Archives of ShowMeDo

Extracting keyword text from screencasts with OCR

Last week I played with the Optical Character Recognition system tesseract applied to video data. The goal – extract keywords from the video frames so Google has useful text to index. I chose to work with ShowMeDo‘s screencasts as many show programming in action – there’s great keyword information in these videos that can be […]

The Micropreneur Academy

Rob Walling has been working to build the Micropreneur Academy – a focused site aimed at MicroISV’s who want to grow their businesses into high-value, fast-growth affairs (original May announce). He contacted me a few months back to ask if I’d like to contribute an article on how screencasts can boost sales of software products, […]

New ShowMeDo series – OpenOffice Calc transition series for Excel users

I spent the weekend cracking through the creation of a new 12-part tutorial  series for ShowMeDo, the result is OpenOffice Calc 3.1 for Microsoft Excel users.  The overview is embedded below, links to all the episodes are further down.  This series was created whilst wearing my screencast production hat for ProCasts. The goal is to […]

Starting work on a ‘How to Screencast’ eBook

Having learned an awful lot about screencasting in the last 4 years, I’m starting work in ProCasts on developing an eBook that teaches How to Screencast.  With over 3 years of tutorial screencasting in ShowMeDo and 2 years of commercial screencasting for marketing, tech-support and training that led to ProCasts, I feel rather well-qualified to […]

OpenOffice Writer tutorials at ShowMeDo

I’ve just finished a new series for OpenOffice users entitled OpenOffice 3.1 Writer for Microsoft Word users.  This series is a part of ShowMeDo’s Club, in 45 minutes I cover 11 topics for the new Writer user aimed at easing their transition across from MS Office: Series Overview in 4 minutes (OpenOffice 3.1 for Word […]

New Python tutorials at ShowMeDo using Learning Paths

The latest development at ShowMeDo is a new learning system called Learning Paths.  The Paths are ordered collections of videos and series where individual items are pulled together to make a journey (a ‘learning trajectory’) for the learner to achieve one particular goal. The Path also allow for dependencies so ‘Fully worked Python Projects’ depends […]

ShowMeDo server move + Python 3 videos

We’ve spent the last few weeks migrating ShowMeDo to its own server after 3 years operating out of a shared box.  Moving the site was a pain as I’m not a low-level Apache hacker but all in everything seems fine now and we have extra capacity to grow. Kyran has skinned the blog so it […]

Presenting at Sussex Uni Research Day

Last week I was kindly invited to speak at a Research Day for the Infomatics dept at Sussex Uni. by Inman Harvey and Anil Seth.  The plan was to talk about ‘life after my MSc [10 years back]’ and to figure out if and how we could get more students involved with tech companies in […]

PyCon UK 2008 Write-up

We’re heading towards the end of the afternoon from a great weekend’s worth of PyCon, Right now Ted Leung is giving the key-note on Dynamic Languages.  JavaScript’s acceptance and speed improvements is being high-lighted, Ted seems to have some worries about JavaScript’s continual growth. Yesterday we had Mark Shuttleworth‘s key-note on how he wanted to […]