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Well, I’m taking a bit of a break from catching up on the mounds of paperwork from my practice. My son is busily banging his toys on the floor beside me… for the moment managing to forget his erupting teeth (thankfully!!).

I’m going to have to lower the mattress in his crib – he’s making attempts to pull himself upright even as I speak, and although not yet successful, it’s only a matter of time… bless his adventurous little heart!!

Anyway, here are a couple of updates from the web:

• Via BoingBoing: A hilarious chart illustrating one of the problems with the movie industry – the product you pay for is far inferior to the product you can get for free. Obviously, people want the better product, even if it is illegal:
• School in the states gives their students laptops, but doesn’t tell them that they can turn the webcams on at any time. Even when said laptop is at home. In their bedroom. 1984, anyone? (But they only use this feature if the laptop has been stolen. Honest!)
• BoingBoing has a page for ‘Games to Get‘ – a list of their recommended games. Most are small, indie titles that are quite interesting, that you would otherwise never hear about. Check it out!
• CHIP and PIN – used in Europe for a while and being pushed in North America – is totally flawed (at least, the European implementation). What good is relying on the PIN & chip on the card for verification when you can trick the device into thinking it’s checked everything without actually checking? (via Schneier and BoingBoing)

And that’s about all for now… OK, back to work!!

Well, I’ve finally gotten around to trying to backup all my important (and not so important files) offsite. Here I’ll give a rundown of the sync products I tried and some issues I ran into…

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Well I was sick the last few days, and looking for some way to pass the time (yes, I suppose the stack of medical journals would have been one way…).

Anyway, I decided to sort through some e-books I had downloaded from Project Gutenberg, and try to find a good reader for them – both on the PC and my Windows Mobile Smartphone. I’d been down this road before and found Microsoft Reader to be OK, once I converted stuff to .lit format… but that conversion was a bit tricky. Seems the plug-in to do it isn’t compatible with Office 2007.

So I stumbled upon Mobipocker Reader, which I’d heard about before but never tried – and the companion Mobipocket Creator.

They’re actually pretty easy to use, will automatically convert from most formats. For those it won’t convert, I tried out Stanza – which is quite popular for Mac & iPhone apparently. The only hiccup I had was that if I converted directly to mobi format in Stanza, the resulting file would crash the reader on my phone. So, convert to text first, then use MobiCreator to convert to mobi format, and voila!  The advantage is I can add a cover art image this way, too.

Yeah, I had that problem. zenphoto uses flowplayer, but I think the problem would exist in any flash-based video player. Basically, it would need to download the whole .mp4 file before starting to play – defeating the whole idea of ’streaming’

Apparently, I’m not alone with this problem. And, as often is the case, someone else on the internet has solved it admirably with MetaDataMover.

Doesn’t your mp4 file stream properly over the Internet? Does the mp4 need to download completely before playing in a Flash player? rndware’s Metadata Mover moves metadata from the end to the beginning of mp4 files. This allows any mp4 file to be streamed using Flash players, without needing to load the entire movie.

I’m just puzzled why this tool needs administrator access. Hope I haven’t installed a trojan…

Local cache: mp4MetadataMover0.9

So I recently picked up a Canon Vixia HF-200 from Mostly Digital. Nice HD Camcorder… love it (besides the fact that the battery that comes with it is underpowered – I bought a heftier one from a no-name Chinese manufacturer that keeps it recording for a while)

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I was having a little issue with Premiere Elements; namely, that when I tried to create a new project, it would not let me “Change Settings” – I clicked on the button, and the dialog that came up was empty, and all the buttons were blank.

This wasn’t an issue before, but I have some videos of my son taken by my brother-in-law’s camcorder, which records in HD. So, I need an HD profile…

The solution is posted here in the Adobe forums:

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On all my Windows XP machines, I’m used to pushing Win-L to lock the screen and go to the Welcome Screen, so for example, I can pass the computer on to my wife, and come back and resume everything I was working on without any lost time.

On Windows Vista (which I have on the laptop because it came with it – and I’m not spending any more money on a Windows XP license, as if you can still find them….), Win-L just goes to a new ‘locked’ screen. It’s an extra mouse click to go to the select user screen. Which doesn’t seem like much, but despite the fact that the resolution is the SAME FOR ALL USERS, Vista insists on refreshing the screen. And Vista being Vista, it is SLOW to do this. So, instead of 2 seconds to switch users, it takes 10-15, which is really annoying for a supposedly ‘upgraded’ operating system.

I know, I know, I should just install Linux on the laptop. My wife probably wouldn’t even notice. :) But, I do ocassionally play games (ok, ok, dual boot, I know).

I’ll do that with Windows 7 I guess…

Anyway, this website has a workaround that, while not ideal, allows me to get to switch users with a quick keypress in Vista (Win-2). So, somewhat improved user switching. Doesn’t help if the screen saver kicks in & goes to the ‘locked’ screen automatically… but when it comes to Microsoft, I’ll take what I can get. They even have a solution for Vista Home/Home Premium without a TSDISCON executable.

1. Create a shortcut on your desktop to TSDISCON (* see below) and call it something like “Switch User”
2. Go the shortcut Properties page and assign a shortcut key. Note that unfortunately you can’t use the Windows Key in your shortcut – so I went for CTRL + ALT + SHIFT + L
3. Right click Start button and choose “Open All Users” and move the shortcut into the Programs folder (confirming the UAC prompt as you go).
4. Log out, and back in again. This is necessary because Explorer hasn’t noticed there’s now a shortcut with a new shortcut key it should be taking notice of.

And that did it. CTRL + ALT + SHIFT + L isn’t quite a neat as WinKey+L but it’s a hell of a lot better than poking around in the Start Menu.

I got back to doing some video editing this weekend (old videos of when I was just a kid!) and ran into an Adobe Premiere Elements issue with the audio sync.

This is video from an old VHS tape I got a local video guy to burn to DVD for me (I know, could’ve done this myself, but the capture card not worth the investment since I will likely never need to grab anything off analog formats again…). I had big problems syncing the audio from the VOB files (except for the first one). Actually, the audio would be out of sync in any player except for VLC player…

I tried a bunch of things, and also tried to ’stream’ & save the file through VLC, but nothing worked. Finally I stumbled upon this guide which gave me the simplest solution of all: Use DVD Decrypter to rip the separate 1GB Vobs into one big VOB file. Presto, problem solved, no more sync issues! (I could’ve tried to join the files with VobMerge as the guide suggests but I figured it would be safer just to re-rip).

Anyway, new videos are in my gallery. Ask me for the password if you don’t have it.