08:33 – And, speaking of OMGWO inventory, with two more orders arriving overnight, we’re just about out of chemistry kits. Fortunately, we’re ready to start building another batch of 30, other than the shortage of 250 mL glass beakers. And I just realized that I have a supply of unused 250 mL glass beakers in my lab that I can use until the new shipment of 144 arrives.
As of today, we’ve begun accepting orders for science kits shipped to Canadian addresses. The kits cost $40 more than kits shipped to US addresses, which covers the additional shipping cost. We’ll ship via USPS Priority Mail International, which delivers the boxes to Canada Post, which delivers the boxes to the customers. From what I’m told, Canada Post may or may not hold the boxes for delivery in order to collect sales tax. Apparently, that’s totally random, and depends on whether Glenda the Good Witch or the Wicked Witch of the West happens to be on duty that day.
Although we’re accepting orders as of now, we won’t actually begin shipping kits until I finish going through all the hoops to get an export license number. We should be able to start shipping kits by mid-July or so, at which point we’ll give priority to shipping backorders from Canadian customers.
Anyone know how to capture to the hard drive something that plays in Youtube? Such as the Tab beach girl ad?
Miles_Teg: http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57405342-285/how-to-download-videos-from-youtube-vimeo-and-more/
Wouldn’t it have been more direct to type your question into Google? Though it leads to an interesting question: Google owns Youtube and Youtube doesn’t want people to save the videos, so will Google serve up answers on how to violate Youtube’s terms of service? (Moments later) Yes, Google will.
RBT: Good on ya, mate! Oh, wait, Crocodile Dundee was in another thread.
Wouldn’t it have been more direct to type your question into Google?
Google: About 36,000,000 results
RBT’s readers: 1 (quality) result
Greg, if you have trouble finding it, I can email you the original Tab girl commercial. It’s only 30 seconds and 3.3 MB.
Firefox add-on: Download Helper, currently at v4.9.9. Adds a little balloon at the bottom-right of the Firefox window (in the status area) which you click on, and select from downloadable items on a page. Actually, YouTube is very cooperative with downloading add-ons. The balloon also appears at the top of the YouTube page, embedded right in the page.
Thanks, I’ve been able to find any number of the Elle ones, but not the 1974 one. And I was just asking in principle, as I have often wanted to d/l that sort of stuff, not just the Tab ad.
I can send you the original Lisa Parker one if you give me your email address.
No disrespect to Elle, but I just watched the Lisa Parker version, and Lisa is simply stunning. Also, the director of the original one makes the director of the Elle one look like a ham-handed hack.
That may well be true, but Elle’s not at all bad looking, and unlike Lisa she’s younger than me.
Of course Elle is an attractive woman.
I just found your email address and sent you the video. See what you think with a side-by-side comparison.
Elle was fantastic, but Lisa was Tabulous!
What a Happy Canada Day! Order just completed!
YouTube has been unpredictable about our ability to download videos and keep them, but if one uses Real Player there is a work-around to do this. I have a bunch of stuff in RP now because not long ago YT would not let me download it.
76 here right now, small chance of t-storms, same-same for next coupla days. Not envious of most of the rest of the country this week.
Thanks!
I’m glad it’s you. I’m much more comfortable shipping my first order to Canada to someone I know. That way, if something unexpected happens you won’t assume I’m trying to rip you off or something.
I have to admit that I’m a bit nervous. I know and trust the USPS service, but once they hand it off to Canada Post, it’ll feel like it’s going into a black hole. I’m sure CP is reliable and honest, but trying to get a straight answer out of them proved impossible. The best I could get was “That should be okay.”
One way or another, we’ll get it there.
You’re welcome! I’m glad to be buying a kit from someone I know. Gives me confidence that I can find an answer if we have troubles.
I have more trust in the USPS, than Canada Post. I’m surprised you got an answer. If you try again, you’ll likely get a completely different answer!
Trust the USPS ? Not on my life ! They have lost multitudinous things for me this year, including a $40K cashiers check (don’t ask, I’m stupid) for six weeks.
I will only use UPS to ship packages to another country as someone there will jump in a vehicle or a rickshaw and take it there. Guaranteed. And we have shipped to over 75 countries in the last 20 years. But then again, I am in the software business and just ship manuals and CDs out. USPS, you have no idea, the client has no idea of where the package is at since they do not have an accountability system.
Yeah. USPS tripped me up this year. I spent several days editing some video for use as court testimony—about 150 cuts of various elements of testimony that the lawyers would choose from during the trial.
I got a call one day that the flash drive which contained all the video had gotten lost, and could I send another copy. No problem, but I was not free to ferry it over from Tiny Town to Indy, so I mailed it. This was Friday. Post office guy said safest, fastest way was first-class with a tracking number and “delivery confirmation”. It would be delivered on Monday. That cost about $5 for something of negligible weight, but so be it.
Was not delivered on Monday. Tracking said (and still says, months later), ‘out for delivery’ on Tuesday. Never delivered; I never got the delivery confirmation; client never got the package. All made moot by the fact that they located the original flash drive on Monday, but damned aggravating. Post Office has no idea where the package went, and no solution for finding it. Lots of “sorry” on the phone; customer service has been trained to use “sorry” a lot these days. Since I did not buy insurance, I am out the cost of the flash drive and the time that would have been billed to the client, had the package been delivered.
That is just one of many stories of delivery and receiving problems I have had since returning to the US just 2 short years ago. Losing stuff seems to be a USPS specialty.
That’s not been my experience. Every kit I’ve shipped has arrived, and I’m often surprised how quickly they get it to the destination. The standard for Priority Mail is one to three business days, but it seldom takes them the full three days. I’ve had kits get from here to California in two days.
The USPS also seems gentler than FedEx or particularly UPS. I think I’ve had only two damaged shipments since we started. One a thermometer (which may have been my fault; we were still experimenting with the best way to pack) and one glass beaker last week. That’s less than 1% damaged shipments. Conversely, I get deliveries almost daily from FedEx and UPS. FedEx damages more packages than the USPS, and UPS many, many more. I’ve gotten stuff by UPS that was so damaged the box had had to be taped together and stuff had fallen out.
I’ve sent 100’s of my wife’s book via USPS Express, Priority and Media without a loss. The worst has been “returned, address unknown”. Usually because the address wasn’t confirmed and I sent it anyway. Some people don’t even know their correct address. I’ve also used USPS International to Singapore and Belize a couple of times with no problem.
If using UPS, one must pack for brutal conditions as I believe that any package that looks fragile must be run over by one of their delivery trucks. I sure do see a lot of tire marks on my packages. My Brother in law who is a loader for UPS says that all of their automatic routing equipment uses tires to scoot the packages forward and occasionally they get “stuck”.
However, that is another reason that I moved from NewEgg to Amazon, the Amazon packaging is way tougher than NewEggs.
Let me be clear. I trust the USPS more than I do Canada Post.
That is NOT to say I trust the USPS, but on the whole, they ain’t bad.
UPS (yoUr Package is Somewhere) has a much worse record with me than the mail, at least for me. I’ve had better luck with Purolator, and even Fedex has let me down.
Working for an organization that does lots of mailings, about 1 million items a years, the UPS is a sick organization.
We get letter returned because the address is invalid, well, not really. Items mailed to the same address the prior month does not work this month. Mailed next month and the address is fine. We call the recipient and verify the address is correct, it is. We call the USPS and verify the address is good, it is. Meanwhile we have a returned first class item with address correction for which we are billed $0.90 for an address that has not changed.
We get automated address changes through the USPS and are billed $0.50 per item. We get many address changes where the change corrects AVE to Ave. Next month the same address is changed to AVE from Ave. The address changes are not consistent directly from the post office with mixing upper case and lower case in no consistent pattern. We just uppercase everything at this point.
We spent a lot of money to have all our addresses processed against the USPS database. Several hundred came back with the wrong ZIP code for the city and the mistake was indeed in the USPS provided database.
Calls to the post office, the regional office that deals with business, have our problems answered with “I don’t know how it happened”.
