The download went fine but when I tried to change format I continued to get errors. As this had never happened to me before I did some research and found that since YouTube went HD any of the videos uploaded recently have a  slightly different .flv format which seems designed to stop conversion.

After trying a number of different ways around this issue (converting using ffmpeg and DownloadHelper itself etc) I managed to ‘crack’ it by doing the following:

Downloaded using MacTubes as .mp4
Converted to .wmv using Visualhub

Students then very happy

I have basically taught myself guitar recently from downloading tabs of songs I know and trying  to replicate them but without having any proper tuition sometimes I am stumped.  Then it occurred to me to go to YouTube for a guitar lesson and no kidding, I was playing Everlong within about half an hour.  Even my wife said it sounded good.

I picked up a couple of key points from the video.  Firstly I needed to tune my E string down to D and boy did that make life easier.  Most importantly the teacher talks about holding shapes with your fingers on the frets.  Trying to apply numbers and fingers and frets from a diagram is hard but when the guy says make this shape with your fingers, then move it here, then here it all becomes clearer.

I could go on to apply lots of profound educational speak about the way people learn but take whatever meaning you like from this.  Instead I encourage everyone to learn a musical instrument using the internet and I hope you get as much satisfaction as I do.

So after we upgraded our home iMac we passed our old one on to Natalies parents which after six months required a rebuild as the drive was corrupted. I should have know the death bell was ringing but reformatted and reinstalled instead.

Then as I leave for Australia Nat rings saying it’s died again and they need it for the NCEA exam timetable that my Mother in law supervises. Bugger. So with fear in my head I thought here is a dead logic board but being well out of warranty I decided little was to be lost from replacing the internal hard drive.

The photo below shows the innards on the dining room table as I followed this video on you tube. Great after five minutes it was apart. Then off to the shop for a new 250gb SATA drive for $150 and put it in, reversed the process and began reinstalling the OS. Now all thats required is to see what I can rescue with disk warrior on the old drive. But once the iMac is out  of warranty it certainly makes this an easy option for schools with these machines, especially for media where a 1tb drive could go nicely.

iMac hdd install on Flickr – Photo Sharing!.

The up side to this is that google do try and use that information for good.   Not only do they provide excellent services but they also help humanity.  Google can now predict, with reasonable accuracy, where flu breakouts will occur 2 weeks ahead of the Centre for Disease Control using search results. Link to NY Times article.

Speaking of excellent services, Google has just released Sketchup 7 3D modelling software.  Sketchup is available in free and paid versions for OSX and Windows and is by far the best beginners 3D software.

Finally for the more geeky of you out there, Google labs have developed a tool for more controls over IMAP mail.  I use three devices for checking mail, desktop, laptop and iPod Touch and IMAP is the most convenient method. However each time I check my mail, using Apple mail.app, it would spend a good few minutes downloading spam from the server to my computer.  Now you can choose which folders get downloaded and which stay on the server, ideal if you are using iPhone 3G to cut down data transfer over 3G connection.  Check out the Lifehacker article.

Here is a quick 3x speed video of Mark making an irpen. Feel free to comment and ask questions if you need any further help making your own. Or you can buy one by clicking on the link on this blog. If you need to see it in higher quality follow the link to you tube where there is the option of HQ.

YouTube – Making the TEK irpen for wiiboard.

Then I remembered hearing about turning your phone into a wireless hotspot on a podcast and sure enough this free app from Joiku does just that.

Start the application and your phone becomes a wireless router which you can connect any of your devices to.  Joiku is kind enough to display the usage so that I can use Vodafone NZs 10MB for $1 data connection without running up any massive data bills.  Unfortunately the free version is not secure so anyone can connect but if you are only using it for brief periods then I can’t see a problem, although the premium version does offer more security.

You do need a 3G phone with wifi and no doubt it will drain the batteries in my N95 in no time but if you are stuck in a hotel with no internet a powerpoint will not be too far away.  I look forward to trying this out at the TRCC conference in Wellington in October.

DownloadHelper’s primary job is to retrieve to your disk the videos that are playing in Web pages, in their original format.

Unfortunately, the native format generally FLV is often not very convenient when it comes to playing back the videos, on either your home computer or a hand held device, burning them to a DVD or reworking the movie.

With the new DownloadHelper’s Video Conversion feature, you can very easily select one or more videos that lie on your disk and choose a pre-defined output format. The program will process the movies in background.

Even better: you can setup the extension to automatically convert the videos as soon as they are saved by DownloadHelper. You can even specify conversion rules which site, which original media format to be processed with a given set of parameters.

Video conversion is available on DownloadHelper 3.1 or later.

Video conversion with DownloadHelper.