This is a little bit of everything we did at CES. I was shooting with a Canon 960is which I borrowed from a friend. I have since purchased and received it just in time for Mexico. (Yep, I’m currently in Mexico.) The touch screen at the Intel booth was absolutely beautiful and a lot of fun. It was running the Intel Core 7 chip. Fancy!

The 3d tvs were amazing. I put on a pair of glasses, and then realized that hundreds of people have been putting them on their faces. Eww! I blame my giant face pimple on those glasses. I saw a lot of devices that made it easier to mirror content from your computer to your tv. Watch out, cable tv. The now is watching streaming content from the computer.

Justine participated in the Build your own pc race. It was so much fun. Next year we are totally going to try to win. We also rode The Big Shot in the Stratosphere. It was a freefall ride at the tippy top of the Stratosphere. I’ve never done this kind of ride before and I seriously regretted it as I was getting strapped in. Turns out, the anticipation is the worst, and it was a lot of fun.

We also stopped by the It won’t stay in Vegas party where I saw Brent Spiner and LeVar Burton. Eeep! They were completely surrounded by a massive crowd of fans and I was afraid I was going to get trampled.

Justine made a ton of videos from CES, so check them out here. The pc race one is great.

I saw some amazing new tech and had a fantastic time. I’m already looking at going next year.

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This is as geeky as it gets. Behold the awesome power of the Lego Turing Machine. If you don’t know about Turing Machines, you can still enjoy that it is made of Legos. I was really into CS theory in college, so this video provides endless enjoyment for me. I hope they make a sequel for multitape Turing Machines.

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What to do with leftover candycanes on Youtube

Jumpcut has been going through some changes, and has recently shut off upload to the site. This is unfortunate, but at least you can still watch your movies…

Well, not all of them. Some of my movies are missing clips, so there’s black spaces between clips when watching. I recently looked back on one of my favorite videos, only to find it broken. I made the above video more than a year ago and used Jumpcut to add the title screens. I decided that this movie was worth my time to fix, and by “fix”, I mean “recreate”. I dug up the original clip, screen grabbed the titles, audio-hijacked the audio, and made the above video. The cracks and pops in the audio really bother me, but I can’t find the original song.

SnapZ Pro panel

Aside from recreating the video, which as an understandable pain, you can get your movies off of jumpcut from screen recording. This is inelegant, but effective. There will be some quality loss, but at least you get the video. On a mac I use SnapZPro. I got it as part of a bundle of mac software, so it didn’t cost me $69. The price seems a bit high for how I use it. I’m sure there are many features I have yet to discover. However, I have tried many free versions of video capture, and none of them worked very well. On a pc I’ve used Cam Studio, which is totally free and doesn’t crash. Before I got SnapZPro, I would turn on my old pc just to use Cam Studio.

Positioning the video capture window

You don’t want to do anything with your computer while it’s capturing, so as not to affect the playback. The video will likely be very big once it is captured. The file was about 2 gigs for this video. It’s worth re-encoding the video to make it significantly smaller before uploading it to another site.

Long live Jumpcut (in our hearts).

______________

<~~~~ feed me, om nom nom

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]]> http://karenism.com/blog/2009/01/12/leftover-candy-canes-i-have-a-solution/feed/ 2 http://karenism.com/blog/2009/01/09/a-little-macworld-update/ http://karenism.com/blog/2009/01/09/a-little-macworld-update/#comments Fri, 09 Jan 2009 07:35:00 +0000 Karen http://karenism.com/blog/?p=525

Youtube booth at Macworld

Macworld has been pretty fun, even though there weren’t many big announcements. I didn’t find anything that really excited me at the event. The little youtube booth had a computer and a soft light on the ceiling so I played a little song in the booth.

Turner (one of the guys from Smule) taught me a few notes.

Gonna make you work work, make you work!

I got to meet Lisa. She’s Canadian. I love Canadians, and their ketchup chips.

While hanging out with Justine I didn’t take too many photos. She had that lovely Nikon D90 that took such puuuurdy photos. It makes me want to get a dslr.

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]]> http://karenism.com/blog/2009/01/09/a-little-macworld-update/feed/ 5 http://karenism.com/blog/2009/01/05/bigtime-hearts-to-grand-perspective/ http://karenism.com/blog/2009/01/05/bigtime-hearts-to-grand-perspective/#comments Mon, 05 Jan 2009 14:17:07 +0000 Karen http://karenism.com/blog/?p=477

In the continued battle against the hard disk limit, I found another useful tool. Grand Perspective gives you nice pretty drawings of your filesystem. If you don’t have it, you should download it now.

It is a fantastic way to find large files you might not know about. For many many months, I’d been holding onto an archive of my computer from when I did an archive & install for Leopard. It was 20g! Deleting that giant chunk of files was like drinking sweet nectar straight from wild flowers. My computer stopped overheating, I haven’t seen a kernal panic since, AND it runs faster.

The X Lab has been pretty helpful with some basic tips on freeing up hard disk space. They recommend that you have at least 5 gigs free on your mac. I am constantly pushing that limit. I regularly see the “Your hard disk is almost full” message, and I am no stranger to the eclipse “error saving message” due to lack of space left on my device.

I’ve taken more steps to permanently solve this problem by buying a Drobo. More on that later.

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]]> http://karenism.com/blog/2009/01/05/bigtime-hearts-to-grand-perspective/feed/ 5 http://karenism.com/blog/2008/10/31/halloweeeeeenie/ http://karenism.com/blog/2008/10/31/halloweeeeeenie/#comments Fri, 31 Oct 2008 21:31:27 +0000 Karen http://karenism.com/blog/?p=357 it is full of the happies.

I cut this pumpkin up. It fought me but I won. In case you can’t tell (I’m working on the carving skillz) this is a macbook pro. You can tell it’s one of the new ones because the trackpad has no mouse button. It also pukes hearts. I can type and click really fast on it.

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]]> http://karenism.com/blog/2008/10/31/halloweeeeeenie/feed/ 5 http://karenism.com/blog/2008/09/24/too-much-video-problem-solved/ http://karenism.com/blog/2008/09/24/too-much-video-problem-solved/#comments Wed, 24 Sep 2008 14:14:41 +0000 Karen http://karenism.com/blog/?p=245

One of my big complaints in the last year has been “I don’t have any hard drive space.” My computer has a 120g hd, but that’s not much since I capture a ton of video. My hd was so full that I started to run into problems. It was really slow, exchange stopped downloading mail, I couldn’t back up my iphone, and I couldn’t put any new media on my computer. It’s been many months and I have tried several solutions, but I nothing worked quite right. Finally I have found a pretty good solution.

Here’s the summary: Buy a few external hard drives (duh! I bought a few of these from OWC based on a recommendation by Tantek), and sync with Super Duper (paid version).

If anyone has any hardware or softare recommendations, or alternate solutions I’d love to hear them. I’m pretty happy with this method right now but it could always be better.

Stories about my attempts, problems, and how I use SuperDuper after the cut

The straw
The day iphone 2.0 came out I, like many other geeks out there, eagerly plugged in my phone to upgrade it. Finally, apps! Or…not. I needed 8gigs of space to back up my phone before I could upgrade. I had about 500mb. Darn. Ahh well, apps aren’t that cool. right??

At this point I had stopped taking photos and videos and switched to a few personal programming projects. Text files are much smaller than photos and I was equally entertained by coding. A few weeks ago I couldn’t start my mysql database which meant I couldn’t continue playing with Django. It failed with a ‘can’t write to sock something’ error. After some poking around I find the real error: Unable to create tempory file; No space left on the device. I attempted to screengrab the error, but my computer was not joking when there was NO SPACE; it couldn’t save the screengrab. That was it. I couldn’t avoid the problem any longer.

Attempted solution
While my problems were unfolding and piling up, I was clearing up hard disk space regularly but it would always fill up so quickly I couldn’t keep up. I bought a Western Digital 250g external at Costco, hoping it would solve some problems. I dumped a ton of data on it, put it in a drawer and deleted files off my drive. Yes, I know. It’s not a backup if you only have one copy but it was only supposed to be temporary. I pulled the external out several weeks later and found that my computer couldn’t see it. I tried a couple other computers, checked my usb ports, but I got nothing. Dead. Dead. Dead. Well, there goes about 100g’s of stuff. Dennis found out they would replace it for free so I got a new one shortly after that. The second drive did the exact same thing. I fortunately didn’t lose any data that time because I still had the files on my computer.

Time Machine doesn’t cut it
In the interim I had a 500g external I was using for time-machine backups. (It now makes loud wheezy noises when turned on, which I won’t even get into here…) Time machine wasn’t ideal for my media files, since I just wanted a flat archive of my photos and videos. Every time I tried to go into time machine to find a file I couldn’t remember exactly when I had added it. I realized that time was irrelevant to my video management. I just wanted one location that had all the media that has every been on my computer.

Success!
When I couldn’t put off my problem any longer I seriously started looking around for alternative backup solutions. I carefully read through the feature lists of many backup programs. None of them explicitly described solving my problem. I decided to try Super Duper because it was free and there was nothing to lose. Super Duper truly lives up to it’s name. Even though the free version only does full backups I was allowed to play with their options. Back up specific folders, overwrite existing files, don’t delete any files. Huzzah! I gladly paid the $30 for the upgrade.

Here’s how you do it in Super Duper.

Create a new copy script

Give it a helpful description in case you forget what it does later on

Exclude all files. This list of scripts comes before the script commands.

Include specific folders to back up. All other files will be excluded due to the previous step.

Go to the options screen from the main application. Under “During Copy” select “Copy newer files from x to y”. None of the older files on the external will be deleted.

Then you’re ready to copy.

Now I back up my computer to an external and then sync one external with another. I then have two copies of all my files. It’s bliss.

Let the video creation continue!!

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I’m really glad that Apple is offering free replacements for mac power adapters. It’s a good thing I didn’t throw them away when they started fraying. I have two that I’m taking to the mac store tomorrow, which means I will then have four power adapters. Although I would rather have the $150 it cost me when I replaced the broken ones.

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Most people I know dislike Valentine’s Day (aka Singles Awareness Day). The hype, expectations, pressure, disappointment, blah blah blah. Women freak out about being single, or finding the perfect lingerie for their imperfect bodies. Men flail around helplessly trying to figure out which Hollywood fantasy to mimic (dinner out, or a home cooked meal, or how about a picnic? How many blood diamonds should be in the bracelet? Wine/flowers/chocolate?) In in attempt to prevent me from buying this shirt, I reached out to the community for support.

Failure. I returned to the store to buy it, but they were out of my size. Instead of simply walking away, I went home and bought it online. Double fail. This doesn’t make me hate the cheesy holiday any less, even though I have become less cynical over the years. In the past, I worked late and then ran home to hide from all the out of town couples crowding the streets and restaurants. This year I may end up spending Thursday beating the crap out of someone(s).

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Here’s a taste of what we did last year. What’s going to happen this year? I don’t know, but we’re aiming to outdo ourselves.

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