Category Archives: Techy

DVD to iPhone via Windows

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“My name’s Matt Haney, and I have an iPhone”.  But then, looking around on the train to and from work nowadays, it seems everyone else has one too.

One of the reasons I got the phone was so that I could watch videos on the train without using the not-designed-for-video-playback screen on my old phone, or having to carry a PSP around.  So, here, for the sake of my own memory more than anything, is how I go about getting moving pictures from overpriced shiny round things onto my overpriced shiny iPhone.

Software used: DVD Decrypter & Handbrake

Basically, the process is ‘Decryptwith DVD Decrypter, then encode with Handbrake’.  This can be a pain for multiple episode DVDs (TV Series boxsets, for example), as you can’t just set it off and go to bed.  This is where the ancient art of batch scripts comes in.  Both of these pieces of software can be run from the command line, so I use a batch script like the following*:

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Cute

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Whilst in PC World the other day (quenching my printer’s thirst for ink), my brother and I chanced across this little cutie. It’s a 1Gb ‘USB Mass Storage Device’ (yawn), but isn’t it cute?!

 

 

Behemoth

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Roll up, roll up. Get your oversized, obsolete electronics here! My lovely 19″ Sony Monitor is up for grabs on eBay, currently sitting at a bid of 1 penny. You have just over a day to get your bids in, otherwise this national treasure will be lost forever, likely to be taken into a private collection.

Go on, go and bid!

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EDIT: Sorry, you’ve missed your chance. My first eBay sale went perfectly smoothly, and disappointingly I didn’t even get a request to post it to Nigeria…

(Alright, it sold for a penny. You can laugh now.)

Whizzy Mappy Thingie

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I am a sucker for maps and aerial photos, especially the glut of web-based services that have been springing up over the last few years. The latest one to catch my eye is Microsoft’s maps.live.com, which includes some pretty scary “Bird’s Eye View” photos. You can even spin it round to get a different point of view.

Here’s a picture of our house taken on a week day sometime last year, before the builders started playing about with the lockups to the rear:

Old link

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…or “Pimp My (Brother’s) Site”

Whilst playing around with Garry’s bookmarking site I came across some old links which could do with an airing. The first of these is a transcript of an interview on Nicky Campbell’s radio programme involving Will Self and journalist Richard Littlejohn. Will Self just about wipes the floor with Richard Littlejohn – it makes an amusing read.

Ooh, Firefox 2 RC3 now has builtin spellchecking (as long as you download the dictionary file) – cool :)

I is, you is, we is…

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Word ‘advised’ me on my grammar yesterday. It suggested that I change the following sentence:

“If the fields do not match what we expect then we are not going to be able to process the data.”

to:

“If the fields do not match what we expect then we is not going to be able to process the data.”

Have I accidentally enabled ‘Ali G’ mode, or something?

Alternatively, can someone tell me why Word is suggesting ‘is’ in that case?

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Google and Comment Spam

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OK, so Google have tried to do something about comment spam. (Yahoo and MSN are in on it too, it seems) The idea is that comment spam is mainly done to improve the PageRank of a particular website, so Google are going to stop using links in blog comments to feed their PageRank algorithm.

It sounds like a good idea in principal, but am I missing something? This will only work if two things happen. First, ALL blogs will have to adopt the technique. Secondly, the low-life, smelly, goodfernutthin’ scum that actually do the spamming have to realise it’s going on.

I can’t really comment on how completely the idea will be adopted, other than to say it’s very doubtful I will be upgrading this instance of MT any time soon.

But even if everyone did patch straight away, I don’t think it would make a jot of difference.

You see, MT has had a little feature since at least version 2.661 (released sometime in the 18th Century, I believe), whereby links in comments are fed through a redirect, stripping them of any googlejuice. But I still get spam. It’s entirely pointless spam because it won’t be raising anyone’s PageRank but it’s still there. All it does is raise my blood pressure once in a while (and Mike’s too, it seems)

So, thanks Google – it’s good to see someone big trying to sort out the problem, but I don’t think this particular attack is going to work.

(My answer would be to round up all the gits and ship them off to some distant moon together, so that they can annoy each other to their hearts’ discontent. Until they run out of air… But that’s just me.)