Brad Arsenault (dot com)
The Blog of Brad
Archive for December, 2008
Intel i7: $999 from Dell
Dec 4th
For the note, I noticed the other day on Dell that they offered the brand new, mind-blowingly fast processor, the Intel Core i7 (yeah, that’s really the name, we went from Petium to Core, to Core 2, and now Core i7??). You can read more about Intel Core i7 at PCPer.com. Basically, this CPU architecture is the biggest change in computing since the original Penium, and did I mention it’s (base) 2.66 GHz quad core? All of that together, Dell is now offering the Core i7 in two of their products, the XPS 730x, and the Studio XPS. The Studio XPS retails for $999! Under 1k! wow.
Screentoaster.com: VMWare Test
Dec 4th
I performed a test on my Vista laptop, C2D 2GHz, 2GB Ram, NVidia 8400 using VMWare Workstation and Screentoaster.com.
I thought the best way to test the efficientcy of the imp[lementation of Screentoaster.com’s screen recorder, I would boot a VMWare machine. This is a very intensive task, and during the recording I did find my computer a bit sluggish, Vista reverted to basic non-Aero display mode, and expectedly took longer than average to boot the virtual machine. Here is the video output.
ScreenToaster.com First Look
Dec 2nd
I heard about this great idea for a screen recording service, ScreenToaster.com, from a TWiT Army Canteen member, wazneeni, and I immediately signed up for a beta code. Early this morning I recieved the code and was left the day to ponder what this would be like. So, I finally was able to test this. Again, this is a first look–I can’t make a final verdict, besides this IS a beta service for now…
Basically the idea of this is to allow a computer user of any flash-supporting operating system/computer take screencasts. You could use software such as CamtasiaStudio (Windows), Snpaz Pro (Mac), Screenflow (Mac), but these work only on one machine, require major CPU/GPU power, and are operating system dependent. Screentoaster though is like most sucessful operations today: operating system independent–take Youtube for example, anyone on any operating system can upload and view videos (limited to Flash supporting operating system though.)
Overall, what they’re doing seems simple, they somehow take video of the screen or an application, use the encoding power of modern flash to compress the near HD video and upload it to the ScreenToaster servers as a flash embeddable video. I used this to take a demo video of my screen playing back video (Flash video, coincidently). The quality was fine, great picture quality, poor frame rate. The biggest drawback yet seems to be the lack of audio capture live with the screen. I will get to the online editing tools later. I’ve attached a sample video I took.
