Tag: YouTube

Cockroach Reanimation at 2k views

My most popular YouTube vid, by far, is Cockroach Reanimation with Electro-stimulation, which just passed over 200,000 views. The viewing demographic is overwhelmingly 13-17 year old boys who like to point out that the cockroach “isn’t actually coming to life, it’s something about electrical impulses and nerves and something scientific-er than that, (insert insult of choice).”

I have mixed feelings about this vid – it’s brought out all the little Mr. Wizards and smartasses and even one scary guy who requested electrocution of bigger things – but in the end, it’s nice to have a kind of popular YouTube upload that I made with a $1 electronic device and a dead/reanimated (just kidding, kids!) insect:

Toyota reviving Nobunaga (Toyota ReBorn), plus killer killer whales

Linkdump follows:

Any modern car ad using a 1960’s S40 Crown is worth watching in my opinion, but the CM being referred to (and uploaded to Youtube just 3 hours ago) is just indecipherable. The making of video isn’t much help, either.

Killer whales attack and eat sharks: In itself, not news but apparently orcas screw with sharks the way that dolphins screw with bait balls, using their cunning mammalian brains

This Chinese Village Is So Rich It Built A Fake Great Wall And Arc De Triomphe: I’m not sure those are signs of wealth by themselves — the small Japanese island I used to live on had miniature versions of those and several other famous structures at their aging amusement park, and the last I heard pretty much every last notable business went to shit (probably entirely coincidental with my leaving, but sorry to all my friends there just in case).

(At least one of the links above are from somebody, probably Mark, on Google+, but I can’t find it now)

YouTube iframe embedding

It seems that the new way of embedding YouTube videos is really slow to render when you have multiple videos on a single page. Offhand, I can’t remember tweaking anything else that would cause this blog to be loading in segments like this. The thing is, I don’t really have time to test it now, so I guess I’ll just refrain from posting so many vids for a while and let the ones below fall off the front page.

Specifying a starting point in YouTube’s Flash 5 Player

In my previous post, I set an embedded video to start from a determined point partway through. The video was embedded with the new iframe tags (specifying HTML 5 instead of a Flash player, which is usable by a broader range of devices, but hasn’t been fully accepted by big developers like WordPress and ebay due to inherent security concerns).

This is the new parameter, which is to be appended to the end of the video link in the embed code:
#t=5m55s

(above, m equals minutes and s equals seconds)

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So in my previous post, the embed video code looks like this:
<iframe title=”YouTube video player” width=”560″ height=”349″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/VLuHMB438gc#t=6m17s” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen ></iframe>

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Google states that the actual starting point may vary by up to a couple seconds, so you should take this into account.

Zato #10 – Zatoichi’s Revenge

If I had time to watch a Zato, it might be this one. My tube time is currently divided between Baby Signing Time, Your Baby Can Sign, The Wiggles, Mickey Mouse (Motherfrakkin’) Clubhouse, Yo Gabba Gabba, and specially selected Sesame Street Episodes. I’ve found that many children’s shows/series get progressively worse with each season they are continued. Yo Gabba is the best example of this, but not the only one. Sesame Street followed this pattern for decades, until they started doing genius musical episodes again.