Idea: ‘Honesty Captions’ for documentaries and other true film

While watching a documentary recently, I thought to myself that what I wanted to see while watching the film was a set of captions I dubbed ‘Honesty Captions’; these captions would contain only one thing: the precise time at which all of the film in the documentary was taken.

With ‘Honesty Captions’ on, I would get information useful to interpreting whether how much the filmmaker is sculpting reality for the story of the film.  Did that angry response interview happen 1 hour or 1 month after the original incident?  Were those two-shots from the same argument, or pieced together from an entire day of film?

Although I got this idea watching a feature-length documentary, I think the concept could usefully be applied to short films on YouTube.  People making / analyzing film clips of politicians, could easily tell how much / little the film was cut together.

EULA to take the Neuros survey?

Though I’m usually a proponent of Neuros, their recent survey had this as their first question :

1. By my participation in the following survey, I hereby agree to keep all information about the survey, including the products and concepts being tested, completely confidential and further agree not to disclose such information to any other party nor to attempt to copy, print or download any information from this survey. As to members of my household, I agree that they are also under this same obligation of confidentiality. In addition, I agree that I and others in my household do not work in the market research or advertising industries or for a news/media outlet.

Sorry Neuros, but I’m not taking a survey that says I can’t tell people what the survey was about.

Geez

UPDATE :

I contacted Neuros about this, and although I still disagree with an EULA for a survey, Neuros’ response was understanding,  and they explained their reasons for the EULA well.

DIY Project Parts Lists; Web Services for “Instant Project Kits”

Over the last year, I’ve been reading a lot of DIY electronics sites: Make Magazine’s Blog, www.hackaday.com, www.uchobby.com, and quite a few others. I’ve read through many project descriptions, and through many, many project parts lists.

Something has been missing from nearly all of the parts lists I’ve read, however. Nearly none of the projects provide “kits” to build the project, and surprisingly few projects even provide links to links to individual part sources. Many provide only a simple plain text list of parts, perhaps including Jameco or Digikey parts numbers.

This startled me, simply because I’m so accustomed to the ubiquitous ‘Amazon’ links at the end of every book review, and nearly every CD and DVD review, I read.

I’ve looked around the web some, and there doesn’t seem to be a seem to be a way to create an “Instant Kit”, to add a shopping list of items to your cart, at any shopping site I’ve seen, even non-electronics sites such as Amazon. Such an “Instant Kit” creator seems like the perfect thing for Amazon or Google-Shopping to create, or for DIY sites like Instructables to integrate into their project instructions.

If this really doesn’t exist, then I think it’s time for someone to write one. Maybe me.

To be at all useful, I believe an “Instant Kit” creator would need to deal with two questions fundamental to shopping from an ingredients list, the questions I ask myself every time I go to the grocery store with a shopping list in hand:

• Which of the item on the list do I already have?
• Which items on my shopping list should I buy at store A, and which at store B? This encompasses a lot of smaller questions about item availability at particular store, price comparisons between stores, store minimum orders.

ITunes vowel-insensitive word search

As ‘user experience’ goes, I’m glad to see that ITunes finds the album I’m looking for, múm’s newest, when I type ‘m-u-m’ into the search box, even though ITunes lists the band name correctly as ‘m-ú-m’.

I hereby dub this feature “vowel-insensitive word search”.

‘Hidden’ Eclipse Features, Anyone?

Sometimes a dead-simple feature hides from me for exactly that reason, because the feature is so dead simple.

Such was the case of Eclipse being able to pop out various parts of its view into multiple separate windows, something I just recently learned from this Adrian Coyler posting from well over a year ago, the English original of this article he wrote for the German-language “Eclipse Magazin”.

To pop all or part of an Eclipse view into its own window, just DRAG the view outside of the main window. That’s it. See that ‘Problems’ tab? Drag it to its own window. The ‘Package Explorer’ tab? Another window. At last, my Eclipse can take advantage of my nice multi-monitor setup.