Youtube Downloader - Ta ta ta ta da DAAAAA! PUPPY POWER!

God Bless YouTube!

Where else can you find entertainment, education and countless kitty/puppy videos?

But what if you wish to preserve the video, downloading for archive purposes or access it from Internet-incapable devices?

Start by installing youtube-dl:

$ sudo apt-get install youtube-dl

Next, navigate to your desired video and copy the URL; e.g.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wtfo43yV8rA

Lastly, execute youtube-dl with specified URL:

$ youtube-dl http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wtfo43yV8rA

The result will be a Macromedia Flash Video file.  Convert to your preferred file format using Ffmeg and Bob's Your Uncle.

Trello -- Get Your Scrum On

For more than a year I was on the receiving end of 'why is your scrumboard not electronic' line of questioning from my team, my leadership, my customers and pretty much anyone else who had an opinion on the matter.

Our scrum room looked like this:

Despite making my living utilizing tech, it proved difficult to defend the 'old school' post-its and whiteboards.  There were a few things that compelled me to keep my distance from Agile tool sets.  For those of you that utilize more sophisticated tool chains, good on ya and I'm not implying there is anything wrong with them.

Licensing costs, risk of loss of proprietary information in cloud-based systems, feature sets that I trust we'd never use (e.g. burn-down charts and metrics) and most importantly I personally felt the  satisfaction of disclosing your task completion and physically moving a task from 'in progress' to 'complete' with a sense of accomplishment.  My resistance was reinforced when participating in sprints led by other scrum masters that used 'MS Excel' (I know, wrong tool) and the tone of the meeting became more a status meeting than a scrum.

I yearned for a scrum room with a wall-sized electronic smart board; electronic equivalent of post-its and baby, Trello is pretty close to what I wanted.

Free to use, flexible, and pretty much what the doctor ordered.  I invite you to take a look.  I've found myself using it at work, home and play and use it from such mundane tasks as packing luggage items to coordinating my blog backlog.

Take a peak, you'll be glad you did.

http://trello.com