SwitchOff Filler

Yeah… so, I’m still in the process of the second page of SwitchOff. “Wait, where’s the first?” Well, two places. One, at the official site, SwitchOffComic.SmackJeeves.com, and on here (sift a couple pages back). But, I’ve got… FILLER! First the sketch:

And the final product (scaled):

Retron… is the hardest “retro” game I’ve ever played. I lasted less than a minute. So you’re this glowing ship, and you have to press <space> to fire bullets and kill the other ships. There’s a catch. The screen goes haywire. Try it out for yourself.

Music, anybody? It’s a very interesting, Flash-based system. By just going to the Pandora site, you immediatly get to the app. Just type in an artist or song you like, and through the Music Genome Project’s database, music starts playing on a custom “radio station” tuned to you. By rating songs, you can build a station that’s EXACTLY what you’re looking for.

Yahoo! Plumbing… er, Pipes

So, I was browsing Digg when I came across the story “5 cool ways to use Yahoo! Pipes.” And I thought to myself, what the hell is a Pipe? Taken straight from the documentation:

Pipes is a free online service that lets you remix popular feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor. You can use Pipes to run your own web projects, or publish and share your own web services without ever having to write a line of code.

So… it’s a way to create canned mashups, I thought. But I was wayyy off. Just looking at the example “eBay Price Watch,” it was very complex. I highly doubt that any two Pipes are alike. Fantasy sports aside, it looks like Yahoo finally built something good. And they have.

Using the built-in JavaScript-based editor that they have going, you can build surprisingly complex mashups. And just what kind of mashup? RSS, of course. With one or more base RSS feeds, you can retrieve, filter, merge, and organize content. For example, this Pipe merges the feeds of all the Official Yahoo! blogs into just one.

The Pipes themselves can take input, be “sub-Pipes” for another Pipe, and import Modules (24 different ones), all in a visual interface. I’m working on a GitP/VGCats/CTRL+ALT+DEL multi-webcomic feed as I write. Linky at bottom. There’s two articles worth reading regarding this… The 5 Cool Ways to Use Yahoo! Pipes story and Yahoo Pipes: A User’s Guide.

In other news, thanks to the snow and coming storm(s) that are going through FCPS, we got out of school early! Yay. Hopefully, we won’t have any tomarrow, but hey, we’re still out for now.

My Pipes:
CTRL+Cats GitP: A feed that melds together the two Giant in the Playground comics (Erfworld and OotS), VG Cats, and CTRL+ALT+DEL. Link: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/_ocS1Jm72xGClYcxfOgC8A/

kidigg: This is just a merging of Digg and kidkonia feeds… allowing you to view however many of each you want, defaulting to 5 top stories and 5 blog posts.
link: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/hHHGR5_72xGXw9krr8cPhQ

Video, Vista, and Linux (Yeah, I was on a V-Roll)

So here goes…

Yeah, so, Vista is out. Wahoo. Except not. While we were over at Sam’s Club, they were A) Selling Vista, and B) Providing laptops on which you could try them out (while bolted to the table). So the ad campaign managers need to get fired… I mean, come on! “The Wow Starts Now”?! What moron came up with that? Anyway, the prices are way up, with 4 different versions for sale: Home Basic, which just sucks, Home Premium, which is OK but not worth it, Business (and the news-to-me Enterprise edition of it) which is not for the average PC, and then Ultimate, which is wayyyyy overpriced and underpowered.

The Home Basic doesn’t even come with the chillin’ interface, which also slows most computers down. I navigated around for half an hour, trying to find stuff out. And you know what? It sucks. Vista looks good, sounds good, and is good for gaming, but please, if you’re not getting a new computer, don’t buy it. It’s not worth it. Almost everything Vista-compatible is also XP-OK.

Well, I also found an awsome Firefox extension: VideoDownloader. It’s free, so get it here:

It is a little icon in your status bar that you can click to bring up a window listing download links for Flash videos on the page. That means Google, Youtube, everything can be downloaded. You click the link and (eventually) get the chance to download “get_video”. You just rename it to whatever.flv and save it! Now, it’s a pain having to stream the video through VLC Player or something like that, so how about we convert it a lot? This is on Linux, so Windows users will have to just read the Help section of VideoDownloader or Google it. Anyway… make sure you have ffmpeg installed (Debian/*buntu users: apt-get install ffmpeg will do it for you :) ) and then type this into flv2mpg, a file with no extension (use KATE or vim or emacs):

#!/bin/bash
if [ "${2}" == "" ]; then
let $2="$1"
fi

ffmpeg -i "${1}.flv" -ab 56 -ar 22050 -b 500  -s 320x240 "${2}.mpg"

And then use chmod +x to make it executable. Here’s how to use it. Just call it with ./flv2mpg or something, and include 1-2 filenames (without any extensions). The first is the FLV file, the second is the resulting MPG file. If you want them to be the same, just include 1 name it it will do that for you. Like I said, this downloads any Flash movie in FLV form. No games, but yes to others. Windows users will have to use a converter.

More On the hPDA

Well, continuing on from where I left off last night…

The hPDA, or the Hipster PDA v3, is a sort of organizer/planner/thing that does everything a PDA does, but much more easily and transferably. You don’t have to boot it up, shut it down, or open any stupid folders. It can’t browse the web or listen to an iPod Shuffle, unless you get one of the newer ones and use it instead of a binder clip. Anyway…

It was thought up by the guy who writes 43Folders, and then expanded upon by the cool guys over at D*I*Y Planner. It’s now up-to-date with D*I*Y’s main attraction, the D*I*Y Planner (hence the site name), version 3.

The “Core Package” for the hPDA has more than 200 different sheets, each the size of a 3×5 index card. At the 43Folders site (HipsterPDA.com), you can see that it’s just a stack of index cards and a binder clip holding them together. What gives? Simple… it really is just a stack of 3×5s and a binder clip (or an iPod Shuffle if you so wish). But the forum members of D*I*Y came up with about 57 different templates for cards, like the GTD Reference Card, Agenda sheets, shopping lists, nowMap sheets, product designs, graph paper, horizontal lined sheets, vertical lined sheets, storyboards, character templates (story-wise), and about 47 other kinds of sheets.

There are two versions (download links provided): 1-Up, which prints to individual index cards, and the 4-Up, which prints 4 to a page of US Letter paper (cardstock is recommended). This one requires a guillotine or something close to it for good speed… scissors also work. They also provide the Graphic version, which has PNG/JPEG versions of every template, so you can set it up how you want it.

So that’s the hPDA. I also recommend the PigPogPDA. It’s technically a Moleskin hack, but the PigPog article doesn’t specify that it has to be… I’m using just one of those hardcover sketchbooks you see at Borders or wherever, and it’s working fine. However, he does recommend a Moleskin Pocket Reporter to use the system. Basically, you have three colors of tags, one each for Active, Processed, and Collection Point. Everything “behind” (above, if it’s lying flat on the desk) the Processed sticky has already been done/processed/used. Anything marked Active is, well, active. It can be behind the Processed area. And the Collection Point is the place you currently are. I suggest you don’t use Active tags, and just save a few pages at the front, and jot down the titles and page numbers of active pages, crossing them off once they’re inactive.

So that’s it for PDAs and whatnot. Look around PigPog, it’s a cool site, as is 43Folders. D*I*Y Planner is good, but mainly just for their Planner or the Hipster.