This blog has moved

This blog is now located at http://nevsblog.auctionsieve.com/.
You will be automatically redirected in 30 seconds, or you may click here.

For feed subscribers, please update your feed subscriptions to
http://nevsblog.auctionsieve.com/feeds/posts/default.

Local history for all your word/text/etc files

Just like local history is cool in IntelliJ Idea, what about having it for all the (relevant) files on your hard drive?
http://desktop.google.com/plugins/i/filerevision.html

I installed the Google Desktop last week and I'm pretty happy with it.
And there seem to be a lot of cool plugins becoming available.

Prevent dumprep from running

Say you have a rogue/frozen program and you go to the Task Manager and click on End Process.
You know how sometimes it then takes ages to take effect?
And then it asks if you want to send an error report to microsoft?
(And of course you always say 'No')

Well all that time is spent creating the report via the dumprep.exe program. And if it's something like IntelliJ that's crashed, the dumprep process size itself balloons out to an equivalent memory size.

This is another case where I finally got annoyed by this one too many times.

So I did a search. Turns out you can turn it off very simply.

Control Panel->System->Advanced tab->Error Reporting->Disable error reporting.

Yay!

Most Expensive Pixel on the Internet

Taking the Million Dollar Homepage to its logical conclusion. I'm auctioning off a single pixel. Yep - the latest in my list of crazy ideas.

Check it out :
http://www.mostexpensivepixelontheinternet.com/

(I think the http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/ is a brilliant idea!)

Star Wars as a silent movie

Here's a request - I'd like a "silent movie" version of Star Wars - ie without the talking - just the music and sound effects. Ala Phantom Edit style.

George Lucas has often said that he regards his movies as "silent movies". Star Wars would be nothing without the music or sound effects.

Have you ever seen the original Star Wars trailer? It doesn't have John William's music and subsequently feels flat. The music is the one thing that George has said turned out better than he hoped. The audience's emotions are swept along by John William's fantastic score. When Darth Vader comes on the screen, and you hear the Imperial March, words aren't really necessary.

Likewise the sound effects are extremely important. What would a lightsaber be without the hum and crackle. Or consider all the other sounds. The laser fire, the millenium falcon, tie fighters, R2-D2. And of course Darth Vader's breathing. Ben Burtt is a legend! If you do a search for star wars sounds there are plenty of pages about this topic.

So what I'd like is to be able to watch the entire movie without any speech, like the silent film George talks about.

Technically I'm sure it won't be that hard to do. Something along the lines of ripping the 5.1 soundtrack, removing most of the center channel and doing some sort of voice filtering on the rest. But I'm also confident that someone will be able to do a much better job at this than me. So I'm putting this request out there to the blogging community. Will someone take up the challenge? Let me know if you do!!!

While you're at it, a version with no sound effects would be interesting too - ie just the music. Here's an interesting interview with John Williams where he talks about this silent movie stuff.

Screencast - boardgamegeek.com

Here's a screencast giving a quick overview of http://www.boardgamegeek.com - a great website for finding out all you'd ever want to know about board games.
http://www.myscreencast.com/nev/bgg.wmv


Yay for Aldie & Derk!

Screencast - recording microphone and audio output at the same time

This demonstrates how you can record what you say into your microphone as well as the sounds from your pc - for example winamp.
This is relevant to podcasting as well as screencasting.
http://www.myscreencast.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=51#51
http://www.myscreencast.com/nev/audacitytest.wmv