Earlier today I tried to copy a large file I had made in Photoshop and I was told that the operation couldn’t complete because there wasn’t enough room on my hard drive for it. So, I needed a way to get a lot of space back, but I wasn’t sure what was taking up all of the room. I set about looking for ways to see what was going on on my drive and I happened upon some really great tools to help you visualize all your files. The process is called “Treemaps”.
I managed to find free Treemap programs for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms. For Windows users, you need to get a copy of WinDirStat (Windows Directory Statistics) HERE. Once installed, you can start it up and tell it to either analyze your whole drive, or specific folders. Here’s how it looks.
There is two options for Mac users. Grand Perspective (Gets up and going really quickly, easy to use) and Disk Inventory X (Longer to scan but a more thorough and detailed interface). Here’s how Grand Perspective looks.
And this is how Disk Inventory X Looks.
For Linux users, you can get KDirStat HERE. I havent tried it yet, but it looks very similar to WinDirStat. This screen capture is from their site.They are all fairly easy to use. Just roll your cursor over the big ones and the filename appears in the bottom left corner of the window. You can then decide which files you want to delete, and start enjoying some free space on your hard drive again.
From time to time most of us see something on Youtube that we would like to download and save.
In my case this week, I found a Youtube channel that has the video broadcast from every NHRA drag racing event of the 2012 season. As my wife and I flew from Australia to attend the Sonoma round of racing, it makes a really great souvenir for us to have the video broadcast. The problem is though, Each days racing is split into about 9 or 10 pieces, and it was a three day event. Thankfully though, KMan2100 has arranged the videos into playlists, so they can be viewed in order.
Now, you could download the videos one at a time using the method described in my post about Video Download Helper HERE, but that will take a LOT of time. If you want to download all of the videos in a playlist quickly and easily, you need to make a download list, then download them all!
To do this, you need to be using the Firefox web browser. Its free, it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux, and if you are not already using it, you should be. You can get it free HERE.
With Firefox open and running, select “Add-ons” from the “Tools” menu in your menu bar. The first Add-on you need is the one that takes all of the videos in the playlist and turns them into a series of links. It is called BYTubeD, Bulk Youtube Downloader. To get it, type “BYTubeD” into the search bar in the top right corner.
Click the “Install” button to the right of it when you see it in your “results” list. This will download and install it. When this is finished, go back to the search bar and type “Download Them All”. As before, click the “Install” button to the right to install it.
To make your new add-ons active you need to restart Firefox. To do this, simply click the text that says “Restart now”
Once you have clicked restart, you can close the Add-ons window, and any other windows that may have popped up.
And now the fun starts!
To get downloading, go to Youtube and find your channel, and click the playlist you want to download.
As you can see, there are 28 videos on this playlist. To download them all, open your “Tools” tab on your menu bar and select “BYTubeD”. It should be at the bottom. This will open a new window.
**BEWARE** – Not only does this window contain info for all the videos you want, it also contains the info for other playlists and videos that are on this page that you may not want as well! As highlighted below, you can see the Sonoma videos I want, but I am not interested in Phoenix or Gainsville etc etc…..
For the next step, you need to tell BYTubed which videos you DO want to keep. To do this, simply highlight them. To select multiple videos (Which is kinda the point of this article) hold down your control key, then click each one if your using Windows, or your command key and click if you’ve got a Mac. Once you have highlighted the videos you want to download, click the start button.
BYTubed will now chew through the playlist and open up a new web page with links to all your videos.
Now’s where the magic happens. To download them all, open “Download Them All” from your “Tools” menu in your menu bar.
All that is left to do now is to check mark (click the circles to the left of the names) the videos you want to keep, choose your download location (I usually download to my desktop) then click “Start” to watch those babies start loading down!
From time to time we all come across videos on Youtube that we really want to download and keep on our computers so we can watch at anytime, or to re-encode so we can watch and keep them on our phones or ipods and ipads to. A simple way to download videos is with Video Download Helper.
In order to use Video Download Helper you need to be using Firefox browser, so if you are not, you probably should be, and you can download it free HERE.
Now you have Firefox open and running, you need to get the free Video Download Helper Add On. To do this, select this “Add-ons” from the “Tools” menu in your menu bar. Once the Add-ons window opens type “Video Download Helper” in the search box in the top right corner.
Video Download Helper should be the first result, so when you see it in the list, click the “Install” button to right of it. Once it has finished downloading and installing, you will need to restart Firefox to make it active. To do this, simply click the “Restart now” text.
