ODF Plug-ins For Office, iPod Sex Tape, Double Digit Live Video Marketplace Growth, Xbox 360 Rube Goldberg Machine, How Vista Makes Its Thumbnails
I’m in Atlantic City with my wife, celebrating our one-year wedding anniversary, so here’s a post featuring a bunch of items I should have blogged weeks ago.
OpenDocument Plug-ins For Microsoft Office
Both Sun and Microsoft have projects tasked with interoperating the OpenDocument Format and Microsoft’s OpenXML Office 2007 file format. Microsoft is financing a converter project on SourceForge, which released a 1.0 earlier this year for Word. Amit Agarwal reported that Sun released a plug-in for Word, Excel and PowerPoint, that lets them save in ODF, but it doesn’t work with Office 2007, and won’t convert OpenXML to ODF.
Chris Pirillo’s iPod Sex Tape
Chris Pirillo created this funny video of a Zune and an iPod making out, with him and his wife providing the voices and inappropriate noises. I wouldn’t advise watching it at work with the speakers turned up.
Xbox Live Video Marketplace Enjoying Double-Digit Growth
Microsoft is proudly noting double-digit revenue growth for the Xbox Live Video Marketplace, which sells TV show and movie rental downloads on Xbox 360s. They’ve now got a growing library with over 2,000 hours of content, and the easiest path to the TV of any video download service (almost all others are tethered to a PC), so its only natural that this would be succeeding as it is. Considering the money Microsoft is making selling stuff on Xbox Live, perhaps it should consider making the service itself free, in order to encourage more people to get deeply involved, and thus become purchasers?
Xbox 360 Rube Goldberg Machine
Check out this “Rube Goldberg”-esque setup that turns on an Xbox 360:
Gotta wish the camerawork was better and could keep up with the “action”. At least the music reminded me of South Park’s World of Warcraft episode:
Oh, and if you’ve heard the “Rube Goldberg” term a thousand times, but wished for some background on these things, check out this Wikipedia article.
(via Kotaku)
How Windows Vista Makes Thumbnails
The Windows Vista Ultimate team blog had a post explaining why some videos never get thumbnails, giving you a look into the process Vista uses to create thumbnails for videos. If you like in-depth looks at the workings of Windows, you’ll enjoy their full post, but if you want the long and short: Windows Movie Maker runs the video, finds the first frame that is not too bright or too dark, and makes that the thumbnail, and if it doesn’t find such a frame in seven seconds, you get no thumbnail at all.
