02.06.08

Notes for the Smash Lab

Posted in Media at 11 pm

Would someone please let Smash Lab‘s voice-over guy know that the Richter Scale does not ‘top out’ at 10, that it’s an open-ended scale? Thanks!

02.03.08

A fresh iPhone each morning

Posted in Apple, Media, Tech at 1 pm

I’ve got a couple of short podcasts that I’m subscribed to that are daily. Merriam Webster’s Word of the Day and Scientific American’s 60 Second Science are short little podcasts that are an interesting way to start my daily commute.

However, it’s bugged me that when I drop my iPhone into it’s cradle at night when I get home, it syncs up the podcasts at that time. This is anywhere from 6 to 11pm. However, the next day’s podcasts are not available until after midnight. In order to get the Word of the Day on the Day of the Word, I’ve been resorting to picking up my iPhone out of the cradle each morning as I’m rushing out the door and dropping it back in and then waiting for it to sync. Sometimes this is just a few seconds, but if one of my other longer podcasts subscriptions had an overnight update, it can take a few minutes.

It’s a small matter for modern living, but I figured there ought to be a better way. iTunes doesn’t have a native way of telling an iPod or iPhone to refresh at a certain time. There’s two times when the sync will start: If you hit the Sync button in iTunes and when iTunes first connects with the iPhone.

The sync button method is a no-go for me, because it A) requires me to do something and B) in order to do it, I need to have the screen turned on and the mouse ready to click.

But when I say “when iTunes first connects with the iPhone”, there are a multitude of ways that this could happen. It could be the time when I plug the iPhone in while iTunes is running. It could be when I restart the Mac and iTunes automatically launches and finds the iPhone connected. Or it could be whenever iTunes gets launched. All that needs to happen is for iTunes and iPhone to become disconnected and reconnected.

So what are my options? I could have the Mac on an outlet with a timer on it and force the Mac to power down and then start it back up again. I could set the Energy Saver preference pane to schedule a shutdown and startup of the Mac. I could build a contraption out of Legos that would lift the iPhone out of it’s cradle and then slam it back down again. I could have a similar contraption that pulls the USB cable out of the Mac and plugs it back in. I could put the USB hub on a timer at its power connection.

But far more simply, I could use AppleScript to tell iTunes to quit and then tell iTunes to run. The key is getting the said script to run at the appropriate time. The easiest way of doing that is to schedule an event in iCal and using the alarm function to trigger the script. So here we go…

1) In your Applications folder look for the AppleScript folder and then open the Script Editor.

2) Type the following lines:

tell app “iTunes” to quit
delay 30
tell app “iTunes” to run

3) Click the Compile button and you’ll see the code get nice and formatted, color coded even.

4) If you want to test it, click the Run button. iTunes will quit if it’s already running and then 30 seconds later it will re-launch.

5) Save the script and call it something obvious like “iPhone Refresh”. I saved it to the Documents folder, but you can save it anywhere. You don’t need to set any other options in the Save dialog box. The defaults are fine.

6) Open up iCal and double click on the time of day when you’d like the script to run. I set it up to run at 6am.

7) Set script to repeat daily.

8) Set the alarm to “Run script”.

9) Below the Run Script setting click and select “Other…” and then find the script file you just saved.

10) Set the “Minutes before” to zero.

That’s it. I found lots of other ways to specifically choose the “Sync iPhone name” menu item, but they were 5 to 10 times the amount of code and with no further advantages. My method will refresh any and all iPhones or iPods connected to the machine, it will disconnect anyone that is ‘sharing’ the iTunes library, and it will help stave off any memory leaks that iTunes might develop. These are unintended consequences, but in my situation, they’re all good ones.

01.19.08

Oh Hai!

Posted in Design, Media, Web at 11 am

Zola LOL!

01.02.08

16:9 Test Card / Test Pattern

Posted in Apple, Media, Tech at 12 pm

Over the last few days, i worked on getting our living room television to display properly from the Mac Mini. The adventure (as boring as it was is documented on my site as: Test Pattern for Wide-screen Displays:
Getting the right aspect ratio to your home theater display.

So a couple years after getting a 27″ LCD display, I finally got fed up with the poor scaling options the display had. There aren’t many options for widescreen source material until we switch to digital cable, so most of the TV we watch is standard definition (SD). If you watch SD, 4:3 video on any display for a few weeks or a month you’ll end up burning-in the center of the screen, leaving the wide left and right margins darker with a very definite demarcation line when you finally start watching widescreen (16:9) content.

