Voodoo on a budget! Some of their articles are quite informative!
Web link of note: Lucky Mojo
(At http://www.luckymojo.com)
Month: June 2004
EarthShip
a forum for sustainable housing and living
Web link of note: EarthShip
(At http://www.earthship.org/)
Ask the Tech Girl
If you like sexy, smart, strong girls with superior tech skills, you are in luck.
“Ask The Tech Girl” gives you the rare opportunity to talk live to a super smart, sometimes snarky and always sexy tech girl, geek chick or network ops cutie. The next time you need tech support, why not spice it up a little? Call our toll free number and find out why we say “We Give Good Tech”…
Web link of note: Ask the Tech Girl
(At http://askthetechgirl.com/)
Dymaxion House
I was just looking at the LoftCube again and my friend Brian mentioned the Dymaxion House, a pre-fab house designed and built by Buckminster Fuller in 1946.
Buckminster Fuller designed his igloo-shaped Dymaxion House so it could be shipped to buyers in a can-shaped container.
None of the parts weighed more than 10 pounds and the cost was about $6,500.
Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn is preparing to open an exhibit of the house designed to withstand tornadoes.
Links
- Dymaxion House at Henry Ford Museum
- Detroit News: Fuller house finds a home
- Dymaxion House entry at Wikipedia
- Buckminster Fuller on PBS (WNET)
- Article on the bathroom of Dymaxion House, which uses a “fog gun” shower, providing a hygenic shower which uses only a single cup of water
- Article on the Dymaxion House
FireBox
Like the Sharper Image, except cool. They have crazy gadgets like the puzzle clock, which won’t turn off until you put the puzzle pieces back together again, or these grass armchair things which are cardboard frames you can use to grow chairs out of the ground.
Web link of note: FireBox
(At http://www.firebox.com/)
Alex Jones: InfoWars
Radical documentarian Alex Jones. The titles alone are worth a visit to his site.
Web link of note: Alex Jones: InfoWars
(At http://www.infowars.com/)
Publish Your Own Book: Self Publishing
I have a few giant volumes of text I would like to have bound into hard copies… Like maybe this blog for example, or a collection of my screenplays.
There are a lot of sites on the web which will print your manuscript into a bound book and even help you sell it. Some of them will sell it off their site for you, printing up copies on demand… some even will print copies for strangers buying your book and will let you collect a royalty on your work!
Here’s the research I did for this idea.
- ranty article at Go Publish Yourself
- My old favorite CafePress has a new Book Service… if you decide to do this, feel free to list me as the referrer because I might get free stuff! My shop ID is ghosthouse . Look, I’ll even put an advertisement in my entry!
I like their deal because not only can you price it however you want (your diary could be $1000… you greedy sell-out!) but also they take PDF, which means I can pretty much print out anything I want, like diagrams or weird fonts. - Lulu it turns out is not run by my friend Lulu, nor is it related to the SF restaurant… They also publish on-demand books, and they have options for color.
- Xlibris was one of the first places I looked. they are a pretty serious service, and have a bunch of different services you can buy from them, like cover design, editing service, and a marketing services. What is kind of crazy is they also have a Art Studio which takes illustration commissions. Another thing I really like is Xlibris offers publishing services for hardback children’s picture books.
- Here is the Yahoo Directory for self-publishing
- BlogBinders is a new service: their printing is a little ghetto but! it’s totally streamlined to print your blog content and it’s also automated:
First, you provide some information about your blog account and an automated program downloads your blog content. Blogbinders application strips out any images and HTML formatting at this point, so you are left with the basic written text from your blog entries. Subjects, dates and carriage returns are maintained.
- iUniverse is a more focussed version of Xlibris… if they like your published book, it gets picked up by editors and gets promoted! Their marketing tools also look like they are more serious, and have things like the Clipping Service and the Publicist Service. Like Xlibris, these are all services you pay for… however unlike Xlibris the initial fee is pretty sizable… as of this writing the cheapest level is $460 !
- Creating Comics is a quick list of links… with tips on getting a distributor, etc
- Dimestore Productions is a small-run publishing company for comics
- iComics has a
pricing list
Nonzero
The title of this book, Nonzero, refers to the concept of the “non-zero-sum,” which comes from game theory. Looking at human history–and for that matter the whole history of life on earth–through the lenses of game theory can change your view of life. At least, that is a premise of this book. What exactly is meant by “change your view of life”? That is a question with a book-length answer. But there is enough material on this website to give you the general idea.
0679758941
Nonzero
The title of this book, Nonzero, refers to the concept of the “non-zero-sum,” which comes from game theory. Looking at human history–and for that matter the whole history of life on earth–through the lenses of game theory can change your view of life. At least, that is a premise of this book. What exactly is meant by “change your view of life”? That is a question with a book-length answer. But there is enough material on this website to give you the general idea.
Web link of note: Nonzero
(At http://www.nonzero.org/)
Bitrate Problem
So, I finally finished my DVD with my short film, Xtremely Xtreme.
However, when I tried burning my masterpiece to DVD- uh oh! it said “bitrate exceeded”! What the heck does that mean?
It turns out I had skipped a crucial step- crucial to my DVD anyway: encoding the audio.
When I converted the video to MPEG2 video and AIFF audio, I chose the Quicktime conversions- Variable Bit Rate with a two-pass algorithm, rendering for NTSC. The result was a .m2v file for each video track and a .aiff file for the accompanying audio.
This might have worked by itself… However, my movie has commentary tracks. Four of them. That means that a single DVD track had five audios to go with the video. Good thing I didn’t have multiple video angles!
As it turns out, somewhere there is a “bitrate settings” slider near the one pass/two pass conversion chooser. Good luck finding it; I couldn’t. I found out that every information stream, such as the video tracks or audio tracks, have a bitrate associated with them, and in total they cannot exceed a number somewhere around 10. “PCM is around 1.5” I was told. Still don’t really know what that advice means.
However, something I did figure out is how to use A.Pack. What A.Pack does is convert AIFF sound files to a much smaller DVD-compatible format called AC3. Using the numbers provided by Ken Stone, I encoded at a much lower bitrate (192; my friend recommended 448 for single audio tracks) and fit all the audio tracks onto the track! Whew!
Links: