Well, I've had a couple of PAL DV tapes from our wedding a few years back and I've kept telling people who didn't understand the french ceremony that I'd make an NTSC DVD with subtitles. Should be easy right? Everything is digital.

Well, 4 years later, after lots of casual attempts, I finally dug in, said it will be done, and cleaned about 20 gigs of space on my hard drive to get to work. Yes you can buy software that should help make DVD's but either they are easy and cannot make subtitles or they are hard, expensive, and say they can do everything if you read their manuals.

Complicating things was my 2ghz/1.5gb server at the other end of a Microsoft terminal services connection so I do not have an actual monitor on the machine making the video.

The source of any useful information turned out to be http://www.videohelp.com with lots of reviews, how tos, and links to everywhere under the sun. Here is a summary of what I did using free software. NOTE: CyberLink's Power Producer & NERO were included as OEM with my CDROM but I guess they cannot be considered free for everyone.



So, at the end, a quick test in VideoLAN seems to show everything in the right place though I really should go through to check that the subtitles are not too out of sync.

Anyways, it is a possible project but it really seems to take a long time, almost 9 hours not counting the numerous failed attempts with other softwares.

So, yes it can be done with enough harddrive space but with all of the testing (another hour to check the sync and then to test on a real NTSC player, not to mention making any changes to the subtitles after seeing them in action) it is not for the weak of heart.

Tags: Subtitles, dvd

Well, I've been working with Docbook for sometime and it's always a hassle to get things looking the way you want (for instance a PDF). There is a lot of support and documentation out there but it is still time-consuming to do what one would consider simple formatting in MS WORD.

Hopefully with the combination of RenderX's Free Personal Edition and XML Mind's FO Convertor it might be getting a bit easier.

Currently I've been using the Apache FOP FO processor and while things do get done there is a lot more formatting that I would like to see in my PDF documents. So far I have signed up and received my XEP personal key. I am hoping to give it a whirl sometime next month and put it to the test.

Tags: docbook, Xsl-fo, transforms

Now that was a concert! We got tickets by luck alone since the 45,000 were sold out in about an hour. After that we were hit by one downpour after another (the first waiting for tickets and the second waiting for the opening act of the band Feeder). But it was worth it 100%!



We just happened to see a friend at another entrance and asked why he was waiting there. "Well, you can get into the front section of the concert if you are among the first 4,000 people there" he said. By the time he was done we said what the heck, we had our binoculars just in case. So we followed him in and by the end of the concert we found ourselves one row behind the front of the stage and having a great time with a great crowd in front of a pretty darned cool band.



I loved the CoeXisT plug, even though it is a part of an ongoing trademark dispute it seems. Anyways, it was a great part of their songs and brought together a lot of energy. Then City Of Blinding Lights and of course Vertigo twice over. That was just too much fun.

Tags: u2

So what do you do if your cell phone is stolen? Well, the first thing was to have the account blocked from use. Fortunately this was easy to do. As for the phone, so far nobody wants to help cover the expenses. When I contacted Swisscom (the service provider) they said that they would replace the SIM card for free but that I had to buy a new phone at full cost.

Now I am worried who might cover the loss by theft. When I asked Swisscom if there was any theft coverage they said no, I should contact my home insurance company. When I asked if they could at least print out the value of the cell-phone they said no, but that I could take a magazine of current phones and send that to the insurance company. I pointed out that my phone was not in the catalog but they said that was the best that they could do.

So now I am having to contact my home insurance company to see if they will cover a phone that I received as part of a 2 year service contract, the phone of course was received at next to no value (because the service contract should pay the cost. If they could have attached a value to the phone I could have used the automatic coverage of my credit card.

As for Swisscom, they end up coming out as the loosers as I was paying the value of the phone almost every month in call fees. Now they get nothing since I have no phone, only a SIM card. Somehow this makes economic sense to them. For me it would actually be cheaper to go to another provider and get a phone from them (assuming that nobody helps to cover the cost of the replacement.)

I do not know what to think of these inkjet printers. So far we've owned both an Epson and HP. Cost wise it does not seem to come out much cheaper than a good photo service... replacing a single ink cartridge is about 75% of the price I originally paid for the printer.

If I try to get maximum value for my letter sized photo paper by printing more than one image per page, I have to figure in the fun time of trimming those images out.

