>Fck Twttr. http://www.drmntftdy.cm/?p=681

Many have gone before me to say it just as well as I could, or better. Me adding my own noise about it would be just as bad as Twitter itself.

>FCK Twttr. Tht's rlly ll tht nds t b sd.

@airshowfan in #29:

"And now that I think about it, maybe the question to start with was what tool to use to FIND the url of the flv file, in the cases when it's neither clear from looking at the html code nor formulaic from the url of the page where the video is shown."

A'yup, there's the rub. Before I learned the Safari/Activity Window trick a couple weeks ago, the trick was finding the actual file name, especially if it's obfuscated, either intentionally, or because of CMS renaming to something that is humanly-inscrutable.

Since I learned the Safari/Perian trick, I've been a .flv downloadin' foo'!

Aw, crap.

Pre-submission Preview showed the code perfectly.

Actually posting it killed the character-entity coding.

Sorry for the mess.
I loathe inconsistencies like that.

@ airshowfan:

Let's see if the character entity '<' will work:

width="640"
height="500"
flashvars="file=http://airshowfan.com/fencecheck/RedBullAirRaces.flv&autoStart=false"/>

width="640"
height="500"
flashvars="file=http://airshowfan.com/fencecheck/RedBullAirRaces.flv&autoStart=false"/>

Magic PreviewBall says "YES!"

:o)

I just tried the "unplug" add-on/extension/whateverthehellthey'recallingthemnow thingy with Firefox for a few minutes, and it doesn't seem to find the actual .flv file, just HTML containers and 4k pointers to the actual media.

Either way, thanks for the heads up on that, Lennox.

My apologies, and can't edit my first message.

The file name you want to look in Safari's activity window for was supposed to paste in my message as:

"http://cache.io9.com/assets/video/knockuuout.flv"

I dunno if this will work for you, but I was able to grab it to my desktop using Safari 3.0.4 in Mac OS X 10.4.11.

Open the IO9 link in a Safari window. Command + Option + A opens the Activity window. View these two windows side-by-side.

When you hit the play button back in your main browser window, you'll see a file name incrementing its file size as the .flv video streams and loads into your main window. Total size will be about 17.6MB.

In the activity window, double click on the name of this file: "http://io9.com/5013523/when-humans-punch-aliens-the-video-remix"

Safari will open a new window, and that file will appear there as raw text/code. Go to Safari's file menu and choose "Save as..." Ditch the ".txt" file extension so that you're saving the file as "knockuuout.flv."

With the free Perian codec/plugin for QuickTime, it'll load and play in a QT player. You can get that here: http://perian.org/

I'm playing it right now from my desktop as I compose this message.

Count me in as a dedicated barefotter.

My arches have gained strength, I never have any concomitant aches attributable to shoes, the only time I ever have foot odor is when I wear shoes.

My feet are tough enough to walk a couple miles around the neighborhood a few nights a week without abrasion. And I do it year round, except when it's below 50°F and wet, or the macadam is just too hot.

Then, I dip into my NewBalance cross trainers, one of the few mass-market sneakers that are available with width selection for my big ol', EEE boats.

The announcer/talking head guy in those commercials is Wendall Woodbury (Google results). He used to be a news anchor and reporter on the local (Lancaster PA) NBC affiliate, WGAL, until he split to start his own production company, located about 10 miles out of Lancaster. He and my Pops (William "Bill" Martin, a newscameraman) were good friends until Dad died in '94. Super nice guy, brilliant, great story teller, and not at all the vapid, vain stereotype one might think of as being a TV news anchor.

When I first saw that commercial, I was a little dumbstruck at the cheesiness of the come-on, but hey, I guess everybody has to pay the bills.

Oh, and yeah—Cockerham rocks as a prince among men. I'd love to meet him and hang out sometime.

John Stossel and I have but one thing to say about Comic Sans:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88lkFzBuPL4

Used to do this as a kid in Harrisburg PA. Pops worked in a news bureau and I made extra-large planes from the accordian-folded teletype paper (each leaf was 8.5" X 22" IIRC). Up to the 15th-floor(?) roof of the Payne Shoemaker bldg on 3rd Street, and let 'er rip. Good times, good times.
==========================================
Oh, and I wonder how well the driver of the SUV near the end of the video would do parallel parking with cars in front and behind the space. They sure did a rotten job with all the room in the world.

:)

I, for one, welcome our new toothbrush overlords.

