AllCapture - Screen Recording Software Inspired by Adobe Flash

from Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal

Balesio, developers of Turbodemo, have introduced a new screencasting software called AllCapture 2.0 that provides a pretty solid post-production environment for editing your screencast recordings.

If you have ever worked with Adobe Flash (the authoring environment, not the Flash player), you know that Flash uses the concept of a visual timeline to show the content of a movie over time in layers and frames.

You can turn-off layers to hide some object (like an image or sound clip) from stage, group similar layers in folders, extend the display length by adding new keyframes, tweak animation and more.

[Screen capture of AllCapture Screencast Software - Notice the TimeLine]

AllCapture frame-by-frame screencast editor is something like Adobe Flash tailored for screencasting. Objects (sounds, images, text captions) are arranged as layers which can be further grouped into folders. Even the Timeline layout in AllCapture 2.0 is remarkably similar to that of Flash authoring tool.

When you record a new desktop movie in AllCapture, it's added as to the Film layer while the mouse or cursor movements go in a separate layer. This is such an excellent feature because you can visually select and disable the mouse cursor in frames. Every single frame that has motion or animation is shown with a black solid dot making it extremely easy for educators and trainers to polish their screencasts and trim the boring parts.

And like Windows Movie maker or other video editing software, you may add transitions and video effects between individual frames to make your screencasts look more professional.

A 30 second 640x480 video recording of a web browsing session resulted in a 7 MB MPG file. Not bad. The software costs around $129. [Don't have the budget, try Jing from TechSmith.]

© 2007 Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal | labnol | Ask Questions

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Add Up to 2TB of Storage to Your Apple TV

Apple TV can now be "user configured" with up to 2 terabytes of external storage via a hack waking up its USB 2.0 port. At last someone has developed a patch to expand the Apple TV's storage through its USB 2.0 port, using the internal hard drive to boot and one fat external 2TB drive to stockpile as many TV series, photos and porn movies as you want. Yes, Cupertino, resistance to hackers is futile, I'm afraid. The process is not difficult, as you will see after the jump.

For this recipe you will need one ssh-enabled Apple TV, one sightly battered Intel Mac or Intel-based Linux/Unix system, one installed version of Mac OS X 10.4 Intel, one clean, "original, unmodified copy of the 'mach_kernel.prelink' file from the Apple TV," one external USB drive, generous amounts of sightly peppered raw courage and a liberal quantity of chilled sherry.

For cooking, first format the external USB drive as Journaled HFS+ in Mac OS X and leave it aside. You won't need it until the end.

Run the script and back up your Apple TV using the included instructions. Now drink some sherry. After five minutes the Apple TV will reboot. Turn it on again without connecting the USB drive until the flying-TV-screens introduction sequence finishes. When you connect the USB the contents from the internal drive will be copied to the external one. That's why the chefs for this recipe, Patrick Walton of University of Chicago and Tom Anthony from Apple TV Hacks, recommend you to "erase the content of your internal hard drive first so that there is no need to copy the content." Finish the sherry or pour yourself another glass.

The Apple TV will restart automatically after the content is copied and from that point on the USB disk will be used as content storage. Unfortunately this will leave the internal drive empty save for the operating system - but, quite frankly, who cares when you are going to end up with a 2TB Apple TV, specially after all that chilled sherry?

If you think the process to enable what should have been a feature since the beginning is not for the faint-hearted, hopefully someone will release a graphic patcher soon. Otherwise, go for it carefully and enjoy. [Apple TV Hacks]

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We're all irrational

from Seth's Blog by Seth Godin

Well, most of us anyway.

This terrific article about a study of eBay buyers and sellers proves it. In some categories, more than 40% of the auctions went for more than the Buy it Now price. Hmmmm. Two tips from the end:

• Set low opening prices. When choosing between identical items, buyers seem to favor whichever auction has the most bids. The best way to grab early bids: Start with a cheap price. By the time a $1 DVD auction reaches $10, it will probably attract more newcomers than a DVD that started at $10.
• Don't use secret reserves. A study of online auctions with and without hidden minimum prices showed that many buyers steer clear of items with a secret opening price. It’s like that old shopping joke, "If you have to ask how much it costs, you can’t afford it."

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Inside the High-Tech Hunt for a Missing Silicon Valley Legend

from Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder

Mark Frauenfelder: Steve Silberman has a story in Wired about Jim Gray, who is lost at sea. He says:

The story is partly about the massive and fascinating DIY effort to try to find Gray and his sailboat -- involving satellites steered over the Pacific, NASA planes, ocean simulators, and 12,000 volunteers analyzing images on Amazon's Mechanical Turk -- but it's also deeply about who Jim Gray was, and why his loss at sea was such a loss for our collective future. Gray was an brilliant, generous, self-deprecating man who routinely gave his expertise away, acting as a mentor to dozens of scientists all over the world, and building enormous resources for amateur science. As I say in the article:

He turned a dorky Windows NT marketing concept ("Scalability Day") into an excuse to build TerraServer, which brought satellite imagery - previously the exclusive domain of intelligence agencies and weather forecasters - to the masses. Then Gray teamed up with astronomer Alex Szalay at Johns Hopkins University to port a massive star-mapping project - the Sloan Digital Sky Survey - to the Web, making the data accessible to professional astronomers, backyard stargazers, and students. Since its debut in 2001, SkyServer has become the most widely used astronomical resource in the world, sparking discoveries about dwarf galaxies, dark matter, and sonic waves triggered by the big bang.

To Gray, both sites were teasers for the coming era of data-centric science made possible by the proliferation of cheap sensing devices, very large data bases, and online interfaces. For life-science researchers, he was like an ambassador from the future who spoke their language. The morning he set sail for the Farallon Islands, he had collaborations under way with oceanographers, soil ecologists, and public health officials.

And he was at least as interested in the scientists themselves as in the petabytes of data they produced. "We connected so deeply," Szalay says. "Sometimes you make these kinds of connections very early in life or in graduate school. But by the time you get to 50, it's rare to meet someone who is so much on the same wavelength. We talked this way, usually several times a day, for eight years."

Link

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Read Full Articles on The Wall Street Journal Without a Subscription

from Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal

"The full WSJ.com article is only available to subscribers." You may often see this registration message when trying to access content published on The Wall Street Journal Online edition [unless you are lucky].

BugMeNot database does have username-password combinations for most paid-subscription websites (including the WSJ) but it's tough to find one that works. Now George has a handy trick though only for geeks.

You can read any subscriber-only articles published in the Wall Street Journal newspaper (online edition) if you have Firefox ( ) and an awesome extension called Firebug (that allows inline HTML editing).

Following are the steps involved to bypass the WSJ yearly subscription wall:

Step 1: Open the Wall Street Journal story web page that you want to read but can't because it's behind the subscription firewall.

Step 2: Add the text mod=googlenews_wsj to URL immediately following the .html filename. See example below:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB11874773.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Step 3: Open news.google.com and press Ctrl+Shift+C - Hover the mouse over any random news headline and click once to the enter the HTML editing mode in Firebug.

Now change the link of that Google News story in the Firebug window to the one we created in Step 2. [change the "href" attribute of "a" tag] Press enter.

Click the modified link on the Google News homepage and you'll immediately get access to the full article on WSJ, not just the two-para summary.

© 2007 Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal | labnol | Ask Questions

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