After an unbelievably successful year, I was pleased to be named Time’s Person of the Year. Here I am on the cover!
I would like to know in what way this could be considered a mirror on the cover.
Stupid SiteKey
I have a savings account and some CD’s with ING. They had pretty good interest rates and it was convenient dealing with them online. Then they started instituting different security measures. Whereas most places let you choose a username that makes sense, they assigned an 8-digit number that you had to use. Then you picked out a PIN. That was okay and eventually I memorized my number. Then they started a keypad thing where they would have the number pad with letters on each number key on screen and you would type in each corresponding letter instead of the number for your PIN. The letters changed every time. This made you think a lot harder, but I guess protected you from programs that capture key strokes.
TV on the Go
The iPod video is pretty neat because you can take videos with you on the iPod just like with songs. But it has a pretty tiny screen. The Palm TX has a much larger screen (3.8 inches diagonally vs. 2.5 inches for the iPod) that offers more detail (480×320 vs. 340×320). So there was promise there.
The problem was I couldn’t move my DVD’s to the Palm. I found two great pieces of software. One is DVD Decrypter (so glad I live in Denmark) and the other is PocketDivXEncoder. DVD Decrypter lets you move the DVD to your hard drive and PocketDivXEncoder then makes it pretty easy to convert the files to the right resolution. I was able to convert a 25 minute episode of Seinfeld (I now own seasons 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6) to a file that was 180 MB. Once I get it on the SD card, I then used a nice media player called TCPMP (with codecs for MP4 video and MP3 audio installed) to watch the show, full screen (landscape). It looks really good as long as you are in the right light conditions (the screen picks up a lot of glare on the Copenhagen Metro train).
The process is kind of slow. Ripping takes a couple of minutes per episode and translating takes another 20 minutes or so. Then it takes a few minutes to move the file over to an SD card, but a lot of this can be done away from the computer. PocketDivXEncoder lets you queue multiple episodes and will even shut down the computer when it is done if you want to go to bed or leave the house. By doing that, I can get the 5 or 6 episodes that might be on a DVD of the 4 DVD season set up in about 15 minutes, then let it crank away for about an hour.
Some guidelines for PocketDivxEncoder: The default audio quality of 7 is fine, but video quality can be dropped down to 60 (instead of 80) and still get good quality (images get jpeggy lower than that). I had one series of shows that was widescreen, but did this by using black bars at the top and bottom. This caused the program to default to a resolution 426×320 (a ratio of 1.33:1 like regular TV) instead of using the full width availabe (480×320 for the Palm TX), so I had to manually change it to 480 and let the back bands overrun the top and bottom. Under advanced options, I selected 2-pass encoding and B-lines which slow down encoding time, but increase quality without increasing file size.
For DVD Decrypter: Make sure you are in IFO Mode and you will see a tree of content divided by folders named VTS and in those are PGC subfolders which in turn contain the episodes of a show with the minutes in parentheses (these are net minutes after the commercials are taken out; even the disclaimers are removed). Pick one of those and a folder on your hard drive to store it in. Half-hour shows are usually around 23 minutes and hour-long shows are 46. Short things are menus or extras.
Austin’s Sitter
Since Austin doesn’t get along well with cats, the last couple of times I have been out of town (Tybee and Dallas) he has stayed with my friend from work, Jenny, instead of with Katie at Susan’s house. She absolutely adores Austin and pampers him beyond belief while he stays with her. One time when I went to pick him up she told me how much Austin likes ham and eggs with cheese on top. Her two boys help take care of Austin as well, taking him for several walks a day. He gets constant attention all the time, which he just adores.
Jenny likes Austin so much that she asked if he could stay over this weekend just so they could see him again. So I packed up his bag and took him over on Friday. On Sunday Jenny called and said her family had taken a vote and it was 3-0 to keep him for another day (Jenny telecommutes on Monday so she would be home all day with him).
Last night I went to pick him up. I noticed Jenny had a bruise on the bridge of her nose. I asked her what happened. Apparently Austin was on the couch next to her when one of Jenny’s sons slammed a door or something, causing a giant bang. This startled both Austin and Jenny and Austin wound up knocking into Jenny’s face pretty hard, breaking her nose. This was on Saturday and I think the reason she wanted to keep Austin another day was because she had missed out on being with him most of Saturday, what with the trip to the emergency room and everything.
Austin is back with me now, but it will be several weeks before Jenny heals up from his visit.
Graffiti is back!
The main drawback of owning the new Palm TX was that Palm had to abandon the Graffiti handwriting recognition system for Graffiti 2, which was awful. After exploring alternatives and getting excited about my new keyboard, I drug out my Palm VX to do a speed comparison. On the first try I got 24.7 words per minute (after weeks of practice I was up to 23.3 wpm with Salamander writing the most common words, for which it is optimized). Wow. Plus I realized that with myKbd I had to look closely at the keyboard to tap the right keys, but with Graffiti I can look at what I am copying down and not look at the Palm.
So I went back and looked for the files. I found some updated files dated in April 2005. Before installing them I did a Hot Sync to back everything up (with the other files my Palm wouldn’t boot and I had to do a hard reset, wiping out its entire memory to get it to work again). Then I put the files on the SD card, moved them over to the Palm, and did a soft reset. It took a while to boot and I thought it was frozen, but then the prefs screen popped up! I was in business. It is even compatible with myKbd, which just replaces the old Palm keyboard.