12 January 2006
A long time ago, I used to record Radio 1’s UK Top 40 on a Sunday evening using my radio cassette recorder. I could then take the songs everywhere with me on my portable stereo system. (It wasn’t made by Sony, so it technically wasn’t a Walkman.) Imagine being able to take a full ninety minutes worth of music with you wherever you went! The fact that the UK Top 40 went on for three hours meant you had to edit out Bruno Brookes and cleverly select which songs you wanted to record in advance. Of course, you could always carry more cassettes if you wanted to really go wild... but those days are long gone. You can now store more than 500 times that amount of music on a device that’s not much bigger than an old audio cassette. Amazing!
But just carrying music around with you is so 1980s. We want to be taking music videos, full-length feature films and TV series everywhere we go – just like they used to do in the future! Well kids, we’re living in the future now...
The other night, I finally learnt how to convert movies and DVDs to a format which would play on both my PSP and Suzy’s iPod without purchasing any software. Forget about buying Sony’s Image Converter 2 (£13.90) and Apple’s Quicktime Pro (£19.99) to convert your movies into a format that your PSP or iPod will recognise. You don’t even need to spend money on UMDs that you can only play on your PSP when you’ve already got the DVD. All you need is DVD Shrink and PSP Video 9. (Yes, despite the name, you can also use this to create videos for your fifth generation iPod Video too.)
DVB Shrink enables you to “backup” your DVDs to your computer (or another DVD), removing any unwanted menus or special features along the way; you can then use PSP Video 9 to convert the movie to a number of formats, depending on what encoding or quality you require. For more instructions on getting your videos onto your PSP, read Getting Started with PSP Video 9. If you’re converting your movies for use on your iPod, make sure transcode them using a compatible profile. I used the following:
SP/320x240/29.97fps/768kbps Stereo/128kbps
Once you’ve transcoded the movie, you should be able to just open iTunes, add the file to your library and update your iPod.
Cheap and easy.
On a related note, Google recently added PSP support to Google Video. However, if you’re getting “Unsupported Data” error messages or having problems viewing the video after you’ve downloaded it to your PSP, you might want to check that you’re:
running firmware 2.00 or above – it seems the PSP downloads on Google Video are in AVC format, which apparently isn’t supported in earlier versions
naming the file correctly – i.e. MAQ10001.MP4 – where the MAQ#####.MP4 naming convention is used for AVC format movies (and SP format movies use M4V#####.MP4)
copying the movie to the right folder - i.e. E:\MP_ROOT\100ANV01 for AVC format (and E:\MP_ROOT\100MNV01 for SP format) where E:\ is the drive letter of your PSP
(I’ve only tried to download a couple of movies from Google Video, so let me know if I’m wrong about any of the above points.)
Labels: gadgets, google, ipod, personal, psp
3 January 2006
I don’t really make New Year’s resolutions, mainly because I’m totally incapable of keeping them. Previous years have seen me try to stop biting my nails (several times) and give up kebabs (which is actually impossible). This year, however, I’m going to try and do a couple of things: chew my food more thoroughly and post to my blog more frequently. Only time will tell whether I’ll keep to either of them, but since it’s the third day of the year already, it must be time I posted something to my blog. (Especially since the extra food chewing hasn’t been going too well over the last couple of days...)
Anyway, it seems fitting that my first post of 2006 should review what happened to me in 2005 – i.e. all the things I probably should have posted about at the time but couldn’t usually be bothered.
Warning: anyone with a low boredom threshold should probably stop reading now as I’ve just read the post before publishing it and I have definitely rambled on a bit too much...
January 2005
I’ve been researching my Ruscoe family tree for around five years, but over the last year or so I’ve started to take it more seriously and decided to visit Shropshire Archives in January 2005 to help fill in some blanks. Whilst we were in the area, I took the opportunity to have a look at where my ancestors would have lived back in the 1800s. If you’ve got the Ruscoe surname in your family tree, you might want to look at my photos from the trip, my Ruscoe Family Genealogy website and the Ruscoe Family Genealogy Google Group.
