nemesis's Journal

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...

2 Comments »

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.

2 Comments »

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.

1 Comments »

Most of you already know that I got a shiney new Nokia N85 last weekend. The dilemma I faced (similar to my Eudora escapades) was how to get my messages, contacts and calendar entries from my old phone to my new one.

Migrating from my 6610 to my E65 was a breeze. Use the latest PC Suite to take a backup of the old phone, and "restore" it on the new one.

But for some reason, PC Suite 7.1 (the latest at time of writing) didn't like my E65. It would happily take a backup of it, but threw up a warning saying that it would only restore on a phone of the same model.

Strange, I thought. So I tried one of the backups I had lying around that was created in a previous version of PC Suite off my E65. Strangely enough, it would happily restore all my data.

So, in four quick steps, here's how to keep all your stuff:

• Install Nokia PC Suite 6.82 (make sure you don't have any other PC suites installed).
• Backup your E65.
• Install the latest E65 (the old one won't work with your new phone).
• Restore your E65 backup.

These steps probably work for many other "older" models, e.g. N95 or even a 6610.

Enjoy!

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