Author Archives: daniel

DVD layer changes

What is it with DVD authoring that the production houses can’t put the layer changes somewhere sensible, like preferably between scenes where there’s no sound? Looking through Michaeldvd.com.au’s reviews, they note a variety of stupidly placed layer changes:

  • The Princess Bride — The layer change is at 49:58 – it is not a good layer change, because it interrupts the score, but it only lasts a moment. The R1 Special Edition has a far better layer change – it’s inside a silent black frame after Westley is knocked unconscious.
  • O Brother, Where Art Thou? — The pause is a little jarring and noticeable
  • Virus — This is during a natural fade to black, but it is still quite noticeable due to the interruption to the music.

With TV series on DVD, most authors do the sensible thing and put the layer change between the episodes. But sometimes, evidently from pure laziness, they just let it fall elsewhere.

  • The Office — For some reason, the layer change does not occur between Episodes 3 and 4 (as I would have expected) but about 3:57 into Episode 4 (Title 4, Chapter 1).
  • Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em volume 2 — This is an RSDL disc, and once again the DVD authors have inexplicably put the layer change within one of the episodes instead of between them.
  • Empires-Peter & Paul and the Christian Revolution — This disc is RSDL-formatted, with the layer change occurring at 2:30 in Episode II – a crazy and infuriating place to put it when it could have more easily and logically been placed in between the two episodes.

Given it’s a well-known drawback of dual layer DVDs, surely it’s not that hard to put the change somewhere where it won’t be noticed. Crap layer changes really destroy the atmosphere of a movie or TV show, and show up a big flaw in what otherwise is a very satisfying and popular domestic playback medium.

A buncha quick stuff

EFF highlights an Australian House Standing Committee report on the US DMCA, and whether or not it should be adopted wholesale by Australia under the Free Trade Agreement.

Meanwhile there’s an open letter to the OFLC about the banning in Australia of the grafitti video game Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure. (Mind you, Metacritic only gives it a 73/100 on XBox; 70 on PS2).

OPML 2.0 is out. Let’s hope it doesn’t break OPML 1 like RSS 2 broke RSS 0.9?

The Age on the retro games boom.

Pah, this sucks. After 64 years in Swanston Street, the Technical Bookshop in Melbourne has moved out to the boondocks of LaTrobe Street near Queen Street.

Why your life shouldn’t be completely online

Why your life can’t be completely online yet: Cameron Reilly on what happens when the only copy of your flight details are in your Gmail… and Gmail goes down. (Hey Cam, look on the bright side — assuming you knew you weren’t flying out of Avalon, there’s only a handful of possible airlines you could have been travelling with, and their terminals at MEL are pretty close together. Are you a fast runner?)

Copyright, shmopyright

Lots of information on Australian copyright law, sorted into handy fact sheets.

Browser vs Website

Am I the only person who uses Alt-D to get to the address bar in Firefox? I suppose I could also use Ctrl-L, or F6, but I’ve settled for Alt-D, probably because it can be easily done with one hand — my left hand — and is close to the bottom of the keyboard, making it easy to find.

Problem is some web sites implement access keys that conflict with this. The default setup for MediaWiki sites uses Alt-D as a shortcut for deleting pages! Thankfully it goes to an Are You Sure confirmation before actually doing it. They seem to have disabled it on Wikipedia, but others still have it.

Likewise, Horde (web mail) uses Alt-B to Blacklist mail senders, conflicting with Firefox’s Bookmarks menu.

Firefox doesn’t appear to have an about:config tweak for turning all such keys off, though altering accessibility.accesskeycausesactivation to False will merely put focus on the link with the access key, not “click” on it.

This article discusses access keys in detail, including listing the requirements for access keys on UK government sites. Alt-5 for FAQ… hmmm.

Does blogging pay?

Charles Wright has made a momentous decision. No, he’s not going to stop writing in plural. He’s closing the Razor blog on The Age/SMH, and asking for subscribers to Bleeding Edge. Some people are taking him up on it. (At least, he’s abandoning Razor. No hint there of him moving on, which seems pretty silly.)

Funnily, Darren Rowse at Problogger has considered this, and from the way he writes about it, has got mixed up by Charles’ writing in plural, and thinks it’s a whole team of people. (“…forms of writing that they could earn money from.“) Some very interesting points made though.

Meanwhile Scoble ponders how to make money off RSS (and blogging in general).

A message from Apple

Apple embeds a poem into MacOS:

Your karma check for today:
There once was a user that whined
his existing OS was so blind
he’d do better to pirate
an OS that ran great
but found his hardware declined.
Please don’t steal Mac OS!
Really, that’s way uncool.
(C) Apple Computer, Inc.

Phones and radiation

Last October the FCC approved a new cordless phone technology in the USA. It’s called DECT… yep, the same DECT those of us in Europe and Australia and elsewhere have been using for about a decade.

As it happens there’s been research floating around that identifies DECT as causing tumours. Is it true? A lot of the information is coming out of the anti-mobile phone tower or anti-powerline movements, which the cynic in me says is just speculation. Likewise, much of the research into radiation from GSM and other mobile phones originates with the phone companies. Vested interests galore.

Even the research from elsewhere seems to be inconclusive, since it’s not an easy thing to detect.

My conclusion is: I don’t know. One could dismiss the risks out of hand, but I always have in mind the stories of my mother as a teenager in the 1960s, getting her foot measured in shoe shops by the use of X-rays. What seems like a useful, safe technology now might seem ludicrously dangerous in decades to come.

So I don’t avoid use of my DECT cordless phone and my GSM mobile phone completely, especially since they’re so damn convenient. But nor do I keep a phone bolted to my head all day. Moderation, as with all things, is the key.

XP defrag

I’m not overly impressed with the Defrag utility in Windows XP. In my eternal quest to try and speed up my mysteriously slow work machine, I decided to give it a go. Cleaned up a bunch of files first, to give the C: drive 6.5Gb free (out of 29.3Gb). Analyze: said I should defrag. OK, so I left it running over night…

Came in the next morning. The little colour graph showing where files are didn’t look terribly different from how it was left. Still lots and lots of red (fragmented files). It said it couldn’t defrag some files… basically anything over 15Mb.

Defrag

Out of curiousity, I clicked Analyze again. “You should defrag this volume.” What, again? What’s the point?!

I did some more purging and eventually ended up with about 10Gb free. Tried it again. Better, but it still couldn’t/wouldn’t move anything bigger than about 30Mb. Weird.

At least the machine seems to have sped up a tad now.