Monthly Archives: November 2004

Brainwagon Radio: Cinnamon Bear, Core Media Player, and Konfabulator

Where your host describes his upcoming special holiday treat, yammers about a couple of interesting bits of software, and plays some holiday music to prime the pump for the largest shopping weekend of the year.

Links from today’s show:

  • I’m going to be presenting podcast for the classic 1937 radio serial The Cinnamon Bear. You can go to to this page starting November 29th and download one episode per day, culminating in the final episode on Christmas Eve. I’ll also have an RSS feed available which I’m still testing.
  • The Core Media Player for Windows plays all sorts of media, including Ogg files.
  • Konfabulator has a terrible name, but many widgets that can enhance your desktop. Available for either Windows or OSX, and they even have a developer’s API.
  • Song of the day: The Whistling Elves playing Dot Com Christmas

Oh Good Lord…

We’ve seen plenty of games, chock-a-block full with violence, sex, sex and violence, but I must admit that it never dawned on me that someone would make a game out of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

I mean honestly, did someone pitch this idea? Was there some session where this project percolated to the top of all possible project ideas? What ideas were rejected? O.J.’s Rampage? John Wayne Gacy’s Playground Partyland? Scott Peterson Goes Fishing?

Bleh.

Brainwagon Radio: Lost and Found, Gadgets, Software and Recipes!

Where your host rambles and meanders through the topics that seem appropriate on a Saturday. Links from the show:

  • I use lots of command-line tools to process and convert video files. Some of the more important ones are mplayer, transcode and ffmpeg. All three are useful and powerful, but have steep learning curves. Still, for mass conversion and ripping of video files, they annoy me much less than other alternatives, and they are all open-source.
  • Mark Tilden is the inventor of BEAM robotics and also the Robosapien, a cute remote controlled robot toy with surprisingly long battery life. You can look for other Robosapien hacks here.
  • Dave Slusher uses blosxom as his blogging software: a good choice. I use WordPress, and have recently begun testing the newest version at a mirror of my text weblog. Verdict: nice, but generates illegal RSS for enclosures (multiple enclosures per item).
  • Get ready for the holidays! Try these recipes from the web:

Example Video From the Aiptek DV4500

My Robosapien: Click for Full Size ImageWell, I promised to make a better review of the Aiptek DV4500 and to post some trial video and image files, and here they are. I took these photos and video in the available light in my living room during the daytime.

  1. The highest resolution photo mode Note that it’s pretty blurry, it is devilishly hard to get sharp exposures in available light. The button to click the shutter is in a poor place to prevent jerky motion, and the overall exposures in this light are very long, making hand held exposures even more difficult.
  2. 352×288 video, snapped of my Robosapien dancing. Not too bad, although a bit blurry and showing lots of compression artifacts. In theory, the manual says this is 30fps, although a couple of utilities that I have report that it is recorded at 15000 frames per second. Eek!
  3. 640×480 video, showing the Robosapien’s fighting skills. Better overall image quality, but clearly shows blurring when the motion is fast. The manual says this is 15fps, but again several utilities I have report the 15000 fps anomaly.

The long and short of it? The Aiptek DV4500 is basically as good as a cheap $30 webcam, but it does record MPEG4 video, snapshots and act as a voice recorder. It has a small video screen, can play back to a television and records to SD memory cards. It’s cheaply constructed, and is blind as a bat in low light (and unlike bats, cannot fall back on sonar imaging). On the plus side, it is portable, uses standard media, is accessible as a hard drive from Linux machines without special drivers, can play back mp3 files (including the 64Kbps ones I use to record my podcasts) and is cheap enough that next year when a really good option comes in at the same price, you won’t feel bad about giving this one to your kids as a hand-me-down.

Addendum: My referer logs indicate that the number one search query to google that gets people to arrive at my site is “robosapien+hacks”. I did a brief weblog about robosapien hacks months ago, merely pointing at other good information, but apparently that has reached the number three position on the page of Google search results. It’s embarrassing really, as all I have really done is drive my robot around to play with the cat. Oh well.

Whew! Found it!

To my great relief (and no doubt, the great pleasure of my wife) I found her missing wedding ring. Apparently it slipped off while she was folding clothes, because I found it between two folded shirts in my drawer.

I think it is definitely time for either resizing or replacement of these rings. Both of us have lost enough weight that our old rings slip off way too easily. But I am ecstatic that I found this ring. It totally turns around a day which was not starting well (my wife’s car has a flat tire). All is well.

Hacking WordPress…

I’ve been thinking for sometime that I should really try out the new development version of WordPress. I hacked some crude support for enclosures into my version, but I heard that there was some new code that is supposed to deal with it in the current version, so I thought I’d give it a try.

The way that I hacked the system was by the use of custom fields: basically I added two fields audiourl and audiolength, which if they were present in a posting would:

  • add the necessary enclosure tag to the RSS feed, and
  • add a link with the word “Enclosure” and the size to the posting so those without ipodder scripts could download the mp3 file

This worked fine, but was sub-optimal because it required me to type in the size of the audio enclosure itself. In the CVS version of WordPress, any link to an audio, video or image file is included in the feed as an enclosure, and the code in WordPress is smart enough to try to fetch the header for the requested item to get its Content-type and its Content-length, so that simplifies the overall process.

It took me only a few minutes to go back through my database using a python script and the MySQLdb package and issue the appropriate UPDATE SQL commands to switch one to the other. Et voila! It worked just fine.

While I was trying out the new version, I noticed that it loaded the index page much faster than mine. The key difference would seem to be the right column, and in particular the code that I got from Chaitgear for tracking referers. Digging in the code, found that it does a wasteful SELECT that probably fetches the entire list of referers. Putting a limit onto that query results in the same result, but operates much faster. That’s in place now.

If the CVS version of WordPress checks out, I’ll probably try to deploy it as soon as I can port my brainwagon “theme” over to it.

Burroughs’ Encyclopedia

Burroughs' Encyclopedia of Amazing Facts and Useful InformationI haven’t posted any Gutenberg Gems lately, so to right this serious wrong, consider Burrough’s Encyclopedia of Amazing Facts and Useful Information. Besides having an extensive essay on good penmanship, it includes chapters on how to be handsome, a table of 150 topics for debate (Was England justifiable in interfering between Egypt and the Soudan rebels? It’s a question I didn’t hear addressed in the 2004 debates!), how to make ice cream, and all sorts of useful facts like the gestation period of buffalo. How can we possibly have lived without this cornucopia of wisdom.

Check it out.

What’s the last place you would look?

Imagine the following.

You are home all day, sick from work. You don’t go anywhere special, or do anything outside your home. Yet, at the end of the day, you look down at your hand and to your horror, discover that your wedding ring has slipped off your finger sometime during the day! Eek!

Well, it’s not quite that dire. I didn’t lose my wedding ring.

My wife did.

They say that lost items are always in the last place you look. So, the question is: where is the last place you would look for a missing ring?

Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Washington, D.C.: U.S. vows 30M newspaper pages to go on Net

The National Endowment for the Humanities is teaming with the Library of Congress to make 30 million newpaper pages from 1836 to 1922 available for free download over the net.

Interestingly:

The span of the joint project is limited because type faces of printers used before 1836 are too difficult for optical scanners to read, and copyright restrictions are in force on papers published after 1923.