Wayne D's Blog

When I was poking around recently trying to find the rates for Phase 2 of the Ontario Computer disposal task I ran across http://www.ontarioelectronicstewardship.ca/pdf/fees/fee_setting_review_dec09.pdf. This document outlines some issues that have occurred in the first year of the program. It has has seen lower sales of covered items and lower volumes of materials collected. To refresh your memory refer to Ontario Computer Tax Kicks in April 1st which outlines the items covered by Phase 1 of the program in it's first year and the additional fee everyone in Ontario pays on computer equipment they purchase.

Some quotes along with my translation from bureaucrateze
OES will review the relative processing costs of portable computers and desktop computers on the basis that portable computers may attract higher per unit processing costs due to the mercury bulbs (designated hazardous material) that are contained in the displays.
Translation: "The tax rate for laptops will rise." 

and As sales of desktop computers continue to decrease, and sales of portable computers increase, the fees collected by Stewards to pay for material management will continue to drop, exposing OES to a deficit that will require a deficit recovery strategy in subsequent years.
Translation: "We need to raise the tax rate for laptops."

The document also suggest that the Collection Incentive of $165 per tonne paid to the people collecting the waste to $215 a tonne to make it more attractive for them to join the program and I assume increase the shortfall of 30% over the volumes the program has experienced so far. In creasing the incentive paid would suggest that fees charged to consumer to fund the program would have to rise to cover increased costs.

one last quote
OES’ proposed action is to model the revised fees based on a percentage factor decrease of approximately 15% of the Year 1 collection target in the Revised Plan. Despite the 30% decrease in first year of Phase 1, OES anticipates volumes of collected material to increase as a result of increased promotion and education, changes to the direct ship program and enhanced accessibility in Year 1.
Doesn't sound too bad until you read    
A 15% factor decrease in the collection target still represents an aggressive actual collection increase of 42% compared to current performance. 

An increase of 42% sounds pretty aggressive. Increased promotion and education sounds like it's going to cost more money too. More information on the fee setting process can be found here http://www.ontarioelectronicstewardship.ca/consultation/consultation.html. I'll update this post when the revised fees are announced on Jan. 28th and we'll see if I'm right or not.  
 

When Howcast.com accepted my Lemon Battery and posted it on their site I used Tweetdeck to simultaneously announce it on both Twitter and Facebook. It worked great until a few days later my wife, who browses Facebook frequently told me that when she clicked on the link which had been shortened with twurl.nl she got a popup saying the content had been reported as abusive.

After a bit of experimentation I realized that the default URL shortener used by Tweetdeck was what was blocked. Any URL in the twirl.nl domain causes the abusive content popup and blocks the Facebook user from accessing the link.

My advice would be not to post shortened URL's to Facebook. Facebook appears to be using a big hammer and instead of blocking a single URL is blocking whole domains. Now twurl.nl is blocked, who knows which URL shortening domain will be blocked next. Conspiracy theorists might also think this has something to do with the release of Facebook's own URL shortening service fb.me. Might Facebook be planning to block all other URL shorteners in the name of security?

I was always curious why I didn't see any referrals to my Lemon Battery video from Google Reader so I subscribed to my own RSS feed using Google Reader to see what was up. I always though that b2evolution, the blogging platform I use had the proper incantation in it's RSS feed because nixiepixel.com, a blog I subscribe to had embedded videos show up in it's RSS feed. Nixiepixel has since switched her blog to Wordpress so I found another b2evolution blog to check what was different with their feed which also included Youtube videos. That feed along with a posting on the Google reader blog led me to the solution. Google Reader requires the HTML embed tag to be used if you want videos to be displayed in an RSS feed. Once I knew the solution I made a small modification to _videoplug.plugin.php in the plugins directory of b2evolution where I changed:

PHP

to

PHP

I expect some of the purists will say that the embed tag is a relic and shouldn't be used but if you want your videos to show up in Google Reader that's what you have to do. Though this example is specific to b2evolution other blogging platforms may have similar issues. Sorry to all my Google Reader fans for taking so long to figure it out. Now all I have to do is get Google Reader to add support for Howcast.com videos.

My latest video brings the classical lemon battery experiment into the new decade by using lemons to light an LED. Far from being difficult anyone can perform this experiment using galvanized roofing nails, some copper wire or older pennies, some clip leads and an LED. A voltmeter is helpful but not required if you follow the directions carefully. The widespread use of LED's for Christmas lights means you probably even have some LED's lying around the house. The video stars my 13 year old son Steven who didn't have any trouble getting the LED to light. You can also watch the video accompanied by text directions by clicking the How to Power an LED with Lemons link directly below the video.

This video was made for Howcast.com as part of their emerging film maker program which pays $50 for each completed video. Howcast supplies the script, voiceover track, graphical elements and cleared music. THey also supply a clear and concise document outlining their production standards. What they don't do is tell you what to shoot and how to edit it. For me it was the right mix of instructions and guidelines while still allowing a wide degree of creative freedom and flexibility. Howcast.com also provided extensive notes after I submitted the first cut of the video. Considering how many things I had goofed up I was surprised that they didn't just throw up their hands in disgust but instead they emailed a detailed list of issues along with suggestions on how to improve my video that were super helpful, encouraging and kind.

I certainly learned more about using Cinelerra, the Linux video editing package i used to edit the video. Cinelerra had all the features and tools I needed with the exception of one thing. The graphics supplied by Howcast are MOV's with an alpha channel which Cinelerra can't import. I didn't realize that the graphics videos even had an alpha channel until I had submitted the video to Howcast. I did find out that a newer version of Cinelerra for Centos 5 had been released after I had started editing the video. I decided that updating my video editing software in the middle of editing probably wasn't a good idea. What i ended up doing was using ffmpeg to convert the Howcast graphics videos into a series of PNG's which Cinelerra had no trouble importing.

To convert the video to png's using ffmpeg I used the following command: ffmpeg -i filename.mov -f image2 %3d.png
I then used a helpful tool called mkframelist which creates a list of the png's for importing into Cinelerra. Download it, put it in either /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin make it executable and use mkframelist -h to find out the syntax you need to use, I created saved the pg's for each graphic in a different subdirectory and used the following command:
ls *.png | mkframelist -r 30 > output.lst

All in all it was a great learning experience for me and assuming I can find a suitable topic for my next video I know what I can do to make the editing process more efficient and way less painful.

At some point I turned off the box that appeared at the top of the EEEPC webcam tool ucview when a video or image file is saved. The box not only shows the name of the video file that you save but also makes it easy to tell when you have stopped recording with ucview which can be difficult because the changes in the button while recording are similar to the way the button looks when you hover over it.

It took a bit of digging to find out how to do this on the EEEPC and where the value was stored.

If you have gconf-editor installed you can find the key you need to change in /apps/ucview if you don't the easiest to mmke the change is to open a terminal window by hitting Ctrl_Alt-T and entering the following command.

To enable the save filename box for videos use the following command:
gconftool-2 --type boolean --set /apps/ucview/hide_video_saved_box false
To enable the save filename box for images use the following command:
gconftool-2 --type boolean --set /apps/ucview/hide_image_saved_box false

That's it, simple isn't it?