Enjoying the internet…
How to stay informed about the BP oilspill?
Jul 29th
Worst case scenario
The explosion of the “Deepwater Horizon” drilling rig on April 20, 2010 triggered the worst oil disaster in the history of the United States. 11 workers died and 17 were injured at the explosion. Until BP managed to cap the gushing oil wellhead on July 15, 2010, 90 million to 180 million gallons of crude oil were released into the Gulf of Mexico.
How to stay informed?
Due to the massive amount of information which mainstream news media spread, people all over the world watch and comment this horrible event.
The most important thing for affected people is to keep informed. So I collected a few links which might be interesting.
Oil spill related blogs and websites
- Florida Oil Spill Law
- The Oil Drum
- SpillBabySpill.com
- MarkIMoore
- U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
- EPA Information about dispersants
- Life After The Oil Crash Forum
- BP’s ‘Nightmare’ Well: Internal Documents Uncover Negligence | Wired Science | Wired.com
Oil spill maps, satellite images and monitoring
- spillmap.org
- NOAA BP oil spill response
- NOAA Ship Tracker
- Deepwater Horizon Response Air Monitoring
- Gulf Oil Spill Tracker by SkyTruth.org
- www.geoplatform.gov/Gulfresponse by ERMA
Live video streams from ROVs at the capped oil wellhead
- Official BP website
- Spillcam on globalwarming.house.gov
- JTnog.org
- bp.isevil.org
- data.plan9.de
- List of direct stream URLs
Help now!
People to follow on Twitter
If you think there are links missing, please comment on this post and I will add them all!
Featured Site Of The Week: www.robot.tc
Jul 29th
Robots – mechanical helpers
For a long time people dream about human-like creations to help them in their every-day life. Nowadays there’s a huge industry around robotics which tries to bring robot technology to the masses. As we have more and more computing power available, robots can take over a lot of serious tasks like helping seniors, enhancing medical trainings or just clean your carpet efficiently while you’re not at home.
The emerging blog www.robot.tc is dealing with updating the world about the latest buzz around robotics, automation and robot programming related topics. Nicely researched short and snappy articles keep you updated about this very interesting topic.
How to capture video streams using VLC player?
Jul 28th
What is VLC?
VLC is a free, multi-format and open source media player application written by the VideoLAN project.
But playing your favorite movie or audio files is not the only thing it can do. It is also able to encode and stream audio or video content.
The other nice fact is, that it is running under a multitude of operating systems like Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, BeOS and BSD.
What types of streams can I record with it?
With VLC you can easily record MMS, WMF and ASF streams.
Tell me how already!
To record a stream you first need to get the streaming URL. You can mostly do that be right-clicking the video picture and selecting “Properties…”:
Look at the “Location” info on the Properties dialog:
Mark and copy the link by pressing CTRL+C and start up VLC. Now go to Media -> Convert/Save… click on the Network tab and paste the URL you copied from the stream earlier into the text box. It should look like this:
The next thing you have to do is to click on Convert / Save and you will see this dialog:
First, enter the file name of the destination file including the extension, e.g. NasaTV.asf
Tick the “Display the output” check box to see how the stream looks like while you’re recording. Then you select the Profile, which defines how the file format will be recorded as and click “Start”. I usually use “Video – WMV + WMA (ASF)”.
Now you will have to be patient, because it can take up to 1 minute, depending on your internet connection, for VLC to start displaying and recording the stream. When you think you have recorded enough, just click on the stop button to close the file you’re currently recording into.
You can download the VLC player on the official website.
How to remotely fix computer issues?
Jul 27th
Average users…
Most of the people nowadays turn on their computers and just start to browse the Internet to read news, update their Facebook status or check their emails. They don’t really care about how things work. But then, someday, they run into a problem. Some application doesn’t start anymore or suddenly something looks different and they start to panic.
Due to the fact that an average computer user doesn’t know and maybe doesn’t want to bother with the basic structures behind applications or even an operating system they often seek help from expensive IT experts who charge a lot of money for a simple task or just a quick change of some rogue setting.
Click on more to read on… More >
How to create tutorial videos?
Jul 26th
The problem
You need to make tutorial videos to teach your new colleagues how to work with a certain application. Now you could create training documents and have some long or boring training session to teach them stuff they often don’t get after the training anyways.
The other option would be to just record step-by-step tutorials of your application. Your new colleagues would just copy over some training videos and watch them to see how to use that new software right.
The solution
Exactly for this reason, and probably because of my lazyness, I found a very nice free application called “Wink” coded by Debugmode.
Here’s the description from the official Wink website:
| Wink is a Tutorial and Presentation creation software, primarily aimed at creating tutorials on how to use software (like a tutor for MS-Word/Excel etc). Using Wink you can capture screenshots, add explanations boxes, buttons, titles etc and generate a highly effective tutorial for your users. | ||
That sounds great, right? It is! You can just download it, install it (Windows or Linux with GTK 2.4 or higher) and create great looking flash videos of how you perform a certain action you want to show to your friends or colleagues. The tool itself has a pretty straight forward user interface which allows you to create a professional looking tutorial video. Either you capture your whole screen, a predefined area or a custom area of your screen.
But you can do much more than just record your desktop. You can add a voice recording to your video, add text comments, draw shapes, add weblinks links, etc. This tool is really advanced when it comes down to features. Also, editing your recording frame by frame can by done easily.
You can download this piece of software goodness by clicking on the Wink logo:
I really hope you’ll enjoy this tool as much as I did 
