Cybertrips

Cool screen savers

2010-02-21T11:38:00.000-08:00

****UPDATE*****
We have made a cool set of screensavers from some of the favorites from Haint Retro.
We call it Haint Darkness. They are dark so that they save energy too!

that are available for download here
from haint.info

Since we are using our big screen TV as a monitor, having a good screensaver is necessary.
We like the 'hot corners' on our Mac screensaver options. It makes it easy to just move the mouse to a corner and automatically go into screensaver mode.

There are many things that we do for screen savers. Since we often listen to music on the computer with iTunes, we often use the visualizer in full screen mode as a screen saver. This is a far out visualizer on the 'jelly' option, (it does not have 'hot corners').

There are many sites that offer things like '60 free wallpapers/screensavers'. They are okay, we even found one we liked. But watch the quality, there are often just a few cool ones in the batch.
We also get nice pictures from places like APOD, National Park Service, NOAA,
(it's nice to get something nice from the government for a change -haint) and National Geographic.
Another thing that we have done is to take a 'snapshot' of a video with VLC (meda player reviewed in earlier post). This seems like it should be an okay use for stills(snapshots) from your own videos for use on your own computer, it would probably not be okay to copy and distribute these stills. It seems that the copyright issues on that sort of thing is a big hassle right now and we don't want to do anything illegal or encourage anyone else to either.
Keep it cool 'til next time
peace and love
haint and littia

Rumblefish Resolved - No Content Id match

2009-11-18T07:42:00.000-08:00

Hi ya'll,

Sorry we haven't posted anything in a while. Like the weekend that this whole Rumblefish trip started going down, we were both coming down with the flu. (Don't know if it wa the HiNi but it laid us oldsters both up for about a week and a half. )So by the time that the TechDirt article came out, we didn't even feel like getting on line.

But we are all better now.

And we did want to give Rumblefish a chance to be cool about it if they were going to.
They were cool.
We mean- they emailed us as soon as the article came out. We didn't contact them.
And they asked us to call them.
We weren't up to talking on the phone - so we emailed them back and asked that they take the notice down.
They emailed back and asked for the url to the page of the video.
So, we got that back to them and they removed the Content ID match.
They apologized and that was cool.

Are we all friends and made up now?
Well, we're just not on the same trip.
As artists, we just see something really wrong with twisting the copyright law that was originally meant to protect artists into something oppresses them and leeches off of them.
A lot of people have said, 'Well so, they are just tapping into a revenue stream that you aren't using and those fractions of pennies from monetization isn't something you could benefit from."
So, does it really matter if it's fractions of pennies (from thousands of videos)?

We guess that it's just a Matter of Principle for us - the Capitalist Principle

A principle that says that those who have more deserve more - even if it means taking it from those who have less.

And we have a different principle - that we are free to have the creative work that we have produced used only in the ways that we intend.
We believe we have that freedom.
It's not that we disagree with others profiting off our art. But that we believe that we should be the ones that make that choice.

Haint has an arrangement with a dealer that sells his folk art - Rising Fawn Folk Art Gallery. But the arrangement and the terms are ones that he chose and agreed to, this is quite different from what Rumblefish wanted to do.

That's all folks.
We've have our say and perhaps we part with philosophical differences about art and capitalism.
That's what freedom is all about
Letting our FREEK flag fly.
Peace and love
Haint and Littia

Updates on Content ID match

2009-10-30T07:03:00.000-07:00

Hi folks,

This is a review and update on the YouTube bummer. A screenshot of the notice is above.
To clear up confusion, the notice is not a DMCA takedown notice -it is a content ID match.
Rumblefish is a music reseller and that is fine. But there are other situations where the content in their catalog was matched with content that was legally obtained through another source.
One is from Dec of last year and was resolved in February
http://help.youtube.com/group/youtube-howto/browse_thread/thread/af23f2c256702ec1
eastvillagepodcasts had bought music from StockMusic.net - a Rumblefish reseller
They were flagged with a content ID match because Rumblefish did not realize that the material was already legally licensed. And as you can see from the posts eastvillagepodcasts went through several months of headache (and was talked to like a criminal by the YT community) for the error.

In our case it appears to be public domain content that was content ID matched with public domain in Rumblefish's catalogue

This is a post I Googled with advice on how to handle it:
http://forums.whyweprotest.net/186-youtube-vimeo-problems/rumblefish-dmca-content-id-claim-fix-w-o-namefaging-self-42732/T

But the vast majority of artists are unaware of this error and simply let the content be monetized - falsely believing they are the ones in the wrong.

There is also a third way that this error can occur. If Rumblefish was licensed (though not exclusively) to sell content for an artist, but that artist also gave permission for the content to be used by another party in their work.
We made a video working directly with another band Sonanaut. Their content is licensed though Groovera and iTunes. But we obtained their music and permission to use it directly from Sonanaut - the kind of sharing that the internet is supposed to be all about. Does this mean that Groovera or iTunes have any claim over the video that we made using Sonanaut's music? Does this mean that if Sonanaut was in Rumblefish's catalogue that Rumblefish would have a claim over it? (these are rhetorical questions and not requests for legal assistance)

This whole trip with the rumblefish/youtube thing is getting just a bit too heavy.
I'm just an artist - and an outside artist at that. Not a businessman, or a lawyer. What we do is make creative stuff and the people we know make creative stuff. And sometimes we do creative stuff together.

Like we did with the Psalters and Sonanaut.

But, hey - we aren't in it for the bread or for the fame. I do art whether anybody buys it or not. And we don't think that the Psalters are into it for the cash either. The song that we used was an Iraq war protest song and the piece of artwork shown being made in the video was a protest piece as well. Neither one of us expected to be a YouTube star - it is free speech and free- as in no $$ speech that is the point here.

