Linking To a Particular Time in a Youtube Video

I find myself using Youtube more and more for learning, whether I'm watching a Google lecture, or a math tutor, or maybe just a long interview. Unfortunately, it becomes really difficult when you are pulled away from the computer in the middle of these long videos to find your place again. So I looked up a way to link to videos at a particular time. Luckily, youtube is on top of things.

The format is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asdf1234#t=[number of minutes]m[number of seconds]s.

Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcBECFLXmuc#t=4m36s

There are two uses for this: One, I can save my place. By entering this little hack into the URL, and then saving a bookmark, (I use www.instapaper.com, but any service or normal bookmark will work,) I can save my place in a long video. Two, this means I can send a video to a friend and not have to say "skip to two minutes in." I can let them jump directly to the portion I want them to see.

Youtube should really investigate enabling saving of location in long videos, but until they implement this, this is a great way to save your place in a long video.

Web 2.0 Site of The Day: Evernote

One of the most useful apps I've encountered in the last few years is Evernote. It has a bunch of handy features, but essentially it's a internet accesible, synced, notebook system for your computer, mobile and web. There are native clients for Blackberry, iphone, Palm Pre, Mac, and PC, but the app's core function is available for any single application that is internet or email capable. The website itself allows you to view and edit all your notes, full functionality, and you can set up an email address to email notes too.

I currently have an android phone, so to take notes I use the email address post method. One really awesome feature that evernote possesses is that it can search the text inside of images. So you can scribble down some notes on a knapkin, take a cellphone pic, and email it to your evernote account. Although it won't convert the whole image to text, you can easily find the note you wrote about "buy a new camera" by searching for "camera."

I use the app as a universal capture for things I need to remember no matter where I am. Whether I'm on my computer, walking on the street, on somebody else's desktop I can access my notes and keep track of numbers or ideas. Whiteboards, napkin breakthroughs, notes from borrowed paper, posters for design inspiration, jotted down Wifi codes... it's all available and easy to access from everywhere.

Evernote is free with ads on the clients and site, and up to 40MB per month upload from your various clients, which I have found to be sufficient so far. I highly recommend using it, it's replaced and consolidated the way I remember small items and ideas throughout my life.

Web 2.0 Site Alert: Mozilla Bespin

Keep an eye on this one. It's growing fast, and becoming more and more powerful. Mozilla Bespin is a project to create a full, textmate style text editor inside your web browser. Recent additions to the code include multiuser editing/collaboration, and more importantly, subversion/git controls. It includes preview/run functions for HTML/javascript, and is quite stable now.

One interesting feature is they plan to integrate it with sites like sourceforge.net and github, thereby making the process of checking out and making changes happen completely in the browser. Couple this power with a tablet like the promised Apple wonder or the Crunchpad, and you've got a winning combination for coding on the go.

In the past, when I've had to work on sites on the go, I've often ftp'd in through someone else's computer terminal app, ssh'd to my server and edited the files on emacs or vi. Maybe now I'll just boot up a browser.