If you have outside dogs, you know they love to wallow out holes in inconvenient places seeking a cooler place to sleep.  Gypsy has made a nice little hole next to a tree close to our front porch steps.  I decided this would be a good place to dump grass clippings from from the lawn, thinking it would eventually fill the hole.

 

 

Gypsy had a different idea.  She decided the clippings make a nice nest.  So, now, I feel inclined to keep up the "nest".

 

 

Have you ever seen a YouTube video that you wish you could save to your computer, or burn to a disc, to be played later when an internet connection is perhaps not available?  Maybe you want to be able to show it to a friend who doesn't have the bandwidth to watch the video.  The demand for such software has been around ever since the inception of YouTube itself.  As a result, there is a plethora of software available on the 'net touting these capabilities. Some of them are junk, and some of them are good.  I've had a couple different programs that adequately accomplish the task.  Not too long ago, YouTube began allowing uploads of higher quality and even high-definition videos.  Of course the other video sites followed suit.  Unfortunately, my old software does not support capturing the higher quality videos.  Therefore, this weekend I set out to find a program that could.  My search led me to this little jewel, ClipFinder HD by Ashampoo.  No doubt, ClipFinder HD makes short work of downloading an HD YouTube video in a various assortment of file types.  So, in my case, problem solved. 

 

Was I surprised to see what this program can do!  Without having to navigate to the various sites, Clipfinder HD searches fifteen different popular video sites: YouTube, vimeo, Spike, veoh, Dailymotion, Google, LiveVideo, blip, Yahoo, metacafe, MySpace, sevenload, MyVideo, videu, and clipfish. (interestingly clipfish is not available here in the USA).  In other words, ClipFinder HD is an independant portal. Even more amazingly is that it performs these searches simultaneously. A broadband connection is a must, but even then, it is recommended that you leave the default setting of having it stop at the top 100 relevant videos for each site.  Otherwise it would just keep going. (I'm of the opinion that if you can't find a relevant video in the first 100, then you should consider refining your search parameters.) 

 

I could go on and on about the beautiful, intuitive interface. It allows you to rest your mouse over each thumbnail for a preview of each video, then just click any video of interest and it brings it to the forefront for you to play it and save it if you like.  All this is done without leaving the hundreds of videos in the background at your disposal. The best thing about this product is that it is completely free.  You can register it to remove the ads, but registering is free as well.  It only means providing a working email address. I can't begin to describe it any better than this YouTube video showcasing ClipFinder HD's capabilities.  Check it out: