Posterous is a new simple web service for when you need to post anything to the web to make it publicly available to anyone: photos, videos, MP3 and all kinds of files.
The good part: no signup is needed. Just send an e-mail to post@posterous.com (remember to attach any files you want to post) and you'll (almost) immediately receive a reply with the address of the website where your files are posted.
Just watch this talk by Nicholas Negroponte and be amazed as most of his predictions (regarding CD-ROMs, web interfaces, service kiosks and touchscreen interfaces) in 1984 were absolutely accurate:
You already know I'm a sucker for everything Portal-related. So, it's not news that I would post a video such as this one:
In order to save some money from MP3 purchases, you can always try to find some other means of getting those MP3s you want for free. Of course not all those techniques are legal, but what did you want? It's for free...
Lifehacker has made a nice post that gives some advise on this area. For example, you can try searching the MP3 you're looking for in the Web. If that doesn't work for you, you can always download the music you want from MySpace. How about borrowing your friends' CDs or using the web? Another possibility is to grab the audio from a video. The quality is not the best but most of the files are audible.
What are your techniques to get MP3s for free?
By now you've probably realized that I'm a huge fan of the Super Mario Bros. console game, and especially, its theme music. If you're a fan too and always wanted to play the theme in your favourite instrument, check out the music sheet here.
Every now and then, while playing some video podcasts and movies on iTunes, when the mouse hovers the movie (to trigger the appearance of the controls), my Mac completely freezes and I have to do a hard-reset. I couldn't figure out what caused this...until now.
If you remember, a few months back I posted a nice tip on how to enhance FrontRow in order to watch all kinds of video files, instead of just Quicktime files. This included installing Perian, a component plugin for QuickTime that adds native support for many popular video formats.
What I failed to notice is that this component somehow conflicts with video playback on iTunes and was the cause of these crashes. But since it only happened ocasionaly with certain video files I wasn't able to find the relation between the two applications.
But today, as I was doing some maintenance on my System Preferences, I notice the Perian section and decided to have a look and suddenly everything made sense: Perian makes some changes so as to allow playback of different video formats, right? So it must deal with video codecs, right? So, it may be related to the video crashes on iTunes... I decided to remove Perian and "voilá"...everything seems to be working just fine in iTunes now. At least, the videos that frequently crashed my Mac, now work like a charm.
I know how difficult it can be, sometimes, to find good guitar tabs to learn music from. Luckily, for all guitar fans out there, I found this great website, Songsterr, that, not only has great tabs, but it has a great on-line software that allows you to reproduce the tab by playing the exact notes at full speed or half-speed, allowing you to easily pick up the chords and playing techniques for specific tunes.
Have fun :-)
Previously, on "The Tech In Me":
No, this post is not about the upcoming X-Files movie. This is only to reveal an important fact about UFO sightings. Ever since Photoshop was released, UFO sightings have suddenly started looking more real and convincing, right? :-)
Image source
This is how far computer-generated face animation has come. Check out the video and prepare to be amazed:
Source: Engadget
And we're back! After a few days to get used to the new idea of being a Father, I'll try now to update the blog a little bit.
But for now, let's flashback to the blog's August last year's best posts:
Whether it is by researching for new interface technologies or modifying everyday devices to operate in a new environment, we have to consider that there may be other ways of interacting with a computer. Pointing and clicking has become a very common task in our everyday use with a computer. But if we want to improve the way we interact with machines and increase our productivity, we have to start thinking outside the box.
DontClick.it is a website dedicated to explore a new interactive experience which doesn't require any clicking with a mouse. Using different types of mouse movements and events, the website is as fluent as if we were moving it with our own hands. It's amazing how something that is so different than our normal interactivity with computers can be so intuitive and familiar.
After a few minutes within the website, I started feeling that every interaction with my computer should be like this. Give a try...it's guaranteed that you'll like it :-)
A few days ago I posted about a website that was an excellent index of resources for web developers. And while that particular website was great for web developing-based resources (programming languages and standards), it didn't have much stuff on web design technologies. But to complete that index, here's a great website with a lot of material on:
A few days ago I posted a nice tip on how to download musics from MySpace using Safari and wget in Mac OS X. In that tutorial, I showed how to use wget to download the music because in Safari I was unable to use the "save as..." function to actually save the MP3 file on the computer. I also explained why this tip didn't work with Firefox (because it doesn't have an Activity window such as Safari's).
But then I discovered that I can paste the "secret" MP3 URL in the Firefox Address Bar and then use the "Save Page as..." to actually save the file.
So, since Safari and Firefox can do some team work, you no longer need to install wget on your Mac to download musics from MySpace.
Previously, on the "Tech In Me":
While exploring the "Open Image Sequence" feature on Quicktime to create a simple Slideshow of images, I noticed that the combo box presented some values that were odd for someone trying to create a slideshow of pictures:
Just the other day, I was posting about Splashup, a kind of web-based Photoshop wannabe. And now, the REAL web-based Photoshop comes to the spotlight. Adobe Systems has rolled out Photoshop Express, a web-based application for editing, organizing, and sharing images. The application, which runs in Flash-enabled browsers, is free and an account includes 2GB of storage.
At first, the idea of having a real (and free) Photoshop application sounded to good to be true. And as soon as I checked it out, I was able to verify that indeed it was (to good to be true, that is). I was amazed to see that the previously referred Splashup is more of a Photoshop-like application than this web-based application will ever be.
The image that you see here is a sample of the functionalities that are available in Photoshop Express. As you can see, this web-application is more of a wizard-like kind of application where you can only apply a few limited basic effects like adjusting the exposure of some photo, remove red-eyes or crop/rotate pictures.
In fact, it does make sense, you cannot ask Adobe to give away for free the only thing that they have for sale. So, even though this web-based Photoshop Express application is not for the Photoshop pros out there, it is still quite a good alternative to those photo-sharing websites where you can do some basic image editing.
But if you want a full-fleshed Photoshop web application, with such complex functionalities as layers and brushes (and especially if you already are a Flickr user), go for Splashup.
If you have ever used the combination FrontRow + Apple Remote on your Mac, you know what an amazing feature this is. It allows you to easily navigate through all of your music, photos and movies stored in your computer.
Well, not exactly "all movies" since it is only able to play the videos encoded in a QuickTime-supported codec. If you have any AVI or MPEG video files encoded with DivX or XviD (or any other video codec), they won't play on Front Row (or QuickTime for that matter). In order for them to play, you have to encode them into a QuickTime-supported format, which can be done using applications such as iSquint.
iSquint is mainly an iPod converter application, which is able to convert almost all kinds of multimedia files into a QuickTime/iPod acceptable format. However, you can also use it for converting to the Apple TV format, which in turn is accepted in Front Row.
Even though this application is a lot faster than QuickTime Pro (and free), it is still quite a time-consuming task to convert a whole bunch of videos to that format. It would be a lot easier to just use the files directly in QuickTime/Front Row.
Luckily, there are some amazing applications that allow you to do just that. Perian, as stated in its website, is the swiss-army knife for QuickTime.
Perian is a free, open source QuickTime component that adds native support for many popular video formats. It enables QuickTime application support for the following Media Types:
