martoon

29.11.05

ANIMATION - insanely twisted superstitials

  • insanely twisted


  • Michel Gagne says "Here is the first series of interstitials featuring "Insanely Twisted Shadow Puppets" that I created for Nickelodeon's 2005 "Halloween Shriekin Weekend". These are the "Director's Cuts" and are not necessarily the ones shown on the network. All the spots were completely animated in Flash. No other software was used for the animation."

    I've checked these out and can honestly say that they are sweet, and when I say sweet, I mean awesome.

    TECH - RSS feeder for your iPod

  • Pod2Go


  • If you've ever had a palm device and used AvantGo, you'll immediately know what this new software does. If not, then basically, Pod2go allows you to select a bunch of text content from the web and have it dumped onto your iPod for future reading.

    Once you open the software for the first time, you can set your own RSS feeds or select a bunch of feeds from a pre-existing list that Pod2go supplies. The list is comprised of RSS feeds broken down into various categories such as news, weather, horoscopes, gas prices, directions... You can also set any text docs from your hard drive to appear in your iPod and Pod2go will create a iPod compatible version of your text doc and automatically stick it onto your iPod during the next sync. It's pretty slick in howit does this. The iPod "notes reader" app has some limited html functionality built into it. Pod2go takes advantage of this and prepares a new directory in your "notes" folder then dumps text files into. If a text file exceeds 4k (the limit a note can be on the iPod) Pod2go will break it up into one or more files and link them together using "Next" and "Previous". Simple but effective.

    Besides keeping me company while giving birth to a food baby, another great feature is that you can have your safari bookmarks synced up to the iPod as well. This comes in handy for when I'm at work and can't exactly remember link I found the previous night. I just connect the iPod to my computer and pull the link from there.

    TECH - Headphone Ear Protection Hack

  • headphone hack


  • This low-tech hack requires only the smallest bit of knowledge about wiring and absolutely no expertise beyond that whatsoever. The completed product is a combination of earmuff style ear protectors and audio headphones, allowing the user to listen to music or any other audio imput with hearing protection (I hook it up to my iPod or a guitar player's output feed to I can sinc up to the music while drumming). This is useful for mowing the lawn, or working on a project the requires both ear protection and background tunes. (Check the link for instructions)

    At first I thought this was a silly thing to do, until I realized that I spend upwards of 6 hours a weekend annoying my neighbors with noisy lawn equipment and making myself deaf in the process. I had a pair of ear protectors lying around and a decent pair of behind-the-ear sony headphones I no longer used. I also had a real old pair of broken hi-fi system headphones from the mid 70's that I could never use because it had a gigantor plug that didn't fit not any of my music players. It had sweet head padding across the top of the set as well as some shiny hole grommets that came in useful for putting together my version of the hacked headphones. I ripped apart the two existing headphones. I used the speakers and the wires from the sony and the padding and grommets from the oldy-timers. I drilled holes into the ear protectors, removed the padding, soldered up some wire and crammed everything together. Because of the padding, I was able to snake the wire from one ear cup across the top, to the other ear cup which allowed me to have only one wire dangling down to the mp3 player which makes the new earmuffs surprisingly tangle-free.

    How do they work? Pretty good. The actual speakers sit about an inch and a half from the ear inside the padded cup so they don't really crank, but because of all of the padding inside of the ear-protectors, they don't need to be loud. The ear-protectors do a great job of muffling all of the outside sound and I'm left with pleasant music. But my neighbors, they still hate me.

    3.11.05

    WEB - word recognition turned on th thwart spam posters

    I've just been machine-spammed. I won't mention the company name since they don't deserve any advertising from me, but as a result of having to remove 15 posts from the same spammer, I've decided to turn on blogspots word recognition for posters. It's cake to deal with if your a human, but it has a tendency to baffle the machines (for now)

    2.11.05

    OT - Pumpkin



    This is a picture of our pumpkin. I took one with the flash and with the flash off. No-flash wins. It looks much scarier that way for sure.