We send a magazine quaterly. The magazine printer and mailer send us a file of addresses that will not be mailed to because they don’t sync with the USPS database. We ignore the file and do not make any changes to the addresses. The next quarter the list is completely different with names appearing that did not exist before, names that existed before now gone. The USPS database is in worse shape than our database.
We have donations that get sent to us in envelopes that are totally mangled. Every so often we get an envelope that is several months, and in a couple of times, years old with a stamp indicating it was found in a supposedly empty mailbag.
According to our post office representative they USPS does not lose mail, they just misplace it. Sometimes forever. But it is never really lost.
Miles_Teg asked how to copy you tube videos. <a href="http://www.real.com/realplayer/searchA" title="free download of real player can."
What don't you put a title on each day on the WordPress Journal?
-Raymond Day
Bill wrote:
“Elle was fantastic, but Lisa was Tabulous!”
Yeah, I like both of them, but my main reason for remembering Tab was that I lost about 50 pounds on the Tab diet in 1976.
Regarding Real Player, isn’t that borderline malware? I’m pretty sure I’ve had it installed twice and gone to great lengths to get rid of it.
“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
So, when will you take the plunge and start shipping kits to Australia?
Probably after the US annexes Oz. It’s not so much that we want a country where every blasted thing is poisonous, but the babes have sexy accents so on the whole it’s worth it.
I disagree. Alabama ladies have far nicer accents than our babes. But ours *do* look good, especially on Bondi Beach, where many of the poorer ones can’t even afford a bikini top… 🙂
Right you are on Real Player. I myself am not at all keen on Real Player or anything related to them. From the beginning they have proprietarily locked up their encoding scheme. They also had one of the worst records for super-invasive installation of their software that broke lots of things in the Win98 days. They were one of the first to install spyware and adware. I would not trust them if I had a gun to their head. And there are many other alternatives these days, so it is not necessary to use them.
The Firefox Download Helper allows one to download most any video in one of several formats that YouTube offers for every video it posts, and requires no other applications than Firefox.
I use AviDemux for simple video editing or format conversions, then play using Media Player Classic HomeCinema. AviDemux is a front-end for the FFMPEG conversion tools.
Video is one of the most complex things a computer must do, and the latest video formats require video cards, chipsets and processors that are not very old (not more than a couple years). We frequently run into situations where some client is trying to play something on a 6 or 8 year-old computer, and it either stutters, the lip-sync is noticeably off, or the file won’t play at all. Smaller law firms do not usually have IT in-house, but when they bring in their expert and update all codecs, that often solves the problem. In other cases, they just have to buy a new modern computer with a decent graphics card, and all works fine. Codecs have changed enough that I can no longer play H264 videos without it dropping frames. I can still edit with no problems; just cannot play the result on my 6 year-old Core2 Duo with ATI Radeon Mobility. But a new DVD player or a new computer plays what I edit just fine. Older standalone DVD players also have problems with newer codec created videos.
I do not want to screw anybody’s computer up, but I keep up-to-date with the latest K-Lite Mega Codec Pack, which also installs the MPC HomeCinema player. IMO, the K-Lite guys are geniuses; I have never seen an installation program as sophisticated and thorough as theirs. But set a step-back point in System Restore before installing, just in case.
Some people like VLC player, but the Windows version is very invasive and will reset all your media file associations to use VLC. No way to stop that as far as I can find. Linux versions of VLC cannot get away with that, so I would only use VLC on Linux, not Windows.
MPC HomeCinema has a bunch of features—like the ability to expand the picture to fill the screen using the NumPad, or to stretch, flatten, or move the picture around in its window. You can also slow the speed in several steps down to full stop, and can advance or reverse one frame at a time in most of the newer formats. It allows offsetting the audio, in case the lip-sync is noticeably off. It is my player of choice for video.
“Google owns Youtube and Youtube doesn’t want people to save the videos, so will Google serve up answers on how to violate Youtube’s terms of service? (Moments later) Yes, Google will.”
Google has so far avoided turning to the dark side. It’s still young enough, with enough of the original people in place, to not yet be taken over by bean-counters and executives angling for their next bonus. I wonder how many more years they will be able to hold out?
