convert wmv to m4a, mp3, etc

This one is so satisfyingly easy I have to jot it down. To quickly and simply convert wmv video get EasyWMA. Ten bucks, it’s worth it, just get it.

I’m reading a book, Efficiency in Learning by Clark, Nguyen and Sweller (highly recommend it) that comes with a CD. Among other goodies, the CD has video interviews with one of the authors, John Sweller. Since I don’t read books at my desk and would prefer to just listen to the interviews on my ipod anyway, I went looking for a converter. (The video files are wmv format.)

I tried Handbrake, but it didn’t want to recognize the wmv files and the latest version is for non-ludites who’ve updated their mac to leopard. Alas.

Fortunately I came upon a forum post recommending EasyWMA. The demo version lets you try it out, but will only give you 15 seconds at 128 bits. The demo is very convincing: conversion is fast and as simple as dropping the wmv file onto the app. EasyWMA is busy converting 37 files as I type. It will be done before I am. Yup, there they are. Lovely.

Off to add them into my iTunes library and I’m all set for the train ride tomorrow. Happy Ending.

the learner’s journey and visual information

Some years back I was lucky enough to experience the making of Head First books from behind the scenes. Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates’ idea behind Head First – learning books that grab your brain’s attention and let you learn effectively and enjoyably – was relatively new at the time. At the time, the process to create a Head First book was, of course, still rough around the edges.

Today the process has been refined considerably, and O’Reilly generously lets us all peek in on what Head First books are built on: the learner’s journey. Take a look at Head First editor Brian Sawyer’s video on the learner’s journey. If you’re creating learning material – for any media – you’ll appreciate the insight. Thank you Head First.

And then…

Being easily distracted as I am (not scattered, curious!), I was intrigued by the title of another of Brian’s videos:  Introducing The Back of the Napkin. It makes perfect sense that someone involved with Head First books would have great tips about visual information. I’ve just ordered Dan Roan’s The Back of the Napkin and can’t wait to see it! A recent, text-heavy e-learning project could benefit from a little visual help, and this might just be the right inspiration for it.

when does a snapshot become a photo?

Are you trying to move beyond taking “snapshots”  into making decent photos? How do you know when you’ve gone beyond taking snapshots? Don’t get me wrong, I love snapshots, all the gazillions of them stuffed in shoeboxes or hiding out on my hard disk.

Recently I’ve been learning a lot about photography through podcasts and experimenting with a used Canon 350D that I bought for the purpose. Nicole Young, a successfull  iStockPhoto contributor, was recently interviewed by Frederick Van Johnson of This Week in Photography fame. She mentioned how submitting photos to iStockPhoto is a learning experience. So of course I had to check it out…

And they have this cool article where you get to see the difference between  a snapshot and a photo that iStock would accept as sellable material: Are you taking snapshots? A *lot* of the difference, not surprisingly, is about composition, your photographic eye as it were. A great resource for anyone who’s got the bug to create nice pictures, with or without intentions to sell on iStockPhoto.

Here’s a sample, can you say what it is that make this a snapshot?

Check out the photog’s own explanation and sample changes.

Click! Click! Click!

YouTube Edu

A bit late to the game, just discovered YouTube’s Edu offering of videos from university partners. They describe it as “videos and channels from our university and college partners”. Without taking the time to dig deeper, I wonder what it means to be a partner and how a college or university gets to be one.

A quick browse through the videos shows big names like MIT, U Penn, Carnegie Mellon, Hofstra, Tulane, and others. I took a peek at an MIT lecture from 2002, apparently a prof’s review lecture before exams. Ever wondered what an MIT lecture on Electricity and Magnetism might look like? Go on, be brave: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=js9SLJ2TU2c

Fortunately there are videos with content other than straight recordings of college lectures, interviews with Noam Chomsky for example.

I’m looking forward to browsing a bit more. First quick impressions: interesting, worth exploring, curious about the value.

Who da thunk?

wordle play

Here’s a wordle image of noahlittle.wordpress.com:

Looks like wordle is weighted toward newer topics, maybe it takes just the posts that appear when you land on the blog. Anyway, you can tell that I’m getting into photography lately.

Have some fun at http://www.wordle.net.

picasa wins out over iphoto

I’ve been using Picasa for mac for about a month now, more in the last few days. I really like it.Why? It’s simple, intuitive and pleasing to use. Here’s how I’ve been using it so far…

First, I download some photos to my computer. (Anywhere! It doesn’t matter!) Then I open up Picasa and use it to do a first quick slideshow of all the photos. That’s the “hey! look at this pic! It came out pretty good!” part. Then I go to library view and look a bit closer, zooming in and around to help decide which photos to trash. Looking through pics is simply a pleasure. Just today I discovered that you can click and hold on an image and it zooms it to 100%. Nice. I do that a lot, zooming in and out and moving the image around to look more closely at different parts.

For the photos that don’t make the cut, I simply click my keyboard’s delete button. Poof, gone. Don’t even need to right-click to then move to trash. And I know it’s just gone because Picasa lets me work with my own file system, and there’s only one image there. (iPhoto? Don’t get me started!)

I can crop, make light and color changes, even do little effect thingies, whatever editing I want – yet undoing them is no problem. Picasa doesn’t save copies of original photos when changes are made, it just keeps track of them and recreates them. And – get this – it recreates them even if you move the photos around after making the changes!

In addition to the editing possibilties (there are just enough for me, I’m no photoshopper) I’ve enjoyed the quick tagging feature. This will really help, for example, gather all the pics of our dog when she’s wet and is playing with a stick. (Yes, I will want to do that one day. Really.)

Overall, Picasa just feels right. I like knowing that I don’t need to peek inside a pkg file to find my images (hello?), they’re all right there in the folders I made for them, organized by me, in a way that I can understand (actually not much different than iPhoto’s year > roll  system).

Long story short: Picasa is a keeper! I’ve already stopped importing into iPhoto, and will continue to move my images out of the iPhoto system into the file system. Got 2009 done, that was easy.

I’ll probably keep iPhoto around as a kind of archive until I’m sure that all my pics are accounted for and viewable in Picasa. Eventually, though, it will become outdated, even more outdated than it already is (got iPhoto 6). That’s when it will have to go. No tears here.

easily resize flash stage dynamically: BrowserCanvas rocks

Over at doesnotcompute the headline reads: “BrowserCanvas. The World’s Easiest Way to Dynamically Resize Flash”. It’s true.

A few months back I looked into this in preparation for a current project. Checked it out, put it aside for later. Now is later, and the proof is in: this is really easy to implement. It took no time to integrate the BrowserCanvas class into my code and use it successfully. Very very nice.

Noel Billig, maker of BrowserCanvas, mentions a few things that you have to have set right to make it work. Reiterating what I needed to do here, just for convenience:

First, the stage settings:

stage.scaleMode = StageScaleMode.NO_SCALE;
stage.align = stage.align = StageAlign.TOP_LEFT;


Then, if you want to view the effects locally (from a file, not over http), you need to set the security for your Flash player accordingly.

That’s it. It’s very satisfying to use a tool like this and have it all go so smoothly. I needed that. Thanks Noel! 

rethinking photo storage and sharing at home

Yippeee, just got a new camera, a lovely Panasonic Lumix LX3. Happy happy happy.

Now I’m thinking about reorganizing how I store and backup my photos. It has to be quick and easy, since I barely keep up with it as it is.
So far I’ve stored them on my computer, but disk space is getting limited and the photos keep growing. Time for an external disk me thinks.
And while we’re at it, better make that an external disk that we can share across 2 home computers.

I’m hoping to get some info about Drobo and getting drooby through Scott Bourne and Andy Ihnatko’s new site Managing Your Digital Life. I’m also hoping that they’re not too too Drobo centric – other options do exist and I’ll need to learn about them too.

academic earth – videos from Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, Yale

Here’s one to look into: videos of university lectures from the big names at AcademicEarth.org.

Their mission statement:

“giving everyone on earth access to a world class education”

Noble, eh?

textarea component’s textformat style is case sensitive – sometimes

This one cost me a few hairs, so I’m jotting it down in case it can save someone else some time (like me, down the line).

In a TextFormat object, verdana is not the same as Verdana. Duh! But the flash stand alone player might make you think it is…

I’m working with a couple CS 3 textarea components, adding them to stage from code (AS 3), and updating the text at runtime (fed from an XML file).

Using the CS 3 compiler, and therefore the stand alone player to view the compiled swf, all looked fine. So far so good. But when looking at the swf embedded in an html page, all of a sudden all the fonts were off. The TextFormat’s font was not sticking. Search, scratch, search, argh.

It didn’t seem to make sense that the stand alone player was displaying the font as desired, but the plug-in player didn’t pick up the style.

It was a stupid spelling error: myTextFormat.font = "verdana" ;
The stand alone player didn’t care, somehow it figured it out. The plug-in player didn’t like it though, and reverted to a default text style.
The fix: myTextFormat.font = "Verdana" ;

Like I said. Duh! Lunchtime, finally.