Spring Is Springing, Fix Up The House
Apr 2nd
Now that we’re emerging from the depths of winter – or the shallow kiddie pool that was this past winter, anyway – its time to start thinking about getting the house back into shape so you can enjoy it for the next eight months. With that in mind, here are a few great blog posts about home maintenance.
Digital Television Distribution
Jan 19th
I just learned about Tipped.tv, a soon-to-be-a-startup with plans to fund small independent series meant for web distribution as an alternative to pitching to studios and networks. This space seems ripe for disruption and these guys seem to have zeroed in on a core group of talent – underemployed, aspiring content creators – that will probably flock to a site run by people like them.
iNuke: So Loud It’ll Probably Destroy Your iPod
Dec 7th
The Ear Incinerator
TechCrunch writes about an iPod dock that weighs 700 pounds, blasts out music at 10,000 watts, and is 8 feet long. I’m betting this thing produces enough vibration at max volume that 1) you can’t get anywhere near it to turn it off and 2) the glass on your screen will shatter in a matter of seconds. Merry freaking Christmas, I guess.
The manufacturer, Behringer, doesn’t seem to have anything on their web site about it yet.
Netbooked: HP Mini 210
Jun 3rd
After months of searching, reading reviews, poring over specs and generally obsessing about which netbook would be perfect for my trip, I finally went to B&H and tried out a few. Turns out basically any of the Atom-powered machines will be able to handle everything I want. As usual, the B&H staff were knowledgeable professionals, which seems to be rare in the world of retail these days. Before going to B&H I went over to Best Buy on 23rd and 6th ave and found the selection there extraordinarily weak (like 6 display models, all almost identically equipped) and the staff inaccessible and generally unhelpful.
There were a couple of different models that made sense, both with 10.1″ screens. The main differences between the Sony and the HP machines I was looking at turned out to be about an extra $100 for the Sony as well as a higher resolution, true 16:9 LCD. I opted for the $299 HP Mini 210-1030NR which comes with a smallish 160 gigabyte hard drive and only 1 gigabyte of RAM. I also bought a 2 gigabyte Crucial upgrade — which I have yet to install — and an InCase neoprene travel case. All said and done, just about $400 including tax.
As soon as I got it home I kinda wished I had coughed up the extra cash for the higher resolution Sony. Turns out at 1024×600 there are dialogue boxes that are part of Windows 7 that sort of get cut off by the taskbar unless you move it to the left or right side of the desktop, which I don’t really like to do. Also, I haven’t yet installed the extra RAM, and yeah, the machine isn’t very snappy. I expect the extra RAM to more or less solve that problem. If it doesn’t, I’ll just disable any fancy visual effects.
There were actually two very similar HP 210 models available. The newer model cost $25 more and has a glossy screen and an “upgraded” keyboard. I tried them both and found that the glossy screen’s main function is to reflect everything around in a really irritating way, and the keyboards were almost identical. No compelling reason to spend extra money there.
Windows 7 Starter Edition turns out to be crippled in an incredibly annoying way: keyboard shortcuts are disabled. I don’t really care about the shortcuts that auto-resize a window to the left or right half of the screen, but windows key + m to minimize windows is really handy and I do miss it. I’m going to upgrade the RAM and then use this machine as-is for a while, but eventually I imagine I’ll pop in a much bigger hard drive and install another OS; probably some version of Windows 7, or maybe try to turn it into a “hackintosh” netbook.
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Buying A Netbook for a Trip To Bali
Apr 19th
I just recently decided that its time to buy a netbook. This June I’ll be traveling to Indonesia for a wedding, and rather than just fly right back after the wedding is over, I’m going to stick around for about 2 weeks and see Bali a bit. The plan is to visit a few different places including Ubud and Permuteran and see the sights. What I’ve learned is that the island is a little pricey to fly to, but insanely cheap to actually visit. According to the NY Times travel site all the local stuff costs just a few US dollars.
I have a pretty serious digital SLR — a Canon EOS 5D Mark II, in fact, so the photos I shoot are gigantic files. I have a couple of Sandisk 4GB memory cards, but that isn’t going to be enough for two weeks, especially given that I’ll probably want to shoot a few HD videos. Rather than stock up on a bunch of memory cards I’m just going to buy a netbook. (Note: I wrote another blog post elsewhere about how to buy a netbook.)
This way I can rip a few DVDs to it for the long ass flights to and fro and also copy over all my photos while I’m there, to say nothing of using the netbook’s wifi and Skype instead of getting donkey punched by AT&T again for international calling and data like I did after a trip to the Bahamas in January. I’m thinking its probably insanely stupid of me not to also buy a new USB mini hard drive for a second backup of all my data. Given that the prices of those things drop faster than Lindsay Lohan’s credit limit, there’s really no reason not to.