February 2005
I received a letter from a popular men’s magazine threatening legal action against me unless I removed photos of two TV celebrities. The images showed how the celebrities looked before and after they were photoshopped for the magazine. I received them by email and made them into Flash movies so that you could hover over each to see the differences. Needless to say, the magazine’s legal team didn’t like this, so I kindly agreed to remove them. I now get hundreds of disappointed visitors looking for the photos on my website each month.
I also made a gingerbread house for my sister’s birthday and Suzy helped me to build a snowman.
March 2005
We managed to get some tickets to go and see The Games being filmed in Sheffield for Channel 4 and watched a few celebrities compete in Olympic style sporting events. The line up included Craig Charles (comedian/actor/presenter), Princess Tamara Czartoryski-Borbon (model), Danny Foster (former member of Hear’Say), Kirsty Gallacher (presenter), Mel Giedroyc (comedienne), Chesney Hawkes (singer), Lisa Maffia (singer), Jonathon Morris (actor), Philip Olivier (actor), Kevin Simm (member of Liberty X) and Anna Walker (presenter). There’s not much else to say about this really. Chris posted an equally brief description at the time.
April 2005
We went to see Richard Herring at the Lescar. I’m not really a fan of his but I thought he was very, very funny. Chris Hill covered it at the time, so there’s no need for me to say any more.
May 2005
During the first Bank Holiday weekend, I built myself a brick barbecue in our back garden. It’s something I’d had planned ever since we moved into our house and, even though we only got to use it three or four times, it was worth the five trips to Wickes, sore arms, aching shoulders and the sunburnt neck!
I also finally updated my website (again) to use XHTML & CSS, moved my three-year-old weblog to use Blogger and was kindly given a Flickr Pro account, which I really should be making more use of. (Maybe that should be another new year’s resolution...)
June 2005
I travelled more in this month that I’d travelled in my entire life. First of all, we went camping in Malham, North Yorkshire for Andy’s birthday (like we did the previous year). Then we went on holiday to Florence for a week, also visiting Pisa whilst we were in the area. About a week later I then made a business trip to Montréal, Canada. (You can read a bit more about these escapades in my Around the World in 25 Days post.)
July 2005
Chris and Dawn tied the knot and I had another birthday, which was when I played Singstar for the first time. (Sadly, this was when we also introduced Chris Riley to the game and he now takes it quite seriously...)
August 2005
A surprising number of rather large spiders made an appearance in this month. I’ve not seen many of them since then, so I can only presume that they’ve been beamed back up to the Planet of the Rather Large House Spiders by their mothership.
September 2005
Suzy and I visited Combe Martin Wildlife and Dinosaur Park in Devon with Lil and Chris (see my photos) and I got to feed a lemur for the first – and probably last – time!
Google released their Gmail button for Google Toolbar, which enabled me to figure out how to add custom search buttons to the toolbar. They then released Google Blog Search which would later result in my website traffic increasing considerably as people found my blog posts much more quickly than they would through the normal Google search.
October 2005
October was an exciting month (for a geek). First of all, I wrote a script to check for Google Subdomains and found a few that people hadn’t seen before. One of these was purchase.google.com which might have inspired the folks over at WebmasterBrain.com to dig a bit deeper, resulting in them discovering the Google Purchases (AKA Google Wallet / Google Payments) sign-up pages. Incidentally, almost three months on and this new service from Google still hasn’t been released yet.
I decided to run the script again after reading a comment by Wouter Schut and discovered the Google Base subdomain. What happened in the days following my post about this discovery was remarkable. Within 24 hours, Google-watchers all over the world were discussing a new service that they didn’t even fully understand. As screenshots started to appear on the Internet, people were speculating what the new service would be capable of, which caused eBay’s stock to reportedly drop by as much five percent at points during the day! The Guardian and The New York Times – amongst many others – referenced my website and I was even interviewed by Business Week magazine! Incidentally, the title I chose for my post – All your base are belong to Google – was used all over the Internet, with some people even posting it to their blogs without even knowing why they were doing it!
