Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Buzz About Wireless - EVDO at 120KPH?

Buzz About Wireless - EVDO at 120KPH?: "Using the RevA network, Cheung was able to play World of Warcraft, download videos from Youtube at 120KPH and use Skype to place phone calls. "

Friday, July 20, 2007

Cult of Personality

Kung Fu Monkey: "Mm-hmm. Mmm-hmm.": "This woman's just been caught out admitting she doesn't understand her oath of office to the people of the United States and that she's misplaced her priorities in a cult of politicized hero-worship ...and she's treating it like Myra from HR is harassing her about the damn TPS forms again."

Check out the video.  This is lovely...

U.S. Will Allow Most Types of Lighters on Planes - New York Times

U.S. Will Allow Most Types of Lighters on Planes - New York Times: "Federal aviation authorities have decided to stop enforcing a two-year-old rule against taking cigarette lighters on airplanes, concluding that it was a waste of time to search for them before passengers boarded."

OMG - The terrirsts have w0n!  

Monday, July 09, 2007

alec

Creative Profanity

So, here I was rockin back from Chicago this weekend, and I had an idea for a weekly recurring feature for this blog: Creative Profanity.

We all have the usual motherfucker or craptastic swearwords; what we need is some new, unique and inventive swearwords and phrases.

To start: "Mudsucking Shitfoot". I know I've read that somewhere in a pulp sci-fi book, but I find no reference to it on Google. Daffynition to come once I think of one. . .

Any ideas?

Monday, July 02, 2007

Omaha Was Bombed During WWII - Omaha's 150th Birthday News Story - KETV Omaha

Omaha Was Bombed During WWII - Omaha's 150th Birthday News Story - KETV Omaha: "OMAHA, Neb. -- The year was 1945 and the United States was in the middle of World War II. Omaha seemed relatively safe until one night in April when a Japanese bomb dropped in Dundee."

Sunday, July 01, 2007

Visual Hub, High Motion and H.264

Just a tip - on Visual Hub for the Mac, when encoding an MP4 file with lots of motion - my example was a series of photos at 15 frames per photo (2 per second) - it fails miserably even at high quality settings.  The fast frame changes just disintegrated into macroblock noise.

However, if I go into Advanced Settings, and check '2-pass' encoding, it clears right up, at the cost of 50% more encoding time.  (2 minutes to 3 minutes for a 2:10 video clip on the 2.33 MacBook Pro)

Another note - at the same settings, without the 2-pass encoding, the AVI Simple profile appears to deliver similarly excellent results.  Not sure what codec is used - Xvid / DivX I assume via FFMPEG.  Also a smaller file size and greater compatibility between Windows, Mac and Linux.

The AVI files can be seen at my KS HSTA site (no, not the UTube, below that!).

W.