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Create a Flash video of your screen output

Flash Screencapture with Mac

When you’re trying to demonstrate a technique or idea using computers, I find that things go a lot smoother with a visual walk-through. In a classroom it’s relatively easy, you just go through the motions on a projector. Over the internet, video becomes your friend. There are a variety of techniques for capturing screen activity to video, but I’m going to cover creating flash videos on a Mac (most of the steps are probably applicable to Linux and cygwin on Windows). You may have seen flash videos in actions over at Google Video, or any other number of sites. It’s a relatively ubiquitous format these days.

The easiest way to create a the videos would probably be to download a program that lets you do it with a couple clicks. Screenography from Vertical Moon seems to fit the bill, but it costs $40. Now for the cheap bastards, we’ll move onto the free, yet complicated solution.

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Oldest page on the Internet

I came across this paper folding page from 1994, that had me wondering about the oldest page on the internet. Obviously, I turned to Google for answers. My search turned up this Slashdot thread that posed the same question a few years ago. Stanford also hosts some documentation of the early world wide web.

Digging through the Slashdot thread reveals that Tim Berners-Lee produced the earliest pages in 1990 and 1991 on his NeXt machine, which servered as both the first server and browser. You had to telnet into the computer at CERN (nxoc01.cern.ch) and look at the hyperlinked files on the machine. The pages no longer exist, but here’s a mirror from 1992.

There are some interesting tidbits in there, like this one:

There is no “top” to the World-Wide Web. You can look at it from many points of view. If you have no other bias, here are some ways of looking for information: By subject, by Type.

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Cease and Design

Pure gold: Let’s teach our students to become better designers by asking better questions not of us, but of themselves. Although, I think it applies to all aspects of education, not just design.