This won't really have any effect on me doing my art - maybe besides inspiring a few new pieces.
But what it does have an effect on is all of you who value creativity as a natural part of human progress. As the internet becomes a place where all creative content is increasingly viewed in terms of monetization, traffic flow, ad potential, copyright bullying and other commercial concerns, the real creative people will just go back to doing what they did before

And that was -

doing our own thing

- and the number of folks that have an opportunity to share in that is less than it would be with access to the internet - but it does not make our art any less rich and fulfilling - it just makes the internet a poorer place to be.

It calls into question the claim that the internet can be the last bastion of freedom that we were promised it would be.

Peace and Love
Haint and Littia

Updates

2009-10-24T10:25:00.000-07:00

Today we searched the YouTube community and help forum pages. There are two references to the Rumblefish problems.
One is from Dec of last year and was resolved in February
http://help.youtube.com/group/youtube-howto/browse_thread/thread/af23f2c256702ec1

The other is from someone who doesn't speak English -so they didn't get anywhere

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/youtube/thread?tid=46371b3c44cd539a&hl=en

We will keep you posted on the latest.

Peace and love,

Haint and littia

Rumblefish and the Public Domain

2009-10-24T08:34:00.000-07:00

Greetings all,

We haven't posted here in a few months. We got used to the internet and new gadgets and haven't had much to post about here for a while.

This is the first post about our adventures with YouTube, Rumblefish, the Psalters and the public domain.

The scene:

We made a YouTube video of Haint's art.
(Posted in Jan '09)

We used a song by the Psalters as background music.
(2004 - Us Vs US - with their permission)

Rumblefish issued a content ID violation on the audio content of the video.
(Let us be clear that this is Rumblefish.com and NOT Rumblefish the band)

The audio was created by the Psalters with public domain content.
(This audio content is mixed with their live musical performance.)

Rumblefish has a lot of public domain content in their catalog and it will be flagged as a content ID match in YouTube and Vimeo.

The Bummer:

The Public Domain is supposed to be a safe place for artists to get content without fear of copyright infringement.

This permits Rumblefish advertising rights and control over public domain and the content of independent artists.
(We are the only ones we know of - but we are sure that we are not the only ones)

This is a violation of our rights as artists.

On Monday we will call a phone number that we found on a forum.
http://forums.whyweprotest.net/186-youtube-vimeo-problems/rumblefish-dmca-content-id-claim-fix-w-o-namefaging-self-42732/
This is supposed to be a contact for Rumblefish that will remove the content ID violation, to make sure they have a chance to fix this without dispute.

The other option open to us is disputing their claim - but this is a dangerous move for a little guy without a lot of money or clout. (we will make a post about content ID disputes later) If they had issued a DCMA takedown notice instead we would have had the ability to issue a counter notice. As it is right now, we either take the risky step of disputing the content ID match, or let them use our content for advertising, or hope that the phone call works.

BUT - even if they do rescind the content ID match this is not the end of the story. Because we had the time and resources to spend 12 hours trying to protect our rights as artists. A lot of artists are not that technical or web savvy and they are the ones that will get taken advantage of by this sort of error.

See ya on Monday.

Peace and love

Haint and Littia

2009-10-24T06:55:00.000-07:00

This post was originally published on Oct 24, 2009 on the blog Haint's Stuff. We have moved it over to this blog so that you can follow the story from the beginning - and so Haint can get back to using his blog for his work.

Goodmorning folks,

After about 12 hours of blogging, searching and emailing yesterday we have some new updates on the Rumblefish- YouTube situation:

The song by the Psalters that was flagged as a violation on our video used public domain content in the audio collage part of their track.

Rumblefish has a great deal of public domain content in their catalogue.

So when the computers do automatic content ID match searches, this public domain content gets flagged as a violation. (we don't know whether the computers that do the flagging belong to YouTube or Rumblefish)

At the end of the day, literally, we found a post on a forum that explains this and gives a phone number and contact person at Rumblefish. It was after business hours in their time zone and all we got was voicemail. So we will give them a call during business hours during the business week to make sure they have a chance to fix this without dispute.

The other option open to us is disputing their claim - but this is a dangerous move for a little guy without a lot of money or clout. If they had issued a DCMA takedown notice instead we would have had the ability to issue a counter notice. As it is right now, we either take the risky step of disputing the content ID match, let them use our content for advertising, or hope that the phone call works.

BUT - even if they do rescind the content ID match this is not the end of the story. Because we had the time and resources to spend 12 hours trying to protect our rights as artists. A lot of artists are not that technical or web savvy and they are the ones that will get taken advantage of by this sort of error.

This will be the last post on this blog about the Rumblefish-Youtube incident. We use this Haint's Stuff bloblog for nice happy stuff about art.
We are moving this discussion to http://cybertrips.blogspot.com/ This is an old blog that told about our experiences on the internet when we were first getting started. We havent posted to it in months, but it seems like a better place for this issue than here.

Back to work. We will be back tomorrow posting pictures of the latest wip - made with repurposed matchboxes.

Peace and love

Haint

CORRECTION: In yesterday's post I said that the viewcount for that video had reached 300. That was an error - it had reached 150 - I misread the stats for a similar video on the analysis report - Littia

The above appeared on Oct 24, 2009 in the blog Haint's Stuff.

The link for the information about Rumblefish and the Public Domain content is:
http://forums.whyweprotest.net/186-youtube-vimeo-problems/rumblefish-dmca-content-id-claim-fix-w-o-namefaging-self-42732/

2009-10-23T09:50:00.000-07:00

The following is a copy of the original post made to Haint's Stuff on Oct 23, 2009. We have moved it over here so people can follow the story from the beginning - and we can free-up Haint's art blog for his work.

Hi people,

There will be no artwork posted on this blog today - somebody thinks I need to Rumble with them instead.

Last week, someone suggested that we blog about the positive experiences that we have had working with other artists in the open sharing of content. We have used music from a couple of artists - Sonanaut and the Psalters - with their permission and attribution on our videos that show Haint making his art. The artists are happy to share with us and we are happy to share with them.
So this would have been just a nice little piece about the artists and the musicians. But I was waiting until I finished the series of posts on Circle Full of Circles. Before I got to make the post about music- crass commercial greed and profiteering raised it's ugly head.

We received a copyright violation notice from YouTube today Oct 23, 2009 on one of the first videos we put up in January 2009. The video was about my piece Superfluous and had just reached 300 views. We don't know if this 'magic 300' was significant in the violation notice or not - but it is a nice round number. Also note the part that says that the video may stay up and be seen with ads beside them.

The alleged owner in this notice is Rumblefish. We checked them out they are a place that wants to sell people music to put in their YouTube videos - no hassle. (Handy - just what I need after being shut down!)

We looked at their list of artists on their website - the Psalters were not on it.

We emailed the Psalters. We have known them for years and have two of their CD's both open source/fair share with attribution.
Reply from Psalters:
yeah--all that stuff is bullshit to us man. you use whatever you want from our music.
i have never even heard of rumble fish.

we thank you for using our music. i am excited that it gets to partner with your great art!
that is an honor to us.

I guess that the song in question may be considered questionable because it does contain a mix of media - audio clips, live music by the Psalters and recordings are mixed. It is 'Us versus US' from their CD of the same name issued in 2004.
I am under the understanding, especially given the length of time that this recording has been publicly available (2004), that this audio was the unchallenged property of the Psalters.
If the music was owned by one of Rumblefish's artists or made using music owned by one of Rumblefish's artists then they need to deal with the Psalters. The Psalters are clearly identified on the video as the ones responsible for the music.

And let us also say that we definitely don't think that the Psalters are responsible in this either. Even unwittingly.

Maybe we don't understand a lot of the new digital media stuff - the track in question seems like an audio collage to us- with bits and pieces from a lot of sources. Looking at it from a visual artists viewpoint, especially a folk artist - we use other people's content all the time. We never heard of National Geographic going after the guy who uses their magazines in a collage. The late Howard Finster (friend and fellow folk artist known for Talking Head and REM album covers) also painted Coke bottles and depicted them in paintings as have many folk artists. Coke isn't all in their business about unlicensed depictions or when a guy makes a vest out of bottle caps. So we don't quite understand how audio collage is any different.
We have to stand behind the Psalters at this time for their creative rights as outsider/folk musicians as well.
Given that the video has been posted since January without complaint and was only flagged as a violation after it had reached 300 viewers also calls the motive of the plaintiff into question - as does the clause about the advertisements.

No, we are not ready for Rumblefish. (The previous statement is meant as a pun and not a copyright violation.) We just want to go on doing on our thing and sharing with peace and love.

If there is anyone out there reading this who has any input, suggestions, or corrections, please leave them in the comments form or email haint@haint.info. We welcome assistance in resolving this. We have more information, emails and screenshots that we didn't post.
We are looking into posting the video on another site so people can see it and make their own determination. (I don't think I can directly embed the video in Blogger - I may be able to get the audio to play on this blog and if I figure it out I will update - L).

This is a far cry from sitting down and making art, but it has the same significance. I express messages in my art and these messages are about the way I see the world and the changes I would like to see. The piece Superfluous from the video is one such piece - an ornate machine that pumps out upside down American flag pins. And this is a real life experience of that.

We'll keep you posted on how this works out.
Peace and love
Haint (and Littia)

This post was originally posted in Haint's Stuff on October 23, 2009

Kinko's and Fed Ex Office

2009-05-08T11:26:00.001-07:00

Happy May folks,
We've been taking some spring time off to work on outside stuff.
We did have one recent bummer to blog about though.
Kinko's is now a part of Fed Ex. We had some documents on the computer that we wanted to have printed out and we don't do this often enough to need a printer. So we figured that we would go to Kinko's website to see how to do it.
It seems that they do have a way to do something like that over the internet, but it seems to be geared toward commercial customers and businesses.
Kinko's doesn't know how much business they are missing out on. We are sure that there are plenty of people that have found themselves in need of printing things that they have in cyberspace, yet they don't do it often enough to justify buying and maintaining a printer.
We are going to take a trip over to the store with a flash drive (next time we're out that way - see what we mean about losing business) and see if they can do it if we take the data to them.

