I was creating a screencast and wondered if there was a way to create one in HD or High Definition now that YouTube and other video sharing sites support HD videos that you create.

A quick Google search resulted in the article How to Make 720p High Definition Screencast Videos for YouTube from Digital Inspiration.

Here’s a test video that I put up on YouTube formatted in .mov.  Below is the HD version of the video that I put up with the embed code that’s explained in the article. For now, start the video and then click the HD button to view in HD. Click the full screen button to view the video in full screen and high definition.

And here is the link to Creating High Definition Screencasts for YouTube that should take you to YouTube and start the video in HD without clicking on the HD button.

You can subscribe to my YouTube Channel as well so you don’t miss any of my videos in the future.

USA Today published an article titled Leaving PCs on overnight costs companies $2.8B a year.

The article talks about how businesses lose 2.8 billion dollars a year when they leave computers on, unused, all night.  In addition, this adds 20 million tons of carbon dioxide, etc.  So I thought I’d record a screencast video using the freely available ScreenToaster. to show you how you can automatically shutdown your Windows XP machine.

A Note on Screen Recording Software

While the video I created is under 8 minutes, it took over 1 hour to upload to YouTube using the upload to YouTube feature provided by ScreenToaster.  Also, the audio gets ahead of the video in spots as well as slurred my S’s quite a bit and even skipped some audio parts.

The other feature that I did not see is panning and zooming which allows you to pan around the screen and zoom in closer to what you’re doing on the screen, making it much better for viewing.

If you’re interested in doing screencast videos, you can try the freely available CamStudio.  Camtasia Studio is yet another screen recording tool and cost over $100.00 but makes it pretty darn easy to create screencasts with many features that help get the point across.

Shutting Down Windows XP Automatically

Here are the steps to shut down your Windows XP machine automatically:

1. Click on Start
2. Click on Control Panel
3. Click on Performance and Maintenance
4. Click on Scheduled Tasks
5. Double click “Add Scheduled Task”
6. You’ll be at the first wizard screen for setting up a task – click next
7. Click Browse…
8. Navigate to or type in the file name box – file c:\windows\system32\shutdown.exe
9. Name the task – “Daily Shutdown”
10. Select Daily to perform task daily and click next
11. Set the Start time to when you’d like to shut down your Windows XP machine.  I set mine for 2:00am.  Perform the task Daily and click next.
12. Fill in the user name and password, click next.
13. Check the “Open advanced properties…” check box and click Finish.
14. Add these parameters to the end of shutdown.exe so it looks like this: c:\windows\system32\shutdown.exe -s -t 60 -c “Shutting Down…” -f
15. Click OK and re-enter your user name and password
16. That’s it!!  Finished.

Now your PC will automatically shut down at 2:00am no matter what.

Here’s the explanation on the command line:

The -s tells shutdown.exe to shut down the computer.  The -t 60 tells shutdown.exe to allow 60 seconds before shutting down the machine.  The -c displays the message “Shutting Down…” and the -f says force the shut down no matter what, even if a program or programs are running.

I re-recorded the video and I used Camtasia Studio to create it instead of ScreenToaster. Here’s the link to the ScreenToaster version on YouTube and below is the re-recorded version using Camtasia Studio.

Okay folks, time for the dry stuff.  When you create a web app, it typically interacts with a database, more specifically an SQL database.

What is SQL? SQL stands for Structure Query Language.  SQL is a way to store and manipulate information in a database.  So what’s a database?  A database is something that stores information.

You use SQL to perform operations on the information that is stored in a database.  An operation is adding information to a database, updating information in a database, as well as reporting on information in a  database.  There are many other operations you can perform on a database using SQL.

Database Example

One of the easiest examples to better understand what a database is, is the phone book.  It’s a paper database.  The phone book stores names, addresses and phone numbers, at least the one I’m looking at.

With the phone book analogy, let’s walk through some beginning SQL definitions.

A database is made up of tables.  A table is made up of rows and a row is made up of columns.  Whoa!!  Okay, if you’ve never been exposed to this stuff it can be kind of dry and confusing, so let’s look at a visual representation of a database, table, row and column that I created in Microsoft Access.

Again, you can see that the full name, address, and phone number of one person makes up one row.  Many rows, or many people then, make up a table. The full name is a column, the address is a column, and the phone number is a column as well as the others.

If you’re a WordPress blogger then most likely it’s using a database called MySQL.  If you use Microsoft products then you might be using Microsoft’s SQL Server.  There are many different database products out there.

