I’m sick of my default theme. I’m starting with something minimal, and then trying to improve it. Consider the look to be somewhat in flux.
[tags]Wordpress[/tags]
Addendum: I’m using the rather minimal Sandbox theme now. I like it. I’m going to try to tweak it as little as humanly possible.
Okay, my previous post detailed why I think most criticisms of the iPhone are off target. But what features the iPhone does or doesn’t have are for the most part irrelevent. I think that the iPhone is going to change the cell phone business at its most fundamental levels, and here is why.
The universe of cell phones is oddly split between two industries: the industry which manufactures phones, and the industry that provides the network.
The cell phone manufacturers would love to sell you phones. To do this, they want to add nifty features that people like: cameras, higher resolution screens, Wifi, GPS and the like. They’d love to sell you a new one every year. They’d love to sell you one every six months if they could.
Then there are the service providers. They sell a service to you. They don’t care whether you get new stuff on your phone unless it is somehow tied to a service that they can charge you for. If your phone had wifi, they have a decreased ability to sell you a $60 month data plan. So… your phone probably doesn’t have it. They don’t want you to upload music to your phone (say, by simply dragging music onto it like even the cheapest mp3 player), they want you to buy it from their online music store, likely paying again for a song that you already have. They want to ding you $2 for a ringtone or wallpaper, when making such things should be trivial.
Enter the iPhone. Half a million units sold in the first weekend. Half a million phones out there this week with wifi. With a fairly affordable unlimited data plan. With the ability to sync the music you already bought to your phone. No AT&T store icons. Merely the ability to use the web from your phone in the way you use the web from pretty much every other device.
Apple got AT&T to bite the poisoned apple, and now everyone is going to have to take a bite. Nokia and Motorola are going to ask for similar deals with network owners. Consumers from other networks are going to demand unlimited data and Wifi.
A caveat: the iPhone does come with the same 2 year contract that AT&T screws you with. I wonder how long such a thing will last. Ultimately Apple will have a new upgrade to their phone, and probably in a lot less than 2 years. All 500,000 of their customers will feel the urge to upgrade, but won’t feel that paying AT&T for the privilege of buying a new phone from Apple is reasonable.
It’ll be an interesting new game.
[tags]iPhone,Cellphone,Rant and Rave[/tags]
I must admit it: I’m beginning to contemplate purchasing an iPhone. They are just very, very cool. I mean, really cool. I know it won’t make me cool to have one, but it is a very neat gadget. That’s why I find lists like the below so amusing.
Buyer’s Guide: Wait! Ten Things You Should Know Before You Buy an iPhone – Gizmodo
Let’s work through them one at a time, shall we?
Sure, people should be aware of these things. But I’m wondering what mythical phone exists that addresses these criticisms. Anyone got any suggestions?
[tags]iPhone[/tags]
Len Peralta has a nifty little website called monsterbymail.com. For a modest fee, he’ll draw you a monster with the name you specify, and he’ll give you a movie file of him drawing it as well. I told him to draw “The Brain Wagon”. Here’s what he came up with:
Too old for Facebook? « Scobleizer
I’ve been on Facebook about a month now. I have just about 2,000 friends.
I think I’d categorize this statement as either “comical” or “a cry for help”. Are they really friends if you don’t remember their names?
Every once in a while, I try to make some actual DVDs using software that I have lying around the house (namely, an Ubuntu box). A question occurred to me a couple of days ago: can I store uncompressed PCM video onto a DVD? It turns out the answer is yes, although the methodology using free tools was a bit convoluted. I’m writing some of it down here so I can find it again.
