Donald Belcham and his collection of 80s videos aren’t the only ones who can supply you with hours of mindless recreation!! I am about to share with you the biggest news to hit technology since the concept of the Turing Machine.

Recently (as in, 5 minutes ago) I found out that there are extensions to Mozilla Firefox (and come on, if you're not using it right now, surely this will convince you to switch) that will allow you to:

• download Youtube and other embedded video straight to your hard drive
• download any flash file or embedded content (e.g. flash games, etc.)

The extension to download YouTube videos, Quicktime videos, any videos is called VideoDownloader.  Look for a small icon in the corner of your Firefox taskbar when you’re on, for example, a Youtube page, and click it to get going.

The extension to download any sort of embedded content is called DownloadEmbedded – it works just like the VideoDownloader except in this case it shows up as a red arrow in the Mozilla taskbar and allows you to download any embedded content. NICE!

So, how do you play these things?

For the Youtube videos, there’s a small app called FLVPlayer that will allow you to playback the YouTube videos (or any other video in Flash Video format) that you've downloaded.

As for the Flash files – if you don’t have the full Flash suite installed, you can always just associate the SWF extension with Mozilla Firefox to load them directly, since SwiffPlayer treats the space bar as "frame forward".  However, definitely use SwiffPlayer if you want to cheat your way through the Flash games by fast-forwarding! 

Now, since I don’t really want to leave you hanging with no pointers to unbridled amusement:

• The pilot for Ben Stiller’s “Heat Vision and Jack”, starring Jack Black and Owen Wilson.  I should warn you that if you don't like Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Knight Rider, or Owen Wilson, then a) you won't like this video, and b) you suck.
• A Flash levers game - it’s easier for you if I don’t explain it.  As a hint, if it looks like you've run out of space to hang things, try to find an alternative placement for one of the items.
  

More posts to come but for now I am busy downloading everything in sight!