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- Choice Tables: The Flavor of Bali, at Roadside Stands (travel.nytimes.com)
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Quick and easy Fajitas
Apr 11th
Here’s my recipe for super delicious, easy fajitas.
- 1 lb chicken breast, sliced into thin strips
- sharp cheddar cheese, grated
- yellow onions, sliced
- mushrooms, sliced
- red pepper, sliced
- jar of salsa
Prep time for this is about 20 minutes. Once everything is sliced and grated cooking time is about 10 to 15 minutes. You’ll want to get one large frying pan and one medium frying pan going with olive oil on a medium/high flame. Get the chicken going first as it will take the longest to cook. Turn the pieces once or twice and let it brown just a bit on the surface. Pour into the pan about 4 ounces of salsa, or about enough to half-cover the chicken. Let it simmer and reduce down a bit over a medium/low flame. Add a small handful of cheese to the mixture — this will thicken up the liquid a bit and, depending upon the cheese, really bring another layer to the flavors here.
While the chicken is simmering you can saute the veggies. I like to do them one at a time, but use the same hot pan. Toss a little salt into the pan with the veggies while they’re cooking.
For the meal in the picture I also made some fresh guacamole, warmed up the tortillas in the toaster oven for a few minutes, and served with some lime chili sauce and sour cream. The salsa was a jar I got in Vermont and it has black beans and corn in it, which is a really nice touch that I might add next time when I’m using a different salsa that lacks that stuff. I grated more cheese than I needed and so I put it in a bowl and served it on the side.
The great thing about this recipe is that you pretty much can’t screw it up. Just follow the cardinal rule of cooking, which is that you can always add more (salsa, salt, cheese, whatever) but you can’t take it away. Experiment with it and see what you like.
Home Video Project
Apr 8th
Last weekend my girlfriend wanted to do a video interview of her brother before he gets married to show at the bridal shower. Its a really cool idea and it worked out great. The steps to getting good video aren’t that hard.
We shot the video on a borrowed DVD-based Sony camcorder that recorded directly to a tiny DVD-RW disc. The video quality is pretty good — 720p, I think. We put the camcorder onto a heavy tripod and sat the groom down on the couch about 10 feet away.
The lighting in my living room is pretty crappy, but I do have one of those funny full-spectrum lamps that people who get depressed use in winter to make them feel a little better. The lamp is super bright and has an adjustable neck which made it pretty easy to aim at the groom.
The lamp did a fantastic job of eliminating annoying shadows from the bottom of his face, and the digital camcorder’s CMOS sensor had no problem figuring out how to get the skintones and other colors in the video adjusted properly. If you want to get good interior lighting done without spending a fortune on pro photographer lighting gear, I wholeheartedly recommend one of these lamps.
We shot about 26 minutes of footage all in one take. Doing it this way makes it much less cumbersome to edit later on because there’s just one file to import into your video editing software. Once we finished shooting I just popped the mini DVD-RW disc into the drive on my computer and copied over the VOB files.
I chose to edit in iMovie, which doesn’t actually support importing VOB files. The solution here is to transcode the file into another format. I used Handbrake to convert the video file into MPEG-2 video which goes directly into iMovie.
iMovie is unbelievably easy to work with. Back in college I used Final Cut Pro to put together a ~3 minute music video for an art class project and it was complicated and dreary to work in. iMovie is so pleasant and easy. I wonder if Windows Movie Maker is as user-friendly. I doubt it.
Once the video was edited together with a few transitions added, I exported to an AVI file in the highest quality output. Should look great on the LCD projector.
One nagging problem with the Sony camcorder, though. The onboard mic records really tinny, somewhat grating audio. I’m not a fan of recording separate audio stream and mixing later just because, frankly, I’m kind of lazy about that stuff, so the clear answer here is just to hook up a little external mic. I didn’t see if there was a mic jack on the camcorder, but there probably was and I missed it. I own a Canon 5D Mk II which has a 3.5mm mic jack on the side, so I’m looking forward to getting some kind of good external mic and seeing how well it works there.
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- DVD Camcorders (prontotech.com)
- Convert videos with HandBrake (coolteachers.org)
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Joe Stack’s Suicide Note
Feb 19th
(I have reposted this note not as an endorsement of his message nor approval of his method of suicide. I think that the internet is made for, among other things, information redundancy. Another copy of this posted at The Smoking Gun.)
Bill O’Reilly is Wrong Again
Jan 18th
Saw this in a post on Reddit and I liked it so much I felt the internet deserved another copy.