Posted by Doug
Thu, 25 Jan 2007 20:11:00 GMT
Today I’m officially (and finally) cable TV free! We’ve finally tired of paying the high monthly fees to get content. Sure, there are lower subscription plans, but none of them include a DVR or are High Def. So, we just pulled the plug. We’re simply going to rely on our Blockbuster on-line account plus our local library plus some iTunes plus some “backnet”.
I setup my old Apple G4 Powerbook (not the powerbook I’m selling on eBay) in the living room with the mini-DVI to s-video connector. Using the 1.3.1 version of Enabler (not the 1.3.5 version) I was able to install Apple’s Front Row to use as a front end for selecting and displaying shows.
I have a bunch of video and TV shows that I’ve “aquired” that are in .avi format. Using iSquint I’m able to convert those easily into the format that iTunes prefers. Also using Parsley is Atomically Delicious I can tag these with the special meta-data iTunes needs to recognize the files as TV Shows and Movies.
All in all I’m real happy with the solution. I’ve also got our family iPhoto album with all of the photos we’ve taken since we got a digital camera setup as a screen saver. So now the idle TV shows snapshots from the past! The kids love it. I think they might actually prefer sitting and watching the slide show of photos to some of the stuff they normally watch on TV when bored.
Posted in Movies, House, TV, Freedom, Mac OS X | 3 comments
Posted by Doug
Wed, 19 Jul 2006 13:12:44 GMT
Josh and I just got back from the Apple Summer Camp: Movie Workshop. It was pretty fun, but fast moving. We were assigned a project to create a 30 second commercial for anything in the Apple store. Earlier that morning the “camp counselors” had shot some raw footage for the Nike+iPod shoes. Right after telling us our assignment, they went through importing and editing their video to produce a commercial. They added music and a voice over and some transitions. They then turned us loose to shoot our own video.
Josh decided to shoot a video for Star Wars Battlefront. We had 10 minutes to shoot the video and 30 minutes to edit and produce the commercial. We ended up with a pretty good little video (2MB Quicktime).
I took my Panasonic PV-GS180 DV camcorder and my Macbook Pro. It’s a good thing too because they didn’t have enough cameras for everyone to use. Their plan was to use the built in iSights on the various Macs. Also, my Macbook Pro was pretty snappy for edits and such.
All in all we had fun. I’m going to try and get Josh to do another video today at home while it’s still fresh in his mind. We’re both looking forward to tomorrow’s iWeb Workshop.
UPDATED: We had about 30 minutes to kill before the camp started. Josh and I created this three page comic using Comic Life called
Camping Chaos (3MB PDF)—zero prior experience. I actually think Josh had more fun with this than making the movie!
Posted in Movies, Family, Software, Mac OS X | Tags Apple, camping, comiclife, creativity, Josh, Kids, MacbookPro, video | 2 comments
Posted by Doug
Mon, 11 Jul 2005 13:56:00 GMT
Carla and I watched Michael Crichton. He’s been part of other great movies like: Congo, Twister, and Sphere. To be fair, he also wrote The Andromeda Strain and Jurasic Park.
Anyway, don’t go see this movie.
Posted in Movies | no comments
