Posts under 'Tech':
This comes to the attention of Bunny Blog via my colleague Nahil, who shared this article on Slate with me via various acts of Facebookery.
The problem of charging iPods seems to my relatively armchair self to be something far too much of the world is devoting time to finding innovative solutions for. For perspective, I’ve owned an MP3 player nonstop since the introduction of the Diamond Rio. I love music and listen to it constantly, and I defy you to find too many photos of me in which a pair of slim headphones is NOT around my neck with a grey wire leading into my pocket. Somehow, only about twice in my iPod ownership have I ever exclaimed “damn, the battery’s dead!” and not been able to do something about it fairly quickly.
You mean to tell me you’ve got your life together enough that you have the discipline to jog or bike regularly enough that you need music to relieve the monotony but you can’t apply the same regimen to charging a device with a 10-hour battery? And you further mean to tell me that of all the things you hope to bring to human understanding with a scientific inquiry into the nature of breast movement the one you remain extra excited for is the ability to charge an iPod?
Steve Jobs, you claim to be making computing devices sexy. But those devices are bleeding the sex out of the rest of our lives.
Press the button and it all goes down right where you’re at!
No kidding, I really tried to build this exact same thing when I was in college. But I don’t know how to build things, alas.
And guess who wrote it? Us!
Creative Cow was so impressed with our spoof trailer for the movie “P2″ that they asked us to write an article about it for their website. For those of you who don’t know, Creative Cow is an amazing user’s group, forum, and magazine for media producers and artists, and we’re very very proud to be featured in one of the very places we’ve turned to for help so many times for technical questions.
For any of you who have ever wondered about how we make things over here at PB, the following article gets pretty dang explicit.
P2 is a movie about getting stuck in a parking garage and being held captive by a deranged parking attendant. Our spoof is about getting stuck in a parking garage and being held captive by a deranged tapeless HD camera.
http://library.creativecow.net/articles/spice_doug/P2.php
Yesterday on my way to the train, I saw two cops riding around Hollywood on these three-wheeled Urban Assault Segways:
How long before we get this… ?
Pretty good article over at NewTeeVee, apparently tonight YouTube is launching new TubeMogul-like analytics for your videos.
The cool part looks to be these maps that show you how popular your video is all over the world.
The site is down right now as I post this (they are making the very site updates I speak of) but I’m excited to check it out tomorrow. We are HUGE in Canada, and I can’t wait to have more proof of this. I’m also super curious about what states our videos are most popular in. Then we can compare with a map of Hillary/Obama delegates.
As may not be apparent by our pictures of foosball tables and playing with Lego, we do a ton of work here, and since we don’t actually have the time right now to update the website, I thought we should at least mention one of our latest projects, Slacker.
Slacker Personal Radio is web radio that learns what music you like and adapts itself accordingly. You can listen on the web, or buy their Portable player and listen on planes, in trains, and even inside large cabinets if that’s your thing, jelly bean. OH MY GOD, but I don’t even have to tell you about it, because we made this video:
I finally met the guys from Slacker at the SXSW Music Fesival, at the Blender/Slacker after party, at around 2 or 3 in the morning. Our videos were playing in the main tent of the party while everyone was drunk on free beer and getting down to the likes of Diplo, A-Trak, and the Cool Kids. Slacker is based in San Diego, and we actually completed the entire project without ever having met face to face. See the rest of our suite of videos over at
Since Super Tuesday, the election coverage has been focusing a lot on Obama’s small-donor, grassroots support – a nice little story of how smaller donors have together financed the largest campaign fundraiser in history. This has been possible largely through collective action online (organized through MoveOn.org and the like) and by simple direct response. It’s easy for almost anyone to take a few minutes and Paypal $20, $50, whatever… and that is driving this kind of change.
So I started thinking, why doesn’t something like this exist for film financing? It turns out, it does!
Tubemogul, the awesome uploading & tracking tool that allows us to upload our videos to ten different websites (youtube, yahoo video, revver, stupidvideos, etc.) with the click of a button (instead of the painful and tedious uploading to ten sites, writing 10 different sets of tags and video descriptions), now has even more features. And I just so happen to love them.
The Boast Feature:
Looks like this! That’s how many views our spoof of the movie “P2″ has gotten across all the websites we’ve uploaded it to. No longer do you have to worry about only ushering people to one place because “the only views that count are on YouTube” or because “Revver is the only web portal that pays.” Now you can point people to wherever the hell you want, because now with Tubemogul you can show how all the views are adding up. Now, granted, of that 124,000 views (as of this post) 122,000 are from youtube, but every so often a video gets featured on Yahoo or Revver or Stupidvideos, and don’t you want those to count, too?
The New Link Feature
Basically, they give you automatic code to generate these links to your videos all over the web:
YouTube, Yahoo, MySpace, Metacafe, Google, Revver, DailyMotion, Blip.tv, Veoh, Crackle and Stupid Videos
No, I didn’t have to copy and paste 11 links, I just copied one block of code, and it felt just like slipping into silk pajamas. Actually, come to think of it, I can’t imagine the usefulness of that one, unless somehow giving web viewers the choice over which of the 11 websites to watch your video is somehow incredibly desirable. Maybe it is?
There is also a tool which lets you embed the latest Youtube comments into your own webpage, which is awesome, but I can’t seem to get it to work in this blog, so that’ll have to wait till I figure it out.
I know it’s only January, but is it even possible that someone will come up with a more-needed, better-executed, brilliantly-inspired device in 2008 than the iPhone Camera Lens? Check it out!
It’s a 6x optical zoom for those of you who are sick of the crappy digital zoom on your camera phone! It’s also larger and harder to carry than a wide variety of cameras that would offer you vastly superior performance in all categories! It’s only $15, which certainly doesn’t make me ask any questions about the quality of the optics!
But… for $15, it probably makes a pretty good gag gift. Also available for RAZR, KRZR, and… well, who cares!