Balihoo Creative Blog

H.264 has extended it’s freedom through the life of the product and I’m freakin’ excited! HTML5 developers rejoice!

I addressed the most recent competitor into the codec war awhile back.

WebM sounds like it could be a great thing. Yes, it will rival H.264 and the most important part about it is not how it works but the licensing issues that it will avoid.
Andrew Agalsoff @BoiseCutters

Well, Andrew… this could be a dream come true. Instead of waiting for Google to catch up or for open-source to save us (Seen an Ogg video lately? Neither have I) we can continue to enjoy what we thought would bite us in the ass. So as soon as mozilla and trident and the rest of those browser cats (and fox… or “foxen” if you prefer) build in native support for H.264 we should be happy developers and delighted video producers. Do not fret any longer that the video you post, stream, burn, and encode may come back to haunt you on Jan. one, twenty-sixteen …unless, of course, the world ends 4 years earlier.

Just one of those things that you are asked daily to do when you know something about technology or design.

My computers freaking out. You know computers; can you look at it.

Sure I’ll look at it, then I’ll laugh at you for using and operating system and a machine you know nothing about. Do I look like an IT department to you? Ok… maybe I do.

I’m having a BBQ this weekend. You’re a designer… can you make me a really cool flyer with a picture of my kitty?

No.

In reality creatives and geeks are much more helpful than this, but it’s those little things in everyone’s career path that you’d like to get away from so you can really get to work. One of those tasks is resizing images for people. It’s a mundane task that seems to stump the most intelligent of people. And really, it’s not that simple. Windows doesn’t offer the best tools to do a simple resize and even the savviest of mac users will overlook the resize function in Preview.

When you are posed with this task for the later part of 2^|S| > |S|, please appoint the unfortunate inquirer to picresize.com directly! After a quick bookmark you should be less one request for the rest of your life …that is until their browser’s bookmarks corrupt and you are asked to magically retrieve them. Rinse, repeat, enjoy!

Back-up.

Do it right now. Even if you think you are double check that your external back-up drive is running. If your not running Time Machine, do it now! If you’re working off a server, make sure it’s one with back up capabilities like an Xserve.

If you’re a Windows user… good luck.

It’s one of those things that’s easy to put off because your new machine runs so smoothly and you never have issues. You’ve been working for months without backing up so why would you want to back-up now and ruin a good thing?

Trust me you’ll thank me later… like when it’s midnight with a client deadline at 8am and your hard drive dies. EPIC FAIL.

Netflix on my Wii. Movie Queue on my computer. SMS “d addnetflix” movie from my phone. Reviews on my Now Playing iApp.

When will we just interface with our TVs?

Interactive television is here… almost. Today Google announced the WebM project (Someone needs better branding… WebMD sound familiar?). This allows their Android platform to creep into your television and rivals both Adobe’s Flash and Apple H.264.

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I recently found myself with a total of 3 dead laptops and I simply could not get passed the mentality that you cant just throw computers away…

Reduce – reuse and recycle right?

The idea that if its high tech you simply throw it a way and replace it, seems to be rampant in our society – and obviously one that manufacturers frankly wish to endorse.

People don’t throw away cars because they break down they find things to do with them.

Being the thrifty sort of chap that I am, I decided to try my hand at re-purposing. One laptop with a broken LCD became a media center and is now connected to a television in my study. The second became a digital picture frame as did the third, and with the junk that was left I now have two portable hard drives once I buy the enclosures.

As we move into a world that increasing dominated by electronics and electronic equipment – seeing older equipment as resources and not as a problem is going to become not just desirable, but absolutely vital.