The Raging Tech

How many remotes do you have?

I’m a BzzAgent, and as part of the BzzAgent program, I take part in word-of-mouth campaigns about products they send me to try and give my honest opinion on. The most recent one that I’ve enjoyed a lot is the Logitech Harmony One universal remote control. I have 3 remotes in the living room, not to mention two PS3 controllers. Now that the Logitech Harmony One can control all my devices (even my ghetto Durabrand Wal-mart audio receiver I got hand-me-down), I only have one, and it’s very neat.

See what other people have tried to do to get all of their devices in sync (this video is hilarious):

(Video Removed due to YouTube’s thumbnail server killing my blog’s load time.)

Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager

I totally thought I’d written about this before, but I couldn’t find one single post on this blog about Chad Vader, the Day Shift manager. If you like shows like “The Office” or “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” you’ll love this classic YouTube series whose basic premise is - what if Darth Vader’s cousin worked at a grocery store instead of commanding a Death Star?

Download High-Quality YouTube Videos

Did you know that most YouTube videos can be downloaded now as high-quality mp4 (MPEG-4) files? There have been browser and URL hacks to download files previously, and several sites and Firefox extensions would allow you to plug-in an URL to a YouTube video and it would snag the file or give you an URL to download.

Now, you can do the same thing to get the higher-quality videos. Just save the following as a bookmarklet by dragging it up to your bookmarks bar in Firefox or Safari, or right-clicking and making it a Favorite in Internet Explorer:

Download YouTube Video

Clicking on this bookmark creates a new link below the video you are watching that should be to the downloadable video. Instead of left-clicking, you’ll want to right-click and choose “Save As” and name it something with a .mp4 extension.

I ripped-off came upon these instructions from a blog called Google Operating System via a Lifehacker post, and there you can find more information, including a Greasemonkey script for Firefox that takes care of this whole business for you every time you visit YouTube.