Category: tech

This is by far the simplest and easiest way to convert your DVDs which you have purchased for use on the video iPod or PSP for Free.

Follow the PDF guide for Windows linked on the left hand side of this page http://roflmaocopterzor.googlepages.com/

The system uses two free apps, DVD43 and Handbrake, a cross platform converter. With the vast amount of crap programs out there charging for this, these 2 free apps not only do the job, they do it really easily. With presets for many popular formats it is super simple.

Have a shiny new nVidia 6800GT video card? Excitedly fire it up and try to watch a full screen DVD movie? Get lame ass black interlacing lines though whole thing only at full screen? Get pissed off that you spent that much to not be able to watch full screen DVDs?

Try going to Guru3D.com and download and install the Forceware drivers 71.20 for XP. It worked for me and made me much happier with my expensive video card. But, I have yet to see if all my games still work appropriately with it.

Trying to find an available iPod Shuffle in Seattle has become a bit of a pain in the ass. I would normally just order online but I wanted to get it now as a gift (and use my apple store 10$ off).

List of stores that are currently out

Apple Store, U Village/SouthCenter/Bell Square
Circuit City
The Mac Store
Target, Northgate/SouthCenter

I thought I would pick one up for the new mom in ths house but everyone else in this town is against me on that idea.

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Jobs intro'd the Mac mini today, as you have probably seen. Man that thing is tiny, it comes with no keyboard or mouse, so add 50$-300$ for a KVM switcher and you are off. In reality the price is not that good compared to having to buy all the parts to make this functional (256MB come on) and the price of a nice iMac, but still these are dang cool. The design is 95% of why this is a cool product, and that design extend even to the box, which Jobs even showed on stage.

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After receiving a Unexpected Kernel Mode Trap error on Win2k startup recently my system was down for the count. It sucked, and a search online to the msft site pointed to a hardware issue.

It turns out is was the video drivers, uninstalled the current ATI drivers and reinstalled back to 3.9 and the issue was corrected. Word to the wise, this information could have saved me days of removing hardware and turning services on and off...

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Grey Tuesday - Online Protest

I heard this album recently and it is dang good. It combines some moving Beatles tracks with Jay-Z's laid back but rough rhymes. It did make me think about the issue of creating something an leaving it to the public to deal with it what they will.

From the Site----
Historic Online Protest
It's time for music fans to stand up and demand change from the music industry's copyright cartel.

DJ Danger Mouse created a remix of Jay-Z's the Black Album and the Beatles White Album, and called it the Grey Album. Jay-Z's record label, Roc-A-Fella, released an a capella version of his Black Album specifically to encourage remixes like this one. But despite praise from music fans and major media outlets like Rolling Stone ("an ingenious hip-hop record that sounds oddly ahead of its time") and the Boston Globe (which called it the "most creatively captivating" album of the year), EMI has sent cease and desist letters demanding that stores destroy their copies of the album and websites remove them from their site. EMI claims copyright control of the Beatles 1968 White Album.

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Winnipeg Sun: Sports - Yankees deal for A-Rod

The yankees will surely kill this year, will be interesting to watch him play third and make it work, but the fact that he gets to link his website to the Yankee's site as part of his new contract is a bit funny.

In exchange for the alterations, which devalue the present-day value of the contract by $5 million, Rodriguez will receive a hotel suite on road trips, have the right to link his website to the Yankees' site and get a guarantee that the deferred money won't be wiped out by a work stoppage.

UPDATE 11/30/04 : For FireFox 1.0+
Go to http://spellbound.sourceforge.net/

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Getting textarea spell checking to work with Firefox 0.8: blogipity: February 10, 2004 05:09 PM

A number of people have reported difficulties getting this extension to work in the new Firefox 0.8 release. I've gotten the extension up and running on my Windows XP machine by doing the following:

- Make a copy of the composer.xpt file in the Firebird components directory
- Uninstall Firebird
- Grab the stuff I want from my old profile (bookmarks, etc), which is still labeled Phoenix, and then delete the profile
- Install Firefox, but not starting the program immediately after the install
- Place a copy composer.xpt into the Firefox components directory
- Start Firefox
- Install spellcheck.xpi from:mozilla.org
- Shut down Firefox
- Install fromspellcheckerfe0_4_0.xpi : This site
(You can also get the composer.xpt file here as well in case you've deleted it)
- Shut down Firefox again
- Start Firefox

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Pixar to End Talks with Disney

"After ten months of trying to strike a deal with Disney, we're moving on," said Pixar CEO Steve Jobs. "We've had a great run together -- one of the most successful in Hollywood history -- and it's a shame that Disney won't be participating in Pixar's future successes."

This is a pretty big deal I think, it will surely hurt Disney, but I think Disney has been in preparation for this, since they recently drop development of actual animation in favor of digital. It will be interesting to who picks up distribution, and if Pixar can continue to compete with Dreamworks.

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Mars Rover Image Archive

JPL's running archive of Mars Rover images in one spot.

Don't fool yourself the new iPod mini is dope, and priced right, I cannot believe that there are so many analysts out there saying that it is over priced at $249 for 4GB, when on the same day Rio introduced the same thing (save usability and design) for exactly the same price. Gruber & 37s are right, the small size and usability trump everything else on the market. When the 1st iPod came out it was 5GB's and $399, yes $399, (people including me thought that was ridiculous, but look at it today, people buy cool shit, it gets better, smaller, cheaper and it rules the friggin' market. Comparisons to the PowerMac Cube are weak at best, I feel like the whole problem with that was upgradeability in relation to price, we are talking above the $1000 price point, not $250, plus it needed to be an ultimately functional device, a computer, the iPod in the end just needs to be cool. Just wait, you will be loading the latest song that the jack ass down the block made the day before in GarageBand and that you downloaded of iTunes for 99c by next year, and you can write an article on how well it all works.

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Purchasing electronics on the Internet has always been something I have thought of as a good thing. There is so much research that you can do, good prices, and tons of actual user reviews. Once we decided we might like to get a camcorder (to go with our new mac with iMovie) I started looking on-line, and made a stop at the new Fry's in Renton (which was a huge let down as far as pricing), the decision to get MiniDV was pretty easy, the prices are great, its digital so it works great with the mac. It seems looking online that the Sony TRV-22 (review | Prices) gets the vote for the most passionate users, and reviewers out there as far as having great picture quality, low noise pick up, and great features. We borrowed a friends TVR22 and gave it a whirl on a trip to San Diego, brought it home and made a little iMovie. Good stuff overall, the buttons changing settings and such are touch screen buttons on the LCD view-finder which I found very cool, but not everyone does.

But after actually walking around (or actually not) with the camcorder it became apparent to me that the only way I was actually going to use one was if it was as small as possible and be easy to lug around and pop out and on and then be put away. Eventually we settled on the Elura 50 (review | prices).

Size became the most important issue for me. I wanted to minimize buying something that I would not use, and I think keeping it small will help that. Sony also has a line as well as JVC of smaller camcorders based on he MiniDV format (Sony also has the newer, less compatible, smaller and cooler format MicroDV that uses MPEG-2 compression like DVD to get 60 mins on the smaller tapes), buy the Canon was less than the Sony's and I think Canon makes better lenses than JVC (no offense Glen). Most complains from the MiniDV cameras, it seems like from looking online, come from there low light quality images, (and still quality, which I could really care less about) but in the end I am not a pro-movie maker and even a 40% hit is the quality of low light shooting is better than lugging around a larger camera on the family vacation.

Some valuable sites and services while looking were:
REVIEWS:
Cnet
Camcorder Info: Great Resource(but they love the TRV22)
DV Spot

PRICING:
DealCam
Foogle
Shopping.com

SELLER INFO:
ResellerRatings.com
Appearantly there is a pretty shady side to the cheap NY online retailers where they advertise them cheap, make you call to confirm, try and sell you extras and then tell you it is out of stock.

And I ended up getting it from Onecall.com in Spokane, even though I had to pay tax on it, at $550-30$+Free shipping - 1%= a pretty good deal.

Still waiting on "next day" delivery by the way (notice Spokane to Seattle via Memphis, wtf fedex?).

FedEx take two, still waiting on "Next Day Priority" notice they removed the expected delivery date...

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There are only a few times when a situation exists where you are waiting to hand a company money if they would just come out with a product you know you want, yet don't see anywhere on the horizon, and even fewer when that product is no blatantly obvious that is painful to not see that product on the market. I am not so sure that I want to get into the issue of why Apple, stubbornly, does not have a multi-button mouse, but the fact that they spent R&D creating a beautiful Bluetooth mouse for all their machines with built in BT and made it only one button is simply astonishing.

So in my frustration, I decided to see what one could look like, and if it could retain the mac look and left/right functionality, and 5 mintues later, voila...

A 2 button plus scroll wheel option:

And a 5 button option:
(after having back/forward mouse buttons I cannot go back)

The point is that I am sure it can be done, it can be made left/right compatible and only serves to help the user, I cannot agree that there are users out there that would be confused by a 2 button mouse or a scroll wheel.

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ok so I am in the Airport heading to Phoenix, for a very sad event, but I am wirelessly connected her at the Airport dialed into over VPN to my work, doing time-sheets, via http, with Safari, playing the new ben folds album over iTunes and downloading some new albums to listen to on the flight, Is this dope or what? This machine is amazing I have to say. I am connected via Way-port here at Sea-Tac. Open laptop, open internet and it goes straight to the way-port page, $6.95 for one day until midnight, not a terrible deal I'd say, ok, back to work.

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The 15" Pb is up in the house and Apple is the dopest man. This damn thing striaght up dialed into the wireless network with NO pain, installed extra 512mb smooth, and bought music off itunes and burned CD all with no effort. Apple makes one hell of a product.

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Mac OS Rumors

"Word on the street is that new 'books are already being manufactured and that all three new models should be shipping in quantity by September, at least one of them significantly sooner. This suggests we have no more than a couple of weeks to wait, and probably much less."

Alright so I am waiting till September becasue it would kill me to buy one of these things they have out there now and then have them jack me one month later with better equipment.

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Amazon Light is making one of the most usable shopping sites on the web uber usable.

Amazon Light

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I am having the hardest time trying to buy a new computer. I love macs, I am a designer come on. But a few years back I had to switch to a PC and have now pretty much made the switch completely. I had a pretty hard time with organizing my files at first it was odd, a bit like after you move houses or cities and I could not find anything and everything seemed totally unorganized, though after a while I got used to it.

The family computer, an original bondi imac 233, was co-oped by the wife who now uses it for her work but it is showing its age, maxed at 128mb RAM and a new 40gb hard drive, up from the original 4GB! Can you believe they put 4GB drives in computers :) So it is getting slow and slower, and will not run the pretty new OS X, and overall we need a new family computer. She wants a mac. She needs Photoshop, Freehand, Dreamweaver and Office. For Mac. I need all the same apps for the PC. Mucho dinero dog.

So anyway, what do you buy? I want a 12" powerbook, she is cool with that, I mean if you buy a desktop you can never make it a portable, no you can't nerd. But if you buy laptop you can always make it a desktop. We don't need no G5 anyway. But I read that the G4 as not all that much better than the G3 for non-altivec inhanced apps. And there is only $250 between the 12" G3 iBook and the 12" G4 powerbook...

Then there is the iMac and eMac. Both great machines it seems to me thought the eMac is a huge thing to put on your desktop, you can pick up a 1GHz G4 for $999 monitor attached, CDRW, 17" screen, granded it needs more RAM, but respectable deal. And the iMac at $1799 better graphics card, better footprint, more RAM and such, but still not expandable and $800 more, for esentailly the same thing.

In the end I guess I am waiting to get a newly reved 15" AiPb if they come out with one here b4 the end of the month, but geez then there will be deals on this round of TiBooks, what am I gonna do?...

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An interesting article that I never saw, from harvard law.

HBS Working Knowledge: Innovation: Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos meet "Ginger"

