Foxy Tunes

If you use Firefox, Foxy Tunes is a great Add-On that will allow you to control your music player from within your browser.

Find it here.

Worst. Logo. Ever.

Or maybe it’s the best logo ever?  Do you think it was drawn that way on purpose?

(h/t to Clicked)

Make sure you bring a towel

Just for fun, go to Google Maps and ask for directions from New York, NY to Dublin, Ireland.

You’re going to need to be in awesome shape with some time to spare.

Not sure why they send you through France, though. Aren’t their beaches historically inhospitable?

(h/t to Boing Boing)

Transfixed

Blogging is temporarily suspended as I try and figure out my new toy.

PC vs MAC vs Linux

A laugh for all of my fellow computer geeks.

Do they deliver the messages via a holographic princess?

As long as it’s the R2D2 from the original three movies, not the R2 from the most recent ones.

And an aside for Mr Lucas.

Why?  Why did you make him fly George? Why?

Boeing Dreamlifter

My office has an amazing view out across Elliott Bay. Not only is it a great view of Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains but I also get to watch the myriad of planes on their approach into Boeing Field.

For the past few weeks, we’ve been able to watch as the new Boeing Large Cargo Freighter, the Dreamlifter, make its test flights as it awaits certification.

This monstrous airplane is a modified 747 that Boeing is going to use to ferry the pieces of their new passenger plane, the 787 Dreamliner, from the various factories around the world to Everett, WA, where the final assembly will take place.

The 787 is truly an international airplane. For example, the ailerons and flaps will be made in Australia, the wings in Japan, the landing gear from France and the horizontal stabilizers from Italy and that’s just the beginning. Boeing hopes the first flight for this plane happens later this year.

Here are a couple of shots of the Dreamlifter that I took out of my office window.

Gizmondo’s Spectacular Crackup

Last year there was a story in the news of a spectacular car crash on the PCH in Southern California. An extremely rare Ferrari Enzo hit a telephone pole at around 200 mph and the driver walked away from the destroyed supercar with nothing but a few scratches.

Turns out, that’s only the tip of the story. The car crash was just a small part of a big, weird criminal enterprise. Check out the story here.

(link goes to Wired Magazine)

Editing Video

Arrghhh!

I have the AFC Championship Game Tivo’d and I decided to save a copy of it offline. It was the greatest football game I’ve ever seen and I want to make sure I’ll be able to enjoy it for the years to come.

I didn’t figure it’d be any big deal. I’m relatively savvy with a PC and all I needed to do was burn it to a DVD, preferably in a format that would let me play it directly on a DVD player.

First step: Convert to a standard file type. Tivo files are basically encrypted mpegs so I needed to find software to convert the file from a .TIVO to a .MPEG. I found what needed here.

(as an aside, I have no qualms about hacking the .tivo encryption. I’m not uploading it to Bit Torrent, I’m not selling it, I just want to back it up so I don’t lose it.)

When I recorded it, I started it an hour early for the pregame and had it run two hours late so I wouldn’t miss anything if it went into overtime. Mistake. In retrospect, I should have recorded it in three segments.

“No worries. There are a million video editors, I’ll just download one and clip the beginning and end of the video so I only have the game itself.”

Unfortunately, I soon learned it’s not that easy. It turns out that mpegs can’t really be edited that way because of the nature of their compression. So now the .MPEG needs to be converted to a .AVI.

“OK, it’s all good, I’ll just dig around and find a file converter.”

By now it’s 12:30 am. I grab a beer and hit the Google. An hour later I’ve tried four different pieces of software and I’m still without a converted file. The mpeg is over 10 GB in size and none of the software can import it to begin the conversion.

Finally at 2:30 am or so, I finally find something that looks like it’ll work. I start the import and go to bed. I got up this morning and the program had a Dialogue Window touting it’s successful conversion of the file.

Stupid lying software.

It’s now 2:30 pm and I’m still trying to figure it out. I’m going the research route this time, as opposed to downloading everything that looks like it’ll work. I’m starting to think Quicktime Pro.

PDA

Today, I bought a used HP iPAQ4155. I haven’t downloaded the manual so I really don’t have any idea what I’m doing. Right now it’s nothing but a glorified MP3 player.