till then, get out and enjoy the springtime
peace and love
haint and littia

Getting More Social with forums

2009-04-23T07:51:00.000-07:00

Haint and Littia have been joining forums.
For those of you are not yet up on all the computerese - this is a place where people get together to talk. The forums are usually centered around a certain topic of interest. Social networks like Facebook are more about people, forums are more about interests.
There are as many different forums and personalities of forums as there are people. Some are real nice and polite, some are full of nutcases, and some are spirited debates.
We like variety so we are members of many different forums. The procedure is basically the same for them all. You sign up or register. You get a confirmation e-mail and then you are ready to go.
The first thing you usually do is to create a profile. This is where you put info about yourself so others will know a little about you, so you know what you have in common.
Usually in this profile there is a way to post your avatar. Your avatar is the picture that you will use to represent yourself. Not many people use their real pictures. The avatar can be anything you want but will need to be simple with good contrast so that it will still look good shrunk down. Most forums allow 100X100 pixels for the avatar. (See below about posting photos)
Many also have a feature to put in your 'signature'. This is not necessarily literally a signature. It can be anything that you would like to close you post with - a catchy phrase, a wise quote, or even a scrolling banner.
Most all forums are structured basically the same way. There are usually a few general categories: one for introductions and announcements, one for technical issues, and ones for the various categories of topics. Within these general categories there are separate topic threads. One person starts a thread on a topic in the general category and other interested people post their replies and comments. Some times threads will split and spring off of one another.
It is good to start by browsing the introductions. Then start browsing topics in categories that you are interested in. The first time we enter a forum, after we're done reading and posting, we use the 'mark all as read' option. This will keep us current and not confused by old conversations.
When you find something that you want to reply to, there is a reply button to push and you can type in your reply. If you want to get fancy there's usually a selection of smiley faces and other icons to pretty it up.
You can also post links to other articles, or to your blog if the forum has an option to embed a link.
Depending on the type of forum, you can also post media (pictures,video or audio) to appear directly in the post. Usually the way this works is that your media is not uploaded to the forum site. You put the address of your media in the forum post, most of them have a 'post an image' icon. This means that if you want to post a picture or other media to most forums that the picture must already be hosted in a web album or somewhere else on the web - like Flickr (or we use Picasa since we use Blogger). So if you want to post a picture on a forum you would use the address of that jpg image in the web album. Usually when you are making a post on a forum and chose the image icon this :[img]*[/img] will appear. Put the web address of your photo in the place indicated by the star. Don't use the star, or add any spaces or anything else to the address.
(this works for us on the Mac) How to find that address: Go to your web album. Click on the picture you want to embed in a forum post. Then right click on the picture. There will be a list of options come up, one says 'view image' . When you take this option, the picture will reload and the address in the address bar is the address of the image in the web album. Highlight the http://whatever. . . , copy it, go to the forum post and paste this address in the space provided by the forum comment editor.
Usually this is easy once you get the hang of it.
General forum etiquette. Although it may appear at first glance that there is little or no etiquette in forums, there are actually some basic unspoken rules.
1) keep on topic. Do not change the topic of a thread that is going - make a new post instead of a reply.
2) do not be a troll. A troll is someone who not only goes off-topic, but also says inflamatory remarks to get an argument started. Or they visit sites and push opposing views. Example: a Christian going to a atheist site to 'save' them all. Or an atheist going to a christian site to tell them they are all crazy. Forums are meetings of the minds. Trolls are very uncool.
3) this does not mean that you cannot introduce new, different, or opposing ideas. These are the heart of forums, but this is best done with respect for others and a good understanding of the topic. There is a difference between honestly disagreeing but being willing to discuss it, and just going on line to tell other people how stupid they are.
4) For those of you who haven't learned this yet from e-mailing - ALL CAPS IS CONSIDERED VERY UNCOOL- it is like shouting. But it is good that it is not acceptable because people can make a more logical argument if they don't shout.
5) personal attacks are also very uncool.
6) it is also considered uncool to make extremely long posts or embed to media that will take a very long time to load. Some sites provide a 'spoiler' option for things like this so that loading a lot of stuff won't slow down the reader if they are not interested in it.
We spent so much time talking about how forums work that we will have to save the list of our favorite forums for the next post. be cool til then.
Peace and love
Haint and littia

Face to FaceBook

2009-04-11T14:16:00.003-07:00

Greetings folks. We have spent the last week or so exploring Facebook and getting to know more about it. We wanted to do that before we rated our experience with it.
From what we understand FaceBook changes quite alot. And it seems that the best way to figure it out is off-line - by talking to someone. After a few simple explanations, it was all made clear.
Your Home tab shows your stuff that you and all your friends post to the newsfeed. The newsfeed gets updated when you enter your comments (and you can add a link or a photo). This whole set-up seems to be a bit confusing - we guess they assume that you know how it all works.
Then your profile page is a page that has stuff about you. But not all of this stuff or links or photos appear on your newsfeed. So if you want everybody to see a link without just happening to go to your profile page, then you have to post it on your newsfeed.
Over all it seems to be pretty cool. We are are getting a lot more information about the things that we are interested in from our friends.
The only hassle is that the use is not intuitive for beginners - like us old hippies.
Peace out - til next time

Haint and littia

About Face Book

2009-04-05T12:25:00.000-07:00

Haint and Littia want to be friends on Facebook. But we are having a hard time figuring it out. We know it's probably quite simple, if you know what you are doing - but the site does not seem to be set up for people who just jump in and try to figure it out on the fly. We only have one friend on Facebook, the owner of Rising Fawn Folk art. So we thought we would give it a try knowing nothing else about it.
There are places to post links,- cool. We definitely want to post links. But some place you post links shows up on one page and another place you post links shows up on another page. And those pages show up at different times to different people. And then we posted stuff on the newsfeed. But we don't understand what is the difference between the newsfeed and the wall. Or the difference between your home page and the profile page and the info page.
We're sure that the flexibility in allowing various levels of access to visitors, friends, and personal stuff is probably quite good - if we knew the way it all worked.
We get confsed when the home page says that we have nothing on the newsfeed, but the wall on the profile page has posts.
Maybe it's just that we are not of the computer generation. In a future post we will explore Second Life and let you know how that went.
And we'd really like to get that figured out before we start making new friends.

fun and games

2009-03-01T09:18:00.000-08:00

We have already blogged about some of the on line games. Here are a few more of the coolest games.

Play with Spider (here) is one of many games now available on line from OneMotion. It is realistic, and very cool. You can feed the spider and change it's appearance. We plan to try some of the other games now available on the site and let you know about them in later blogs.

ZeFranks Page (here) is a very cool site, ithas a lot of fun things to do. Our favorite is the scribbler (here). It can make anybody look like an artist and gives nice effects to artistic scribbles. There are also many other things to do on ZeFranks website. Explore and let us know which ones you like.

Line Rider is a fun little game where you draw squiggly lines and then a guy on a sled rides down them. It is very cool. We use the older version (here) but you can get an updated player for the new version at the website.
That's all for this week

Peace and love
Haint and Littia

Casio Exilim digital camera

2009-02-16T10:35:00.000-08:00

We got out first digital camera a couple of months ago. It is a Casio Exilim EX-277 7.2megapixels.
We use it to take pictures of everything we post- except for itself - and that's why we don't have a picture of it.
It can also take videos.
It has a whole lot of settings and the menu to select them is easy to use. It makes it easy to get a good shot. But we still try a couple of different settings on some things to get the best shot. Taking a lot of pictures to get the best shot and lighting is much better with this digital camera than it was with the old film cameras. Take as many shots as you need and keep the best ones.

a leather carrying case Littia made for it.
(it has a YouTube capture mode - but we've never used it)
It is a super cool little camera and cost about $130. It is easy to use, download into iPhoto, and charge the battery. We haven't had to change out the memory chip because we just erase it when we upload the pictures to the computer.
Keep it cool til next time
peace and love
haint and littia

Media Player - VLC

2009-01-29T10:03:00.000-08:00

Our favorite media player for playing anything - and that's why it's our favorite - is from Videolan.

