Archivo de la Categoría 'English'

How to download youtube videos “for dummies”

Publicado por
habitaquo2
el 9 Mayo, 2007 en English, Habitaquo, Internet, Tecnología y Videos 4 Comentarios

Who is still unaware about downloading youtube videos, is someone who doesn’t know what is cool on the web, but what is true is that for many of my friends everything surrounding computers seems like magic and I think anyone reading this can feel the same too, that’s why I’m writing (and I’m translating) a step by step guide “for dummies”.

Step 1.- Look for the Youtube Video you are interested on (it also applies for any site you may use such as Metacafe, Google Videos and any other).

Step 2.- Choose any from the thousand sites that allow you to download from youtube: www.youtubex.com, keepvid.com, javimoya.com/blog/youtube_en.php (from a Spanish guy ;-), www.youtubia.com, www.vidgrab.com or my favourite: vixy.net.

Step 3.- Open the desired website and enter the link to the video you selected on Step 1.

Step 4 (Optional) In case you chose vixy.net or any other supporting many output formats, choose the one that you prefer the most.

Step 5.- Select Enter, Accept, click the button… In brief: Send the data and wait a little until the download starts.

In general all those webs download the file in a “.flv” format which is Flash proprietary, and which means that not all Video players will allow you to play it (Our beloved VideoLan won’t have any problem).

For example, vixy.net allows you to download the video in divx+mp3 which reducing the final size and avoiding problems when playing it. In the other hand it takes a while to transform the videos, which can force us to go back to Step 3.

I hope it all clarified the whole process.

By the way, for those Firefox freaks fans, you have dozen extensions that shorten the process, also available for download from Firefox Add-ons.

The OS-Tan, when the Otaku meets the Geek

Publicado por
habitaquo2
el 9 Mayo, 2007 en English, Tecnología y Varios 0 Comentarios

Today I found this website in meneame, where Linux is very appreciated. Those are a series of very artistically wallpapers where we can see Linux distributions’ OS-Tan

The artist has some more pieces of her work available at Deviantart.

Ok, now you may be wondering what OS-Tan is. Perhaps something similar to habitaquo? Well, it’s a creation, but it has nothing to do with habitaquo.

The OS-Tan are some manga girls (in case you want to find the boys you have to look for OS-kun) who personify the many operating systems (OS), each one having its own behaviour. It all started then the Japanese from Futaba Channel imagined WindowsME as a problematic and doubtful girl. From that time on many characters for all Windows versions, some other OSs and software have been created.

There are comic books with all of them, and each aspect of the Operating System is represent within their behaviour.

In Spanish there are few available, but some time ago I read some translated comic books at Otakubell, which now seems unavailable.

Anyway and going back to the beginning of the news, the backgrounds are quite handsome and funny, and even if you are not very fan of the Japanese things nor very freak you may be interested on it.

Lost is ending and the masses are not always right.

Publicado por
habitaquo2
el 9 Mayo, 2007 en English, Internet y Reflexiones 1 Comentario

Reading the daily news (well, it was 3 days ago), I found that Lost has an end, not for now, but it has been decided that the end comes in 2010, seasons 4,5 and 6 with 16 episodes and 8 months of break between them.

You can find some more information about Lost here.

I thought it was interesting and I thought on “menear” it (same as digg, but is Spanish), and as I use to do I tried to find whether it was already submitted (there’s nothing that I hate more than duplicated news) and I found that someone had already sent it.

But it happens that it was discarded (although I was able to vote for it, quite weird) because it was voted as duplicated from another news, which had also been discarded because of being duplicated from the first one.

If you look carefully to those 3 news, in the first (and “original”) news it says that Lost ends on 2009, the next news says 2009 and the last one 2010.

Reviewing the sources, 2008 and 2009 were just rumors, but after reaching this point anyone can have this question: Voting for news that are going to be discarded because of being duplicated? (12 negative points means no salvation). Publishing new news adding more duplicated? (which possibly will be discarded instantaneously). Or voting for the first one, which is wrong?

The problem is that we should know how to vote, both positive and negative votes.

If positive, read the whole article because I think news with a nice description can reach the main page independently of where they link to (in case negative points wouldn’t exist).

And same for the negatives, don’t vote for duplicated news just because another one says so, don’t bury something if you’re not totally sure that it deserves is, because good news with 5 or 6 negative votes can’t survive.

Perhaps some news are Spam from the author, but those can be good news deserving positive votes and perhaps voting as duplicated based on news which were discarded can’t be too fair for those good news.

it’s English, not a deja vu

Publicado por
habitaquo2
el 5 Mayo, 2007 en English 3 Comentarios

As you may have noticed by now, the last few entries in habitaquo were written in English. Don’t worry, it’s not the same again, just a few entries until now (the ones that you can see before this one) and the next ones from now on.

Why do we do that? Just to allow people who don’t understand Spanish the chance to read and understand what we write. Keep in mind that we’ll continue writing in Spanish, and basically the English entries will be translations of the new Spanish ones.

If you want to read only the English posts just follow the tag “English“ which will accompany all the English translations

This post was just to let you know that habitaquo will continue being the habitaquo it used to be, but now in English too.

WoW has its own creditcard

Publicado por
habitaquo2
el 5 Mayo, 2007 en English, Internet, Juegos, Tecnología y friki 0 Comentarios

I have to admit that from the very beginning I thought WoW (World of Warcraft) would be a few months thing with not too many MMORPG players involved, but I was totally wrong.

WoW is a massive phenomenon with million accounts in many countries.

Each patch or update is very important among followers, and this time they have crossed the line jumping to Real World, Blizzard has associated with First National Bank of Omaha in order to offer players the chance of obtaining the Visa WoW. That card has many advantages included, such as obtaining days in the game in exchange of buying things using the card, or a free month just by using the card for the first time.

It’s not the first game that has something similar. It’s even more interesting Project Entropia’s initiative (the first game based in a economy which has a coin that can be exchanged by dollars) where users can obtain a credit card that allows them to obtain money from the game in real life ATMs.

What is for sure is that those WoW cards will be sold massively

You can find much more in the official website.

Consupermiso, another fiddling site?

Publicado por
habitaquo2
el 5 Mayo, 2007 en English, Habitaquo, Internet y Juegos 0 Comentarios

Disclaimer: All given links to the webs shown have my referral. I won’t become rich (you neither) but keep it in mind.

I’ve taken part of Consupermiso (translates as: “allowed-by-you”) for many years, literally (perhaps 5 or 6 years), and I only have 13,71€. In fact, I didn’t expect too much from the many mails they send me, almost one per week, just because of clicking on the link within them.

EsFacil (translates as “it-is-easy”) is much more time consuming because they send me 4 or 5 mails per week and I just have 16€.

But I want to move the topic. It happens that the way the have to make people lose Euros from their accounts is by having contest and so on.

The last great idea they had was to have a contest with a Xbox360 as the main prize. The contest winner would be the one with the highest score.

Few hours later everybody knew where the flaw was. For the rest of unaware humans the contest was just about sending the scores to a server, but in fact it’s not too complicated to modify the scores given that they all are obtained from your computer

For those really interested about it I have to say that they don’t send plain text. The scores are previously encoded transforming the digits to characters and the adding the corresponding character from the cyclic “cspgame” key and then codding it with the URL (time needed to crack it: 2h)

Going back to the main topic. That they knew about the flaw since the very first day can be thought given that none ever said a word, and April 16th (due date) all scores increased incredibly, from 40 million to 214.738.647 which is the highest number that the database can store.

The funny thing is that more than 15 days after that none within the organization has said a word, and none of the people who took part received the 15 cents back, nor none of them received the Xbox.

It’s a big shame and it has been a perfect game for them, normal people played the very first days, all the freaks spent a lot of money obtaining high scores and also obtaining the nullification of the game (no prize for anyone) and the game owners haven’t close the game, so many more people can still take part on it. Anyone could thing that it was designed badly on purpose.

The sad thing is that I thought Consupermiso was a serious company among the ones within this kind of “advertisement allowed companies” world, once more I’m disappointed.

Explanation of the steps, given by a participant, showing how anyone can cheat.

Do you want to be my neighbor? Vecindario 1 (neighborhood -1) just released

Publicado por
habitaquo2
el 5 Mayo, 2007 en English, Internet, Vecinos y ZList 0 Comentarios

We have just released the first neighborhood of our initiative, at this point we are just 7 blogs, the idea is to be some more blogs, and after that create another neighborhoods.

The thing is going on and it’s a great idea because there are many unknown blogs in this world, which should receive some attention. Now you can’t say that you don’t have someone who you can send memes to nor that none reads you.

We create micro-communities (15 blogs) for everyone where any kind of blog is well received. This is what businessmen call “networking”, in Real Life it’s just to meet people so none can say that Internet makes us unsociable people.

Take a look to the blogs within the neighborhood.

Do you want to be my neighbor? Just leave a comment.