Birmingham Web Designer Jeremy Flint blogs here. He works for Kinetic Communications. He organizes events and programs for IPSA. He takes pictures and posts them on Flickr. He also blogs about Hiking and Mississippi State Sports when he has the time. He recommends Dreamhost for all your hosting needs. Make sure you grab the RSS Feed.

BarCampBirmingham2 is planned for April 12 at Innovation Depot in Downtown Birmingham. BarCampBirmingham is a user generated conference created around an open, participatory workshop-event, with content provided by participants. Those participating choose the session topics for the day and then present to each other. It’s free. It’s fun. It’s a great way to meet the local technology community.

Innovation Depot has generously donated use of their excellent facilities for the event, and sponsorships from Google, Microsoft and IPSA will help make this a great event. New folks are adding their name to the Wiki everyday, proposing new sessions, and offering to help in any way possible.

If you are planning on attending, make sure you visit the BarCampBirmingham wiki and add your name to the list. You can also subscribe to the BarCampBirmingham Google Group and follow BarCampBirmingham on Twitter to keep up with discussion about the event. Most importantly, you can talk about it on your blog, in your office and with your friends.

We had the first planning meeting today for BarCampBirmingham2. Things are coming together nicely. Our tenative date for the event is April 12. If you are interested in participating, either by attending or helping to plan, make sure you head on over to the official Wiki and add your name to the list.

You can also join the BarCampBirmingham Google Group and follow BarCampBham on Twitter to stay in the loop on the latest updates.

We hope to have our location locked down soon.

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It is the night that makes Apple geeks everywhere giddy with the anticipation of a 5 year old on Christmas eve. Tomorrow, Steve Jobs will give his annual MacWorld keynote. Sure, he gives keynotes at the WWDC each summer, but the Macworld keynote is where he usually introduces the big stuff. For instance, he introduced the iPhone at last year’s Macworld conference.

In the weeks and months leading up to Macworld, rumors fly around the web like moths to a flame, some credible and some just downright ridiculous. This year, the main rumor seems to be that Apple will release its first “sub-notebook” in quite some time. The last notebook that would fall into the classification was the 12″ Powerbook. This new notebook could be a mere upgrade to the existing MacBook line or a completely new product. Some even hope it is the long-rumored Mac Tablet (which is doubtful).

Some other things that are flying around the rumor mill:

• Updated iPhone (16GB edition)
• New Cinema Displays (iSight included)
• iTunes Video Rentals
• Apple TV 2.0 (to rent said videos from iTunes)
• iPhone SDK (for killer apps that won’t break your phone when you update it)

So anyway, tomorrow will be a long day of working, watching the live blogs of those in attendance and watching and re-watching the video that is released later in the day.

With the holidays in full swing, my son has already participated in two Christmas programs - one at our church and another at his school. I filmed both of them using my Canon ZR700 in widescreen format. I had a few people at church ask me about getting a DVD of that program made, so I got the tape out the other night and started importing video. But something was wrong.

The video was being imported at 4:3, stretching the 16:9 source video. I looked through every preference panel I could find in iMovie and saw no where that I could set the video source to be Widescreen. It took some digging through the Apple discussion forums to come up with the answer, so I thought I would detail it here for everyone.

After you start iMovie (I am using iMovie HD 6), start a new project, which brings up the Create Project dialog box. At the bottom of this box, there is a small, dark gray arrow with “Video format” next to it. Clicking this arrow will reveal a list of formats to choose from, including DV Widescreen. Select this option if you are using a non-HD camera.

That is pretty much it. Its a simple option, just not very obvious.