Read the full article: 16:9 Test Card / Test Pattern

12.27.07

The American Look

Posted in Design, Media at 12 am

If you like the products at Design Within Reach you’ll love the video The American Look.

It’s a love letter to the mid-century designer… pardon me, “Stylist” with all of the bombastic pronouncements that you might expect from a corporate-sponsored documentary from 1958. It’s just about a half hour long and minutes 26 and 27 are the retro-futuist scenes, but the whole thing is a real Modernist treat.

12.08.07

Dear Television Networks…

Posted in Media at 10 pm

Jock wrote Dear Television Networks and noted:

In fact it seems that all you guys are willing to do just about anything, except the one thing the consumers really want. We want to buy the shows, and watch them commercial free whenever and where ever we want. We want to be your customers.

Jock, You know this isn’t how the economics work. Advertisers pay WAY more money than viewers will ever pay for the content of the shows. Even longtailing the shows, the productions companies would have to have some sort of up front ROI in order to stay in business.

But advertisers are willing to spend LOTS of money to ‘borrow’ our eyeballs. They don’t understand that (poorly done) commercials are less effective than they think. One day advertisers might get a clue, but only after all the ad agencies sales staff have been rounded up and put to pasture…

09.22.07

Depeche Mode: Strange on LaserDisc

Posted in Media, People at 9 pm

If you noticed my Depeche Mode fandom it should not come as a surprise that I may have a bit of a Depeche Mode library. Having been an obsessive collector of Depeche Mode for a number of years (tapering off after the Ultra era), I still have quite a collection of releases, but there are a few items that have always been out of reach. One of those items recently became available:

eBay: DEPECHE MODE – STRANGE * JAPANESE LASERDISC WITH OBI

Yes, the only non-VHS release of these videos up until the DVD era. Now here’s why this is important in a Depeche Mode collection: 1) it is laserdisc, which means playing it more than once doesn’t risk destroying the media (unlike video tape), 2) it is laserdisc which means, properly taken care of, it will retain a higher quality signal than the VHS release, 3) it has entire song and cuts of other videos that are currently unavailable on DVD.

The closest release of these videos on DVD was The Videos 86->98 DVD, which had the ‘single mix’ of most of the tracks (A Question Of Time, Strangelove, Never Let Me Down Again, and Behind The Wheel) which is a terrible thing, and a travesty when it comes to the NLMDA video because it cuts out NEARLY HALF of the original footage! Adding to the problem is the lack of the short inter-song connections and the the complete loss of the video for Pimpf. What makes Pimpf so special? It’s the only b-side that Mode has ever made a video for.

Strange is one of the best Mode releases, ever. Now I have it in the most pristine format ever released.

So, as of this week I finally have purchased (but not received yet) the Japanese laserdisc release of Strange, thanks to an eBay god, a friend of mine who goes by the handle “HighVelocityVav”. Vavrin, your are my hero, my fast-fingered-friend!

…And before you ask, yes, I do actually own a laserdisc player and no, I don’t even have to dig it out of storage.

09.16.07

HDTV on the Mac in Portland

Posted in Apple, Media, Tech at 10 pm

So I got the $100 rebate from Apple for my iPhone and added that to a small monetary gift I got recently to purchase the Elgato EyeTV Hybrid which I had on my wish list for a while. The device receives HDTV signals and passes them to a Mac and works pretty well.

The one piece missing from the package is an antenna. A simple $20 antenna gets a good solid signal. Given the location of our TV, facing west out through our westward-facing windows out to the West Hills where the TV broadcast antennas are at, we could have gone with the even cheaper $10 model. Remember, in most cities, HDTV broadcasts use the UHF band, and any UHF antenna can be use. (There’s no need to get an HD-specific antenna so don’t over spend in this arena.)

The biggest problem with our setup is that the Mac Mini only has the base 512MB of RAM. Until an upgrade, a few of the highest quality channels stutter. KGW seems to be pushing out a full 1080p signal, which I think is overwhelming the RAM buffer. Whereas the KOIN and KATU feeds are at 720p and the Mini keeps up with them pretty well.

The reason I’m most interested in Over The Air (OTA) HDTV is that our analog cable signal gets horrible crosstalk and ghosting. With a lack of insulated coaxial wiring, local channels are bad to really bad. Now we can see them really in clear, sharp high quality. Next to getting Digital Cable, this is the best way to get these channels.

