BlueDot Productions » technology

More Powerful Facebook Fan Pages

ri — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 16:33:05 +0000

Facebook! A name that draws fear or disgust from many web developers. Fan or Foe, facebook is the hot place right now, as everyone is using it. What does this mean to developers and graphic designers? It means we get to learn yet another constantly changing API.

To add more interest and stickiness, there are some new tricks that will allow us to add images, video, tabbed browsing, and many other features normally reserved for only our blogs.

Here’s some great tricks I came across:

http://www.johnhaydon.com/2009/04/create-interactive-facebook-page/

http://www.labnol.org/internet/create-custom-facebook-pages/17957/

iPad + TouchOSC = Amazement!

ri — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 18:41:26 +0000

As a remixer and VJ, the importance of control surfaces have been paramount. It’s our tactile connection to our art. It’s the ability to interface with too many buttons and knobs. It’s how the creativity flows.

Over the years, we have used MIDI, and music keyboard systems. Our favorite to date has been the Novation Remote SL, as it has LCD screens that sync with our software.

A few years ago, we were taken by the Lemur. What a beautiful device! Touch screen interface. Programmable screens, knobs, etc. Unfortunately, it had a pricetag that was about the same as a new Macbook Pro!

I picked up an iPad so I could see what can be done with one of these things. They’re cheap, they’re responsive and now they have apps to control our music and visual arts software! Additionally, you can create your own wireless setup and control your set from across the dancefloor!

The first step is to get TouchOSC. From there other applications can tie directly into Ableton Live, Modul8, Logic, Etc. Don’t let the setup discourage you!

Deactivate Visual Editor – WordPress

ri — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 04:29:01 +0000

I just recently had a client that needed a sniffing javascript to serve up an iPad version of their cinematography. While this was easily added in the WYSIWYG editor within wordpress, if you hit the “visual” tab, Poof! The javascript would become broken in a strange enough way that required too much debugging. Instead of leaving a possible trap to our clients, we needed a solution: A great plugin to deactivate the visual editor when editing specific pages or posts within wordpress.

The visual editor is nice when pages and posts are simple, but when you try to add special text such as php code to a page then the visual editor oftentimes has to be deactivated to edit the page. This plug-in allows you to set which posts should not use the visual editor by setting a custom field ‘deactivate_visual_editor’ to true. This allows the visual editor to be deactivated for the given post/page, but remain active for all others.

Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/deactive-visual-editor/

Gimme that data!

ri — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 04:34:37 +0000

Now that we have a couple of Canon EOS 7d’s here at the bluedot studios, we’ve been researching what is the easiest and fastest way to transfer this data to the laptop so we can open the card back again for shooting.

We started with a Lexar FW800 CF Card reader like the one here. It’s quick! Fast enough that you can preview your footage and photos without downloading right away, which is quite nice. But, not enough bandwidth to run the video at full frame rate.

So I was plugging in my jack out to the stereo on my MacBook Pro, and realized… hey! This thing has a PCIe ExpressCard slot! The PCIe is what our RAID system here runs 11tb into, and it’s a blazing method of thru-put, allowing editing of HD footage. I wonder if I can find a CF card reader for it the laptop?

Well low and behold, there is a company doing this with the outrageous speeds of 2.5Gbps rather than USB 2.0 speeds of 0.46Gbps. Here it is, the CFEXpress Pro.