Posts Tagged ‘cool shit’

Just A Kaltura Test

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

UPDATE: Check the bottom of this post for a July 19 update.

This is just a test of the new Kaltura plugin.

[kaltura-widget wid="coz4kveom8" width="446" height="400" type="grey" addPermission="-1" editPermission="-1" /]

I’m just farting around here so please bear with me. Kaltura is a new open source video company that provides software and services that allow for the easy posting, uploading and online editing of video. This is pretty cool shit for independent bloggers because it allows for communities to develop and grow where video, and not just text, becomes the means by which ideas are expressed and shared.

It’s sort of like what you can do through YouTube; posting your own video comments connected to other videos, but running it all from your own web pages. The variety of options (free & paid) available are overwhelming and I’m only just getting my head wrapped around them. Using it here and now was dead simple - it’s just a Wordpress plugin that allows me a pantload of options. Very cool.

The video above has been posted here using Kaltura but the video source itself is from archive.org. It’s Superman and the Mechanical Monsters, an old Fleischer Bros. cartoon that is now in the public domain. One of the unique things about this particular cartoon is it was one of the key sources of inspiration for Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow; in fact you can spot some sequences that were reproduced in the Sky Captain feature virtually shot for shot.

I’ll blab more about Kultura and Open Video later.

Cheers.

UPDATE: ReadWriteWeb reports on Wikipedia going forward with open source video - in concert with Kaltura - and the possibilities inherent in such an expansive library of shared knowledge being wrought in video is making my head spin. More later.

ReBooting The Future - Juan Enriques - TED Talk

Monday, April 6th, 2009

I’ve been having a series of email discussions with my friend Bryan that has become a wide-ranging exploration of how humanity is likely to evolve alongside our rapid technological advancements. I do intend to distill those emails into a one big fat ass blog post but I’m a bit too busy at the moment to get that done for you.

Instead, I found this fascinating talk by Juan Enriquez at this year’s TED conference where he touches on some of the same territory Bryan and I have been treading; and I thought I’d share it with you.

This kind of stuff has been consuming me lately because I think it is really fucking cool and pant peeingly scary. I’m not a technophobe by any stretch of the imagination and have no problems envisioning a future where we and our machines are one. The idea of the Borg makes for good storytelling but it’s not a frightening future in my eyes.

Bryan and I are not profound scholars when it comes to this shit - we just like to think up the most fucked up possibilities and then extrapolate them further to see if we can glean a sense of where the human race is heading - or maybe just scare ourselves like kids telling ghost stories around the campfire. Each time a new article or news report is published we start kicking it around like a big blob of silly putty just to see if it’ll bounce off the walls or leave dents in the ceiling - metaphorically, of course. I do have large quantities of silly putty - I know where to buy it in bulk - and when you drop five pounds of that shit you better protect your kidneys ‘cuz it comes hurtling back at you like a motherfucker.

But I digress.

I’ll come back some other day with all our notes and pimp it up with pretty pictures and links to all the crap that was inspiring us. In the meantime, enjoy Enriques and don’t be afraid of the future. Just keep your eyes on the assholes in charge right now.

Cheers.


Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada