I also spend a large amount of time finding things to read on the Internet, but don’t necessarily have the time to read them when I find them. And even more often, when I want to read them, I have only my iPhone, and intermittent connectivity (commuter train, subway, etc.). For a little while I was using Instapaper to save articles for offline reading, but I had to think ahead and sync the Instapaper app before going off the grid. And frankly, another bookmarking service wasn’t something I was really into at all.

Now, Instapaper does this crazy thing where it magically finds the content of an article and formats it so that sane people can read it, but that wasn’t really enough to get me to keep using it. However, I also knew of another service called Readability which essentially does the same thing, minus the read-it-later aspect. And also, I knew that Evernote comes with a web clipper that shoots the content of a web page into your cloud-brain with a single click in the bookmark bar.

How great would it be if I could reformat articles and send that stripped-down version, with only the relevent content, into Evernote to read later? I’m always syncing Evernote on my phone, and I’ve always got it open when I’m on a computer, so everything should stay in sync really well.

Well, turns out that’s possible. Thanks to some helpful articles (which I of course copied into Evernote), I made a little bookmarklet which Readability-izes the current web page, then clips it to Evernote. Just copy the code below into a new bookmark’s URL field and put it in your shortcut bar. Click it on a page you want to read later, and it’ll pull the article contents, then launch the Evernote clipper (you need to install that first), and clip it.

Code

javascript:function%20enClip(){EN_CLIP_HOST=%27http://www.evernote.com%27;try{var%20x=document.createElement(%27SCRIPT%27);x.type=%27text/javascript%27;x.src=EN_CLIP_HOST+%27/public/bookmarkClipper.js?%27+(new%20Date().getTime()/100000);document.getElementsByTagName(%27head%27)[0].appendChild(x);}catch(e){location.href=EN_CLIP_HOST+%27/clip.action?url=%27+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+%27&title=%27+encodeURIComponent(document.title);}}(function(){readConvertLinksToFootnotes=false;readStyle='style-ebook';readSize='size-small';readMargin='margin-wide';_readability_script=document.createElement('script');_readability_script.type='text/javascript';_readability_script.src='http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/js/readability.js?x='+(Math.random());document.documentElement.appendChild(_readability_script);_readability_css=document.createElement('link');_readability_css.rel='stylesheet';_readability_css.href='http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/css/readability.css';_readability_css.type='text/css';_readability_css.media='all';document.documentElement.appendChild(_readability_css);_readability_print_css=document.createElement('link');_readability_print_css.rel='stylesheet';_readability_print_css.href='http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/css/readability-print.css';_readability_print_css.media='print';_readability_print_css.type='text/css';document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(_readability_print_css);})();function%20timedCount()%20{if(document.readyState%20==%20%27complete%27){t=setTimeout(%22enClip()%22,600);}}timedCount();

Some caveats though: be sure to turn off the Evernote clipper’s formatting, or you’ll actually wind up with a carbon-copy of the Readability page, with no wrapping text, and some colors and fonts that won’t look so good on, say, a phone. But once you sort that out, you’ve got yourself an Instapaper alternative that integrates with everything else in Evernote.

And sorry, if you read this blog through an RSS feed, you’re not seeing the images. It has to do with how the site works – I don’t need to manually resize my images, but the tradeoff is that they don’t show up in the feeds. Sorry!

Plinky, recently acquired by Automattic (the WordPress people), is a site created to alleviate writers’ block. They basically provide an essay prompt every weekday as a way to spark blog entries. I’ll give it a try for a while and see how it works out. So if you see entries marked “powered by Plinky,” that’s what’s going on.

Also forthcoming: an entry explaining the images in these posts. I promise there is some rhyme, and maybe even some reason, behind them.

This was a collaboration with the very funny Jim Merritt, a fellow member of the BMI workshop.  The song was our submission for an assignment.  We were to write a charm song for a musical adaptation of “It’s A Wonderful Life.”  This song is for Clarence, the guardian angel, when he gets to Earth.  Perhaps it’s not the most appropriate music for Clarence, but it’s a heck of a lot of fun.  And I’m particularly fond of the piano part.