@JJJJ...

That Wired article also explains the damnable producers of television (and probably radio...) commercials.

Folks complain about them being louder than the programs they buttress, and we keep being told that there are FCC rules in place about how "loud" they're allowed to be, but anyone even tangentially acquainted with audio engineering knows that they are often compressed and limited within a few microdecibels of being illegal.

This annoys the living piss out of me, and millions of others as well, I'm sure.

@TMCCARTNEY...

You may get a laugh out of this. A buddy of mine from the Adobe forums is well known for his gruff public attitude. Many of us who know him well know he's really a pussy-cat.

A few years ago he posted an image of himself telling a clueless newbie the answer the newbie really needed to hear. I grabbed the JPEG he posted and softened his image...but only just a little bit.

Stab the link! (about 176KB):
http://home.comcast.net/~phosphor-digital/bbs/bukokittyanimation.gif

Who are we kidding here:

She was kicked out because of her increasingly odious old-lady effluvia.

Who knows the story behind the TelCo audio alert that continuously cycled through a rising and falling "reeeeeooorrrrrreeeeoooorrrrrreeeeoooorrrr"... Each "reeeooorrr" might have been about 3/4's of a second, the low note was separated from the high note by about a Major 7th. It wasn't shrill, so much as it was kind of an annoyingly comical sound. Could've come from the audio department of the Warner Bros cartoon building.

It happened when you messed up dialing, or something. Haven't heard it in probably 20 years, maybe more.

Always wondered what it was supposed to signal.

Oh, the fun we used to have in the late 60's-early 70s, when we could walk to the local Mom & Pop corner store and buy 3 oz. boxes of saltpeter for 11¢. A big reason I sold greeting cards from that company that advertised in comic books was so I could finance my saltpeter, sugar and BBQ briquette research.

3 of us teenage kids would pool our money and walk out of the store with a standard paper grocery bag half full of saltpeter, and the cashier wouldn't even blink. And then we'd do it the following weekend. Still, not even the slightest arch of an eyebrow. Of course our Moms always wondered why they were going through so much sugar.

Somehow--and fortunately--our folks taught us well enough that we never used the stuff to damage property. And we paid enough attention in science classes to respect the nature of the reaction, even when mixed in huge quantities.

Maybe there's something to that.

Seeing how they grow wild, psilocybin mushrooms can never be "banned." Just criminalized.

I've been periodically ingesting all manner of psychedelic and hallucinogentic substances for close to 35 years. Occasionally, at "Heroic Doses" (thanks, T.McK!)

I NEVER once did any of the stupid crap of the type that always gets spotlighted when the legislators feel the need to clamp down.

I sure can't say the same thing about the many times I acted like a galaxy-class jackass from consuming alcohol.

Most current drug laws are antiquated, detrimental to society at large, and only serve to put otherwise law-abiding citizens in jail and make a certain class of criminals a WHOLE lot richer. Did the U.S. government learn NOTHING from alcohol prohibition?

"You can get the $2 bills in sheets of $2000…"

Hmm...That would be one damned big sheet, about 111.3 sq. ft. Don't know of any intaglio presses that print on substrate that large, but I could be out of the loop.

I thought US notes came in sheets of 32, maximum?

@ David in reply #6:

I've been seeing this half-dollar-glued-to-the-floor type of religious come on for over twenty five years.

First time I was fooled, the image was of half of a US$20 note...the leaflet was exactly the same size as a US note and folded in half. The 3 other faces on the folded tract had the Jeebus info.

I'm pretty sure this idea is nothing more than a mass marketing thing...churches can buy them by the box-full and have their own info printed on them. Churches subscribe to these things just like they subscribe to church news fillers that contain those pithy statements they put on their letter signs on the church's front lawn.

Ahhh, what a racket!

Giant/Eagle isn't a convenience store. It's a full-sized/full-service grocery store.

And that Reagan note that Ethan posted about? I've seen one of them as well, but the only thing it has to do with the story is the denomination (of the note, not the church). ;o)

Meh, PCPro.co.uk was only a month or so late with this story.

I guess their still keeping a ye olde magazine printer's schedule?

Near as I can figure, she she must have turned around and realized that the art directors have switched out Helvetica on the game screen and replaced it with the abominable Comic Sans. Sure would have made me puke—sick, opiates, or whatevs notwithstanding.

ABC News's John Stossel warned us!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88lkFzBuPL4