I saw an interesting thing today.. the Pinnacle Video Transfer... hmmm.. it feels so strange that the name is just that.. Pinnacle Video Transfer.. anyway, it perked my interest enough for me to get it. :P

So.. what does it do? It directly captures video into a USB device without having to pass it through a PC. I'd write more but then again this thing requires a demo to understand why it might or might not suit you. So a video it is then!

Useful little thing if you need something to just convert some analog video to a file quickly without any hassle and you're not too worried about fine tuning the settings.

Anyway to see some sample output, go to my SkyDrive here.

It was just announced, and there's no real code that's publicly available. But it's an interesting idea and I can't wait to try it out. So keep your eye tuned for more info on it... Microsoft Live Mesh!

I just went to Thailand for 2 days for a training session. I don't like going to places where they can't speak English properly. For one thing it's difficult to communicate with people on stuff like directions or is the training center 5 blocks left then 3 blocks right or the other way around? The kicker came when I was ordering some dinner at a MOS burger, I was tired from a day of training so I kinda zoned out a bit and I read the menu as "TXXXkatsu Rice Burger" along with some description in Thai, I didn't think too much of it and just assumed it said Torikatsu (Breaded Deep Fried Chicken)

So I placed my order and when the burger came, I sunk my teeth into it and instead of the feeling of chicken meat. It felt squishy... I pulled the burger away from my mouth and I saw the filling. It WASN'T chicken.. it was OCTOPUS or SQUID... one of them.

On the plus side though as I was walking through the shopping malls I bumped into a classic car show.. and I bumped into this little guy.

A Delorean!!! An actual one, not a modified prop!! It just looks cool with it's gull wing doors and rough stainless steel body.

Finally my Minolta 50MM lens has arrived, so now I can take close up portrait style pictures with the spiffy blur (bokeh?) thing that happens in the background.

This should work out just fine.

For those of you who has been following my posts on Silverlight you'll know that as part of my journey to see how Silverlight ticks I tried to make a slideshow application. That essentially stopped the moment Silverlight 2 Beta 1 was released and I saw DeepZoom in action.

And after poking around with it for the past week, and reading up the stuff over at Wilfred Pinto's blog I have succeeded in creating a... hmmm.. DeepZoom Photo Album for lack of a better word.

Here check out a little sample here.

It probably needs some more work, performance wise one important tweak would be to NOT fill up the whole browser window with the DeepZoom image at the start, since the user's browser window might be oh.. 3046 pixels wide? :P But anyway.. Silverlight 2 itself is still in Beta so there's a chance there might be some more changes in the future so I'll just keep everything as it is first. Anyway if you find performance slow.. ZOOM OUT, or resize the browser window to a smaller size. The SIZE of the display area determines how LARGE an image will be used for display.

And more importantly for those of you who are interested in actually creating something like this.. I have something for you. The sample you see above? It was generated by a program...

Which you can get it off my SkyDrive here

A bit of warning though.. the program.. pretty rough at the edges (heck it doesn't even come with an install program!), it was made for my own consumption first, and also.. it relies on 2 other pieces of BETA software which is the Microsoft DeepZoom Image Composer and Silverlight 2.0 (Install the appropriate runtime for your platform), so be sure to install those 2 things first before you even try to run this program. The program was made with the .Net Framework 2.0, which if you don't have that installed when you try to install DeepZoom you'll be directed to the appropriate place to get it.

Oh, and you'll need an account over at Silverlight Streaming to host the album if you don't run your own server.

I'll make a more specific err... instructions post later but the generic flow of the program is.

1. Press the ADD button to add pictures to the album
2. For each picture you can type in a caption.
3. Then press the PUBLISH (disk icon) to save the album
4. If everything goes well you'll get an uploadme.zip file in your target folder. Upload that to the Silverlight Streaming service.
5. Consume the application in your blog using the IFRAME tag.

Since most of the code was retrieved from the public domain I'll upload it to CodePlex once I figure out how it works.