Well, that’s it for this installment of Getting to Know SQL.  I wanted to keep it short and digestible since there’s a lot to SQL.  In part 2 we’ll get going with some free SQL tools so we can play around and experiment.

In this post I’m listing some of the stuff that’s on my Windows XP machine at the moment that I use regularly in my daily work.  Maybe there’s something new here that might benefit you in some way.

1. Flock – Flock is a social web browser that brings all your social site into one browser.  You can also install most Firefox add-ons in Flock as well.  Some of the add-ons I use include:

• Delicious Toolbar – So I can bookmark great content.
• StumbleUpon Toolbar – So I can Stumble randomly or specific categories of websites.  There are quite a few ways to Stumble around the interwebz.
• Web Developer Toolbar – So I can view the technical details of websites I visit and to troubleshoot my own.
• Firebug – allows me to view various aspects of a web page in detail and very organized.
• Google Notebook – Allows me to right-click on a page and save it to my Google Notebook.
• Screegrab! – Allows me to save a picture of the screen to memory or disk.
• SEO for Firefox – 3 letters reside in your browser’s status bar – SEO.  Click it on and off to provide various SEO information for the pages you browse as well as search results pages.
• I also use different browsers including Google Chrome, Opera, Safari, and Internet Explorer.

2. Audacity – Audacity allows me to record streaming audio.  Sites that don’t offer mp3 downloads.  This is mostly voice, lecture type audio.

3. Comment Sniper – Comment Sniper allows me to be notified when some of the blog I read post a new blog post.  This allows me to comment quickly on those site and possibly get to the top of the comments list.  This helps with readers on other blogs to click on my profile and end up at my blog.

4. Filezilla – This is a free FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program that allows me to transfers files from my PC to my web host’s server.

5. Paint.NET – I use Paint.NET constantly to work with images.  It’s free and offers quite a bit of functionality to get the job done.

6. HTML-Kit – HTML-Kit is a free HTML editor but also formats and allows you to work with CSS as well as PHP and many other languages.

7. TweetDeck – The infamous TweetDeck is the killer client of choice for interacting with Twitter.

8. ZoneAlarm Free – ZoneAlarm is the premier software firewall engine for your Windows XP machine.

9. AVG Anti-Virus - AVG is an anti-virus protection software and best of all it’s free.  Works great!!

10. Spybot Search & Destory – S&D is an anti-spyware program that monitors the activity of your PC notifying you of registry changes and more.

11. Process Explorer – Process Explorer allows me to dig into the memory where all those processes are running and trouble shoot any bad situations.  I also use other Sysinternals tools that allow me to monitor what’s going on with what programs are writing to disk and the network tools that allows me to view what connecdtions are connect from where to my PC.

11. Audible – I use Audible to listen to books.

12. TortoiseSVN – I use TortoiseSVN to download the latest beta version of WordPress.  It installs menu choices when you right-click on a folder in Windows Explorer.

Well there’s plenty more tools I use so make sure you subscribe to my blog for future tool reports.

For me, 2008 was filled with new smart phones – the Apple iPhone, various models of BlackBerry (which one should I get?), and T-Mobile’s G-Phone (Google Phone). All of them feel a bit like version 1.0 and all of them seem to have features missing that the other one has.

So, I’ve held off and I’m still using my crusty trusty Palm Treo 650.  But this year might have to be different, we’ll see.

The Palm Pre is Palm’s latest offering in the smartphone arena.  Introduced at the 2009 International CES (Consumer Electronics Show) last week, the Pre generated quite a bit of buzz.  And of course, it’s making me feel like I need a new phone.  

The Palm Pre will come out on the Sprint network which is good because that’s what I’m on now.  However, there seems to be no pricing information out yet except Internet buzz of $399.00.

The Apple iPhone and BlackBerry models have had huge success and the Palm Pre seems to combine features from both phones which offers the best of those two worlds.

Offering features such as a QWERTY keyboard, a full-sized touch screen, and a gesture feature that allows you to swipe your hand over an area below the touch screen helps cut down on finger printing the screen, while still offering on-screen touchables when needed.

The Palm Pre’s new WebOS is built with the Linux operating system at its core.

Below is a 11-minute video from MobileCrunch that show the features of the Palm Pre.

And here’s a YouTube video directly from CES 2009:

Here’s another take at Gizmodo – In a Nutshell: Palm Pre vs. iPhone vs. G1

I want one NOW!!     Make it a good weekend.