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I was going through some of my bookmarks and came across this article by Macworld with many good screen savers for Mac OS X. If you want something different, check them out.
Screen savers live! [via Lifehacker]
There’s also a couple that I really like at http://wakaba.c3.cx/s/lotsablankers/.
This example uses the command-line version of mplayer. It will extract the titles without doing any transcoding or editing to them. Run the command…
mplayer -dumpstream -dumpfile /save/path/video.mpg dvd://1
If a DVD has multiple titles/videos, change the 1 to the number of the title you want.
If you get errors like…
Couldn't open DVD device: /dev/dvd
No stream found to handle url dvd://1
try adding in the option
-dvd-device /path/to/dvd
to the above command.
On Ubuntu the path is /dev/cdrom0
On Mac OS X the path is /Volumes/Name_of_DVD
You can also specify a path to a folder containing a DVD’s Video_TS folder somewhere on your drive.
For Christmas this year, one of my sisters gave me a SanDisk Sansa e250. In my opinion, if you’re willing to do a little bit of tinkering (or maybe more than a little), many MP3 Players can be better than an iPod. Especially if you factor in price.
As it turns out, for this specific player, SanDisk did an awuful job with the firmware (software). Most things I’ve figured out though. In the process I discovered a forum great for any MP3 players other than the iPod, Anything but iPod. I also discovered Rockbox to replace the SanDisk firmware. Both firmware’s have their up sides, but after using both, Rockbox is starting to come out on top.
After much googling, I managed to figure out the formats needed for the files and get them scripted. Now it’s pretty much Drag’N'Drop to get photos, video, and music onto the player. I’ve posted what I’ve discovered and the scripts I wrote over on the ABI forums. If you’re interested, you can find that topic here.
One of the bad things about skating on ponds is that the ice just never seems to be good for skating. It’s always rough, covered in snow, or not quite thick enough. This makes the second year that we’ve solved that problem. The solution? An indoor skating rink! By laying down some plastic and turning on a garden hose, we turn the loft of our barn into a small, but out of the wind, skating rink. The biggest problem is that the plastic always seems to develop a hole or two… Yet, as long as the weather is cold, it’s not a problem for long. Onto the pictures…
A couple of months ago I posted a photo of one of our hay fields. You may have noticed that it’s a little bigger than normal photos. It is actually three photos that were stitched together. There’s several programs that can do this. You could do it in Photoshop (or GIMP) and there are probably several plugins to help. A good way, on the Mac, is to use DoubleTake. It’s a good program and easy to use, yet it’s shareware ($24.95) and I’m just too cheap. Especially when there’s an open-source alternative.
Fortunately, there is an extremely powerful, very good, and open-source alternative. It’s known as Hugin. Unfortunately, it isn’t exactly easy to figure out. There are many options that can do many things to make the resulting panoramas more ‘correct’, but it does end up being a bit of a cluttered interface. You can kinda ignore some of the options and get the basic stitch done fairly easy once you’ve done it once or twice. I won’t try to explain how to do it, but Lifehacker had an extremely helpful how-to. It can be found at http://lifehacker.com/378490/stitch-photos-into-panoramas-with-free-software.
Maybe a month or two ago, I finally decided on a camera and bought it. I wanted one that had good zoom capability and could still fit in a pocket. I kinda wanted a DSLR for the better (larger) sensors in them and the manual controls, but the bulk and price took them out. The Canon G9 was a contender since it had a full manual mode, but it would add another $200 to the final price and the zoom and movie mode wasn’t quite what I wanted. In the end I settled on the Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ5.
It’s the size I was after and has 10x optical zoom with image stabilization. It also has digital zoom that goes up to 67.5x, that while it does cut down the image size and megapixels at the high end of that, the photos do turn out better than I would expect. The two photos below show the difference. They were both taken from the same spot without using a tripod. The one on the left is without any zoom used and the one on the right uses the full 67.5x. Top two used the flash and the bottom two had the flash off.
I wasn’t after a high megapixel count, since I’ve heard that the high numbers don’t help as much after a certain point. It seems that the small sensor in point shoots is what really hurts. Size of the pixels or something like that… Anyway, it does a 9.1 megapixel photo that doesn’t turn out too bad. When viewed at full size, there seems to be a bit of noise in the photos. It isn’t too bad though and most of the time I don’t look at them at the maximum possible size. Click the photo below to zoom in on it and see what I mean. To be fair though, I think this one shows it the most and some of it could have been incorrect settings and/or the conditions.
It also does high-definition (720p) video and the full 10x optical zoom works while shooting. I haven’t messed with that mode much yet, but in seems to have trouble keeping focus. It’s slightly over 130MB, but you can the click play button below to view the low-quality converted version or download the original video to see what it looks like. (Download link is on the bottom right of that page.)
Other than the case that I found at Wal-mart, I found the cheapest prices on Amazon. I did find one site selling it for less, but I couldn’t bring myself to trust the site. Always do a search about shopping sites you’ve never heard of before buying.
I hated that the camera didn’t take AA or AAA batteries, but a spare was only $10 or $15 so that wasn’t too bad. I’ll be looking into making or buying a portable charger sometime though.
The SD cards were a bit of a pain in the neck. I knew that for the movie mode, I needed a card with a 20MB/sec write speed. However, half the cards that I found didn’t state the speed in MB/sec. Just something like Class 5, Class 6, 120x, 133x, or not at all. Then with the difference of SD and SDHC I couldn’t find a good chart to tell me what each class would relate to in MB/sec. I ended up with a couple 4GB SD card that says 133x that I think refers to about what I need. It seems to work well enough, so I guess it’s all good.
Overall, I’m happy with my choice. I had to make some compromises to get what I wanted and it does have some problems. Yet in the end, I think it was the best one for me that’s available. As long as it holds up to the rigors of time.
Now some photos to finish with. All taken with the Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ5.
Finally finished putting up the hay for the year. Here is a photo of what we put up down at my Grandma’s homeplace. It’s the furthest we get from home. It’s also the place we usually have breakdowns. Didn’t even make a full round before a cylinder broke this year.
Well, we have all our corn in the ground and coming up. We had started the beans, but 2.5 inches or so of rain put a stop to that for a bit. During the winter Dad purchased a new, well…different anyway, tractor. It doesn’t seem all that wore out, but it had been sitting out for a while. A little bit of paint and a few decals sure shined it up a bit though.
Before:
After:
