Japan time-lapse video

inter // states from Samuel Cockedey on Vimeo.

Cats

Cat parkour:

(found here)

Downward facing kitteh:

(found here)

Omusoba recipe

This Omusoba recipe looks really yummy.

DIY PC build

Kotaku has a nice article about building your own PC vs. buying it pre-built.

YouTube Movies

YouTube now has a "Movies" section where they stream full-length movies (with commercials) for free. (well, most are free, for some others they ask for a fee)

How to add an Avatar-videolog-like overlay to a movie-clip

Watching the movie Avatar, I was wondering whether it was possible to add an overlay similar to the one visible in the movie during Jake's videologs to home-made movies using simple tools like iMovie 09. I wouldn't want to shell out the money for pro-tools like Final Cut or Adobe After Effects.
I figured I wouldn't get the full realtime-time-display and blinking "REC"-tag, but a static picture should be possible.

I found a PNG-file somebody created and posted here which looks exactly like the one from Avatar. (He also created an After Effects file for those who have that software, which displays the dynamic effects)
(in case the link ever dies, here are mirrors of the PNG and AE file)

Now, how to overlay the PNG into a movie? I tried iMovie and while it is possible to insert a picture into a movie-clip, overlay doesn't seem to be an option. The image is just statically displayed wherever it's pasted in.

I found another solution here, which suggests using Quicktime Pro. That worked perfectly.

Here are the steps that worked for me:

- I exported my movie-clip from iMovie 09 by going to Share - Export Movie - and I chose the HD option (which creates a 1280x720 video)
- I opened the exported video in Quicktime (Pro)
- In Quicktime, go to File - Open and open the PNG file
- In the open PNG file, go to Edit - Select All and then Edit - Copy
- Back to the movie-file, go to Edit - Add to Selection & Scale
- Now, in my case, my movie was 1280x720 but my PNG file was 1920x1080
- Go to Window - Show movie properties
- There are now 2 video tracks in the list. Video Track 2 should be the PNG picture.
- I selected Video Track 2 and changed the Scaled Size to 1280x720. This brought the size of the video back down to what I wanted it to be
- In the dropdown-menu Transparency, I selected Straight Alpha Blend and set it down to 0%.

Controller Art

Mads Peitersen's Deviantart page (found on Kotaku)

Machinarium on sale

Nuff said.

Ubuntu Upgrade to 10.04 - Problems with MKV playback

Today I decided to upgrade my HTPC from Ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04. (The Update Manager has been offering me to upgrade for a few months now)
I figured that, as 10.04 has been out for a while now, the little annoyances and bugs had probably been worked out and I should be able to run everything that I need (XBMC for MKV video playback). Turns out I was wrong. Never *EVER* touch a running system! You'd think I'd have learned that by now.

The upgrade completed successfully but it turned out that HD video playback of MKV files does not work so well with Ubuntu 10.04 on my Acer Aspire Revo AR1600. XBMC started fine, but HD video playback was choppy as hell.
I searched around a bit and while other people have the same problem, there doesn't seem to be a solution. I think the problem is not XBMC, but either Ubuntu or the Nvidia drivers in conjunction with Ubuntu. Either way, it's screwed up now.

I'm now backing up the files I need from the box to an external drive so that I can do a re-install of Ubuntu 9.10 and have everything just like it was 2 hours ago.

Video from Evo 2010

EVO 2010 from richhhard on Vimeo.