But Jobs was still shaking his head at Bezos's suggestion. Because of the Internet, he said, slow was no longer possible. People would learn about Ginger in a flash of bits and bytes, and would want one now. So a small launch in a foreign place was foolish, because if the machine was unavailable in the United States, the company would blow its chance for $100 million of free publicity in its biggest market. Plus, Singapore was a nest of pirates, and the company would end up spending a fortune fighting them. If the company wanted a slow, controlled launch, better to start on a handful of U.S. college campuses.
"If you show this to Hennessy," Jobs said to Doerr, referring to John L. Hennessy, president of Stanford University and a world-class engineer, "he'll shit in his pants." Evidently Hennessy did that more readily than Jobs did. "And if you offer to give him a hundred of them if he'll run a safety study and a usage study, that's a done deal in ten minutes," continued Jobs. "You do that at ten colleges and maybe at Disney, so people can see them but not buy them."
But he warned that even this sort of slow launch was filled with dangers. If one stupid kid at Stanford hurt himself using was filled with dangers. If one stupid kid at Stanford hurt himself using a Ginger and then announced online that the machine sucked, the company was sunk, because there was no way to control that or counter it if people couldn't ride one for themselves. With a big fast launch, on the other hand, a few malcontents wouldn't be heard above the general hoopla. "I understand the appeal of a slow burn," he concluded, "but personally I'm a big-bang guy." For the first time that day he smiled. "The risk with a fast burn," he continued, "is that it exposes you to your enemies. You're going to need a lot of money to fight thieves."

Jobs said he lived seven minutes from a grocery and wasn't sure he would use Ginger to get there.

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CNEWS Tech News - Palm buying Handspring in merger of two handheld device makers

Palm Inc. is taking over Handspring Inc. in a merger of the two leading handheld communications device makers.

I really could care less about PDA's, but I have alwasy liked Handsprings approach to design.

8 bit has a little review if some of the wifi places in town, if I ever get a new portable than can last more than 4 mins off the leash I'd like to check it out, such a cool concept and all.

8Bit Joystick.com: Review : Seattle WiFi Cafes The Zeitgeist and Auriface

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Business 2.0 - Magazine Article - Is TiVo NeXT?

Everyone who has TiVo (TIVO) loves TiVo; it is to television what Macintosh was to computing -- a revelation. Which is exactly why Apple (AAPL) should buy TiVo and once again redefine the intersection of culture and technology.

Folks love TiVo for the same reason they loved the Mac in 1984 and the iPod in 2001: It gives control back to the end user. TiVo viewers call the shots regarding when, how, and -- soon -- even where they watch. Once content or access is purchased, the end user is in charge, just like with the iPod.

It gives control back to the end user Yes, yes and they should give them away like cell phones and just charge the monthly fee.

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In November 2002, a telemarketer called my home in D.C. at 5:24 a.m. This is the story of how that call cost him $500

How To Make A Telemarketer Cry (or, Suing Bozos for Fun & Profit)

Not only is this a great story but another case of someone going above and beyond, using the internet to help his fellow man, and explain all parts of the process, I dig it.

Wikipedia is a multilingual project to create a complete and accurate open content encyclopedia. We started on January 15, 2001 and are already working on 115241 articles in the English version. Visit the help page and experiment in the sandbox to learn how you can edit any article right now.

What a sweet deal, kind of suprised I have not seen this before, a free online ecyclopedia of useful information built via the wiki process, which I have to say I know little about.

Good find Lee->Communication Culture: Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia

Smartmoney.com: Breaking News: Apple Said to Have 2 Weeks to Bid On Universal Music

This is crazy if it actually happens, I thought it was a joke last week, but it needs to happen, the music indusrty so needs to pull its head out of its ass and move into the 21st century. We have given them a good 4 years to pull it toghther and since they cannot get a decent distribution method togher, please let Apple step in and shock the industry into movement.

Since I just finished The Tipping Point, which I reccommend to just about anyone, I found this post about Quark pretty intereseting.

>Serious application software gets sticky over time. It starts slowly, but eventually it's difficult to peel users and their apps apart. In the case of QuarkXPress, stickiness manifests itself in wide-ranging ways. At the basic level is user interface stickiness: Quark users are familiar with the palettes, dialog boxes, keyboard shortcuts, and the basic "pasteboard" metaphor Quark uses for document windows...

Read the full post from Daring Fireball

Just like the book it does not really point out any huge new issue, but illuminates how we get in certain situations. Though I have not used Quark really since school, I do wish we could unstick Illustrator, and I work to that end a lot, by always send clients FH files along with EPS and AI files they request. I much prefer Freehand, though AI is more stable, the simplicity of the selection tools and the multipage layout are too dope to ignore.

Always amazed by what people come up with and alwasy happy to see them post a full how-to on the web.

