Black Friday Deal for iPhone
Labels:
App Store,
Black Friday,
iTunes
Black Friday madness is no longer just an American thing. The wife is doing her nut today with all the bargains to be had in America's traditional Black Friday sales. If you don't know what that is Google it. Google is your friend.
So for all you iPhone or iPod Touch users out there I have come across a website dedicated to Apple App Store on iTunes and the great thing is they are pointing out directly all the good deals for Black Friday. Lots and lots of price reductions and some Apps that you normally pay for are free for today which is a damn good Black Friday deal if you ask me. 24 hours worth of really good apps including games and some very interesting apps you may not think about. Midnight tonight ends lots of deals, but we can add 5 hours to that because of the time difference.
Get'em while they're hot.
Protect those precious DVDs
And now for the last video related post and yet another link to another download. However, this is really good.
I have kids. Four to be precise and they are all little darlings. They do what kids do. Open DVD box, take out DVD, play it in DVD player, leave it lying at their arses. Use it for a coaster. Make an uneven table even by sticking it under one of the legs. Use it as a frisbee to beat one of their siblings with a la Shaun of the Dead.
What happens? The bloody thing ends up a scratched mess and unplayable. Sound familiar?
A piece of software I have used for quite some time and recommended to others goes a fair way towards solving the problem and then solves some other problems just for good measure. Again, the link on the title takes you to the software in question.
Handbrake is a DVD ripper. It takes an original DVD and makes a file of the movie on your computer. Generally it makes it an mpeg file which can be played in a player such as QuickTime. Now, let me be clear. I am not condoning in any way the pirating of films. When I have done this in the past it has been with content I have bought. In America, that is termed as 'Fair Use'. Ireland and the UK are a bit stricter on these things so tread carefully.
While it is a wonderful way in which you can backup, protect and yet still play your bought content, it has another use which is the one I mainly use it for. That is, ripping it to play on the iPod. That plays out much better these days with the likes of the iPod Touch and the new iPod nano's which are widescreen so ripping these to play on them really looks the part and quality wise it is pretty brilliant.
However, the Handbrake people have really gone to town on enhancing the latest version. Handbrake has moved to 0.9.3 and is Open Source so that makes it free. That magic word again. For a 0.0.1 revision it is packed full of new stuff. Look up the Handbrake website to find out all that is new but two things stick out.
First, it allows you to use any video source and rip it out any way you like.
Second, it links to the previous blog post regarding VLC. It actually uses the codecs found within the new version of VLC and uses them to rip and encode so the best way to get the very best out of Handbrake is also to install VLC. Again, it is all free so no need to panic. There is more but even these two things make this new version of Handbrake a must get. As you can see from the link, it is again a multi-platform piece of software although it was originally a Mac only app. These days Windows and Linux users get in on the action which makes this piece of software another tool in the video arsenal.
So go, download it now.
Swiss Army Knife of video players
One of the main questions people like me in the profession will get is, how do you play that particular piece of video. The problem is that there are lots and lots of ways to encode video using what are called "codecs", the way in which the original video will be compressed to make the file smaller and formatted in a way that will be playable on most players.
Note the most. Not all. Surprisingly, people do not always encode in such a way that will make it playable on the most popular players. The big three are Windows Media, Real and Quicktime. If I have left anyone out, then I apologise.
Windows does have a really useful tool called GOM Player and so far I have been able to play the vast majority of material on the Windows side using that. However, there is one player that sets itself apart as a great piece of software. God bless those Open Source heroes who provide these wonderful applications for free.
VLC player not only has just been updated but plays a fantastic range of video and for me has worked 99.9% of the time. The 0.1% that failed was probably not worth looking at anyway. One of the great things about this is that it has a really superb inbuilt array of codecs that seem to play everything and when I post the next story you will also understand why getting VLC player along with those codecs is so important. Not only is it superb for these reasons but it is also multi-platform, Windows, Mac OS X, the inevitable Linux but even BE OS. Startling. Click on the post heading to take you straight to download all that VLC goodness, and remember, there is even more good stuff to come on the next blog post.
YouTube comes of age. A bit...
I've had the fortune to be involved in a bit of video stuff recently. I was asked to produce a series of films for the Catholic Archdiocese of Armagh and then in work we have been doing a fair bit of stuff with video and enhancing your YouTube channel. All interesting stuff and I really enjoyed making the films as well as doing my own stuff with the family and creating those special moments. Great for sharing with friends and relatives.
So the next few posts are going to be exclusively video related. I promised John, our principal photographer that I would post this stuff as this is exactly some of the things we are looking to enhance within the Belfast Media Group.
YouTube. Great piece of innovation and brilliant for videos that entertain us during the long working day. No, sorry, we don't do that in our place of work. *Ahem*
Of course, a couple of the principal problems with YouTube is its lack of native widescreen support and the quality of the video itself. YouTube have just within the last week corrected one of those problems. Perhaps you have noticed that they used to produce videos in the 20th Century format of 4:3, the old traditional TV size. My problem recently is that in producing the films for Armagh the did the "letterbox" effect and had black bars at the top and the bottom as the video camera I was using was widescreen. Not true widescreen mind you, but wide enough to make it look modern. Now if you go to YouTube you should have noticed that it is all change and they have moved into the 21st Century and everything is now widescreen. Great for us at BMG as we are now producing all our videos on 16:9 so this is perfect for us.
Now, the next problem involves a bit of trickery and if you click on the title of this article it takes you to the link where I found the trick. It is really very good. As we all know, YouTube can look very pixelated. Features and text can be downright illegible but if you upload video to YouTube that is reasonably better than what you get back, then this trick will enable you to embed this in the URL link and display quite significantly better quality. Here is how you do it.
Just simply add &fmt=18 at the end of the URL. That's it. Nothing more. However, a YouTube engineer got in touch with the author of the article and said that if you add &fmt=22 it gives the highest quality available and is the equivalent of 720p. Now that is not to be sneezed at. Given that we recently shot video at our fantastic Aisling Awards in the Europa Hotel using a very nice camera with exceptional quality, we shall be field testing this on YouTube to see how the quality really shows up. The link gives and example of low quality and high quality and you really do notice the difference.
Give this a go with your own videos on YouTube and see the difference in your own work.
Happy Birthday Windows
My word, doesn't time fly when you're enjoying yourself.
No sooner are we allegedly getting Windows 7 than we realise that today is the day that 25 years ago Windows was released to an unsuspecting world.
All that remains to be asked is has it made as radical a difference to the world that many would have us believe. I gotta admit, I think the answer is yes.
Lord how I miss that clunky old interface.
Does Tech & the Election Process go together?
Labels:
Diebold,
Election Fraud,
USA
Sometimes when I get exasperated with a Tech problem (see the previous post!) I use my well worn sentence...
"Perhaps we should go back to the stone and chisel."
It meant I could be a chisel sharpener in order to earn a living. Much less complex than the world we have built for ourselves.
So is it a good idea to introduce any form of advanced technology into any electoral system? More specifically, of course, I refer to the USA electoral system. Diebold machines and touch screen displays and all that stuff. There has been talk in the past over how error free they were. Were they tampered with? Did the last two elections get stolen because of hacked machines? All that sort of stuff.
Now rumours are coming to the fore regarding potential anomalies with touch screen display voting systems in the State of Texas. Clink on the link to find out more.
http://blogs.computerworld.com/e_voting_issues_in_texas
The more I think about these systems the more I think we should stick with the stone and chisel method of electing our political representatives. Good old fashioned paper cannot be hacked. Any changes to the ballot paper makes it invalid. Of course, we don't need to be told how to work an electoral system to our advantage but the days of "vote early, vote often" have largely been taken out of our system and while no system is perfect this is one area in my life where I am very happy for technology to take a back seat.
What price, democracy?
Is .docx the equivalent of a virus???
Labels:
Microsoft,
Open Standards
I'm getting seriously pissed off with this.
So, Microsoft have had released for some time Office 2007 and Office 2008 (Mac version, of course) and in that time people have been either upgrading or buying as new with their computers.
Now, don't get me wrong, I have absolutely no problem with people deciding what software they want to buy. Zero difficulties.
However.
I remember encountering two problems in the past with this. First of all, I find it the height of bad manners when someone sends a file that they make sure the file they are sending can be opened by the person at the other end.
It is pretty bloody pointless sending someone a WordPerfect file these days, is it not? Who has WordPerfect??? Not a lot of people. So would you not be a tad on the annoyed side if someone sent you one and then asked what your problem was when you could not open it up?
Part of the problem here is that everyone expects you to have Microsoft Word (or Excel, or PowerPoint, or whatever) but did anyone actually bother to ask? Now, we know that most people have something that can open up the file in some shape or form but we would not send a Quark XPress file and expect everyone be able to open it up would we?
So, people are getting the latest version of Office and the constituent parts. The default file format in Office 2007 and 2008 is .docx, .xlsx and so on. Microsoft's new "open standard".
Open standard my arse. Quite a few times in work people are getting these things through in their emails and are perplexed that their version of Word does not open it up. How frickin' open standard is that? Most people do not know that Text Edit on the Mac cannot open it up. They want the formatting anyway and don't want to be bothered with another application. They just want the thing to open.
Second problem, is that it just reminds me back in the day when people downloaded an extension for Quark XPress called PasteBoardXT. It extended the size of the pasteboard around the XPress page which people wanted and liked from Aldus PageMaker. Problem was that it then required the PasteBoardXT extension to be installed on another machine if you copied the file or sent it to someone else. Before you knew it loads of people had to download the extension in order to open up the file. It was viral. You were forced to get the extension. And then to get around it people started download PasteBoard XTerminator so that they could open the file when they did not want PasteBoardXT. It was a completely crazy situation.
Now the answer is simple. You simply go in to Word preferences and set the default file format to Office 1997 - 2003 .doc and then the problem is solved. If you don't know how to do this, Google is your friend. Look it up. It's easy.
As far as I am concerned Microsoft is in a real sense forcing people to upgrade to the new version. Yes you can get around it but for the less technical savvy amongst us it screams "Upgrade me!!!!". I don't like it and it is uncalled for. For those who have the new version, do the right thing. Check if the person you are sending Word file to has the new version. If they don't then save it down a version.
Just because someone doesn't have the same version as you does not mean you have to force them to be the same as you.
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