Daily Archives: 11/30/2004

iPodder out, Doppler is in…

Sorry the team working on iPodder, but I’ve become too frustrated with it to continue using it. I have been having problems with iTunes crashing periodically, with items which are downloaded and inserted multiple times, and with a situation where a feed which botched once and refused to download again, even after uninstalling and reinstalling (hint: wherever you are storing the history, it isn’t removed during an uninstall). So, toward that end, I’ve decided to give Doppler a shot.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Tidying up images…

Neat Image While testing the low light performance of my new cellular phone, I noticed that even in medium indoor lighting, the camera had significant amounts of noise (and blur). Still, there is a cool program called Neat Image which I’ve mentioned before. It can remove a lot of the noise from images and yielded the following cleaned up image.

If you do a lot of photography in low light, try giving Neat Image a try. Highly recommended.

Brainwagon Radio: MPx220 and MythTV

Where your host describes the fun he’s been having with his new cell phone and his travails in trying to get MythTV installed.

Links for the show:

I’ve currently got video recording from an old Brooktree 878 card (made by Pinnacle) working at 320×220 at 60% or so cpu load on my aging 800mhz Celeron box. There seem to be very few problems with dropped frames or synch. Unfortunately, there do appear to be significant problems still with sound when watching Live TV: the video lurches and I get prebuffering audio errors in the invoking xterm window. I’m also having quality issues with horizontal streaking: I’m beginning to suspect that it’s the card.

I’ll keep you all posted on my improved efforts.

Python 2.4

Two things are occupying my mind this morning: the first: an internal reminder to pay my mortgage today, and the second is that Python 2.4 has been officially released.

Notable changes in Python 2.4 include improvements to the importing of modules, function decorators, generator expressions, a number of new modules (including subprocess, decimal and cookielib) and a host of bug fixes and other improvements.