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Here are some interesting links from today:

• Burn almost any video file to a playable DVD
  Putting any old video file - like the DivX/Xvid-encoded videos you’ve downloaded with BitTorrent - onto a DVD to play on your TV can be a daunting task. There’s plenty of software that tackles this sort of thing for a price, but as a lover of open source software, free’s always my first choice.Luckily for all of us, authoring playable DVDs from just about any video file has gotten a lot easier in the open source community. This week I’m going to show you how to burn those downloaded TV shows to a DVD you can play in your living room using the free (as in speech), open source application, DVD Flick.
• Chinese Doctors Officially Classify Symptoms of Internet Addiction
  The Beijing Health Ministry is soon to adopt “internet addiction” as a disorder along with compulsive gambling and alcoholism in the official diagnostic manual. Doctor Tao Ran, who treats sufferers at Beijing’s Military General Hospital, says the threshold is around six hours a day and one of the following symptoms in the past three months: “yearning to get back online, mental or physical distress, irritation and difficulty concentrating or sleeping.” So, um, yeah, I’m addicted, along with ten percent of users under eighteen in China, according to a study cited by a state official.

In case you haven’t seen one of the 50 different DTV commercials that are on every other hour or you need more information on how it’s going to work… check out this video.

If you haven’t heard of the JingProject, head over to the site right now.  I’ve been using Jing for several months (since the initial beta) and I use it all the time.

Jing is a free product by TechSmith, the makers of the premier screen capture product Camtasia Studio and screenshot app SnagIt.

Here at my day job I use it to make little How-To videos or document a process.  It’s so much easier for me to just record the steps with Jing and send a link to the video to an end user, colleague or friend than to write out the steps in an email precisely enough for them to follow.  With Jing’s instant publishing integration it takes no time to upload the video to the web and send the link or save it locally as documentation.

Jing does have a 5 minute limit so therefore is only good for quick, informal screen captures.  If you’re wanting to make a longer or more polished video stick with Camtasia.

Here’s a quick lesson on how Jing works and the ideas that spawned it.  Take a look.

Just before the arrival of my 2nd daughter I launched a new Wordpress site so we’d be able to keep family and friends up to date with the latest pictures and goings on.  We’d previously tried this but after a couple weeks it would start to fizzle to one post a week, then one a month and so on to basically a dead site.

The first couple sites were ones I was building in Dreamweaver with static pages that all had to be updated by hand. Part of the reason in the past that we didn’t just use a blog site was because we wanted pictures and sensitive information to be password protected.  Family blogs are different in that respect. You aren’t looking to get huge viewership, you just want to be able to share private photos, videos and stories that you wouldn’t share with the entire world.

Long story short it was never easy enough to post, much less for my wife to be able to post, there were security issues and password communication problems with family, etc.  There were just too many obstacles to overcome to create a successful family blog…  until now.

Finally! This time we got it right.

Thanks to the help of this post on Simply Basic, I decided on Wordpress and a pile of plugins. Surprisingly it works nearly flawlessly, is easy to use, my wife can post with ease (and therefore posts more often), it’s secured, family can all have their own login, and much, much, more.

Here are some more details on setting up your own secure Family Blog.
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