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Photography, Photos | No Comments »

Every once in a while I want to do some quick video editing.  Windows Movie Maker usually did a decent enough job, though it was always a bit down on features.  So when Microsoft said they were redoing it for Windows 7, I was happy.  It could use a bit of a facelift and some design improvements.

Except they made it worse.

My biggest complaint is that they now offer only a few output options–not customizable.  So if you happen to need one of the exact width, height, bitrate, and audio quality combinations they’ve preset for you, you’re good to go!  But you won’t.  To try to fix this, you can attempt to edit one of the .prx files buried in Program Files.  But it still won’t work right.

Then, if you do change it in a fashion you think should export the settings you actually want, Movie Maker will override it with some preset aspect ratio settings you didn’t know about, conveniently adding black bars on all four sides if necessary and reducing your video to be nearly indiscernible.

Not to mention random UI issues, like a lack of a usable timeline, and by clicking in many places it will jump back to the beginning of the video…completely losing the spot you wanted to edit.  Too bad.

I like Microsoft and Windows 7, but Windows Live Movie Maker sucks.

General | No Comments »

I use Facebook as my primary social networking tool, including status updates.  I know it’s a concept they stole from Twitter, but I like the way Facebook has done it better.  But I also have friends who use Twitter, and for a long time I had a Twitter account but it languished in inactivity.  So I decided I wanted it to receive my Facebook status updates.  That’s easier said than done, I found.

There are many Facebook apps that will grab your Twitter status and mirror them over to Facebook, but not the other direction.  There are also apps or sites that will update both simultaneously–from your PC or your phone–but that’s just not what I wanted either.  For many people, this solutions may be fine, but I wanted to keep the long character limit Facebook allows and still be able to update from the Facebook app on my phone.

So here’s what I did…

1. You need to get an RSS feed for your status updates.  That’ll be along the lines of http://www.facebook.com/feeds/status.php?id=????????&viewer=????????&key=??????????&format=rss20. (Note that I’ve blanked out my ID#, viewer#, and key;  ID will be the same as viewer (mine’s 8-digit numeric) and key is a 10-character alphanumeric.)
2. You’ll need to find your own ID=, viewer=, and key= strings.  Head to http://www.facebook.com/notifications.php.  Then find the “Subscribe to Notifications” section on the right, and click the link to go to the RSS.  The address bar should now show you all three strings that you’ll need to fill into the URL in Step 1.  Copy/paste (or simply replace ‘notifications.php’ with ‘status.php’).
3. Now we need to use a third party site to read the RSS feed and update Twitter with it.  Maybe there are several ways to do this, but I’m using Twitterfeed.  There you’ll set up an account and add that RSS feed to it.  There are several options worth checking out, like the polling time (check for updates every x minutes) and whether or not to include a bit.ly link back to the Facebook post.
4. Once you’ve provided Twitterfeed the necessary info (feed, options, twitter account info), and activated the feed, any new updates you make on Facebook should also find their way to Twitter (after a small delay).

Note: The caveat to this method is that you can update Facebook with much longer posts than Twitter, so when they’re carried over, they may be truncated.  I’ve enabled the option that includes bit.ly links back to the Facebook post, so people who are actually my friend can read it in its entirety there.

Mini-Projects | No Comments »