Phasor Burn

It appears one can watch RSS feeds from within the VR known as Second Life.

I’ve also seen in-world computers that you can play flash-type games on. Yes, I’ve recently gotten pulled into the Second Life universe and have spent a few multi-hour sessions in-world. Interesting for now but I do not know if it will hold my attention long term.

But . . . maybe I can catch up on my rss feeds while in-world and not need to spend much more total time on the keyboard every week. hmm.

Then again, do I really need to see this kind of thing? (Actually, haven’t managed to stumble across anything happening live like this, just after-the-fact in youtube)

I suppose this is one way of raising increasing interest in soccer (football) in places that don’t pay much attention to it already (North America).

Ever want to download a google or youtube video and keep it as a stand-alone file on your local disk? Maybe in a format other than flash?

Here’s how you do it on a Mac . . .

1. Use the built in browser, Safari, to go to the video page.

ie: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1886760264074850931

2. Let it load the entire video (the progress bar needs to go all the way to the right).

3. Go to Window -> Activity and look for the entry related to that tab.

4. Open the disclosure icon and search for the video file url. It’ll probably be the largest one.

5. Double-click on that file. Let it come down into your default downloads folder.

This gives you the original file, probably a flash (.flv or .swf). Not a terribly useful format to me ; I want this in mpeg4 format.

6. Go grab iSquint. Install it, run it. Drop the .flv or .swf file from step 5 into the work area of iSquint, and tell it to optimize for TV. Crank the quality all the way to the right aka “go nuts”. Choose h.264 if you like. Wait a few minutes.

7. You should now have a standard mpeg4 h.264 version of the file.

when scientists found a massive Tyrannosaurus rex thigh bone in a remote region of Montana a few months ago, they were forced to break the bone in two in order to fit it into the transport helicopter. This act of necessity revealed a startling surprise: soft tissue that had seemingly resisted fossilization still existed inside the bone. This tissue, including blood vessels, bone cells, and perhaps even blood cells, was so well preserved that it was still stretchy and flexible.

More here.

Next post . . . how to pull these flash videos off of Google or YouTube and have them as stand-alone mpeg files on your local disk.