09.08.07

DVD to iTunes and TiVo using Mac OS X

Posted in Media, Tech at 12 am

The latest process:

1) I’ve saved my DVDs using MacTheRipper (For discs that are tough for Handbrake to handle.)

2) Recoded them to .m4v (MPEG-4) with Handbrake (great for iTunes. Handbrake also automagically runs the file through MetaX to gather more info.)

3) Converted the the .m4v’s to .mpg (MPEG-2) via Tivoizer. (I had to really look hard to find a copy of Tivoizer on the web. If you’re looking for it and want a copy, send me an e-mail. It’s just a GUI wrapper to FFmpeg, but it makes it easy to set and forget.)

4) Holding down Option while opening up the TiVo Desktop system preference shows the Videos tab for sharing them from the Mac to TiVo. (This step only needs to be done once, the first time.)

5) Drop the .mpg file into the folder that’s set in the TiVo Desktop Video tab preferences.

6) After a while, the TiVo Desktop software processes the video and creates a *.properties file

7) The .properties file can be edited by hand in a text editor to reflect the Title and such that you want the TiVo to show. (Note that the TiVo Desktop software uses the first part of the filenames to associate the .properties and the .mpeg files. The “title” property in the .properties file does not have to use the exact filename as the source file, so it can be edited to your heart’s content.)

As TiVo is the main way that Amy and I watch TV, this is the best way we have to integrate what used to be a separate video source (DVD Player, PlayStation 2, LasedrDisc, or Mac Mini) which require another remote control to operate. Now everything we have, video-wise, is accessible via TiVo’s interface. Now I’ve just got to get Miro to drop stuff into the proper folder after converting the incoming videos to MPEG-2.

08.26.07

Going to^D^D with the Movies

Posted in Media, Tech at 12 pm

Of late, I’ve finally started watching more of the movies I’ve got on DVD, because I’ve ripped them to my iPhone. (Please don’t tell the MPAA, kthx)

Office Space was a wish list gift from Amy last year and I finally got around to actually watching it again. It really holds up well even though it’s from 1999. The floppies and the hybrid MacOS menus with the Windows Hourglass wait-state cursor is still a little funky but it’s a fun show.

The latest version of HandBrake is the reason for the sudden interest here. Its latest revision now has automatic presets that work really well. It was only about 5 minutes to get used to the app and look through the windows and panes and preferences before just choosing the default iPhone settings and letting it rip… literally.

Now I’ve got Episodes IV, V, and VI ripped and waiting for the next sync. I think the The Work of Directors discs are next on the list. I devoured the first box set when we got it, but I’ve been slow to getting to the second set, even though it’s got Anton Corbijn’s disc.

So now when I’ve got a free moment at lunch or sitting, waiting, I’ve got a couple of full length feature films that I can watch for great lines and cultural appreciation.

One improvement to HandBrake that I’m hoping will make it in the next version or two is support for auto-ripping and ejecting. Having a whole DVD ripping work flow that works as well as iTunes’ would sure be nice. Drop a disc in, come back later and see and ejected disc and drop the next one in. Bang bang bang.

The last piece of the puzzle after the iPhone rips will be the Tivo rips. Our Tivo has the ability to pick up videos from my Mac, once the proper steps are taken. (Step One, Step 2) but I still need to find a simple way to again rip the DVDs to the proper file format.

Handbrake creates MPEG-4 files from DVDs. But Tivo wants MPEG-2 files:

Resolution 720 x 480, 704 x 480 (D1), 544 x 480 (3/4 D1), 480 x 480 (2/3 D1), and 352 x 480 (1/2 D1). The higher the resolution, the better the video quality and the larger the resulting file, which means longer transfer time and more disk usage on your PC and DVR.
Bit Rate 1 – 8 Mbps. The higher the bit rate, the better the video quality and the larger the resulting file. 4 Mbps is recommended for high-quality video.
Frame Rate 29.97 (standard NTSC). Do not try any different frame rates.
Aspect Ratio 4:3 (recommended) or 16:9
Audio MPEG-1 Layer 2 for TiVo DVRs without DVD; AC/3 (Dolby) for TiVo DVRs with DVD.

Just read an interesting post about this sort of thing. So it looks like Mac the Ripper + Visualhub will be the two step process I’ll need to go through to get this put together.