May « 2006 « Sprayfly

May, 2006

Juggling Videos- In a variety of formats

I have recently been doing some recoding of my juggling videos and a redesign of my website. You will now find all my videos available in Windows Media Video, Quicktime Movie and Flash Video formats.

Why These Three?

I made the move because, being a Linux user and having many Linux visitors to my website, I realised that offering a Windows only format was far from ideal or fair. I decided to offer Quicktime video because I like the players simplicity and the Apple Codecs are great for keeping file sizes to a minimum without severely reducing the image quality. Quicktime is also great for Mac users as it is a built in part of the OS. I believe that Quicktime Movies can also be viewed using certain linux multimedia players but just to make sure that everybody can watch I have also offered my videos in Flash Video Format. Anybody possessing a web browser with Flash 7 installed should be able to watch the content regardless of their operating system or network environment.

What Tools do I use?

The flash player that I chose is a free script that can be downloaded here:
http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=Flash_Video_Player
It can also be embedded into other flash movies or templates.

As for the video encoding, I used Flash Video Encoder 8, Quicktime and Windows Media Encoder.
Hope this will help some of you who haven’t been able to watch the videos until now.

Linux / WL-HDD / Wiki / Windows — No Comments
25
May 06

OpenVPN Guide for WL-HDD and WL500g

I have recently added a guide on my wiki at http://www.sprayfly.com/wiki/OpenVPN which details the entire setup process for an OpenVPN client on Windows XP and server on an Asus WL-HDD or WL500g. Its probably the first of its kind and goes into great depth.

Whats it about?

The guide goes into a lot of detail, both in installing the server on the WL-HDD/WL500g to installing and setting up the client on the windows XP computer. Furthermore, all the key and certificate generation is also covered. I have tested the guide fully and from it, I have a fully working setup with no errors encountered along the way.

OpenVPN allows you to access windows shares over the internet, securely! This is great if you need to access files on the office network or want to be able to share photos or documents with other members of your family.

All credit for this guide goes to Propa who was the original contributor to the Wiki. All I have done is make the guide more user friendly and have restructured it a bit.

The Web — 3 Comments
23
May 06

Quote HTML Code in Movable Type

Here is a very simple way to allow html code to be displayed “as code” in movable type as opposed to being rendered.

How its done

For example, if I try and quote the code to link to www.google.com, movable type will not display the code but the link itself! This is quite frustrating:

Code For Link

An easy work-around is to substitute all < characters with <
You could also substitute all > characters with >
This is known as character encoding.

Hope this is useful to somebody

Site News / The Web — No Comments
23
May 06

Add to Del.icio.us Icon for your Site

Having recently discovered the social bookmarking service, del.icio.us, I decided that it would be useful for readers to be able to bookmark individual posts on my blog. This is actually quite easy to implement in Movable Type.

What to do?

In your Movable Type Individual Archive Template, simply insert (where required) the following code:

<a target="_blank" class="permalink" href="http://del.icio.us/post?url=<$MTEntryPermalink$>">Add to Del.icio.us</a>
I put this next to the permalink part of the template and used the permalink class. A new window will open when the link is clicked on and readers can enter a description and the relevant tags. Great!

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