The first thing to realize is that PCM audio on DVDs is only legal when sampled at 48khz, instead of the 44.1khz that is the standard for audio CDs. To test, I ripped a file from one of my CDs using “grip” to store it in wav format. I then used the Swiss Army knife of sound conversion, sox, to resample it to 48khz and to store it in big endian, signed word format (2 channels):
sox input.wav -r 48000 -c 2 -s -w -x output.lpcm resample -q
The -x option tells it to swap the byte order: I think that DVDs expect audio in bigendian form: Intel boxes (such as my Ubuntu box) are little endian. If you forget this step, you’ll probably have nothing but annoying noise when you burn your cd. For some reason, I think the extension on the output file is significant, but I could be wrong.
To multiplex this with a properly formatted video file, you can use mplex:
mplex -f 8 -o output.mpg -L 48000:2:16 video.m2v output.lpcm
Try running mplayer.mpg on the resulting file. The sound should work, and that mpeg should be usable by programs like dvdauthor.
Oh, some more things: I was trying to figure out how to convert individual image files into mpeg video, and get the right aspect ratio. I was particularly interested in making 16:9 video that would look right on my HD TV set. I ended up using the ppmto4m program on a 960×540 file with square pixels, piping the result through y4mscaler to resize that to the 720×480 format that is standard for video dvds, and then using mpeg2enc to create the video file. To test this, I encoded a simple 16×9 grid pattern with a command line that looked like:
ppmtoy4m -n 3932 -r -F 24000:1001 -A 1:1 -I p grid.ppm | \ y4mscaler -O preset=DVD_WIDE | \ mpeg2enc -f 8 -o video.m2v
Why the odd size? Mostly to make the math turn out right. Ultimately, your image is going to be squished into a 720×480 mpeg stream. Oddly, that image has a 3:2 aspect ratio. To make a 4:3 image with square pixels and 480 lines, you’d need 640 horizontal pixels. These would get stretched out, so you wouldn’t really get the highest resolution possible (it’s about 12% low). To make an appropriate image, you’d need the full horizontal resolution (720) with enough vertical resolution to make pixels square (720×540).
If we do the same calculation with 16×9, we find that an input image of 720×405 would work out fine, but again, we wouldn’t get all the vertical resolution we need. If we do the minimum necessary vertical res, the horizontal resolution doesn’t work out to a whole number. Such untidiness doesn’t seem right to me. So, instead, I use the same vertical resolutio that we used in the 4:3 case, and computed the necessary horizontal resolution to match. You end up with 960×540.
(Note: Oh, I could stop being silly and use 854×480. It’s off by only around 0.08% from being square. Nobody could detect it)
None of this probably matters unless you are trying to be especially tidy with aspect ratios and encodings. But since I work at a movie studio, I try to be tidy.
Addendum: I also did some experiements adding MPEG II audio to these streams. I couldn’t get toolame to actually resample the sound from 44.1k to 48k, so I ended up using mp2enc, which worked fine but much slower. I’ll revisit this later. I haven’t really played with AC3 sound either.
[tags]dvdauthor[/tags]
This just made me crack up this morning:
Addendum: It’s a prairie dog, not a chipmunk.
Yesterday and today, the TechShop in Menlo Park held an open house. I had heard of this place before, but it is in Menlo Park, which is a bit more than an hour from me, so I never really seriously considered joining. I must admit, having driven down and visited the place today, I’m definitely considering doing so. It basically rocks.
They have lots of different machine tools and shop equipment available for members, but the bit of kit that I was most interested in was the laser cutter. This is a rather nifty gadget that can cut and engrave many plastics, paper, cloth, and wood (no metals really). I turns out that I have been contemplating a project where such a capability would be useful (mainly, the manufacture of a high precision Nipkow disk for a mechanical television set. As I watched one of the workshop members demonstrate the capabilities of this cutter, I felt it might be nice to try to do a test. So, I broke for lunch, drover over to a nearby Togos, had a sandwich, and in a fit of serendipity, stopped at the nearby office supply store to pick up some poster board. I then drove back. Sitting at one of their public access Ubuntu machines, I wrote a simple Postscript program that plotted the outlines of a nipkow disk, and sized it to 10 inches (the paper stock I had was 11×14″). Here’s the same Postscript file converted to a PDF. I saved it to my USB stick, then brought it into the laser cutting room. Martin (I think that was his name) then imported the file into Corel, setup the print options, loaded one of my pieces of poster board, and printed. I hit the “go button”.
And it cut a perfect version of this piece. The holes are remarkably smooth and beautiful. It’s cut with a degree of precision that I simply can’t imagine. It’s well beyond the level of any jig that I could have made. He printed another one for me, just for fun. Both of them took less than two minutes. Damn. (I tried to figure out some way to photograph the piece in a way that would show just how cool they were, but so far, no dice. Take it from me though, very cool.)
If I was going to do this for real, I’d probably cut a round backing piece out of a thicker wood stock, and then glue a perforated piece of matte board to the front to make the thing for real. But the principle is definitely there.
They have other good stuff too. Multiple lathes, including a smallish South Bend similar to the one I learned what little skill I have with a lathe that I have. Mills. Metal cutting bandsaws. TIG and MIG welders. A 3D printer. It’s just freaking amazing.
If I can get my crap together, I suspect I’ll be paying the $100 monthly fee for a couple of months. It just rocks.
Thanks to all the nice helpful people there.
TechShop is the SF Bay Area’s Only Open-Access Public Workshop –Welcome
[tags]Techshop[/tags]
Boing Boing: Symphony for old IBM mainframe
In 1964, an Icelandic IBM 1401 mainframe engineer figured out how to get the machine to emit beautiful, bassy notes, and composed a symphony for it. Now his son is touring the symphony wiht interpretive dance thrown in.
Wikipedia has a nice entry on the IBM 1401, including some details about this musical. 🙂
[tags]Computer Music[/tags]
From Ed Felton’s Freedom to Tinker blog:
Let me say right up front that I have not accepted the Jesus Phone as my personal Lord and Savior.
The rest of what he has to say about the iPhone and its possible impact on the world of cellular phones is pretty good too.
Phew. I was on Ratatouille for almost two years, and today it’s finally in theaters. I wonder if all you crazy people camped out waiting for your chance to buy an iPhone are going to cut into our weekend box office. 🙂
Click here to find out about all the people camping out for the iPhone. Attempts to find people blogging about camping out in line to see Ratatouille have not yielded any results, but reviews have been pretty darned good (94% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes) so I hope that some of you will drag your weary bodies and shiny new iPhones to the theater and see it.
[tags]Pixar,Ratatouille,iPhone[/tags]
I hope that the ghost of Chief Justice Earl Warren rises from his grave to haunt the Supreme Court. Prepare to set your clocks back fifty years.
Supreme Court: Schools can’t use race to assign students
To be fair, I haven’t read the actual decision (PDF link). I’ll try to do so tomorrow and have more commentary then.
Addendum: Sigh. The PDF above is 185 pages, and I don’t have the time at the moment to go through it and develop a more informed opinion. I surfed on over to SCOTUSblog, and read some of their commentary. From this post::
One reading of today’s decision in the race cases is that the Supreme Court has outlawed programs that seek to increase racial diversity in the schools. Justice Kennedy’s concurrence does not adopt that view, however. And because his is the fifth vote, it is controlling. The better view, I think, is that the Court today has come close to extending the Grutter model to the lower school context, holding that school districts may account for race as one factor among many in student placement.
Holy spy satellites Bat Man! Check out this awesome image of the ISS taken from the Clay Center Observatory in Boston with a 25″ telescope.
APOD: 2007 June 28 – A Visit from Atlantis
Now, imagine a telescope three times larger, aimed down at the earth from there.
I know I’ve been a bit over the map with my postings lately, but I’ve been catching up on my blogroll, and there are some pretty diverse topics. From Bruce Schneier comes an interesting article pointing at research which shows that the Census department supplied data that enabled the internment of Japanese Americans in WWII, in violation of the law and contrary to their stated position.
Schneier on Security: Risks of Data Reuse
[tags]Privacy[/tags]