brainwagon

Actually, you don’t need a range.

This recipe has shown up in my inbox twice today, so I guess I have to blog about it. Ellen Spertus has a nice recipe for making your own Floam on her website. What is Floam you ask? (I apologize in advance to linking to the annoying Flash infomercial). Well, it’s kind of like clay, except that it is colorful and full of tiny beads, so it is pretty lightweight.

Ellen’s recipe basically calls for a mixture of homemade slime with expanded polystyrene beads. The slime is basically a mix of glue and a solution of borax, so it’s not like this would be expensive. I made a cup full of the stuff awhile ago as an experiment, and it was oh so fun to play with.

I bought Carmen a video iPod a few weeks ago, and she loves it. You can apparently play video on a regular TV, but you need a special Apple video cable to do so. Or do you? According to the guys at MacDevCenter, all you really need to do is realize that the special Mac cable is just an ordinary A/V cable with an eight inch to RCA plugs like you’d use to connect a camcorder to a TV, and remember that they send the video out the red connector instead of out the yellow connector.

How annoying is that? I suppose we should be grateful, they could have done something really annoying and made other cables really incompatible with their own, but sheesh.

I just noticed that there was a new version of The Core Pocket Media Player available. When I upgraded my Dell Axim x50v to Windows Mobile 5, TCPMP no longer seemed to use the accelerated graphics hardware, which this new release seems to cure: it again has support for the accelerated chipset. Unfortunately, AAC support has been removed, which means that many MPEG4 videos I have no longer play. Frown.. Still, a worthy media player.

BoingBoing ran a short bit about the publication of a book after my own heart: Retro Gaming Hacks by O’Reilly. My own project just requires a bit more work, which I am going to get to this weekend. Really.

Raphael Assénat created his own reprogrammable cartridge for the Sega Genesis so that he could give a try at writing his own homebrew games. I’ve seen his webpage before, in particular, his experimetns with webcams. Good stuff.

Hardware-wise, the Genesis is kind of a cute computer: It’s got an 8Mhz 68000 processor, 64KB of dedicated video ram, and a separate Z-80 chip to control the sound processor. A veritable super computer compared to the machine I’ve been playing with.

I took one of the Superman cartoons available from archive.org and tried various command line tools to make a version that would play on the iPod video. I seemed to have a bit of trouble getting ffmpeg to write a .mp4 file that Quicktime/iTunes liked, so eventually I used ffmpeg to write a raw .m4v video file, encoded the audio separately with faac, and then used mp4creator, part of the mpeg4ip tools to combine them, hint and optimize them. It seemed to work.

Here’s the tracks in the file…

[fishtank] % mp4info super.mp4
mp4info version 1.3
super.mp4:
Track   Type    Info
1       video   MPEG-4 Simple @ L1, 614.881 secs, 192 kbps, 320x240 @ 29.970027 fps
2       audio   MPEG-4 AAC LC, 614.741 secs, 62 kbps, 48000 Hz
3       hint    Payload MP4V-ES for track 1
4       hint    Payload mpeg4-generic for track 2
 Metadata Tool: mp4creator 1.3

I believe that these are the commands that I ran:

The net result: this video file. It’s a little blocky, but should play well on your video ipod. Let me know how it works out.

Just in case you got tired of showing off Desparate Housewives on your new video ipod, you can surf on over to archive.org and download some of their feature films to help fill those gigabytes. Some worthwhile classics: Night of the Living Dead, film noir classic D.O.A. and Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe. Simply download the 256kb MPEG 4 version, sync them to your ipod and voila! Entertainment.

(Oh, these files also play just as well in the Core Pocket Media Player I mentioned in the previous post).

Enjoy.

Update: Further testing reveals that while the videos from archive.org work, the audio is occasionally plagued by intermittent static bursts. Some incompatibility between mpeg audio codecs? More exploration is clearly needed.

Well, my wife and I are coming up on our 11th anniversary of our first date, an important holiday which she leveraged to get me to buy her a new video iPod, which she’s had for a couple of days. Expect a podcast in the next few days (recorded not in my car, but in BrainWagon Studios, aka my dining room, but with decent mics and my mixer setup) to relay her impressions of the little gadget, and the results of our efforts to load various kinds of free video media on it.

In the mean time, not to be left out, I downloaded the Core Pocket Media Player for my Dell Axim x50v, and I must admit, this is one slick program. It allows playing of MPEG-1, MPEG-4, DivX and MJPEG video files on your Pocket PC, along with MP3 audio and Ogg Vorbis files. It’s released under the GPL, and free, so download and enjoy! They apparently even have a version for Smartphones, so I’ll be checking that out before our next podcast.

Update: I tried out the SmartPhone version too. It works well, albeit not as smoothly as the version for the Pocket PC (much lower power computer in the phone). Good stuff!

Apple announced some stuff. Their website is slow, probably a good sign.

Carmen already wants one of the new black iPods.

I spent some time this weekend playing around with Free World Dialup. What is that?

FWD allows you to make free phone calls over any broadband connection using devices that follow current accepted Internet Standards. This can be a “plain old telephone” with an IP adapter, an IP based phone or any number of free soft-phones (software for your PC or PDA like Pulver Communicator). However, FWD is more than just free phone calls. FWD is a complete IP communications network.

I mucked around with this a bit in the past when I was experimenting with Asterisk. But let’s face it, using a laptop to do phone calls was just… well… I’d rather use a real phone. To do that, I needed some sort of SIP adapter. Interestingly enough Linksys is making zillions of these, specifically the PAP2, which are generally sold locked to Vonage, one of the cheaper and best known VOIP providers. They are cheap (Staples had them for $50 with a $50 rebate, and the one I got from Best Buy was $35 with a $10 rebate), so it’s kind of a pity they are locked.

Well. You can get around that. It’s not a complete nobrainer, so I don’t recommend this process unless you are fairly comfortable with screwing with things, but I did manage to get it to work. Once you’ve got it unlocked, you can use Sipura’s instructions on using their adapters with FWD to retarget it (it turns out that the PAP2 is identical to an Sipura 2000, except for minor software differences).

So now I’ve got an IP phone. It doesn’t really interface with the PSTN, but it’s a cute gadget. I will probably use it to play around with Asterisk. Should be fun.

Besides, it’s got blue LEDs in it.

Anyone whose using Free World Dialup can call me at #709654 and leave me a voice mail.

My Cyborg Name:

Make your own. Thanks Carmen for pointing this one out.

In a previous weblog posting, I mentioned that I had bought a Linksys NSLU2 NAS (networked attached storage) device that I was hacking away on. I recently dusted it off and started playing with it again, after installing the unslung firmware that lets you run linux on it. What was curious was that I had mentioned previously that the slug (as they are affectionately called) was a 266mhz ARM processor. But I found out recently that Linksys included jumpers to effectively run the processor at half speed.

But you can fix that by snipping out a surface mount resistor (I just cut it out with an exacto knife). Total mod time: approximately two minutes (once I read the page on how to open the case). Net result: double speed NSLU2.

Cute.

The Nintendo DS is kind of a cute little gadget, and what’s cool is that someone is already doing all the heavy lifting of getting TCP/IP to work on its wireless. This uses Adam Dunkel’s lwip implementation. Not quite done yet, but interesting!

How about a plastic bunny that waggles his ears when you get mail? Or you can use it to send instant message. Or songs. Via Wifi. It’s… just… so impossibly useless.

I need one.

I mused about a retro-style game console in today’s podcast, and over lunch I found xgamestation.com, who manufactures a simple video game system which is obviously inspired by the same ideas:

Imagine understanding how video game systems are designed and developed at an engineer’s level. Imagine writing your own games for a piece of hardware you’re personally capable of building. This isn’t a field trip to the factory — this is decades of video game hardware development boot camp compressed into a single product designed to upgrade your brain and take you to the next level of skill and understanding. It was estimated that only 100-200 people on the entire planet understood the workings of the legendary Atari 2600 and its design. What if you could design machines like this and beyond?

Nifty.

It uses the Ubicom SX52 chip, which is an interesting choice. The chips run fast enough that they support the idea of virtual peripherals, and are quite inexpensive. Far too inexpensive to really justify the $199.00 pricetag of the xgamestation, but still, there are probably some good ideas hidden in this.

Logged for later consumption.