Entertainment
Make Animated Movies with Xtranormal
Now, you won’t become your own Pixar any time soon, but you can easily work out some dialog with Xtranormal’s text to movie offering. There are some premium features to Xtranormal but you can do quite a bit for free. You will have to create an account to use the service. There is an online version of the tool or a Windows downloadable version. They’re both pretty easy to use but let’s take a closer look.
Web Version
The online version of Xtranormal is easy to work with, has more tools to offer, and doesn’t require a download or a Windows PC. On the flip side, it can take longer to render a preview and significantly longer with more traffic online. It also requires Adobe Flash.
YouTube’s Life In A Day Project
Google has a huge project coming up on YouTube on July 24th that requires your involvement and the YouTube logo has been helpfully reminding us about.
From the YouTube Life In A Day site:
One world. 24 hours. 6 billion perspectives.
Life In A Day is a historic global experiment to create a user-generated feature film, shot in a single day, by you. On July 24, you have 24 hours to capture a glimpse of your life on camera. The most compelling and distinctive footage will be edited into an experimental documentary film, produced by Ridley Scott and directed by Kevin Macdonald.
Avi2Dvd and DVD Flick – Converting Videos (.avi) to DVDs
At one end of the house, I have a Sony PS3 that can stream videos from my PC connected to a TV that can also play Divx and Xvid files from a USB drive. At the other end of the house, I have just a standard TV and a DVD player. Of course, since I can’t do something in one place, that’s where I want to do it. So, the task was to come up with a way to play .avi files on a standard TV with a DVD player.
Light-Bot 2.0 – A Game Teaching Programming
I enjoyed writing my last post that covered a tech-related Flash game, Manufactoria, and others seemed to enjoy it as well. So, I think this can be a welcome addition to the topics that 404 Tech Support writes about mostly because I’ve found and been enjoying another Flash game. This game is called Light-Bot 2.0 and requires the player to implement computer programming-like logic to complete the different puzzles.
Google Gets Into the Spirit of the World Cup
With the World Cup kicking off in 3 days, Google is having a little fun of their own. You can find it for your self if you do a Google search for ‘World Cup‘ and scroll down to the bottom.
Click this image for an enlarged screenshot of the easter egg.
I’m enjoying all the little easter eggs Google has been planting lately like the Pac-Man Google logo. They’re simple but still bring a smile.
Props to @TromboneKenny for spotting and sharing this.
Product Review: Apple iPad
I had the opportunity this past week to check out an iPad and use it as my own for a few days. The conclusion I’m walking away with is that I’m underwhelmed and grateful that it wasn’t my own money that I spent on the gadget. This may be one of the few critical iPad reviews out there but of course, it isn’t all negatives. There are a number of positive features on the device but still the overall conclusion that I walked away with was that the device was rather frustrating and didn’t quite have a fit in my habits. For the record, I’m testing the 16GB (no 3G) iPad.
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