Breaking Radio Silence

I've done a terrible job on the blog front this week. Our time here at eleven72 has been consumed this week with the hurculean effort of finishing up a twenty minute industrial video that we were hired to do. It's good to finally have that off the plate and to be able to sit down with y'all (yes, I said y'all. we're in Texas here and that's how we roll).

By way of making up for a lack of interesting posts this week on our blog, I wanted to mention a few of the very cool things I've seen around the blogosphere lately (sure I'm working hard, but I've always got time for the net, right?). Anyway, here are some notes from my reader:

Hope For The Hokies

Greg Atkinson at Church Video Ideas posted a link to this site where the Passion folks are giving away some great worship tracks as their way of offering up hope for all the people struggling through the darkness reverberating from the terrible events that took place at Virginia Tech. You can see and download those tracks here.

Jott to Self

Have you heard of Jott? I heard about this one from Greg Davis on his blog Technically Speaking. Man, this Jott thing is really cool. I just signed up. From your cell phone, you can call Jott and leave a message for either yourself or one of your contacts. Then Jott transcribes that message and emails it to you or whoever you want it emailed too (emails it as text!). Check out their website for details. I'm looking forward to Jotting.

Brian Davis and Worship Tech Online

This is a new blog I read about on Church Video Ideas. I checked it out and it looks like it's going to be a fantastic resource for any of you out there who are in the trenches pulling off church services week in, week out. There was a great post on there a few days ago about using mics in your services and having back ups for your back ups. Brian Davis really seems to know his stuff and this looks like it will be a blog full of really good, practical, useful advice. Check it out here.


If you're a Gmail user, you should check out this Better Gmail extension that you can add if you use Firefox. I read about this on Lifehacker and I'm using it now. It does some really cool things like lets you save searches, has a filter assistant, gives you label colors, lets you preview conversations in your inbox and more. Read about it here on Lifehacker. The post includes instructions on how to download it.

Well that's what's happening in my corner of the blogosphere. I'd love to hear what you're reading. Leave some comments and we'll check out your favorite blogs and haunts.

And Now For Something Completely Practical (And Free!)

If you work with video and if you have ever had to compress and resize video files for downloading or for distribution on the web, you've had to worry about aspect ratios (the dimensions of the video). One big problem I've had before is when I'm trying to crop a video that was originally 4:3 (standard) to be 16:9 (widescreen), but I can't figure out what the 16:9 dimensions should be. It usually goes something like this for me: "Alright, so if I want the width to be 320 and in 4:3 the height is 240, what would it be in 16:9. 16 times what equals 320??? x times 9 equals what???" And I just start down that road with my questionable math skills and don't always like where I end up.

That's where this free Aspect Ratio Calculator from WideOpenDoors.net comes in. It does the math for you, so you can even experiment with different sizes without having to spend time refiguring each aspect ratio. Simply input one of the dimensions into the calculator and hit enter and it calculates the other dimension. So simple and so useful. Get it here!