Once Firefox restarts, you can close out of the Add-ons window and any other windows that have popped up, and you should now see a new icon in the top left.
This means you are all set to go! Now when you wake up at 2am and worry that Gangnam Style is going to be taken down and you will never see it again, you can open it up in Youtube, click the little black upside down triangle next to the colored logo (when its gray out it means there is nothing to download on the page – when its colored, there is a file it can retrieve for you) and select the quality of the file you want to download.
Once you have selected your preferred resolution and format, its just a matter of confirming with the “Save File” dialogue box, and your good to go!
Video Download Helper has a swag of other cool features as well, but we’ll cover those another time as I know you just CANT WAIT to go and run your new Gangnam Style video up on your home theater system!
Not sure what a pretty lady who can afford and appreciate a good cup of coffee has to do with horse riding though? Ahhh Who Cares……..Opp-Opp-Oppan Gangnam Style Baby!
I got an email from a reader asking how 3D movie makers make things feel like they are coming out of the screen. The best answer I can give is that to achieve this effect, you show a lot of depth and dimension when you are actually shooting the video. In other words, have a very distant background, and have the object you want to leap out of the screen positioned a lot closer to the camera. This causes the background to have a narrow parallax effect, and the item in the foreground to have a wide parallax effect.
Here’s a sample video showing the effect, and you will need your red/cyan 3d glasses to see the effect – Check it out! I Got’s me a block of wood Yo! BOOYAH!
httpvh://youtu.be/ekua0h2r8Iw
Below is a screen capture from the video. If you look closely at the tip of the block of wood you can see that the gap between the left/red channel of video and the right/blue channel is quiet wide. This distance makes the object appear close to the viewer. If you follow along the length of the piece of wood towards my hands you will notice that the distance between the red and blue channels narrows. This narrowing gives the feeling of depth and dimension, tricking the viewers brain into thinking I am further back in the field.
If this video was shot in 2D and you wanted to convert it to 3D, the perspective of the parallax (The Wood coming out at you) would be lost, and the effect would not be as dramatic. You probably could rebuild it using something like Adobe After Effects, but it would be a MAJOR MAJOR undertaking. The quickest, and easiest way to achieve this effect, is to create it and shoot it in 3D.
I’ve noticed recently that the home button on my iPhone has become a bit dodgy. It doesn’t always work, especially when I double click it for multitasking/app switching.
I had resided myself to believing that the actual button mechanism had worn and was malfunctioning, when my wife told me how to recalibrate it. I was dubious at first, but this little “fix” has solved my problem, and my home button is back from the dead!
To start the recalibration process, press and hold the lock button on the top of your device, just like you are going to turn it off.
Instead of sliding the red button with white arrow to the right, press and hold down the home button.
After about 5 or 6 six, your phone will go back to your home screen, and that is it! During that 5 seconds, your phone re-calibrated your home button, and with a bit of luck, everything will be like new again!
From time to time an app on your IOS device may crash and become un-responsive. Just like on your computer, sometimes apps need to be closed and shut down, then completely restarted to become active again.
To do this on your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad, quickly double click the home button.
This will push whatever you are looking at on your device upwards, and the multi tasking menu will appear. This is also how you can open another app and use it without closing the one you already have open. The ones you have used most recently will be in the first group of four icons that appear, and you can scroll/drag left and right through them to find the one you want to close if it isn’t on the first screen. Once you have found the icon for the app you want to close, put your finger on it, and leave your finger on it, and all of the apps will start wiggling and dancing (Like they do when you want to re-arrange them. The difference here is that they will now have a red circle with a white minus sign, as opposed to the black circle with the “X”. The red minus means close, the black X means delete).
Now all you have to do is press the red circle with the minus sign in it to close the app completely. Once it is closed, press the home button once to stop the apps dancing, and you can now restart the app by opening it like you normally would.
Closing out of apps completely that you are not using can also aid in preserving battery life, and help speed things as well, as apps are no longer in an open state using up resources while they lay in waiting!
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Earlier today I tried to copy a large file I had made in Photoshop and I was told that the operation couldn’t complete because there wasn’t enough room on my hard drive for it. So, I needed a way to get a lot of space back, but I wasn’t sure what was taking up all of the room. I set about looking for ways to see what was going on on my drive and I happened upon some really great tools to help you visualize all your files. The process is called “Treemaps”.
They are all fairly easy to use. Just roll your cursor over the big ones and the filename appears in the bottom left corner of the window. You can then decide which files you want to delete, and start enjoying some free space on your hard drive again.