VLC is super cool. It has played any media that we have put in it so far. It plays audio (even the new exotic formats like OGG) - it plays video.

You can make play lists and manage them.

The audio has a visualizer option and equalizer.

There are many video options. We like the snapshot option to take a still of something on screen - purely for personal use of course.

We also like the crop options so that we can fill our screen and not have black bars at the sides and/or top.

We even use it to play our iTunes video podcasts since it has better featues and options.

VLC is super cool - oh and the best thing for old hippies is that it is open source. And they have a version for Windows users. Check it out.

YouTube -WeTube

2009-01-20T10:52:00.000-08:00

We didn't get the slide show done like we wanted for YouTube using the iPhoto slide show. It was pretty cool but we couldn't add text so we used iMovie to make the slideshow. More about iMovie in another post.
So far we made two posts to YouTube in the past week. And YouTube was pretty cool.

The first one is a video that we took with the Casio digital camera (still need to blog about that) it shows Haint putting the 16 individual boxes that make up his latest shadowbox into the frame.

The second one is a video slideshow made with iMovie. Once we got it put together with iMovie we exported it to M4V format and uploaded it on YouTube.

The uploads take a while, about 30 min to 1 hr so don't worry that it isn't working unless you get an error message. The first video we posted came out pretty much like it was on the camera. The second video is much better in the 'watch in high quality' YouTube viewing option.

iMovie is real cool for posting things to YouTube - the export options are set up to help you get the right format for YouTube.

YouTube is easy to use and has handy things like 'insight' that we can use to see how well our videos are doing.

Ten million teenagers can't be wrong - YouTube is a easy and popular way to post videos (or slideshows) to the web.
Give it a try and send us your links.
Til next time
Peace and love
Hope and change - Haint and Littia

iPhoto - wePhoto

2009-01-14T10:10:00.000-08:00

iPhoto is Apple's photo album manager for the Mac.

There's a lot of things that are really cool about it.

About six months ago we got a digital camera (Will blog about it in another post) to take pictures of Haint's latest shadowbox and make a blog about the construction prodess.

We take the pictures with the Casio camera and load up iPhoto and plug the camera into the USB port on the computer.

iPhoto asks us if we want to import the pictures. We just let it take all the pictures off the camera - it is a lot easier to review and select the ones to keep and delete in iPhoto than it is on the camera itself.

Then we let the computer delete the originals on the camera and eject the camera just like a disk or iPod. This way our camera's memory chip doesn't get clogged with random pictures that we don't know what they are - and nothing gets accidentally lost - so far.

iPhoto automatically divides each day of photos from the camera import into an event.

The event thing is cool for stuff like shows or parties or -duh- events.
But we are trying to keep track of a sequence of events so it was a little trickier. But we figured out how to handle a sequence of 200+ photos. iPhoto has tags and key photos and other stuff we don't use much. Mostly we use the tags to organize the photos of Haint's older artwork.

We do use the edit function for cropping and straightening the pictures. It is pretty cool and easy to use for the kind of pictures we want to edit.

We also made our first slide show last week.

The slide show maker is pretty cool also. You can pick up the pictures from the top bar and rearrange them in the order that you want. There are a lot of transition effects and you can change the effects (sort of ) between each picture or use the same transition for the whole slide show. It was a little tricky to find out how to adjust the transition between each picture (- you use the same adjust button to adjust transition that is used to adjust the photo when in edit mode.) And you can add music from the iTunes library or other places. Using your own music library is okj for in home use - just be sure not to post anything online with somebody else's music without permission.

We ended up with a 75 picture slide show that runs for 3.5 min and looks real good. We just need to figure out how to put captions on the photos and we'll be ready to post it to YouTube.

Some things that were uncool:
The slide show has an option to show the titles of the photos during the slide show. We thought this would be far out because then the titles could be used to help describe the pictures being showed. But when we exported the slide show - the titles were not on it. So - big wish for Apple - give us some way to put words on the slide show.
Other uncool thing also has to do with the titles of the pictures. When you are editing the slide show - the title of the picture that you are editing does not appear anywhere. When you pick a picture from the top to edit - you have no way to know which one it is. It's probably more of a hassle for us with the kind of pictures that we are trying to organize.
But like we'd be watching the slide show to see if it looked ok. That one's upside down.
So we stop the slide show and the upside down picture is there but we don't know what it is called - the title doesn't appear anywhere.
You can edit the picture in the slide show mode but it would be easier to keep track of them if there was a way to see the title.
And I guess that the last thing that is uncool about iPhoto is that it keeps the pictures in it's own library in it's own format - like iTunes. That means that the pictures are hard to find and to make work with other non-Apple programs.
When we post the blog - we have to export the photos as JPG's to a spot where we can upload to the blog. And (not that disc space is a big issue like it was back in the day) but that means that we end up with duplicates of the photos in different formats for different functions.

And one last thing - moving selected photos by clicking on them, picking them up and moving them from event to event was a major hassle - til we got the hang of it. It was a coordination problem it seemed, to just learn how to move the selected blob to the right place in the window to make it scroll. We must play more video games! And finally learned to put the mouse pointer almost up to but not all the way to the top bar.

iPhoto is pretty cool for what it does. We can't help but wish it could do more - and was just a little easier to figure out.

Peace and love - Happy Inauguration day
haint and littia

Blog Blog

2009-01-07T06:58:00.001-08:00

A blog is kinda like a newsletter. It's a way to let people on the internet know what's happenin' and where your head is at.

We use Blogger.com - this is the Google site that let's you set up blogs like the ones you see on Blogspot.com - like this one.

If you have a Google account - Gmail, then you can use Blogger and it is free.

The instructions are really easy and they have a lot of templates so you can chose how you want your blog to look.

And if you want to be a non-conformist, your blog's look can be easily customized with a little experimentation in the 'Layout' section. We used some of Haint's artwork on the header. And Littia did some Word Art in Microsoft Word to make the title.

For the most part Blogger gets a really cool rating from us.

The only hassles that we have had with it is with the way that it handles pictures.
Gotta give Google a break though - part of the problem is that we have a Mac and it seems that Google is just now getting things put together for the Mac operating system.

Mainly the problems were with importing pictures to put on the blog (we haven't tried video yet).
One problem was getting the pictures in the right place alongside the text. When the pictures are imported they are placed at the beginning of the blog, so we have to move them to the place where the matching text is. Although it is possible to click to select the picture and pick it up and drag it to the place you want - it is somewhere between real hard and difficult to drag it to another place in the text that would require the window to scroll up and down. So we ended up clicking and dragging in a leap-frog-like way until the picture was positioned where we would want it. But sometimes the pictures got lost and it also seemed to have some effect on the font (type style) selection. We select Arial but sometimes moving the picture around made the font revert to Times New Roman. Only on the blog editor - the actual displayed text when the blog is posted is still aria it only appears changed - confusing. But we learned and got a little better. Now we use the Cut and paste in our Firefox browser editor and have no more problems with the pictures getting lost.

Anyway, the other problem is one that Apple is working on. we saw a video about it on Google Video the other day - here.

When you upload your pictures to Blogger for your blog, Google also stores them in a Picasa web album for you. Every once in a while, we either lose the pictures when trying to make a post or sometimes we might want to reuse a picture - and there they are already in the Picasa web album. The download photo's window asks if you want to download a picture from your computer or from the web. So we figured that there must be a way to access the photos that Blogger has automatically stored for us in a Picasa on the web - somehow(?) - somewhere(?).
How do we access the photos previously uploaded to our blog and saved to Picasa for use on another post?
We're not sure we have a clue about this - short of the video - which shows that even if we did figure it out, it wouldn't have done us any good since Picasa for Mac is just now in the Beta phase.

Like we said other than that, Blogger is a really cool and easy way to get yourself out there on the web.

Peace and love Haint and Littia

Google is Cool

2009-01-03T13:41:00.000-08:00

We love(We always look to see the newest way that they add pictures to their logo on holidays. Here's an prototype of what they could do with some mandalas.)

Google.com is not just a search engine that is handy for looking up things like 'how much salt do you put in a cup of water for a neddy pot? tor How to take care of that potted plant grandma gave you for Christmas? -
Google has many other cool parts.

G-mail free email accounts. Pretty cool - never had a hassle. It's easy to use - One thing we would change - if we ran the world - is the way it handles what they call 'Suggested Contacts' . 'Suggested contacts' sounds like it should be 'people you e-mail alot but haven't added to your contacts list' but it seems to be more like 'people you e-mailed once - like that dude on Craig's list with the bogus ad.' That dude needs to be in a 'people who I've e-mailed before' list.

Google Maps is another part of Google's cool stuff. You can type in an address and look at a street map or a satellite view or a hybrid of the two. Easy to use and to zoom in and out - Google Maps has another very cool companion feature -

Google Street View is way cool. It is just like driving down the road in a car - but way cooler. You can turn around and slow down and look to both sides and go back down the road again. Street View is not available for all areas but it is trippy to 'drive' around the old neighborhood on the computer if it is.

iGoogle is for Apple users. It has a lot of cool gadgets that we can add to the homepage. And it has cool themes that you can add to it too. Some of our favorite gadgets are:

the local weather radar
the moon phases
daylight map of earth that shows where it is day and dark
games - I like Floodit and Color Junction - L
new DVD releases
random world webcams

Google has lots of cool stuff. We already blogged about the Google Reader in the last post. And the next one we will blog about another Google thing - Blogger.

Til then - keep it real
peace and love
haint and littia

Beginner's Guide to RSS Feeds and Google Reader

2008-12-31T08:12:00.000-08:00

When we first got the computer, the Google Reader seemed totally dumbfounding. But now that we have figured it out - it is a great additional resource for video and other media.
The Google Reader is kinda like a special e-mail box. We subscribe to RSS feeds from different websites. When these websites post something new, a link to the new post, a short description, and sometimes the post itself shows up on our Google Reader,

Some of the RSS feeds we subscribe to:

our local newspaper - Not only do we get the same news as in the paper newspaper - but we also get videos from the newspaper(??). Though the quality of a lot of the videos is pretty rough.
kid's flickr account - The latest pictures posted to their flickr accounts show up on the Google reader.
blogs that we follow - We can get RSS feeds from blogs that we follow to let us know when they make a new post. This is especially handy if they are not regular daily bloggers.
YouTube: Most Viewed Videos - Today and Google Video - Top 100 Videos have lots of cool things to watch.
Scientific American and National Geographic both have lots of good science info and also have lots of videos. Note that Scientific American does not put all of their new videos on the RSS feed and we go in the website to their video section to watch the rest of their videos.
We also subscribe to some of the TV news networks and to the BBC international version - we like their 'Pictures of the Day'.
The Consumerist is good to find out the latest about the economy and buying stuff - and the hassles with buying stuff - and what to do if you get ripped off.

This is what we can do with the Google Reader. But it is still a little confusing - so here is a step by step of how it works.
When you are looking at this blog in the address bar of your web-browser, you can see the little blue (or orange) rainbow or arch looking thing

When you click on it you will see a message to subscribe to RSS. If you don't find a RSS icon in the address bar of the webbrowser, look around on the website, like at the bottom of the webpage, around where they also offer podcasts, downloads or e-mail alerts.

And when you click on that you get this:

You can select to add the RSS feed to the Google Reader or the Google Homepage, but the Reader makes it easier to categorize and manage your subscriptions.

