YouTube Gripe

There is no immediately available RSS feed for my own favorites?! What the hey! My first idea was that it should be really simple and therefore it might just be a particular way of constructing a URL.

And in my searching, there are a lot of other users who are looking for this same feed. I found several solutions that go deep into parsing the XML result of a REST request using the YouTube Developer's API or *gasp* the actual My Favorites page!

Fortunately, I found a solution done using Yahoo! Pipes. I took a peek into how it was done. And it WAS simple!

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/users/<insert username>/favorites

Now I just have to test if it works on the PSP's RSS Channel! =D

(UPDATE 2008-03-10 7:52PM -- Awww, man! It's an Atom feed, not RSS!)

(UPDATE 2008-03-11 12:03AM -- Before Jaemark posted his FeedBurner comment, I was already playing with Yahoo! Pipes plus a bit more research.. aaand it seems that you just can't get video direct from YouTube onto the PSP.. there are a lot of PSP-compatible video sites, but YouTube still has the bulk of the videos worth sharing.. oh, well..)

Animé Pet Peeve

DragonBallification, noun.

Using the combination of the following techniques -- IN A SINGLE ANIMÉ EPISODE:

1. Pointless repetitive animation (a.k.a. stock footage) to lengthen a particular scene (most commonly, fight scenes)


2. Scenes with excessive silence and *gasp* silent staring, probably to achieve a certain dramatic effect through supposed non-verbal understanding between characters


3. Severely stretched out moments, most obvious in chase sequences where both parties are able to think or speak long lines during the chase (sometimes in several non-contiguous scenes) and the surroundings never seem to change, despite supposedly moving in insane speeds (and not going in circles)

Most associated with: Major fight scenes of Dragon Ball Z
Last observed in: Naruto Shippuuden Episode 24 ([1] Gai and Co.'s battles, Sakura's battle with lame geometric shapes; [2] Sakura's battle; [3] Naruto and Kakashi's chase)

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I left out some other animé pet peeves (awkward poses/positioning of limbs is one other) since they aren't really attributed to Dragon Ball Z, but to animé in general.. Now I see that having a list of just 3 items is a bit awkward..

Anyway, I think these things are merely the result of poor translation of the scenes from the manga..

Keyboard Pet Peeve No More!

The stock keyboard that came with my PC has this annoying extra button labeled "Macro" just beside the Right Shift button. However, due to this extra button, the Right Shift button is now shorter. Not only that, but the darned Macro button was mapped to type a Backslash! Whenever I miss the Right Shift button, I get something like "\please" or " \instead".


Earlier today, I have finally found a free utility to remap any keyboard button!

Enter AutoHotKey (http://www.autohotkey.com/).

It's a cool utility that manages all standard input devices: keyboard, mouse and joystick. With it, you can create macros and can auto-expand abbreviations (ala programming IDE templates). It runs on plain-text script files, but it also has a compiler which generates a script's corresponding executable (.exe) file that can be used on computers that don't have it installed.

Now that darned Macro key has been re-mapped to Right Shift. =D

So cool. I definitely have no other use for it, but it's still pretty cool. =)