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The recession has spread from Wall Street to Sesame Street. Sesame Workshop, the 41-year-old non-profit educational organisation behind the Sesame Street television programmes and home to such luminaries as Elmo and Oscar the Grouch announced on Wednesday that it would eliminate a fifth of its 355-strong workforce as market turmoil ate into its income and assets.
via FT.com / Companies / Media – Downturn hits Sesame Street.
CreateHDR is an online tool that lets you easily add High Dynamic Resolution effects to images without using Photoshop or any other HDR software. HDR images show greater range of tonal detail, than your camera could capture. This site emulates HDR effect so you can play with it with no Photoshop or other software. You can enhance some pictures really well and produce stunning results.
It is also worth looking aqt the High Dynamic Resolution Gallery, for examples of before and after shots .
This is my first xtra normal video.
Very basically, the tool takes what you type, for one or two characters, and creates a video of your selected characters. You can control pretty much everything in the video, from background music to camera shots, and character appearances and actions, by dragging icons and dropping them into the dialog. You can share the videos and grab copies of other people’s videos (this is probably the best way to start out).
There’s a youtube video over at Chris Pirillo showing how to create xtra normal videos. I didn’t use it (it probably shows), but for an example of how easy it is, the kids (one 10 and two 8 year olds) are already building their masterpieces. Unfortunately, they didn’t have time to finish tonight (school tomorrow) and they’ve topld me I’m not allowed to ‘show everyone their unfinished stuff’ (their words not mine !!).
Homer tries to vote for Barack Obama, but runs into a few problems. Note the YouTube user id
The Simpsons spoof the Mad Men, the intro into one of this year’s annual Treehouse Of Horror stories.
I know there’s a lot of sites (like vidtomp3) that let you extract music from online videos. But what if you already have the video (in my case, some *.mp4 files) on hand ?
Converting MP4 files to MP3 is quite easy, once you have appropriate software. I used google to find the free version of NCH Software’s Switch Audio File Conversion (this is provided free as a teaser for Switch Plus – you can download Switch Plus demo here or purchase Switch Plus online here).
The options are laid out very simply, but are comprehensive enough for me. You can can control
It may be a basic program by true audio engineer standards, but it meets my (9albeit simple) requirenments.
All-in-one style web-based file and unit converter. Quickly convert between:
- measurement units: size, area, distance, time, velocity, mass, etc.
- file formats: documents (.DOC, .PDF, …), images (..JPG, .GIF, …), audio (.MP3, .WAV, .AAC, … ), and video (.WMV, .3GP, .AVI, …) formats.
from jeff jarvis at Buzz Machine:
Jon Stewart was, of course, brilliant in his defense of satire and The New Yorker:
Tiltviewer
provides an interesting way to present your photos online. Generally photos are
presented in a slide show presentation where photos are displayed one
after the other. However, Tiltviewer presents
your photos in an almost 3D like grid allowing people the freedom to
glide around your photos.
You will have to download some code and
place it on your website in order to use Tiltviewer, which may restrict it’s usefullness, but once properly configured it gives your
photos a very modern interface and backdrop. You can zoom into each
photo, move around a 3D like space and even click on each photo for
more information about it.
There are two ways (that I know of) to play a youtube video in a loop.
The first one requires that you manipulate the loop parameter of the embeddable player (here’s the complete list of parameters) – in the example, replace VIDEOID with the ID of the video you’re playing:
href="http://www.youtube.com/v/VIDEOID&loop=1
If you add the autoplay parameter, the video will start to play automatically: http://www.youtube.com/v/VIDEOID&loop=1&autoplay=1
Another method is to use Loopy for YouTube, a Greasemonkey script that adds a small link below the video to start the loop. The script requires Greasemonkey , a Firefox extension, and it’s efficient in that it doesn’t reload the page to download the video again.