When you chose to add it to your Google reader you will get this:

This first listing shows all of the entries or posts - and if you subscribed to something like CNN there will be lines and lines and pages and pages of unread items that go on into the past forever. Note that there are two view options: List view is easier.
So the first thing you want to do is to 'mark all as read'. (Unless you just have to read the things on the list first.) This will give a logical starting point, from this point on all the unread items that come up will be new ones.
When we go into the Google Reader, we look at all the unread items - if it is something that we are interested in, we will click on the title to expand it. Then, depending on the feed, either there is a summary or there is the full article. If it is a summary and we want to see the whole article, we mark it with a star. If it is a video we mark it with a star. If the summary is good enough or not what we thought it was we just go to the next one.
Once we have gone through the list starring the ones that we are interested in, we 'mark all as read'. Then we can go through and read the starred articles, most of the posts are best viewed using the little blue arrow at the far right end of the line. This will open up the webpage (in a new tab in Firefox) and we can't get full screen on some of the videos unless we do this.
Usually we read the print articles and look at the photos and slideshows first - while listening to our music. Then we watch the stack of videos.
We unstar the article when we are finished with it, and sometimes if we think it is something someone else would like - we use the e-mail feature at the end of the expanded list item.

The only real hassle is that each different website (ABC,National Geographic, etc.) has their own video player so each line on the reader has to be manually selected and played. Some of the websites have user playlist capability on their players that helps this problem (- but then we don't have a way to unstar the videos to know which ones we have already seen.)
To get you started, we have included links to our favorite RSS feeds.

Happy reading - Peace and Love
Haint and Littia

Where's the Golden Gallon?

2008-12-27T06:51:00.000-08:00

We make this blog to let people know how things work on the internet for us. We try new things and try to use the internet as a tool to help our daily lives - sometimes it doesn't work out that well.
We wanted to call the nearest Golden Gallon (local version of convenience store) right down the road to see if they had what we wanted before we drove over there. Well that should be easy with the internet - but it turned into one weird trip.
First we Googled Golden Gallon on the road that we live - it wasn't there. Then we went to the Golden Gallon website - I know we're not crazy - we drive by it all the time - H. But it wasn't listed there either.
So we finally went to Google Maps.
We searched the map of our city and zoomed in on the intersection where we knew the store was. We found the name of the intersecting road, went to that intersection and did a search of that area for the closest gas - there it was. Only when we put in the exact location did we finally get the listing and the phone number that we were looking for. Bummer - we should have used the phone book to begin with. I don't really think this was a problem with Google Maps as much as it was a problem with the companies and different franchises -L

We use Craig's List when we are looking for something. We like to buy used and keep things out of the landfill. Craig's List is well organized and easy to use. Sometimes we're not sure if an old listing is still any good.
But you do have to watch for rip-offs - especially with rentals. We've seen the scammers on there offering a house to rent at a good price - just send them the money and they will send you the keys. Yeah, but we saw that same house two weeks ago - the same picture - just a different address -H. The problem with scammers is not Craig's list fault - no more than it is in your local newspaper.

We visited Angie's list for the first time yesterday - we were looking for a reliable appliance repair person to fix a dryer. The first thing we noticed was that on every page - in everyplace was a message to 'Sign up and join us'. We did a quick look to see how complete the listings were for our area. Specific info is only available to members.
Okay - that's cool. The fees weren't all that bad. We can understand that they have to charge a fee - I saw their commercial on TV. They said they had to charge a fee to ensure the integrity of the reviews - so maybe it would be cooler if they said you had to join if you wanted to write a review - but not to look at a review.
Hey - we're writing a review on a review - that's deep! But we deal in green - real cash money.

K
a
a
Ching

No plastic - no e-plastic. Personal choice - that's our trip.

But we're probably not the only ones.
How many people would use the internet more if the websites didn't treat you like you didn't exist unless you have a paypal account or credit card and are willing to use it over the internet? Paranoid or not some people still are freaked out about that part and don't want to use their credit cards over the internet no matter who tells them that it is safe.

There are some companies like Newegg that accept things like checks and money orders.

Let us know if you know of no-plastic friendly internet businesses and we'll post them on the sidebar.

Peace out, have a good one

Haint and Littia

Mind Games

2008-12-26T08:50:00.000-08:00

Today we were going through our Google reader - (a great thing, once I figured out how it works - L) and we found a post in a blog that we follow about mind exercising games.

It is overcast and 41 degrees outside and the day after Christmas - so we decided to play games.
The first few are online versions of regular games like in puzzle books and in the newspaper.

Rebubbled is described as an action video game. The object of the game seemed pretty easy when we read the instructions but - we don't really know much about action video games. This means that when we pushed play - we had no idea how to make the little guy do anything.

Guess the people who made it thought everybody knew which keys to use to shoot and move and all that other stuff. We looked all through the Help sections

and even watched a video on YouTube but no - no way was anybody telling us which keys to use.
We almost gave up when we noticed the Setup option - which was for you to reprogram the keys that you wanted to use - and gave us the all important clue about which keys to use. But I still sucked at it - L
And there were commercials on it - That gives it a 'Bummer' - H

That stacking one looked pretty neat - I liked that one -H.
Assembler was a really cool game. It was a trip to feel the objects move like they do in the real world instead of how I'm used to moving things around with a mouse. The instructions and operation was the easy part - the rough part was figuring out how to solve the puzzles with the pieces you get. It's a good head game.

Tanagrams is pretty cool too. And the instructions are easy to understand. It is about moving shapes around to make other shapes. We like these mellow kind of games where we aren't getting freaked out about what's gonna try to kill us next.

All the games can be found at the blog link above.

A Hard Drive for Christmas

2008-12-26T07:39:00.000-08:00

A hard drive for Christmas was not 'over the hills and through the woods . . . ' since we are grandma's house these days. The hard drive was a Western Digital My Passport 250 G -

We had pictures and a start on a good music collection - it would be a bummer to lose it if the computer crashed. -H
I guess it depends on what you keep but the 250G was plenty for us - for now. If we need more space later - we can get another one and have a second backup - L

It was $100 over the internet from a place called newegg. One reason we chose them was because we don't deal in plastic. They have other ways you can pay (money orders - we don't use checks either) and are about the same price as the storefront places (that are going out of business now).

We didn't need any help installing the thing. It is set up for Mac and has Firewire. We didn't quite understand the Firewire part. But what that means is that it doesn't plug into a electric outlet - no power cord. The same wire that plugs into the computer supplies the power too.

