Dave Kellam

I love my cordless trackball; it really makes sense for a trackball to be cordless, you can lean back and rest in on the arm of a chair and surf away. Now the downside to having a cordless device is when you forget half of it somewhere. I brought the transmitter home but left the trackball on my desk. The lack of computer shops in Brockville means that Dave had to buy a relatively standard and boring two button mouse from microsoft, blah. I also picked up a pci usb 2.0 hub, my external powered hub has been really flaky and likes to lock up the system when I sync the palm or camera. I haven’t installed it yet though.

On another note, do any of you mac freaks know a good way to automate taking screen captures and uploading them? Actually, my biggest annoyance is the pdf file that the standard mac screencapture keystroke generates. I could write a folder action that converts the pdf to a jpg and attach it to the desktop. I could probably use curl or something to upload it too. I haven’t had much luck finding one, although I know a number of them exist for windows. Oh, folder actions are pretty cool if you haven’t played with them. Here’s a good one for attaching to the desktop, it will convert read only files to writeable (if you drag attachments from Mail to the Desktop, it makes them read only.

Check out the Excel love letter at the end of this post, it made me laugh. The post itself has a point, which is that weblog posts tend to have too much metadata and not enough of whatever that person is trying to talk about. It’s also kind of funny that the post itself is kind of hard to read because there’s a so much crap strewn in the middle. Gargh, brain!

Of course I’ve been done for awhile now but have failed to post much of anything. Haven’t really been up to much, just taking it easy. Stuck around in Kingston to see Return of the King, as Brockville is sorely lacking in the theatre department. Apparently they’re going to have one in by 2005 though, just about the time I could care less. As far as the movie goes, it held up well and wasn’t a disappointment. There’s the standard “The ending drags” complaint, but it’s more the sitting on your ass for three hours. He should have saved a longer cut for dvd, or at least put an intermission in. On the plus side, the theatre didn’t have any previews attached to the movie.

I’m back home for awhile now, a day earlier than expected. My dad was given tickets to a hockey game tomorrow night, so it looks like that’s what I’m doing. Nothing much new, although I did add the BlogTimes bar to the page. It gives a visual indication of when most of my posts are, or at least it would if I managed to write more than once every couple days.

Here are some excerpts from an article describing Saddam’s capture.

Inside, dirty laundry, including gray trousers and a towel, hung from a clothesline above a bed covered with a floral blanket. The poster was tacked to the wall near a second bed which appeared unused.

In the makeshift kitchen, a small fridge contained a few Bounty candy bars, some hot dogs and a can of 7-UP. There was old bread on a counter, leftover rice in a pot and dirty dishes in the sink.

Two AK-47 rifles, documents and $750,000 in cash were also found and removed from the property during the raid.

I guess it’s the last one that gets me. You think he could have made a better hole in the ground. Then again, he probably had at least two or three holes in the ground… a man of his status,

I was sick of the layout. This is a quick make-ver until I do something better. I’ll probably tweak it a bit later, but I had to change it now. I created the graphic a couple days ago, it had a column down the side that was blue, but I didn’t like it that much. I also haven’t rebuilt any of the archives, so all of that still has the old layout.

From the IMDb “Now Playing” description of Honey:

Honey (Alba) is a sexy, tough music video choreographer who shakes up her life after her mentor gives her an ultimatum: sleep with him or be blacklisted within their industry.

This has Oscar contender written all over it.

Whee, I’m Picard. Bam, take that Riz. Spock? Data? Go get me my Earl Grey.

I may also be a huge dork for taking a Star Trek quiz, but that doesn’t count.

This just seems weird to me (article):

Major is an extremely sociable dog that “loves to search for narcotics,” Watson said.

Barking during a drug search isn’t a threat, Watson said. Dogs are taught to treat finding drugs as a game of hide and seek.

“Why is a dog barking?” Watson said. “It’s not because it wants to bite someone. He just wants to play that game.”

Some dogs are trained as passive alert dogs and will sit when drugs are found. Others are aggressive alert canines and bark or take other actions.

It’s a game kids, it’s all a game. We teach Scraps that biting your face off is just a game, so when he’s biting your face off that’s alright because he’s just playing the game.

I went home for a day or two on the weekend, to say hi and visit the family. Got a flu shot while I was back, I think it made me feel kind of crappy yesterday. Or just feeling crappy made me feel crappy, who knows. I’m getting sick of this site design, it looks boring. I always get sick of my website at exam time, it gives me an excuse to redesign. I used to use PHP, then I just had to create one new template. I still use it, but not effectively. I should really be creating some header and footer files that get reused across the board.

Oh and I have managed to get some studying done. It’s astounding. There’s such of sense of apathy floating around me this semester. Running a newspaper is more fun than school.

Obviously, my complete lack of posting has meant that I’ve had absolutely nothing to do. I’m “busy” and don’t have to post, as opposed to when I’m busy and don’t have time to procrastinate. I thought about doing a redesign, I even gave it a brief attempt, although I was just trying to give the colours a new tinge. I’ll leave it until after my exam season is done. And by exam season, I mean my one exam. It’s so weird to have so few exams, but it also means that I did all the work for the courses during the semester. Which probably explains the burnout and why I’ve just been sitting around watching movies and sleeping a lot.

The other thing I’ve spent a significant portion of time doing is trying to encode dvd movies on a mac. And you say, “Ho ho!” but macs are great for media and and producing video and all that. And I will agree completely. There’s a lot of great tools for putting movies together and producing print/web media, but in terms of ripping dvds, I’d like to point out that industry types with the big money for loads of Apple equipment and the superexpensive multimedia editing suites don’t really have a need for ripping dvds (they just buy em). Now me, I’m sitting here wanting to rip some dvds that I own. Now there’s a lot of things that you’ve got to take into consideration for ripping, you’ve got framerates, resolution, audio type, audio tracks, container format, subtitles and so on.

The biggest issue for me is space (and I imagine a lot of others too). If you’ve got plenty of harddrive space around (>7gb), you should have no trouble space-shifting your dvd. For example, it takes more power to spin your dvd drive than your harddrive, so if you want to conserve battery life on your laptop, you rip the dvd to the drive. Basically, all you need to do is rip the Video_ts folder to your harddrive using DVDBackup or OSex, this’ll take some time, because it needs to crack the decryption bullshit that the makers have so nicely crippled your product with. OSex is kind of complicated and kind of wonky but it’s pretty powerful. Some players, like VLC will let you play the Video_ts folder from anywhere.

So, you want to create a rip that you can put on a couple cds and give to a friend, because you know that fucker is going to wreck or lose your disc. The first thing I looked at were containers, there are some nice formats out there, like ogm and matroska that are starting to gain in popularity. Unfortunately, neither format has tools available for mac right now (although we can decode them), I’d be leaning towards the matroska format myself. After that, there isn’t a whole lot of choice left. You’re basically looking at the avi container, created by Microsoft many years ago. It’s not all that bad, it just tends not to play nicely with multiple audio streams and subtitles. So, essentially that leaves us looking at doing an AVI encoding with XviD or DivX, with one stream of audio in mp3 or maybe AC3 format. Not too bad, but it doesn’t have the cool factor that multiple audio tracks does. There’s also 3ivX and quicktime, but I’m not really sure about that yet.

After you’ve got the dvd rip on your computer, you should be able to do most of this encoding jazz using ffmpegX, a graphical front-end for the ffmpeg command line tool. It’s alright, although I’m pretty sure that it doesn’t play nicely with variable bit rate (VBR) audio streams, so use a constant rate. You might even need to just avoid encoding the audio with ffmpegX and use passthrough, choosing instead to grab the elementary streams from OSex and converting the AC3 file to MP3 with bd4go.

With all that said, there’s a lot of playing around involved and I’ve yet to produce anything I really liked. It’s not to hard to get decent rips, but it’s fairly hard to get everything right if you’re trying to do something like nicely put them on cds. If you’re going with pure ease of use and don’t mind sacrificing control, you can use DVD2one. Although, I’m not sure how nicely they play with encrypted dvds.

Here are two good ripping guides for mac, although they lean towards using 3ivX and Diva — DVD Ripping on OSX and Shepmaster’s DVD Ripping Tutorial. There isn’t a ton of info, but it’s an evolving area, so new shit is happening all the time. Google is your friend.

This is definitely a bit glossed over, but I don’t remember all the things I’ve done in the last few days. It’s kind of fun, but it makes you crave bigger and faster processors. If you have questions, email or comment, but I might not have an answer. If you’re using windows, there’s lot of tools out there, like VirtualDub.

Well fuck, I was talkin to Freeman tonight and he was all on about November only having 30 days and having to finish off his essay and here I am thinking that there’s still at least one more day left. It didn’t really sink in until I watched an mailing list reminder message come in, ringing in the first of the month in email fashion. This also make three solid posts in a row that I have somehow managed to link to Freeman. Or maybe just 3 of the last 4 but it’s kind of sick. Point of that was applications for teacher’s college were due on Dec 1, which happens to be today. Thanks to the marvels of the internet, I have it completed and sent in. Thank you to Queen’s for accepting letters until Jan 31st, when I’m sure I’ll have that extra day.

Well, the end of the semester came and went. I managed to write two tests, do an assignment and finish a rather large report in the span of two days. Or something. It wasn’t all that much fun. Then I drank myself stupid with the rest of the GW crew at the friday night wrap party. Saturday and Sunday, I do nothing! First non-Sunday day in awhile, crazee! Now I go to have a drink or two at the Scherzo and play some vids with Dave.

In the spirit of procrastination I decided to write an applescript that allows you to enable/disable multiple tracks in iTunes, since it seems to be natively lacking that functionality. Basically, the disabled tracks won’t get played in playlists/random selection — it’s useful if you’re an album whore and have tracks you never listen to just but you just needed to have the whole album. I began my quest but decided to check the internet first for existing scripts. Low and behold, Apple comes through (why this isn’t in the product is beyond me).

Now, don’t let that shifty purple logo and iTunes 2.0.3 thing deceive you, the Enable|Disable Script will work just fine with iTunes 4.1. You can’t get the scripts by themselves, so just download the whole package, unpack it and throw the Enable script into Library>iTunes>Scripts and then try running it on a track in iTunes. It’ll ask you to find Internet Explorer.app, just select Safari instead (i think all it needs it for, is if you’re not running iTunes 2.0.3 it’ll launch the webapp and bring you to the site to download it).

That concludes the procrastination session, I’m off to study some more computational geometry and approximation algorithms. Go team!