If you have MediaInfo installed and hover the mouse you can get a tooltip with the play time of the video clip and some other info.  But I've yet to see a shell extension where you can select multiple media files, right click to select a command, and get the total play time.  Even if you drag & drop a bunch of videos onto MediaInfo I don't think there's any option for total play time of all the clips.  Would be very convenient for those of us who like to burn discs full of .avi files or whatnot.

The latest edition of Ehtyar's Tech News Weekly is out on the DC Forum.

Table of Contents:

• 1. Researcher Raids Browser History for Webmail Login Tokens
• 2. Network Solutions Breach Exposed 500k Card Accounts
• 3. Palm Plays Cat-and-mouse With Apple, Reenables ITunes Sync
• 4. Wireless Power System Shown Off
• 5. Microsoft Caves to EU Pressure, Will Offer Browser Ballot
• 6. Microsoft Aims at VM Market With Linux Kernel Code Offering
• 7. Intel's New 34nm SSDs Cut Prices by 60 Percent, Boost Speed
• 8. EFF's New Lawsuit, and How the NSA is Into Social Networking
• 9. Hackers Scoffing at IPhone 3GS' Hardware Encryption
• 10. [NSFW] Saturday Night Live - Cork Soaker

A while ago a local blog mentioned a graduate student who was trying to raise a thousand dollars so he could try to make a go of creating and selling homemade organic chocolate bars from scratch (roasting the cocoa nibs, etc.).

He actually ended up raising the money through a site called Kickstarter, and I was proud to contribute a little bit.  The fun thing that he is doing, which i think is really important in terms of making the whole crowd-funding idea work, is that he is blogging about his experiences making the chocolate, etc.

I want to encourage more people who read this, who have a small dream project they need a little funding for to go for it, and maybe try a site like Kickstarter to raise the money you need (as the excerpt below states, the money raised is not investment money, it's a donation to you).

If you do try it, I really do think that the key is to blog about how that money is spent and how you do with the project -- if you do that, everyone can feel like they are part of the experience and if it doesn't succeed as you hoped, everyone will still feel like it was well worth the try and the learning experience.

What is Kickstarter?
Kickstarter is a new way to fund ideas and endeavors...
A good idea, communicated well, can spread fast and wide.
A large group of people can be a tremendous source of money and encouragement.
Is Kickstarter an investment mechanism?
No. People who use Kickstarter to fund their projects ("project creators") keep 100% ownership and control.

What's in it for the people who pledge?
Project creators can offer products, services or other benefits ("rewards") to inspire people to support their project.

http://www.kickstarter.com/learn-more

These two movies are very cool:

http://vimeo.com/4238052
http://vimeo.com/5677879

It's simply amazing what they can show on buildings!

my default LBC dock is at the top of the screen but due to some apps not being able to differentiate between a monitor's screen area and workspace, the windows open at coordinate 0,0 and get hidden behind the dock.

so i wrote this AHK script which keeps them in line by moving those windows down. so if you have this problem then this script will be useful to you as well.

It's often been said: It ain't what ya got. It's how you use it that counts. I don't think there's ever been a better example of that than the onboard guidance computer used on the Apollo moon missions.

Think your aging Pentium laptop is too slow to get any real work done? Read on:

http://www.downloads...-apollo-11-computer/

How powerful was the Apollo 11 computer?

by Grant Robertson Jul 20th 2009 at 8:30PM

With all the buzz about the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing I got to thinking, how powerful were the computers that "took us to the Moon?" It turns out, they were nothing short of amazing. If you've never had a nerdy bone in your body, feel free to skip this post. But, if you ever laid on your back under the stars and thought about Mercury, Gemini, Apollo or the Space Shuttle, read on and see if you're as geek-struck as I was researching this.

And if you're an ubergeek, you can download a working simulator of the Apollo Guidance Computer to get a feel for what it was like to use a bleeding edge real-time computer - back in 1969.

Virtual AGC and AGS

The purpose of this project is to provide a computer simulation of the onboard guidance computers used in the Apollo Program's lunar missions, and to generally allow you to learn about these guidance computers.

Link: http://www.ibiblio.o...html#What_Is_An_AGC_