I have lots and lots of home videos. We’re talking hundreds of hours. As time goes on, though, I’m worried that these tapes will deteriorate and I won’t be able to watch them in five or ten years. So, I’ve made it my mission recently to start archiving these things digitally, not just to preserve them, but so my family can watch them fairly easily and actually use these videos as memories.

This is harder than you might even think. My family’s videos span four formats: VHS-C (those chunky little versions of VHS that held about 20 minutes each), Analog 8mm, Digital8 (Sony’s proprietary DV format), and MiniDV.  I’m most concerned about the Digital8 tapes; Sony was the only company to produce or support them, and they’ve moved on now. This means that when the Digital8 decks of the world stop working, my tapes are useless. So, I’m using our aging Digital8 camcorder to start archiving in the mid-nineties since these seem to be the most at risk.

I had to spend a lot of time considering formats for the archive. Native DV video takes up about 14 GB/hour, and at about 300-400 hours of video, I wasn’t ready to commit that much space to the home videos (especially considering we’ll be keeping a backup copy of the data as well). Saving the video in some kind of MPEG2 DVD format seemed silly; DVD is on the way out, and there are better codecs now anyway. What I finally settled on was MP4 files encoded in H.264 (incidentally, the files should be ready to dump onto Blu-Ray without transcoding). True, H.264 is a delivery codec, not an archival or editing one, but I tested out the durability of my settings by recompressing the MP4 files as MPEG-2 for DVD, and there was very little noticeable degradation in the output. I’m happy with my footage being able to survive one generation of recompression.

I’m keeping the video in its native resolution of 720 x 480 interlaced. This presents its own problems, namely that computers and progressive-scan equipment will have to deinterlace and squish the video slightly in order to play the clips back correctly. But in the interest of flexibility in conversion years down the line, this seemed like a good compromise between space, viewability, and quality.

On the subject of audio, it turns out sync is a huge issue when capturing consumer home videos, especially from analog sources. I’m using the Digital8 deck to do the A/D conversion from 8mm, and apparently the audio is passed at 12-bit, 32 kHz. Almost all of my Digital8 and MiniDV footage was also recorded at this setting, apparently. Editing software hates this, and the audio falls out of sync with the picture almost every time. So I’m forced to let Final Cut upsample the audio before touching the captured footage at all.

From there, I’m breaking each tape into days or events (right in Compressor) and saving the MP4 files in the format “YYYY-MM-DD_DescriptionHere.mp4″. I figure even if networked playback systems can’t deal with metadata, this will at least let us sort the events chronologically, and get a vague idea of what we’re looking for.

It’ll be interesting to see if what I’m doing is actually as future-proof as I hope it is. It’s frustrating to think that digital video, perfect copies of bits and bytes, may be susceptible to obsolescence down the line. But we’ll still have the tapes as a line of last defense, and as long as I don’t kill the playback equipment over the course of the project, we’ll never have to use it (and degrade it) again. The process seems ridiculous, but it’s already paying off. As David Pogue of the NY Times coincidentally wrote recently, I’m really enjoying watching the tapes as they’re capturing. And that’s the kind of experience I hope to make possible years from now by having this archive at our fingertips.

But that’s not what I’m writing about.  No, I’m writing about what happened when I first opened the box.  Inside the packaging theres a smaller box which contains all the installation discs for the various components of Logic Studio, and the bundled bonus content.  And sitting right on top of all those discs, was one labeled “Final Cut Pro.”  I kid you not.

It’s not even like this disc looked similar.  Final Cut comes on white-colored discs, Logic on black.  It was the opposite color.  I was distressed at first, so I decided to pop it into the computer just to see how bad a mistake this was.  Confusingly, the software on the disc was indeed Logic Pro 9.  Somehow in manufacturing, they printed this disc with the Final Cut branding, apparently.  So now I’ll own a legitimate install disc that I had to label with a sharpie.

Pictures of all this after the break.

In other news, I’m now involved in the exciting production of Jon Fuller’s new album. I’m playing producer/engineer, and it’s quite the undertaking. So far we’ve got piano and bass, with a drum session tomorrow. Check out his site for more up-to-date blogging about the project.