How to build a tin can waveguide antenna

Business 2.0 - Magazine Article - The 101 Dumbest Moments in Business

"After hyping its new disposable cell phone as "innovative" and "technologically advanced," Hop-On (HPON) sends a sample to a San Francisco Chronicle reporter, who cracks open the casing to uncover the phone's "revolutionary" secret: Nokia parts. The company explains that it had run into glitches and had missed its deadline. "

NSLog(); - Starting a Blog (with MovableType)

I love it when people take it upon themselves to just type up good info and leave it out there for everyone, reminds me of this web crossing post.

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What Do I Know - OS X Software: Sony Ericsson Clicker

Another damn reseason I wish I was still a mac user, and money to buy both a new mac and a new sony phone. Very cool, wave of the future kind of stuff, some what low tech, somewhat low cost, cool stuff.

Todd Says:
A few days ago I was one of a handful of people, with their jaws touching the floor, watching a mutual friend test drive a demo of the amazing Sony Ericsson Clicker - an app that turns your mobile Sony Ericsson phone into a wireless remote control for OS X. Not only can you control PowerPoint / Keynote presentations, iTunes and your DVD player, but the app also turns your phone into an proximity sensor; allowing your physical presence to trigger application events, like turning iTunes on and off, changing your availability status in iChat, or virtually anything else you can think of with a few lines of AppleScript."

Surfin' Safari

This is so rad, and Apple is so killer that there is this level of direct connect to fixing apps like this, speakling about the v62 text decoration fix.

DRUDGE REPORT 2003®

Is it jsut me or is Drudge getting stale? He does not seem to have as many breaking stories as he used, and the stories stick around for longer than usual. I was suprised to see he did not link to the new Trade center plans being chosen.

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What Do I Know - Money Pit

I absolutley agree with this, I used to read Salon somewhat regularly, it was differnt and intersting, now I just find it offending, and rediculous.

The Register Says:

Microsoft Corp is believed to have trained its acquisition crosshairs on Macromedia Inc,

Wow, Microsoft owning Flash, that kind of gives me the chills, and not the good kind. This article is a bit old, but if that happened I would feel a bit odd, some of my favorite apps are Macromedia apps, and I would hate to have them Micrsofted, but there really ain;t much I can do about it. I do think the software industry in general is bound for a round of consolidation soon. There are too many players still fighting for similar markets, and only hanging in there by mis-leading consumers and decision makers, by making what they do more complex than it is.

V A G A B O N D I N G > one man, one year, one world

Vagabonding.com chronicles the solo, one year, round-the-world journey of Mike Pugh, an optimist from Chicago, USA.
Mike has been on the road for 138 days. He's currently in Varanasi, India.

The iPod's biggest flaw so far on the PC at least is this DO NOT DISSCONNECT message, I have been wanting to listen to it all night and have not wanted to restart to see if I can get this "plug and play" device to give me approval to uplug the stupid thing. MusicMatch Jukebox is the biggest peice of shit software I have ever used.

Update: 3/30/03: Since I get hits on this topic pretty frquently I decided to update the post. For me updating Music Match did the trick every once in a whiel I have to resart my computer if the iPod has been connected for a long period of time. There are some resorces out there:

The ipodlunge forums are a good place to start.

Update 7/25/2003: Anyone find this useful, anyone fix thier problem? Leave a comment.

Update 9/1/2003: I now find the best way to get the iPod to disconnect from the PC is to go to My Computer and right click the iPod as a removable drive and choose eject, it no longer "sticks" in Do not mode.

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Why is it that the iPod has such a hard time being disconnected from windows 2k? when you do all the necissary umounting and such?

UPDATE: Also see Do not disconnect, again.

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I am in love with Movable type so far but I am starting to try and see what other options are out there.

I know of:

blah-ger
Radio Userland

UPDATE:

Lee also found these...

http://cafelog.com/ and
http://phpweblog.org/

then this wblogger.com thing

and then I found more stuff about MS Share Point

But then I think the capper is this comparison tool

I think that there is a body of work that could be done out there laerning about mistakes and ill-concived designs of websites, by looking through design firms portfolios of websites and then looking at the actual websitre and how it has evolved. Not in order to point out problems but in order to learn the real world implecations of the designs on the usability with out having to set up formal usability studies.

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