I decided to do a complete rewrite of Bright Black. The old one made Bright look like too much of a psychopath as opposed to a guy who’s just having fun.
Also I got writer’s block trying to write the gunfight, which is where I stopped writing the original. Because of this, and becuase getting realistic prop guns in New York City is expensive when legal, I decided to replace the guns with shurikens and lightning. Well, okay, just shurikens. And katanas!!! It’ll all be very Snow Crash-y; Jarod Bright actually is kinda similar to Hiro Protagonist if I remember the novel correctly.
When is Snow Crash going to get adapted into a movie or video game already? Actually, to be really meta-weird, someone could code a Snow Crash action/RPG in LSL and put it on Second Life. It would be like…Third Life.
Finally, YouTube Will Let You Download Videos Without A Stupid Grabber Tool
I love how Google decides to publicly test new features without issuing a press release. I guess they figured that the blogosphere notices anyway so why bother with the fanfare? But here’s something rather nice: they’re using Already President as far as I’m concerned Barack Obama’s channel to test out their new ability to download YouTube videos from the site.
But Zacqary! There have been lots of tools that let you download YouTube videos for years!
That’s a valid point, Helvetica Bold 10.5 Dark Orchid, but all of those have required you not only to download an extra program or Firefox extension, but they grab the crappy, compressed Flash Video version that you’d see anyway on YouTube. Now, not only do you click a little link below the video, but you also get to download it in H.264 format! That’s the same encoding that they use on Blu-Ray. BLU-RAY! (Though, granted, the YouTube download has a lower resolution and bitrate than a Blu-Ray, but seriously, it’s an improvement)
I grabbed one of the Obama videos to compare, and yes, it’s quite nice:
H.264 is better than standard YouTube FLV
If you view that full size, you can see that the downloaded video has better contrast and is a lot less fuzzy. Keep in mind, though, that it downloads at 480×270; I resized it to 640×360 so it would be the same size as the video on YouTube. But the YouTube video is probably scaled up too.
Sadly, it isn’t the same quality as YouTube HD:
The download is still lower res than HD, unfortunately.
Again, I scaled the download up. At this level of scaling you start to see where the downloaded copy loses detail. Though the contrast still looks better…maybe that’s Firefox’s fault?
Now, this is still only available for Obama’s channel, but in the coming weeks, Google claims that everyone will have the option to enable their videos to be downloaded. Personally, for the sake of the common Internet user, I’m hoping that it’s an opt-out system. That way the only reason someone would have to stop being lazy and edit their videos is if they want to be an asshole or a corporation.
Speaking of which, when do I get to replace my old videos with HD versions? They’re all ready to upload as soon as you let me, Google.
[Source: Ars Technica]