Paul's Time Sink

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HD QuickTime content

Paul Westbrook | 30 April, 2005 19:10

Apple just released QuickTime 7 that has support for the H.264 codec, which provides a good compression format for video. They even have posted some movie trailers in HD to show off their new version of Quicktime.

On my 800Mhz PowerBook G4 the HD Batman Begins trailer does not play that well. Maybe it would have if I had a faster computer.

JHymn

Paul Westbrook | 30 April, 2005 18:17

Jhymn Icon I have bought over 900 songs from the iTunes Music Store. When I want to listen to this music on my TiVo, I need to convert it to the mp3 file format. Using iTunes the only way to convert protected AAC files to mp3 is to burn the tracks to an audio CD, and then rip the CD.

Also, this process doesn't work well if you don't convert a single album. You can burn tracks from different albums onto a single CD. But when you rip the tracks, all of the track numbers and album names are incorrect.

JHymn is a java application that allows you to convert the music that you purchase from the iTunes Music Store, into a unprotected format. In addition to converting it to a unprotected format, you can also have the audio file converted to mp3.
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Review of Mac OS X 10.4

Paul Westbrook | 29 April, 2005 20:30

Ars Technica has a great review of Mac OS X 10.4. I am looking forward to using Spotlight. I wonder if it will be a replacement for QuickSilver as my application launcher.

Google cache?

Paul Westbrook | 29 April, 2005 19:10

I have noticed the some people are accessing this site though Google Cache. I don't know what people are doing this. I understand the case where the web site is inaccessible, but in these cases this web site is up.

I am curious, if you are browsing here though Google Cache, please leave a comment and let me know why.

Idea for TiVo Home Media Engine application

Paul Westbrook | 28 April, 2005 21:00

A while ago, I was looking at streaming mp3 servers, and I looked at the SlimServer software. There are a couple of java applications that implement the slim server protocol. SoftSqueeze is a java application that emulates a Squeezebox. The TripleFat is a java application that emulates a SLIMP3.

Since the TiVo Home Media Engine runs applications written in java, I am sure that it wouldn't be too hard to take one of these applications and remove the interface, and replace it with a HME interface.
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Shutters

Paul Westbrook | 28 April, 2005 19:18

About 2 months ago, our 2 year old son gave us a scare. He started to climb over the loft wall in our master bedroom. The loft overlooks our livingroom. We decided to install shutters to cover the opening.

We called Larson Shutters and the owner came out to do the measurements. That was about eight weeks ago. Today, the owner came out to install the shutters. I think that they look great.

More pictures

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GeSHi plugin for pLog

Paul Westbrook | 28 April, 2005 13:14

I just found the plogeshi plugin for pLog. It implements the Generic Syntax Highlighter for pLog posts. It will do syntax highlighting for many different languages like C++, PHP, or Perl.

It will convert:

$str = 'one|two|three|four';

// positive limit

print_r(explode('|', $str, 2));

// negative limit

print_r(explode('|', $str, -1));

to:

$str = 'one|two|three|four';
<br />// positive limit
<br />print_r(explode('|', $str, 2));
<br />// negative limit
<br />print_r(explode('|', $str, -1));

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Reverse Engineering in Mac OS X

Paul Westbrook | 26 April, 2005 12:23

Rich Wareham has written an good article on revere engineering Mac OS X. He writes Desktop Manager, and has needed to reverse engineer some of the undocumented APIs in Mac OS X.

[via TUAW]

MediaGate MG-25

Paul Westbrook | 26 April, 2005 12:21

The MediaGate MG-25 is a 2.5" hard drive enclosure, that can be connected to a TV to play back DivX and MP4 files. This small box can output video up to 1920x1080i, so the video should look pretty good. It also plays MP3 and OGG files, as well as displays graphic files.

One downside of this is that it gets its power from the USB port, so it will have to be plugged into a computer to be run. It doesn't look like it can be used as a standalone device. I would love it if this has an ethernet port, where the content could be copied over across the network, and this could just be connected to a TV.

[via Gizmodo]

CDs vs. Sqeezebox

Paul Westbrook | 24 April, 2005 12:45

Our son has a CD player in his room, and a stack of CDs that he listens too. Since he changes the CDs himself, the CDs are getting scratched up. This is not really a big deal, since I have ripped all of the CDs, and could burn another copy if needed.

The problem comes around when we put him to sleep. Often we put some music on so he can listen to while falling asleep. But when we happen to pick a CD that has been scratched, the music skips and may even stop, and he wakes up.

I was thinking that the Squeezebox would be a perfect solution for his room. We would have set up some playlists for him to listen to when he goes to sleep. When he is fully asleep, we could turn off the music remotely, from the web interface.
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Sidenote

Paul Westbrook | 21 April, 2005 19:09

When I have wanted to write myself an not, I have been using Stickies or writing the text into a shell window. This isn't ideal, since I normally don't keep Stickies running all of the time, and typing into a shell doesn't really work, especially if it is a multi-line note.

I just found Sidenote yesterday. It is a little program that puts a drawer on the side of your screen. When you move the mouse over to that side of the screen, the drawer opens up. Then you can type or paste your text into a note.
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Converting Mac to unix line endings

Paul Westbrook | 21 April, 2005 18:51

I lost the script that I used to use to convert mac line endings (returns) to unix line endings (new lines), so I did a search on the web to see what scripts I could find.

There are a lot of implementations of this script. Some using perl, shell script or the flip program. The one that I like to use is an alias in my .bashrc. I found this at macosxhints.

alias mac2unix="perl -pi -e 's/rn?/n/g' "

Software demos

Paul Westbrook | 20 April, 2005 19:30

A while ago, I looked into Desktop Managers for my laptop. I tried a few of the Desktop Manager in their demo modes, but I didn't find any that I really liked, and then deleted the demos.

Yesterday, I got an email from You Software, announcing their You Control: Desktop software. I figured that they just came out with a new version, so I wanted to check it out. After I downloaded the demo, and tried to launch it, it claimed that my demo period had expired, even though I just installed this new version.

I seems that they use the date that I checked out the old version as the start date of my demo period for the new version. Maybe this was unintentional, but I am really unlikely to purchase this software, especially if I don't know if it will work for me.

Another trackback spam filter

Paul Westbrook | 18 April, 2005 20:54

I have modified the validatetrackback plugin, that I wrote earlier, to include an option to hook into the Bayesian spam filter that plog has built into it. Now, when enabled, this plugin has two options.

Check the url that is included in the trackback itself, and see if it points at a html page that has a trackback url. If it doesn't then throw away the trackback.
Tokenize the trackback, and pass it through the bayesian spam filter that plog has built in. If the spam score is higher than the user specified threshold, then toss the trackback.

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Podcasts

Paul Westbrook | 16 April, 2005 13:06

For the past month or so, I have been listening to podcasts. I have found that they are great to listen to at work. The ones that I enjoy the most are Geek News Central and Coverville.

Here is the opml file with all of my subscriptions.

Paul's Time Sink

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HD QuickTime content

JHymn

Review of Mac OS X 10.4

Google cache?

Idea for TiVo Home Media Engine application

Shutters

GeSHi plugin for pLog

Reverse Engineering in Mac OS X

MediaGate MG-25

CDs vs. Sqeezebox

Sidenote

Converting Mac to unix line endings

Software demos

Another trackback spam filter

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