(example video removed)

I’ve never gotten around to releasing the Flash player plugin I wrote a couple of months ago. It’s basically a small player written in Flash that I’ve been working on for some time now wrapped in a Flash plugin. It allows you to use simple tags to embed FLV, SWF (click here for limitations) and MP3 files into WordPress posts.
More WordPress plugin: this.player

By default, embedded YouTube videos are 425 pixels wide, which is wider than the content column on Choking on Popcorn. To be able to easily resize and add cool videos to that site I copy-pasted together a very basic plugin for WordPress. It allows you to simply use something like [youtube ]xxxxxxxxx[/youtube] to embed the video. The ‘xxxxxxxxx’ bit needs to be replaced with the actual video’s ID of course. I know there are tons of plugins that do similar things and are vastly superior, but this one suits my needs perfectly.
More WordPress plugin: Youtuber

Even though I’m pretty much stuck using Windows for work, I’ve always been fascinated by alternative operating systems. Years ago I had a dual boot system with Windows 2000 and BeOS 4.5, and a couple of years ago I played around with Linux on older machines. None of these solutions were very useful though. Having to switch back to windows to use Photoshop or having an old PC take up desk space isn’t very convenient. This is where virtualization software like VirtualBox comes in.
More VirtualBox

I guess everybody knows the ‘six degrees of separation‘ theory. What it comes down to that you connect with everyone else in the world with a maximum of six ‘steps’. If this is true, a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of mine knows Robert De Niro. Cool.

Although I’m not quite convinced the theory holds entirely (what about isolated tribes in the Brazilian rain forest?) I recently discovered that I need only one or two steps to connect to three of the hottest projects in the tech universe.
More Who needs six degrees?

One of the few problems wth free software is the fact that the authors usually do not have huge marketing budgets to promote their work. This is why I didn’t know about Synergy until Matt Cutts blogged about it. It’s also why it took me ages to find a decent backup tool. I was just about to pay for a mediocre shareware solution when I came across Cobian Backup.
More Cobian Backup

Last week, when working on a game for a client, we decided raid the company’s snack machine and prototype the game using colour-sorted M&M’s in order to work out if was any fun and balance the game by adjusting variables. My random number generator supplied the randomness, Masterfoods the colourful candy. Great fun!

Thanks to Suzanne for the picture from her camphone.