been awhile

I has been a while since I posted on here. I switched to type as a blogger of choice. (http://nathanstevens.typepad.com). I have also been playing with plurk. Let's all join plurk.com and communicate.

Plurk.com

Now that SmartNotebook can play flash files (flv). Now youtube files that are blocked by firewall can be dowloaded and played within the software. Which leads to the point of this post. I found a nice nice program for downloading youtube videos. YouTube downloader is a simple java program that downloads the video. Copy the link to the video and paste it in the box and start dowloading. Here is the link to the software:http://sourceforge.net/projects/ytd/

SmartNotebook Express

I was looking around this morning and stumble across SmartNotebook Express. It is a SmartNotebook in a browser. If you already have your notebook file (.xbk), you can open the file in Express. It has the basic commands of the SmartNotebook (draw add text, and add slide) has. The is the beta version, so it may change. It looks to be a good tool for distance education tool.
Here is the address: http://express.smarttech.com/

Aviary.com has been coming out with some really cool web apps lately. They released Myna the other day. It is a web-based audio editor. The setup looks similar to Garageband. It imports wav, aif, mp3, wma, m4a, and ogg files. (Really nice selection) You can set the type of license to the recording. It works really well if you are using smaller files that are to be assembled. Multiple tracks can be added to the recording. There is a library that sounds can be pulled from. The compilation can be downloaded as a wav or as a mp3 file.

Photobucket Mashup

I was stumbling around looking for a free web-based video editor. I came across the fact that Adobe has one. It is Premiere Express. It is that backbone of Photobucket's Remix option. The look is similar to Windows MovieMaker and iMovie 06. Images and Videos can be uploaded into Photobucket. Different pieces can be added to a timeline to create a story. Text can be added to images and videos. Other extracs can be added and then the video can be published.

Creating Model View with Photos

I was looking to create an interesting photo for the front of our brochure. I thought creating a a model view of the front of the media center. I found a tutorial on using masks in Photoshop to create a model view. I saw on Cole Camplese's blog that there was a response with a web site that can create these photos for you. The web site is http://tiltshiftmaker.com. The focus can be adjusted up and down. Everything outside of the focus becomes blurred to create the effect. The pictures I took were from on top of a ladder. Here is a the image I created:

Developing an a Organizational Plan

I was looking at the way the way Penn State's TLT Community Hub and Cole Camplese's blog about how they are using stickers to track what who was going to what event at their TLT conference. I thought it would be nice to label each entry with a box that that would like enties by likeness. Here is what I came up with:
It is a little blurry, but I had trouble getting it into blogger. I am trying this at work. As a item is taught, I am going to label equipment that matches what was taught. Hopefully, I will start seeing folks have better recognition in what is actually possible. I hope this makes sense.