Saturday, February 10, 2007

Helmet Surfing - Stop Motion with people

Christopher and I made this movie after seeing Tony vs. Paul:

Download the Helmet Surfing movie here.
QuickTime 7, iTunes 6 or VLC 0.84 will play the file.

It took about 3 hours to make and 2 hours to edit. I wrote the music in a day and the credits song is the first song I ever wrote.
I hope you enjoy it and find it entertaining.

Sunday, December 24, 2006

Christmas rapping

Hannah, Andrew and Christopher (H.A.C. for short) made a Christmas Eve rap.

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Thursday, October 26, 2006

Christopher's Buttons

This blog is up for voting in the vloggies in the "children's" category - do please vote for us.

This movie is one the boys made about 5 years ago - Christopher invented some magic buttons, and they started working...


Download the Christopher's Buttons movie here.
QuickTime 7, iTunes 6 or VLC 0.84 will play the file.



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Saturday, June 17, 2006

Robogames report

We went to the robogames today:

Download the Robogames movie here.
QuickTime 7, iTunes 6 or VLC 0.84 will play the file.

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Saturday, June 10, 2006

Review of Casablanca's Cafe

Casablanca's Cafe is extraordinary

Jun 10, 2006 by Andrew Marks
Casablanca's Café
1185 Lincoln Ave
San José, CA 95125
(408) 993 8636

★★★★☆ Casablanca's Café is an extraordinary Persian restaurant in down town Willow Glen. I had the Hummus sampler and a Gyro Sandwich (lamb, red cabbage, lettuce, cucumber, tzatziki in lavosh bread) which was very nice Although the food is grade-A the actual environment is slightly drab with only four ornamental fish on the wall and two nice paintings that look like a window in a beach hut. What I think made it special is that you can buy assorted Persian delicacies on a shelf near the counter. I strongly recommend Casablanca's Café.

Friday, April 28, 2006

Apple is holding my data hostage

When my boys' videos started getting some interest via their podcast and the Make film festival, I got 2 emails in a row from Apple's mac.com service saying I was exceeding bandwidth limits, and then I was cut off.

Back when I worked for Apple, they launched mac.com as a free service, and I bagged our family names in their namespace. The integration of iDisk into the OS made it a simple way to post files to the web, and I used it for both work-related sample code and personal bits and pieces.

Later on, Apple did a bait and switch, and started charging for mac.com. I decided the cost wasn't too onerous, and we could keep the email addresses and the hosting. It costs $100 a year, and $10 for each extra email address, but the switching cost seemed high, as we have a lot of friends who use those email addresses, and the hosting integreation is handy.

Later on, I kept getting 'your email account is full' crap, and pointed out that gmail offered 100 times as much storage for free, and they later relaxed the terms a bit.

Then came this, from noreply@apple.com:

Dear .Mac Member,

Please be aware that you have reached 100% of your .Mac data transfer quota for this two-week period and we have turned off external access to your site(s). Attempts to visit there will produce a page explaining that your site has gone over data transfer quota and the material requested cannot be displayed.

You can still publish to your site(s), but you will not be able to view any changes on the Internet until your site is reactivated. Reactivation will happen on the 1st or 16th of the month, whichever comes first. To review your data transfer usage, click here. To increase your data transfer quota by purchasing additional storage space, click here.* For more information see Help.


I thought 'OK, I'll move my stuff to other hosting, and redirect my links' - but the iDisk 'Sites' folder is also disabled on my machine, so I can't get at my files to move them.

So, if some of my posts here are missing movies or images, that's why.
Amazon's S3 service is looking interesting, both Google and Microsoft are preparing hosting services, and there are a plethora of video hosting sites like blip.tv.

Apple's terms are uncompetitive, and stopping me from accessing my own files until I pay is a nasty kind of blackmail.

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Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Andrew and Christopher won the Make Movie Festival


Andrew and Christopher
Originally uploaded by Kevin Marks.
Bre Pettis writes:
With so many great entries it was hard to pick a winner, but the Marks Brothers' Fun with Dry Ice shined through. Their top notch explanations of how to have fun with dry ice was really great. The grand prize is a box set of Make Magazines signed by the Make Magazine staff, a Make: t-shirt for each brother, and Make: license plate covers, which they'll have to wait until they can drive to use!

The boys, Rosie and I are dead chuffed.

Friday, December 30, 2005

The Magic Hamburger

A magical claymation:

Download the Magic Hamburger movie here.
QuickTime 7, iTunes 6 or VLC 0.84 will play the file.

Wednesday, December 28, 2005

Fun with Dry Ice

Andrew and Christopher demonstrate fun things to do with dry ice:

Download the Dry Ice movie here.
QuickTime 7, iTunes 6 or VLC 0.84 will play the file.

Friday, May 27, 2005

Bacon Bacon Bacon Movie

Andrew and Kevin made a movie while cooking breakfast:

Download Bacon movie here.
It's in homage to the badger movie


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Monday, July 05, 2004

mistake on mum's blog

Well as some of you may know my mum has started blogging. Anyway I read her blog and wrote a comment on it. I wrote "I can tell that you take good care of your children but since I am your child I live it". I made two mistakes and my mum got it rid of it on the site.


P.S. Maybe I should check my comments more carefully.


Written in Andrew Marks' own hand

Saturday, January 31, 2004

Almost Dead Andrew

1. I almost break my rib cage
2. I almost break my wrist
3. I cut my foot badly
4. I faint from overdose of helium and almost broke my skull



MORAL: that which does not kill me makes me stronger (Dad told me that)

Wednesday, November 26, 2003

Donate to Rupert - the True Survivor

Mummy and I were so cross that the others threw Rupert off Survivor last week that we asked Daddy to set up a website for him. Here it is:
Donate to Rupert - the True Survivor
I drew the picture.

We made a t-shirt too.

Monday, August 11, 2003

Apple Camp

I went to Apple Camp with Christopher - here we are

Tuesday, July 29, 2003

Confusing the Barber

One day my dad went to the hairdressers. My brother went inside and got a lollipop from the barber. So, I went in in and the barber gave me a book.
Then my brother came in again.
The barber looked around, very surprised, and said "OH! There's two of them!"