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

Screencast - AuctionSieve - eBay search and filter

I've created a quick introduction screencast for AuctionSieve, my eBay search and filter tool.

Check it out here : http://www.auctionsieve.com/screencasts/

Screencast - Windows Media Encoder encoding itself

See WME encoding itself : http://www.auctionsieve.com/blog/wmesquared.wmv
Windows Media Encoder can record footage of itself - or rather, another instance of itself.

Screencast - Optimal Windows Media Encoder settings

Here's a screencast showing how to set up Windows Media Encoder for optimal screencasting.
http://www.auctionsieve.com/blog/wmesettings.wmv

The first thing I did when I heard about screencasting was try to find what tools were out there. Turned out Windows Media Encoder fit the bill quite nicely - being free and all.

The next step was to figure out how to set it up nicely - it has the proverbial 101 options so I went searching and found this blog entry by John Howard (no - not the prime minister of Australia) : http://blogs.technet.com/jhoward/archive/2005/01/24/359391.aspx
But the irony was - he didn't create a screencast showing how to set it up!

So I thought I'd do it myself as my first screencast. Hope you enjoy it!

Screencasts rock!

Check this out : http://www.myscreencast.com/

I'm excited by the potential of screencasts. I've enjoyed watching and learning from what few there currently are.

I thought "Wouldn't it be nice to have a central place where people can share and find screencasts rather than having to scour blogs."

So I set up myscreencast.com

Transcription of audio

The people at builderau transcribed the audio - thanks guys!
http://www.builderau.com.au/program/work/0,39024650,39176462,00.htm

Links to notes on James Gosling

Some notes on the session by others :
http://www.twelve71.org/blogs/alan/archives/000729.html
http://blogs.cocoondev.org/crafterm/archives/002729.html

James Gosling in Sydney

James Gosling was in Sydney today and gave a Q&A session to a group of about 500 developers. It went for about 90 minutes and James had a number of interesting things to say.

I don't know how 'proper' this is but I recorded the audio on my Palm and thought others would be interested. So here it is. Please excuse the poor quality.

Links to my projects

The project I most actively work on is AuctionSieve, a frontend for eBay users that makes it super easy to filter eBay search results - http://www.auctionsieve.com/

My other java stuff like my J2ME midlet GlobalTime is available here - http://www.hashbang.com.au/