Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Homeless Rather Get Handouts Than Work


Video

A Phoenix news crew with hidden cameras went around the city to see if the homeless people would actually accept work as their cardboard signs claimed. They offered $20 to each homeless person in exchange for one hour of landscaping work.

The result is not surprising.

Homeless people would rather stand at street corners to wait for hand-outs than do actual work.

To all the people who say "if the news crew would offer more money, maybe the homeless person would leave his corner".

$20 for one hour of landscaping work is a lot of money.

Plus, don’t forget “beggars can’t be choosers”.

Saturday, November 19, 2005

Anime Dorks 2005



Todd Roy of Kwoon.com returns to FanimeCon 2005 in San Jose, CA to revisit some of the old dorks that he met last year and meet some new dorks.

Part 1: http://tinyurl.com/pn28u

Part 2: http://tinyurl.com/lu4v2

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Anime Dorks


video: http://tinyurl.com/njgge

Have you ever wondered about what kind of people are into the whole "anime" and "cosplay" scene?

Thanks to Todd Roy of KWOON, we now have the pleasure to show you some of dorks attending anime conventions.

Want to see more?

Here are the footage from FanimeCon 2005.

* Anime (アニメ) is Japanese animation, sometimes referred to by the portmanteau Japanimation. It is often characterized by stylized colorful images depicting vibrant characters in a variety of different settings and storylines, aimed at a wide range of audiences. Anime is usually influenced by Japanese comics known as manga.

* Cosplay (コスプレ kosupure), a contraction (or portmanteau) of the English words "costume" and "play", is a Japanese subculture centered on dressing as characters from manga, anime, and video games, and, less commonly, Japanese live action television shows, Japanese movies, or Japanese pop music bands. However, in some circles, "cosplay" has been expanded to mean simply wearing a costume.

Friday, November 4, 2005

Tipping Isn't a City in China

Tipping Isn't a City in China

Although "Tipping" is not a city in China, but "Tiping" is.

Wednesday, November 2, 2005

Would You Laugh?

It is Halloween night.

Door bell rings.

A little girl standing there, dressed in a store bought costume, not saying a word but gave you the dead stare.

You try to complement her about her costume; she is still not saying a word.

No big deal, she may be just a little shy.

You present her with a large bucket of full size candy bars filled with sugar and chocolate.

She takes one.

You tell her that she can have as many as she wants.

She does not say a word but started to chew on the candy bar with wrappers still intact.

She is chewing and chewing.

You are concerned about her health and safety, so you tell her that the wrapper is not edible and she should remove the wrapper off first.

She stopped chewing.

Instead of peel the wrapper off with both hands, she starts to shake the candy bar violently, and hoping the centripetal force from each shake would slowly push the candy bar out of its wrapper.

You are somewhat disturbed by the child’s odd behavior, but luckily her mother shows up (she was talking on the cellphone in the driveway).

You ask her what is wrong with the little girl.

She replies: “Um, yeah, she is autistic…”

Soon after they left and the front door is fully closed, would you laugh?


* thank, Matt

Tuesday, November 1, 2005

How To Save Flash Videos From YouTube



Every video posted in YouTube has its own video identification code.

The eleven digits of both upper and lower cased alpha-numeric video identification code is used to watch videos via YouTube’s website or embed them into other websites.

To download the videos via
KeepVid or similar sites, the eleven digit video identification code is still useful, but in case of KeepVid crashes, user has to “kick it old school style” by reading YouTube video’s page source.

Using the F-16 Crash video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4Knsa7kBPE) as an example, here is how to save videos from YouTube “old school style”.

In Firefox browser, open “View Page Source” and do a text search for

player2.swf?video_id=

YouTube Flash Video Page Source Example
(screen capture)

For this example video, its public video identification code is b4Knsa7kBPE, but the internal prolonged video identification code is

b4Knsa7kBPE&l=48&t=OEgsToPDskI3D6CVWsTxEa4BzcTHKXc7
&s=E04B5F8107785BA4:8A51374783A7BCE6


Keep in mind that the code between “&t=” and “&s=” may be session-sensitive and changed every time the video is accessed.

To save the video, the URL path format is

http://www.youtube.com/get_video?video_id=prolonged_video_identification_code

By paste the above URL into browser would not download the video. The best way is to paste it into an email and send it to oneself.

The default file extension assigned by email clients (Gmail, Thunderbird, Outlook) when saving the video is html (hypertext markup language), change it to flv (flash video).

Media players like VLC can play flv files stand alone. To convert flv video to other formats like Audio Video Interlaced (.avi), Quicktime (.mov) or Windows Media (.wmv), use CinemaForge.


Update1: Keepvid.com can direct download videos from Google Video, YouTube, IFilm, Putfile and various other sites.

Update2: Javi Moya has created an extension called VideoDownloader 1.0 for Firefox which would download embedded videos and media files directly from Youtube, Google, Metacafe, iFilm, and other 60+ video sites. (more)