Trying those nifty red-eye correction pens on the ink-jet photos doesn't always work well with the inks either.

And finally, I am starting to see photos I had printed getting pretty faded after 8 months of hanging on the wall with some indirect sun. I did not realize that there were as many different qualities of ink-jet paper as there are colors in the rainbow. Cheaper papers fade quicker. So now I am buying the top of the line HP Premium Plus Glossy photo paper to see if it can hold an image for at least a year. Even that says I have to leave it dry for days before mounting it.

The only thing that they are clearly good for is saving a trip to the mailbox to order prints or for making lots of little changes with a photo program and seeing the changes immediately. This is definitiely a nice benefit but that's about the only real one we've seen.

Tags: inkjet, life

After spending a good amount of time trying to figure out MacOSX's iChat, a quick check on Google showed that it does not support USB webcams, even if you have the proper drivers for them (Logitech for instance).

Fortunately there is a low-priced solution with the aptly named iChatUSBCam from http://www.ecamm.com/mac/ichatusbcam/. This software allows iChat to use an existing USB webcam instead of those much more expensive firewire cameras. Also, they have a great list of suggestions where to find MacOSX drivers for many USB webcameras (you still need a USB webcam that will work with MacOSX).

The existing version 2.0.2 does not work with 10.4 MacOSX Tiger but there is a beta version that supposedly does. I don't know if it was us but using the original version 2.0.2 on out 10.3 MacOSX system we had problems making an iChat to a 10.4 MacOSX. After loading the beta version of iChatUSBCam the problem went away.

Don't forget to be sure your firewall will let the video through. Until we changed our firewall rules we could not accept an incoming call. Apple describes the needed changes here: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93208 .

As a side note a PC user can also communicate with the iChat video client if they use a Windows XP computer and download the latest AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) software from http://www.aim.com/. The video quality will not be as good as between two MacOSX systems.

Tags: iChat

Google has released a great new version of the keyhole satellite viewer http://earth.google.com/ . If you have the minimum computer system below this is great fun to zoom into various addresses/ cities/ countries, to show kids how the world turns, or to search for Gilligan's Island. You can even get driving directions and then fly along the route!

Mars is included too but I don't know how accurate the driving instructions are.



Additional hint, if you go to Seattle don't turn on the Show Coffee Shops option. You might need more than the minimum system configuration to show all of the results

Minimum configuration:

* Operating system: Windows 2000, Windows XP
* CPU speed: IntelÔøΩ PentiumÔøΩ PIII 500 MHz
* System memory (RAM): 128MB
* 200MB hard-disk space
* 3D graphics card: 3D-capable video card with 16MB VRAM
* 1024x768, 32-bit true color screen
* Network speed: 128 kbps ("Broadband/Cable Internet")

Tags: earth, Viewer

Finally, my main desktop machine is pretty darned close to silent. We were having to turn it off during dinner just to make a nice meal. It took me forever to track down where all of the noises were coming from but here it is from loudest to most silent: generic power supply, Intel cpu cooler, video card fan and a couple of old hard drives. By the time it was done I had replaced all of the above with fairly quiet components.

So what did I use to quiet a standard 2ghz computer... Well, there is the Enermax AX(G)-FMA "Low-Noise" 300W Power Supply, Zalman CNPS-7000 CPU Cooler
, and I just replaced the video card and hard drive with okay-priced newer versions. It was a huge improvement. If you ever want to see, just try opening your computer and disconnecting the things mentioned above BEFORE powering it on. Now instead of a strong breeze it is a nice light hum.

Tags: Silent, zalman

I had loaded this up once to check it out, only to find I couldn't get rid of it. It would always try connecting to the Internet, always take up memory and just sit there in my toolbar like a bad joke you just couldn't forget. Argh, well, fortunately these folks http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=288 had the simple steps needed to get rid of it. Very simple, very quick.

And if you're looking to get rid of that, maybe cidaemon.exe and cisvc.exe aren't needed either. They are the automatic indexing on your NTFS drives. Just right click on each of your NTFS drives, choose Properties, and in the General tab uncheck "Allow Indexing Service... .

The people at http://www.adognamedfish.com/ spent 10 hours building a lego ship. Not only that but they left their webcam running to record the moment(s). I hoped they exercised a bit but the final product sure looks neat. I've never seen so many lego pieces.

Tags: lego, Stardestroyer