This is part of my morning musical focus. Ambient, triphop, and such are styles I’ve long delighted in. From back in the early days of electronic music. I find the graphics accompanying this to be cool, too.
Category: Digital Life
Politics, The Death Star, And The Place Of Memes
Saw this thread today:
“Death Star” is the perfect brand ID.
You can update it every day. “The Trump Death Star has killed 74,773 Americans…”
Or
“Trump has so far caused 74,773 deaths, and when you’re a star, they let you do it”— Tom Joseph (@TomJChicago) May 7, 2020
My mind immediately pictured the scene in A New Hope where Obi-Wan senses the destruction of Alderaan. Doesn’t seem like a positive message about a candidate to me. Anyway, I whipped out this meme in response.
A little cheesy and amateurish, but thought “what the hell”. I might regret it as there possibly will be an explosion of crankiness. Or maybe not. Might be one person who likes it and it fades into oblivion. In the end, I thought this silly little meme sums up my feelings succinctly.
May the Force be with you All.
Free and Useful Tech Tools for Students
This week I started my coursework for my new career: full-stack web developer (for more about that decision, head here). In the few days since courses launched (online, as we’re still practicing social distancing), I discovered/reinforced the importance of several tech tools.
I started experimenting with this about a week ago. I’d seen ads for the free app, and, well, haven’t been too interested. I think I’m a solid writer. But I finally wore down and decided to try it. I’m actually quite pleased. And, as the syllabi that I’ve read the past few days state pointedly, grammar, spelling and syntax in the online posts are a part of our grades. So, that much more valuable. Though less delightful, but important, I’ve seen I’m not so perfect a writer. Having these, shall we say “nudges” helps make me that much better. So, I recommend it.
2. Evernote
This tool is one I’ve been using for at least 10 years. It’s my journal, and main note-taking tool. Articles I’ve read, want to read, brainstorming sessions, projects I’m working on, travel info, checklists…all of this an more are dumped into this tool. The searchability is great! And the ability to customize your organization system is excellent, too. Whether you prefer to have custom “notebooks” or you prefer to “tag” notes, you’re covered by Evernote. I also appreciate that there’s geocoded information in the notes, and also a number of third-party tools to explore.
I’ll post other ones as I discover them. Do you know of any I should explore? Leave a comment and let me know.
4/16: Editted as WordPress converted my manually typed numbers into a <ol> list.
New To Zoom? Check Out This Great Intro Video
With coronavirus forcing us to transform education and interpersonal communication, the folks at Zoom now find their tool becoming the defacto standard, education and beyond. Plenty of organizations (churches, businesses, non-profits) are utilizing Zoom (why Zoom and not Google Hangouts? Skype? I’m not entirely sure at this point, but think it was because the reached out first…I should explore this at some point).
I’ve been a fan of Steve Dotto for years, and highly recommend his videos for guidance about things tech. Steve created this video (below) as a tutorial for many of the basic features. So, if you haven’t used Zoom, or haven’t used it extensively, I highly recommend Steve’s video. My wife (a teacher), who’s used Zoom quite a bit the past few weeks picked up some great tips. It’s highly worth your time.
Need To Reduce A Video’s Size? VLC’s Got You!
I’ve used VLCfor years, since it’s a powerful video player (has most every codec out there…can play pretty much anything), but wasn’t aware I could use it to change formats or compress files. As I had some huge videos to upload to a WordPress site (which limits me to 500 MB…even after editing the php.ini file), I explored ways to shrink the files. Of course, I came up with a bunch of pay options. But, buried below the fold (fortunately on page 1 of SERP) was this video. And, boom, problem solved! I loved VLC before, and an am even bigger fan now.
Animated PNGs
Yesterday, it took me ages to figure out how to convert a .mov to an animated PNG. One of our services can’t use gifs at all, only pngs. (Here’s more insight into the format.) I remembered that there were such things, but damn, I’d never created one before. It looks like browsers don’t support then that well, so that Adobe doesn’t support their creation natively. I saw in several forums that you can download a plug-in to do that, but no one linked to one. I found EZGif.com, a free website that let me do the conversion. It’s not the most elegant process. It works fine if I open it in a browser, but not if I try to open it in Windows. My, what a pain!
An Ad That Will Challenge Your Notion Of Community
Take members of diverse groups, provide a safe space for honesty, and you, too, can create a piece like this. Danish TV2 did a brilliant job in breaking down social barriers in this short (3 minute) video.
Spinning Russian Dancers
Delightful little video. However, if i tried spinning around like this I’d hurl.
work bitch – britney spears pic.twitter.com/9EFXIJBK6d
— soviet soldiers dancing (@communistbops) January 15, 2020
Some thoughts on sound
The past few days have brought a few opportunities to edit some sound files. I’ve used Audacity in the past, but it hit me that Adobe’s Audition is part of my Creative Suite subscription. I found it slick and fast. Now I was only trimming the files and boosting the audio. It felt much easier to me. That might be due to my decades of experience in Abode products. This, their UX is somewhat natural.
Next. I want to spend some time exploring balancing sound, cutting out noise and such. It should be fun.
What’s your favorite tool? I lean towards Audacity mainly, if for no other reason, free!
Video, Shoots, and Real Estate: Thoughts on the Future
Did a video shoot today with the owner of the company I now work for. It was his first video with a videographer, so he had to work though nervousness and his desire for perfection. I was quite pleased with how things went. And that he came away with a ton of ideas of how we can make the next one better.
Preparing got today reminded me of the one below, where I am on camera. I’ve been behind the scenes many, many times. I do like being in front of the camera, I should do more of that. Maybe, once I have my real estate license back, I’ll go full on into being a YouTube agent. One of many possibilities to explore.
So, the video below is one I made with the C & K Real Estate Team. I really enjoyed making it and have thought, many times, it would be a blast to do more.
What do you think? So many options, do little time.