there we go. comemorating the flaw in our calendary *again*

SMART says my disc is ok but considering some values i think it's just making stuff up.
meanwhile, i have a idvd project the crashes idvd. "crap"

on other news, horray for lunches with old dear friends.

imovie/idvd is getting old pretty fast. idvd can't do multi-disc projects which is a bit annoying as i'll have to break up the imovie project manualy which involves copying a 70G project. gar.

on more sucky computer news, hal's /var got misteriously corrupted tonight. so it's either a kernel bug (unlikely), solar flares or a bad disc. as always, i'm bracing for the worse.

went shoping. ended up shoping for train related parts. all for vasco of course!

played santaclaus today and went around deploying a bag of gifts. oh the joy of having old friends!

otoh, 2 things pissed me off today,
a) some people still do ident lookups
b) all ident servers that do what i want are laced with crack. i'll have to write the 2 lines of perl myself

you look the other way and poof, there went the first day of your vacation week. of course, playing LotR:BfME like a crazy mofo didn't help.

it's xmas day. there'a litlle kid involved. what do you think happened ?

eventually went along with mpeg2enc cause the ffmpeg export script couldn't put out a convincing dvd structure.
discovered another thing kino needs, a tv safe bounding box. i spend a good hour making pretty labels just to discover they all fall into the "oh ops, your tv will very likely not show that!" zone. anyways, i redid them better, set both cores on the video, noticed i need a better clue at nfs tuning, burned the dvds and made covers! all with a cool 2 hours to spare.

and the evening was basicly binge gift opening.

found out the kino dvtitler plugin doesn't like 32kHz sound. it was highly annoying but just a speed bump.
i'm still undecided quality wise about ffmpeg vs. mpeg2enc. about speed is depressing, 2pass ffmpeg is faster than mpeg2enc runing on both cores ...

turns out kino already has an annotate feature and i'm dumb. joy.

on other news, sensible soccer on a genesis emulator. that's thaaa shiznitz!

the top news today is there's no work on friday.

i need sandy claws to bring me gigabit ethernet. 100bT is clearly not a viable way for nfs anymore.

kino also needs an anotate feature. keeping track on paper is a bit against the concept of digital editing.

today i saw a dvd that claimed copy protection. i thought to myself, but don't all dvds have copy protection ?
then i discovered it has errors designed to make pc based players crap. that's nice of you guys!

'The professors said the student was told by the agents that the book is on a "watch list," and that his background, which included significant time abroad, triggered them to investigate the student further. '
how's life on the land of the free this days ?

on others news, they delivered the clothes dryer today. i'm appauled at the quantity of fluff my clothes possece.

"TechWorld is running an article saying that Vista's graphics will not be in the kernel."
and only 20 years too late! otoh, what you win in stability you lose in performance. maybe game demos will start coming out for linux first :)

kino needs a clipboard. really. just the edit line isn't enough

i have about 4 hours of video to turn into about 1. this isn't going to go well.

discovered you also make money on GT4's director mode. the ps2 is now making me $600.

today was a weird news day. while /. claims 'Staellium UK (cell provider)' just invented flash sms (which is just a bit bellow /. average) news.com claimed sony just invented the canon pro1 (which prolly isn't very diferent from the news.com avg)

spent a good bit of the day getting back up to speed with kino and all that lot and piecing back together the cut of vasco's first dvd after the rm incident.
kino could do with a scratch space and multi file import.

then i realized kino can't edit the movies from my canon S1 which is understandable as it produces videos as far away from DV as can be. so i started considering imovie again and went about figuring out how imovie did it. turns out imovie "imports" the clips and in the process converts everything to DV in local storage. well duh, that i can do better. so after 5 minutes of tinkering this is what came out:

for i in mvi_* ; do
DATA=$(dd if=$i skip=320 count=24 bs=1 |
perl -MDate::Manip -e '$date = ParseDate(<>);
print &UnixDate($date, "%Y.%m.%d_%H-%M-%S");' ) ;
ffmpeg -i $i -target pal-dv $(basename $i .avi)-$DATA.dv ;
done

not exactly the beautifullest thing ever produced by efective at pumping out DV files with the clip date embeded in the filename.

incredible how Pulp Fiction still hauls so serious ass after all this years.

the whole apple iLife thing is getting disapointing.

you know. i hate GR maps that are marked SP but are actually impossible to complete in SP cause the AI is too stupid.

but besides that, today was clearly a slow day.

wohoo holiday and stuff.

got myself all wet trying out the new water pressure cleaner. turns out the hose is punctured and i have to go return it. blah.

while the 2-3-1 has some interesting possibilities like the amount of fire the security team can lay down and having the sniper unhindered by an idiot with a rocket tube on his back. otoh it's heiny backwards for urban stuff.

i really should see military related stuff as i always end up with GR ideas. this time is back to 2-3-1 as oposed to my usual 2-2-2 with a demo guy looking over my sniper.

i wish GR would allow higher gfx settings. that way i'd be able to get shot in much higher realism.

monday after an extended weekend everything feels a bit rusty

Vandals set light to a giant straw goat Saturday night in a central Swedish town, police said an event that has happened so frequently it has almost become a Christmas tradition.
oh man. those crazy swedes really know how to party!

on other news, i found once you decide to edit video with apple stuff there is no turning back. it can't export anything remotly usefull. someone should really write a imovie-to-smil filter.

how i got my 2 bluetooth sony-ericsson phones working with osx: i paired them, started Sync and pressed the button. when the phones are around and a sms arrives it pops up a little message. it's nice.

how i got my dad's bluetooth sony-ericsson phone "working with his windows xp: i installed the usb bluetooth adapter and paired the phone. then i tried to get the SE apps working. they couldn't see the phone. then i fumbled around with the stuff the usb adapter installed and realized it came bundled with an alternative bluetooth stack. decided that was part of the problem and selected window's native stack. of course, this is all sprinkled with uncountable reboots. tried to pair the phone and the pc and but it just wouldn't work. the pohne would find the pc with no services, the pc wouldn't find anything. realized that's probably the reason why the adapter came bundled with an alternate stack. tried to go back to that stack, it wouldn't work, ended up reinstalling everything and repairing the phone. that stack came with services and eventually i managed to get a phonebook sync started by the pc going. however, the stuff went into outlook so it was almost a step backwards. in the end couldn't find any way of manipulating sms or connect the SE app to the phone dial adapters.
and all it took me was 4 hours!

the day was wasted in lines and shoping. I also discovered i deleted something i shouldn't have. all in all, not a good day.

oh the joys of holidays, todllers and having the sinus backed all the way up into your skull.