I came across this handy little utility from a company called Humanized by way of Michaels Binary Bonsai blog.

Enso basically gives you some of the power of a command line shell but in a much more user friendly and accessible manner, you hold down the caps lock key and type out the first few letters of a command which will start bringing up auto complete options, you simply let go of the caps lock and the command is fired. Enso comes with lots of built in function like application launching, switching windows and firing off google searches. You can also add your own commands.

Take a look at the promotional video on the Homepage.

After appearing in just about every other publication going as well as making it onto the BBC’s newsnight programme, Ian has managed to make it into this months Fortune magazine awesome. The article with Ian in is in a section called “What’s Next?” makes me wonder whether they’ve cribbed this from Roo’s blog name

This weekend Hanan and Myself took a trip up to the ye olde town of Warwick to attend the evening party for Holly and Michaels wedding. I only met Holly towards the end of last year but since then we’ve become good friends and I was honoured to be invited along.

The event was in a fantastic old Tudor building called the Lord Leycester Hospital, there wasn’t a right angle or straight wall in sight, with beautiful warped wooden beams and a string Shakespearean feel to it.

It was great to finally meet Michael and talk to the rest of Hollys family who were all very hospitable as all true Scots are

Ian was there earlier on in the day and took some great pictures of the happy couple.

I’m running on a Windows XP machine so my choice of toolset is going to be dictated by that, I have plenty of friends who rave about the Video editing capabilities of Macs and Quick edit pro but i’m not to splash out without good reason besides I recently aquired a rather well endowed dual core intel machine with a kick ass graphics card, for err… no other reason than i managed to melt my laptop through excessive SecondLife usage… ahem

Soo, after extensive research… i.e. quick google search followed by search of SecondLife forums and a quick jaunt on the awesome Machinima.com I chose to use Fraps for video capture and Adobe Premiere Elements for editing. After being a bit suspicious to start with of Elements; fearing It was vastly cut down, I discovered to my pleasant surprise that for such a cheap product it is amazingly full featured and allows editing of video in real time plus layering of multiple video tracks on top of each other, I got to grips with it within an hour or so and was very pleased with the results.

Recently my evenings have been taken up exploring the medium of Machinima, in particular machinima made using SecondLife. It’s been a fun experience trying to transfer any skill I’ve picked up from photography into composing interesting moving images.

Using a virtual world like SecondLife to experiment in opens up a whole world of possibilities that just aren’t feasible in real life, for one i’m strongly influenced by anything i see in the professional domain of any medium; so my immediate urge is to go out and take dramatic sweeping camera shots that would require some serious equipment to pull off, with Machinima I can do this at virtually zero cost. In the real world I’d also need actors, cameras and props. In SL I can build all the props myself and I can control the actors to a certain extent.

Of course the end result probably won’t have the same impact without proper actors and recorded dialogue, but that’s not the point. Machinima is all about freedom of expression and having the simulated environment to allow the mind to wander free and be creative.