Total Conversion

I made up an looping slideshow with 24 slides. Each one has a recording of myself saying something inane or screaming at one of the 20 colleagues in the open plan office I share. I have set the slides to loop repeatedly. Each slide has a duration of 35 minutes, so tomorrow, my voice will ring out unexpectedly in the office while I take the day off. I have disconnected keyboard/mouse/monitor and I hope security isn't freaked out during the night while they make their patrols.

So this girl at work says my blog is boring and geeky.  I guess I'll take half of that as a compliment.  I'm taking tomorrow off work, but, since I work in an open plan, I thought I'd leave them something to comfort them while I'm away. I made up an auto-running powerpoint slideshow with 24 slides.  Each one has a recording of myself saying something inane or screaming at one of them.  I have set the slides to loop repeatedly.  Each slide has a duration of 35 minutes, so at various intervals tomorrow, my voice will ring out unexpectedly in the office. I unplugged keyboard, mouse and switched off monitor.  As I sit here typing this blog post, that looping presentation is running.  Any security guards walking by might be tempted to unlock the office and look in, but I doubt they will know what the hell is going on. The possibility of playing creaking horror sound efforts to freak out colleagues just came to mind.  Save that for later. Will post any funny feedback

One more reason I love my android tablet. I copied some training dvd's I have onto my Apache server into a folder named training. I then browsed to the folders and see the different dvd file layouts. I can browse them and watch the videos. Each one has a different structure and layout. Using a mixture of .mov, flv and wmv video, some with html navigation. Everything plays and launches beautifully from the Android Browser. On the IPAD2, only the .mov files play properly. Will probably have to re-encode all the other videos so my wife can access them. What a pain! Navigation is also a pain due to the lack of a back button on the ipad. Its such a mission to get it running smoothly I'm tempted to just not bother. Oh, and that's not all. When selecting a video to watch, Android pops up an option to play via upnp to my TV. So I can watch it on tv and multitask on the bloody device at the same time. It works so much better than the IPAD in this use case its like com

Just went to Cnn.com to look for Wall Street protest news. Can't even find the word WALL on main page. I've been noticing this media bias for years, but this is just ridiculous.

Just got the eeePad Transformer keyboard dock. batterylife := batterylife + hours(8);

So a lazy friend of mind decided to rebuild his media server and didn't want to do it alone.  Foolishly, I agreed to help.  I've been down this road before and could have predicted the outcome. The plan was he wanted to install Ubuntu Server to be a streaming media platform for his family and also to his new Asus eeePad Transformer Honeycomb Tablet.  All good and well.  A good enough reason to blow an evening, I thought.  I had been planning to upgrade an old Fedora 12 box, so I told him I would do the same install with him and we could share the learning experience together.  I always figured I could reinstall Fedora or CentOS again a few days later, if I didn't want to stick with the Ubuntu Server.  Considering that it would be running in headless, GUI-less mode, I figured the Ubuntu box wouldn't get on my nerves too much. Naturally, R chickened out at the end and I ended up doing the install on my lonesome.  Thankfully, I had anticipated this so by the time I got

streamed 1080p mkv over wifi to eeepad transformer tablet to plex client. 6 second buffer at start. works great. also tested upnp. mediatomb on served,upnpplay rockplayer on tablet. didnt test hd yet

Agreed to wipe the O/S on one of my Fedora Servers to help a friend. He wanted me to walk him through a Ubuntu Server setup so I thought I would wipe an older Fedora12 box and do an install while he does his. I just finished installing & configuring Plex ( www.plexapp.com ) & Mediatomb on Natty Server. 4 hours later everything working. Some minor lessons learned along the way. Sadly, he chickened out and I'm stuck with an Ubuntu Server I'll probably wipe. http://www.plexapp.com

None of this is cast in stone.  In fact, I can pretty much guarantee that this will change before the next release.  I have been implementing some changes to WinFF that I felt would get me into the swing of developing.  I am learning a lot of lessons during this process, but feel excited enough about it that I wanted to share. Current Released Version This is a screen from the current development version.  It needs much more testing and quality control before release and the list contains a ton more info that the average user needs to see regarding file info, but its useful to have on during the development cycle. The key new features I am excited about is the enhanced queue display in the file list with all the extra detail and the ability for each queue item to have different conversion settings.  This has bugged me for a while and in the spirit of "fixing it yourself" I spent the last few evenings on this. I hope the many users of WinFF enjoy the new functionalit

Android port for Lazarus incoming! http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Android_Interface#Compiling_the_example_LCL-Android_Appl Finally something that will let me write Android apps with my fave dev tool! http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Android_Interface#Compiling_the_example_LCL-Android_Appl

Started hacking on WinFF again. It's been too long. www.winff.org if you've never used it before. http://www.winff.org