November 2005
I finally went to see The League of Gentlemen live in Llandudno (as I’d mentioned earlier in the year) and the show was absolutely excellent, completely exceeding my expectations. It was well written, well performed and well worth the wait. My only real gripe was that it wasn’t long enough; the two 45-minute acts just went far too quickly! For any League fans didn’t get to see it, I’d definitely recommend buying it as soon as the show is released on DVD.
I also held my school reunion and bought myself a PSP. I actually posted an update around that time, so you can read more about all that if you like.
December 2005
T’was the week before Christmas and my sister gave birth to a baby girl, making me Uncle Tony and ending the year perfectly.
The End.
If you’ve read all the way to here, you deserve a medal! Please accept my most sincere apologies. When I started writing this post, I only intended it to be a brief look back at 2005 but then I got blogorrhea and I couldn’t just hit the delete button after spending so much time on it...
Happy New Year!
Labels: gadgets, genealogy, google, personal, photos, psp, ruscoe.net, theatre, travel, tv
28 November 2005
Whilst my PSP is absolutely brilliant, I can’t help thinking that it must still have loads more to offer than just games, movies and music...
Imagine if I could take my PSP on holiday with me, speak English into it and have it instantly translate what I said into another language and speak it back to me. Well, if I want to translate what I say into Chinese, Korean or Japanese, this review suggests that’s not such a crazy idea after all. TalkMan was recently released in Japan and does exactly that. It’s bundled with a USB microphone that screws into the top of your PSP and uses speech recognition software to try and find a match for what you’ve said in its huge list of common phrases. You can even play games to help you with your language learning and pronunciation.
It’s not quite a Babel fish, but it’s one step closer I guess.
(What else could that USB microphone be used for though? I’m thinking that SingStar for the PSP would certainly keep my fellow tram passengers entertained on the way into work...)
[Via Waxy]
Labels: gadgets, links, personal, psp, translation
9 November 2005
My last post was sooooo popular that I can sense the Internet’s eyes have been watching me closely, anticipating my next move. Naturally, I feel like I should be following it up with something that will get the whole web talking again, but that’s simply not going to happen. Things have been unusually quiet on the Google front, so if you’re after some breaking news about “The Mighty G” I’m afraid you’ll have to look somewhere else as this is going to be one of those boring posts about what I’ve been up to recently – and I’m sorry about that because I hate posts like this too. Anyway...
A couple of weekends ago I went to the school reunion that I’d been organising since January. Only twelve people turned up, so it wasn’t a great turn out, but it was pretty much what I expected really. It was good to see the people who’d made the effort though. I did learn one very important lesson from the experience: not everyone uses the Internet as much as I do. (Some people don’t even have a computer, never mind an email address – can you even believe that!?) Maybe I’ll organise another reunion in five or ten years and use the good old Royal Mail to deliver my invites rather that rely on email.
In other news, I finally dusted off my credit card and purchased myself a Sony PSP. What a pain in the arse it was to get hold of one those! I should’ve listened to what people were saying back in May and either purchased an import or pre-ordered a UK version. After um-ing and ah-ing for a couple of days, I decided to order one from Play because their website said they were “In Stock”. However, after clicking the “Place Order” button and waiting for them to release my order, they suddenly decided that they were “Awaiting Stock” instead. Three weeks later, I was still PSP-less so I phoned my local Virgin Megastore – just on the off chance that they might have some – only to discover that they were expecting a delivery later that week. A couple of days later, they gave me a call and I had one in the palm of my hand... quite literally! My advice? Buy! Buy! Buy!
Labels: gadgets, personal, psp
