It’s time to stop using mailto: links.
I mean c’mon. You think I still read my email in a local client? That’s just so twentieth century.
Captcha FAIL
I think my eyesight is okay. I know I’m a bit colourblind, but other than that and a lack of perspective, it’s okay.
These captchas, seen on the Oz-Astra web site forums though, these are too much. I know you have to fight spammers, but there comes a point where real humans are going to be defeated too, and eventually give up in frustration. Thankfully you can refresh the image and hope for something a bit more readable, but why not bring the difficulty level down from eleven so it’s not so hard?
(I’m not trying to single this site out; there are others that also frustrate. And I suspect this is down to an over-zealous implementation in vBulletin.)
Copying your iPod MP3 collection onto a Windows PC via the iPod
I wanted an instant music collection at work, without installing iTunes or anything else, and without individually ripping the CDs. Fortunately all my CDs had been ripped to MP3 on my iPod, so I just took it into work and plugged it in.
Of course you don’t want to use iTunes, as that will mess it up completely, but as long as you can browse around the iPod’s files (eg you’ve switched-on Enable Disk Use), look into the \iPod_Control\Music directory (it’s hidden, so switch Explorer to view hidden files) and you’ll see iTunes has helpfully given random meaningless names to the MP3 files, such as F00\AJUR.mp3
No matter. Copy them to the new PC, and then drag them to Windows Media Player’s media library. It looks at the MP3 tags, which do match the actual artists and track names, and displays those in its library.
Done.
I knew there was a reason I encoded all my songs as MP3 instead of AAC. While there are hacks to get WMP to play AACs, officially it can’t — making it awkward to do on a corporate PC. I figured when I ripped them that MP3s are more widely supported, and perhaps more futureproof.
Saw a guy on the train with an old-style portable CD player. ‘Cos, you know, digital music from real CDs have a warmth that MP3/AAC on iPods just can’t match…
Melway edition 1
Damn. Someone at Ausway forgot to renew the custommaps.net domain, so the First Edition Melway is no longer online.
Apparently they haven’t realised yet, as it’s still linked from the Ausway site.
Some pages are in the Internet Archive (and also some from edition 5) though not all.
Update Friday: I was wrong; they’ve moved it to here (but they haven’t updated all their links yet)
Something I don’t like about WordPress
I love WordPress.
But not 100%.
Something I don’t like is how it decides arbitrarily when to decide to re-authenticate you.
I had logged in here to write a post, and it happily let me type it all out, until I hit the Publish button, when it decided to double-check who I was. Which was fine, but by the time it had done that, it revealed that the draft of the post that had been saved was from several minutes before I’d hit Publish, and I’d lost a couple of links I’d put in which now I’ll have to find again.
Blargh.
Twitter widgets
I used Twitter Tools for a while with WordPress, and it worked well until recently, when it stopped.
While pondering what went wrong, I noticed Twitter now has an official set of widgets for web pages.
Twitter / Get a Widget for your site
They’ve got customised ones for MySpace, Blogger, Facebook, Typepad, and a generic one (in HTML or Flash) for everything else.
Byte Back
Over the weekend the Byte Back retro-gaming event was on in Stoke-on-Trent, UK. Here’s a set of pictures from it, and there’s also some video. Check the Stormtroopers queuing up to play the Star Wars game!
(Click through to watch in HD; lots of detail to be seen.)
Not Slashdotted, Fried
Oh dear lord, have I crashed mobypicture now? Oops. — Stephen Fry
I guess the term for this is: Fried.
Though some are referring to The Frying Point.
The dangers of HTML email
See what happens if you don’t properly anticipate how your HTML email might be rendered?
Yep, the world’s thinnest and lightest 17″ notebook… featuring a really odd-looking askew display, apparently.
(GMail in Firefox 3.0.6 on Windows)
Misc stuff
Guitar Hero/Rock Band compatibility: For those looking at the options for Guitar Hero and Rock Band (insert grumble about RB2 not yet being available in Australia), check Joystiq’s instrument compatibility chart to see which instruments work with which games.
OpenID: Ooh, this I like: Jeff Atwood on how to use your own URL for your OpenID.
Unix quick reference: Here
No more Pinnacle
It’s this kind of thing that Geekrant was devised for.
I’m boycotting Pinnacle products from here on in.
Pinnacle Studio 10 Plus is pretty good. Good enough that I don’t feel the need to upgrade to the latest and greatest. It handles all the video formats I use quite well. It grabs a lot of resources, but video editing always does. I’m happy with it.
BUT… the Pinnacle 310i capture card I have… it’s never worked well. As I have written before, the media centre program that came with it was horribly slow. The capture results were good, but I always had to keep an eye on the CPU usage, or it would start dropping frames.
(I bought it in the first place because Australian Personal Computer noted it in its Best Tech column. I’ve read that magazine for decades, and generally trust its opinions, but won’t be using that particular column for a recommendation again.)
Eventually I got it running with Virtual VCR, which is analogue only, but gave consistently better results.
Then a couple of weeks ago it died. Completely. No response.
After wrestling with drivers for a bit, I disabled it and went and looked for the Pinnacle 60e USB tuner I’d got as a freebie with Studio.
I tried it with some of the Pinnacle software, which was underwhelming. It’s DVB only, so wouldn’t work with Virtual VCR. So I looked around for freebie PVR programs, and found GB PVR.
GB PVR is one of those freebie media centre applications someone’s written. It’s reasonably responsive, if a bit bare-bones in places. It has some quirks, like it’s totally not designed to handle people operating it without a remote control… so for instance I haven’t found a way to record live TV manually; have to program it. And the timer only does 10 minute increments. Annoying.
Interestingly it seems to record the DVB-T stream directly onto the disk, leaving you with a TS file. This can be played using the K-Lite codec pack/Media Player Classic (VLC should play it too), and you can convert it using HDTVtoMPEG2 into a standard MPEG file to use in Virtual Dub and other applications. All good. (Well, as long as I tuned to the channels with the AC3 audio; some of the others required more fiddling to work.)
Once I figured out the quirks in GB PVR, I got absolutely outstanding quality recordings out of it. Really really clear, as you’d expect when working directly with the DVB stream. Fantastic.
Then the 60e stopped working. Un-#$&#ing-believable! Just stopped. GB PVR stopped doing what I asked of it. The logs revealed it couldn’t start the capture. Nothing would talk to it, tried uninstalling and re-installing, nope. Error 10 starting it up, whatever the hell that means. And the config screen reported there was now no capture device on the computer.
Dead.
Jeez.
Now, I might normally assume it was a problem with the PC. So I installed it on the other one. It worked for a couple of days, then also stopped.
So no more Pinnacle products for me.
Some of the Hauppauge capture cards look good. Alternately there are some new TVix products which double as standalone PVR/media player units.
Dave’s suggestion of going via Firewire is a good one that I’ll look at. Unfortunately my cheapie firewire video camera doesn’t have an input.
The C64 lives!
Evidently the Herald Sun thinks predators commonly use the Commodore 64C to access Facebook and MySpace.
Or maybe it’s just an old photo from the library.