nemesis's Journal

Apple's recently announced a new gadget for fanboys to jump at. The "iPad".

It's really the bastard-child of the Apple family, with no market segment to fill. An unimaginative name, with an unimaginative design (it's literally just an oversized iPod Touch).

So what's the iPad supposed to be? A glorified ebook reader? If that's the target market, then here's three reasons to buy a Kindle instead:

E-ink display
An LCD screen refreshes the content 60 times a second. In essence, 60 flickers per second. The end result of this is that your eyes fatigue far faster reading LCD screens than they do reading text off paper (think of something -- anything in nature that you look at for an extended period of time that flickers this fast).

E-Ink displays on the other hand, refreshes only when you turn the page. This makes for a more pleasurable reading experience, and makes it far easier for you to plough through that 200-page novel.

Battery life
A side-affect of not having to constantly refresh the display is you get whopping battery life out of E-ink displays. The Kindle will go 2 weeks between charges. Compare that to the iPad's paltry 10 hours -- presumably at minimal brightness. If you'd planned to load up your iPad with maps, you'd barely get a day of use.

Physical keys
You can't underestimate the power that physical keys has on your speed of data entry. Pecking out an email on a touch screen is frustrating to say the least. Humans operate significantly faster when given tactile feedback (that "press" you feel when you hit a key).

No doubt the fanboys will all rush out to buy themselves a new iPad. Apple's marketing hype really is second to none...

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Ever wonder why you get so much spam in your inbox?

Next time you give your email address out to a company, think what they might do with it. Dell, for example, sells your email address to spammers to make a buck.

Most of you already know I obsessively create a new email address for each organisation I deal with. This serves two purposes:

• You can track which companies are bad, and sell your email address to spammers
• You can immediately "unsubscribe" from the spammers, by simply deleting the email address.

I've found it to be immensely effective in fighting the never-ending battle of spam.

Thats right, Dell. I'm on to you.

I should start a blacklist of companies that sell your email address to third parties. I've already got a handful...

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I'm disturbed and disgusted at the number of websites nowadays that have annoying popup DIVs with flash applets.

Case in point:


As the title says, not all your users have flash. Many of these sites are written by design-tards who don't think about these issues. Often they won't even include a non-flash "close" button.

"But why don't you have flash?", I hear you asking. There's a few reasons:

• It might not be available on your particular platform (64-bit Windows, for example)
• You run the FlashBlock extension, because you find that the only use for Flash is annoying advertisements and emo goths videos on YouTube
• You don't run Flash, because it's plagued by unpatched vulnerabilities

Spare a thought for your users. Also, if you use floating DIVs because your popup ads are blocked, think again why your popup ad was blocked in the first place.

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This took a while to figure out.

I wanted a generic command that would resize the video to 320x240, regardless of whether the source was in widescreen or not; and if widescreen, then crop only the middle section out.

Note that the original framerate is maintained. You could probably save some more space by dropping the framerate to 15 or 20 fps.

If you want to save more space, try dropping the audio bitrate, and adding :vbitrate=500 to lavcopts.

mencoder -of lavf -lavfopts format=mp4 -oac lavc -ovc lavc
-lavcopts
aglobal=1:vglobal=1:acodec=libfaac:abitrate=128:vc odec=mpeg4:keyint=25
-vf scale=-3:240,crop=320:240,harddup -noskip -af
lavcresample=44100 -o output.mp4 input.avi

Enjoy.

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