Youtube is starting to annoy me, by placing ads at the beginning of the more popular clips. I always hit the Back arrow when that happens. Well, there was one time I wanted to listen to “Weird Al” Yankovic’s Eat It! so much I gritted my teeth, turned down the volume while the ad was running and then back up when the song started. I don’t mind *some* advertising, but the ads before songs really annoy me.
I find all the media players will “grab” control, but VLC is pretty good at letting go. It’s been a while since I’ve installed it, but I seem to recall being able to tell what programs you want it to open. Just reset the default program for those file types. A minor annoyance, given what some programs will try to do.
As for Youtube and their ads, that’s Google, for ya. Remember, they’re not in business to provide internet searches and videos for your FREE enjoyment. They are in the advertising business. You think they should be working for you for free, while they actually work for the businesses who pay them.
Brad asks: “Google has so far avoided turning to the dark side. It’s still young enough, with enough of the original people in place, to not yet be taken over by bean-counters and executives angling for their next bonus. I wonder how many more years they will be able to hold out?”
A friend on another forum uses this as his signature line: “What year will Google rename themselves to Cyberdyne Systems?”
I submit that the bean counters are already in place. That’s why they’ve come up with their particular business model. They realized that individuals won’t pony up the money, but businesses will, so they provide a free service with ads, and rake in millions in revenue. Engineers and programmers would never would have thought of that. That type of thinking takes a really smart button pushing calculator monkey.
I have never had any problems downloading material from YouTube using FF add-on Download Helper. Have been using it since probably 2006 or earlier. Download Helper does have copyright protection in place, so any site can keep you from downloading material via Download Helper, but YouTube never has. In fact, it allows the Download Helper balloon to be inserted at the top of every page. You can activate a download from the FF status bar, or from the top of the YouTube page.
I have waaay too many odd associations for my files to let VLC mess with them. Some file types open players, some open editors, still others open my ripper or a file manager. VLC screwed me once in Windows; never again.
The inserted leap second of a couple days ago seems to have caused great havoc on Linux servers—especially anything built on Debian Squeeze (which includes all of recent Ubuntu). Quantas’ entire flight booking and weight distribution system crashed.
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/leap-second-crashes-qantas-and-leaves-passengers-stranded/story-e6frf7jo-1226413961235
It affected people on the radio automation forum, but did not crash anything. Just put the automation software out-of-sync for a day or two. That meant only that the clock on the software blinked, until correct ntp time was restored.
Lots of data centers went down completely.
http://serverfault.com/questions/403732/anyone-else-experiencing-high-rates-of-linux-server-crashes-during-a-leap-second
Chuck, you must have missed the installer option to select which audio and video types.
http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y16/astr8shooter/vlcinstallercapture.png
As you can see you can drill down and choose exactly which file association you want VLC to open, or not.
I’m sort of surprised that one expects audio/video players NOT to grab the associations. After all, you are installing the product to play things, right?
This was years ago that I installed it, but I assure you that—at that time—there was no way to select or stop it from associating itself with everything. I am very careful about that kind of thing, and there was nothing that warned it would grab all associations, so I assumed it would grab none. Took me months to recover from that. Even stepping back with System Restore, did not put back my old associations.
I have no need for VLC at all, except to verify that video I provide will play on it, for others who use that software. But I will not ever install it again on a Windows machine, so I will never know.
Actually, we recommend using Windows Media Player on recent Windows computers. Your standard computer user has fewer problems with it than any other software, so we have found. People who have the most problems, are those who buy an external drive and install the software that comes with it. Power DVD and recent versions of Nero can really ruin a formerly well-functioning computer. Windows is now a mature OS, and messing with it by installing stuff that Windows already possesses, is just asking for trouble if one is not an advanced user.
For those who enjoy the Aubrey/Maturin novels of Patrick O’Brian, just about the entire 21 book series is available for the Kindle at $3.99 each. Yesterday there were four still at higher prices, today three of those were down to the same price as the other and I’m hoping the last one will be soon to. Good stuff if you like that sort of thing (Napoleanic-era Royal Navy and such).