Author: Mark Boszko

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Mark Boszko

Film & Video Editor, Voiceover Artist, macOS IT Engineer, and Maker

  • The Final Frontier

    4 min ramblings

    I’ve always been interested in the space program. The Shuttle program started just a couple of years after I was born. I remember being awed by Skylab… and being crushed by the Challenger disaster. I felt for sure that I was growing up in a world that was heading toward making the universe I saw […]

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  • Here’s a dilemma

    ramblings

    Last night from TechCrunch:

    So, you say this is for its “news value”. Fine. What’s the story? This documentation must be in support of some incredible revelation that the public simply must know about, right? For the public good? Twitter is going to sell all our souls to the devil, is that it? If […]

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  • Speed Test

    ramblings

    It used to be that I trusted Speakeasy’s Speed Test for accurate network measurements, but in light of recent results, I tend to trust Speedtest.net a lot more. To wit, these are the results from our recent switch to Comcast “Blast” broadband service (taken in alternating tests between the test services):

    I understand Comcast does […]

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  • Downloading Movies from Dropbox

    geek, howto

    When you upload a QuickTime or other movie file to Dropbox, and then get the “public link” to give to someone else, Dropbox does a really cool thing and redirects the original movie file link to deliver a very simple web page with the movie embedded in it instead. Which looks great in a browser if you just need to view a quick clip — but what if you actually intended for the link to be a download instead?

    It turns out the trick is a little obscure, but fairly simple. All you need to do is add ?&dl=1 to the end of the “public link” URL. So:

    http://files.getdropbox.com/.../movie.mov

    becomes instead:

    http://files.getdropbox.com/.../movie.mov?dl=1

    Once you do that, Dropbox forces the download link, and the movie will download instead of playing in your browser.

  • iPhone ///gs

    ramblings

    The new iPhone announced on Monday is officially called the “iPhone 3G S” by Apple, but others (myself included) immediately started calling it the “///gs” — a combination of the Apple ///, and the Apple ][gs, two early pre-Macintosh Apple computers.

    This was too good an idea to pass up, so I’ve created […]

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  • HDV Workflow

    flicks, geek, rants

    Quick word of advice.

    If you’re ever editing anything shot on HDV: NEVER EVER capture low-rez DV proxies and expect to recapture in HD clean at the end. Yes, I know the HDV decks have that hand-dandy feature to downconvert to DV over firewire. DON’T DO IT. NONE of these HDV cameras seem to record […]

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