editing tool, especially nice if you use Flickr since it’ll allow you to take your photos located on the web or your computer, tweek some basic things, then post them. But, you can also grab photos from elsewhere, or re-tweek your Flickr ones. It’s also very fast, simple, and an amazing bonus feature these days, no registration needed for full functionality! One function I see missing is the ability to change the size, resolution, etc, so I could use this as my sole “convert and upload tool”, but then, I’m not a Flickr pro member.

January 31, 2007

Online video converter

Since I was playing with getting video on the site, I was checking out online video sites, and ran across this: http://heywatch.com It’s online, it’s free for the basic, low volume account, and can convert most anything to almost anything in a few clicks. You can even make a custom target, if you want to upgrade to the paid version. I used this to whack some videos into a format my Nokia E61 could read.

January 30, 2007

Unearthed home video

Mom got over it… [QUICKTIME http://www.kencasting.com/Movies/TheKnack.mpg 260 320 false true] powered by performancing firefox

January 29, 2007

Embedded video test with QuickTimePost plugin

Another embedded video test. This time, using a plugin: [QUICKTIME http://www.kencasting.com/BlenderMovie.mov 260 320 false true] Format url width height autoplay controller powered by performancing firefox

January 28, 2007

Today’s Yuppie Porn - Espresso machines

Once read a review of “Under the Tuscan Sun” calling it pure yuppie porn. I just loved that description of feeding the consumerist machine with really attractive images and marketing. So, here’s my Yuppie porn for today… Saw these machines at Sur La Table today, in a nicely lit cabinet over next to the shiny $2k espresso machines that aren’t industrial quality enough to justify those prices. These were less.

January 25, 2007

Picoblog post

Posting on the road with my trusty E61, boy are my thumbs tired! Moblog via Picoblogger