Groupon.com is coming to Vancouver

March 19th, 2010

Groupon.com is a new coupon concept that is coming to Vancouver. They’ve been doing heavy web advertising today, I guess they are geo-targeting the Lower Mainland. The concept, is that a store offers a discount, usually a discounted gift certificate such as $12 for a $25 Gift Card, and Groupon members buy-in. The offer only goes live if a minimum number of Groupon members joins the deal. It’s been in the USA for a while, I think I heard about it a few months ago.

I did a quick Google search to find out example deals, this article about the San Jose site came up.

I signed up, so that I can see which local retailers give Groupon.com a try. If you’re into new marketing concepts, or if you are a retailer yourself, sign up for your own Groupon.com Vancouver account – yes, I get a referral credit for that link.

I’m keeping an eye on Groupon in Vancouver. If it hits critical mass, I suspect that one or more of my retail clients will be experimenting on Groupon.com sooner rather than later.

Recording from a Hauppauge HVR-950Q USB TV Tuner to VirtualDub

March 6th, 2010

The 2010 Vancouver Olympics are over. IMHO, they were awesome. Unfortunately, it’s time to get back to work. Almost.

I want to record some video from Shaw On Demand of a curling event that I attended live. I have access to a Hauppauge HVR-950Q USB TV tuner – a great piece of hardware paired with terrible software.

I had multiple issues, but in the end, as I type this, I have my old laptop capturing the video from the composite (i.e. “RCA” video) input from the Shaw Digital Box.

I started this adventure on my day-to-day laptop, a 1.5 year old laptop running Vista. On this computer, the WinTV 6 software could not properly display the signal from the composite input. It would get about 1 frame per second, plus some really weird “chipmunkesque” spurts of audio. It was unusable to view the composite feed, never mind trying to record from it. I then tried the newly released WinTV 7 software from the Hauppauge website. It was worse – it is even more bloated, even slower, and still unable to view the composite input properly. Note: I have previously watched the Over-the-Air HDTV channels with this unit, so it’s specific to the composite input, and it might be specific to my laptop. There is a big difference between OTA HDTV and composite – an OTA signal is compressed MPEG2 and the unit passes it directly over the USB to the TV tuning software, whereas, the composite is fed in some sort of raw format that requires massive USB bandwidth – i.e. there is no on-device MPEG encoding.

I tried VirtualDub next, the free video capture software that I’ve used from time-to-time for years. VDub could preview the signal fine, and with much less processor overhead. Unfortunately, when I tried to start the capture, I kept getting this error: “The Capture device does not support the video format”. I eventually find a solution to this error, but only after I tried my ancient laptop.

I tried using my ancient HP Celeron 1.1Ghz laptop. It runs XP, and my theory was that the Hauppauge software just doesn’t like Vista. This might be true. I was able to use the WinTV 6 software on the old laptop fine… eventually. You have to run the install, and the setup from an administrative login. Otherwise, the software will crash hard, without giving any clues as to why. Watching the composite input in WinTV 6 used a lot of the CPU, but it is a 5 year old laptop, so it’s all relative. It was unfortunately, far too slow to do a live encoding to MPEG.

So, I knew that the composite signal worked reasonably well. I tried VirtualDub on the ancient computer. I got the same error when trying to start the capture. The fix? The trick is to look at the VirtualDub device properties to see in which format the preview was coming in. In my case, it’s 720×480 UYVY. Once I set this on my custom capture format, VirtualDub worked fine. I’m not able to encode to MPEG live, I’m using HuffYUV and 10s of GB of hard drive space to capture 2 hours of video, but it will work. I’ll have to transcode to MPEG4 later.

In the end, I could probably have used VirtualDub on the first laptop that I tried now that I knew how to get a compatible capture format. According to Google, there aren’t many people who have had these problems… I feel special. Sometimes I wish things would “just work.”

Super Bowl XLIV Bingo Cards Word List – 2010

January 25th, 2010

Wow, we have dozens of people using print-bingo.com to create Super Bowl themed bingo cards already!

This is a reminder blog post about our template bingo word list for Super Bowl bingo cards. You’ll find the list on print-bingo.com. All you need to do to create your free printable bingo cards is click submit a couple times and our custom PDF for you will appear for you to print.

This year’s Super Bowl is on Feb. 7, 2010.

As always, at print-bingo.com, you can customize the cards so that you have exactly the terms you want. The Super Bowl themed word list is not specific to any given year, so you might want to insert a few extra terms like “XLIV”, “New Orleans”, “Saints”, “Indianapolis”, “Colts”, etc. Oh, and the actual teams – once they’re decided, of course.

Enjoy the game, halftime, and the ads!

A Print-Bingo.com Word List about Vancouver, Canada

January 25th, 2010

For the next couple months, our hometown, the fabulous city of Vancouver, BC, Canada will be in the news a lot.

Teachers around the world will be looking for a good word list about Vancouver, so we made one. Visit print-bingo.com for our template Vancouver, BC, Canada, word list which is great for bingo cards, and other educational activities. We’ve mixed in some geographic words, landmarks, transit names, historic neighbourhood names, and more. Feel free to customize it to fit your needs!

Basic access to print-bingo.com is free. However, hundreds of people every year decide to upgrade for only $10 to get a whole bunch of extra features.

P.S. Hey, look at that, an entire blog post about Vancouver without using the “O” word. :)

A great user generated video about Naque for Unique Names

January 21st, 2010

We were absolutely floored to stumble upon this great video about the Naque for Unique Names website!

This clever young fellow, DamageTutorials, seems to really enjoy creating his usernames with unique-names.com.

Not only is it a better quality video than we would ever be able to make, coming from us it would literally be self-promotion. When this fellow does it, it’s much more believable.

Thanks DamageTutorials! You made our day.

Update: Rats, it appears that DamageTutorials’ YouTube account has been deactivated. We’re hosting the video here on the blog, we can’t find contact information for DamageTutorials… so if you happen to see this, drop us a line.

[hana-flv-player video=”http://blog.perceptus.ca/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/youtube-unique-names.com-damage-tutorial-f_0019ba.flv”
width=”425″
height=”344″
description=”DamageTuturials’ video about unique-names.com”
player=”4″
autoload=”true” autoplay=”false”
loop=”false” autorewind=”true”
/]

Here’s the original YouTube video embed, though, it probably will never work again:

Check out the video DamageTutorial’s – Unique names – Thinks of a username for you in seconds on YouTube. Make sure that you turn on your speakers, the narration is quite good.