The hard drive then shows up on the desktop and in finder.

Making backups is easy with a program called Time Machine. It does it automatically once you go through a simple set up procedure. ( We excluded our Movies folder from backing up since we usually throw them away once we watch them.)

The Time Machine has nice graphics too.
The Time Machine and the Western Digital My Passport get a 'really cool' from us so far.

Also the nice mossy desktop is wallpaper from National Geographic - we downloaded some nature pics and some underwater ones and some space ones.

Video on the Computer

2008-12-22T13:21:00.000-08:00

We don’t use our TV as a TV -L – too many commercials -H. We remember back when we first got cable and they told us that the advantage was that it would be commercial free. Well – we all know how that turned out – so we get all our video over the web. And we use the computer as a dvd player. We can get videos about dinosaurs and art at the library.

There are a lot of ways to get video over the web Many network shows – especially news are live streaming. We have the medium speed internet for our area but we can get most of them pretty good.

CNN live is good for breaking news. Networks show some of their whole shows – usually a day or so after air time, The Daily Show and others are available on the Comedy Central. And there are some clips for shorter viewing. We can watch the evening news (item by item) through the network’s news websites. MSNBC seems to be the easiest to use – they seem to have commercials at random – sometimes we get them and sometimes we don’t. HULU. has many shows and clips to watch like Saturday Night Live and old sci-fi shows. We also watch YouTube but Google Videos has longer pieces.

Video podcasts are easy with iTunes but you can go to the individual websites to download episodes as well. We download National Geographic and Discovery Channel podcasts. ‘Democracy Now!’ and ‘Mosaic: World News from the Middle East’ both give another viewpoint than the networks and more in-depth reporting. We also watch ‘Boing Boing TV’, 'The Rachel Maddow Show', and 'TED talks' has good podcasts to download and watch.

We also get local news over the local news website.

And we get other videos through the Google reader – news videos from the feeds we subscribe to. We will blog about the Google Reader in another post.

We have iTunes, we don’t use the movie or TV show part much –bummer 3.99 to rent a movie and 1.99 to watch an episode. The podcasts are more our thing than regular TV anyway.

we don’t run out of things to watch.

iTunes

2008-12-20T16:04:00.000-08:00

Since we have a Mac we have iTunes. We like it pretty well and have the latest version.

Things we like best about iTunes:

Visualizer - iTunes has a nice visualizer. It is a thing that makes colors swirl and make patterns in sync with the music. We find the Jelly option to be the most far out. The patterns are in brilliant neon colors on a black background and look like moving mandalas. It works especially well with the new age and electronic music.

If we had that thing back in the '60's we woulda spent days staring at it - H

Podcasts - podcasts are a good alternative for news and entertainment. Most of them are 3-10 minutes long but we get some that are an hour. Some are audio and are good to listen to while we do artwork or housework. Others are video and there are some that we get just to see the HD pictures. Our favorites are: ON TV 'Beautiful Places in HD' -- National Geographic 'Wild Chronicles' -- 'Hubblecast'. More about our favorite podcasts in another post.

Playlists - Playlists make it easier to categorize music and have a mix of your favorites. We have allotta kinds of music: old rock from our original collectiions, new age and electronica, folk, world and tribal, jazz, blues and chants. We loaded up all our CD's and tapes and organized them in playlists. We have playlists for 'quiet music' 'jazzy music' 'classic rock' 'tribal' and other moods. And the smart playlists are good for sorting out our video podcasts - we have one for news, one for nature videos, and so on.

iTunes Store - we put money in an iTunes account with a giftcard since we usually don't use plastic money. We listen to a couple of internet radio stations (also through iTunes) and when we hear something we like - we look it up on the iTunes store and buy it.

iTunes is a good way to keep our music and save our cd's and tapes - we even got the album covers for most of the cd's that we put in.

But some things were uncool:
1) when we backup our iTunes library we couldn't find an option to not backup the podcasts. We keep several podcasts for random viewing but once we see them - they go in the trash. And since a lot of them are in HD they are real big - over 1/2 of the backup was HDvideo podcasts we didn't really want to save on cd. Does anybody know a way around this? We're getting an external hard drive.
2) maybe they got this fixed with the lastes update - but we had to fix ours manually. After the latest update some -but not all - the video podcasts played in a box in a black box - kinda made a large screen pointless.
3) It is much harder to rewind, find, and replay a part of the video podcast with the QuickTime video player that works with iTunes.

The Set-up

2008-12-19T13:02:00.000-08:00

Remember back when parents got a new car and they gave their kids the old one? Well, us getting a computer was something like that - we got a used one from one of our kids.
It's an iMac mini and it seems to be real nice. We haven't had any technical problems with it and it looks cute sitting on a trivet on the coffee table,

Folks come over and see it - they say- 'Ha - That little thing?! That's it? Can you even fit a CD in it?'

The first thing we did was figure out how to hook it up to the stereo. It's an RCA - and 5 Disc Changer is probably not it's model name but that's what it's got wrote on it.
Overall we're happy with the stereo -
except I have problems hitting the open tray button when I'm trying to turn the volume down -L
This works pretty good, we can put it on aux and listen to what's playing on the computer. (More about the music when we talk about iTunes in another post.)

Then, after about 9 months we made the big step -
and got a Samsung 40" flatscreen HDTV. It's nice - definitely a far out on the neat-o-meter.

Haint went to get a 32" and came back with the 40" - but it looks good - L
But I wish I woulda got the fifty after I saw how good it looked -
I want to steampunk it - put gold and brass doo-dads on the black frame and install a red velvet curtain that opens by remote control. - H

The HDTV works great as a monitor, here with iGoogle. Had to set-up the screen with the computer - and we didn't do it - the computer whiz son did. But there's a chart in the back of the TV manual for the settings.

Products reviewed:
iMac mini - rating: very cool
RCA stereo RS2564 (I looked in the book) - cool
Samsung 40" (with pc input plugs) - far out