Page 55 – Krunk4Ever!

February 6, 2008February 6, 2008

How To Get Media Center to Play Any Video File

So for the longest time, I have been trying to get Media Center to play .mp4 files, but after countless searching for solutions, I never really came across a working solution. There have been instructions on installing different codecs and adding/modifying registry entries.

Today I realized that after my format, I could no longer play Quicktime (*.mov) HD trailers in Media Center anymore. I’m pretty sure this has to do with the fact that I had reinstalled Windows Vista Ultimate recently and never bother to do something. I’m pretty sure Quicktime Alternative (now better known as QT Lite) has already been installed, but I reinstalled it just in case, but that didn’t seem to work. HD trailers played fine in WMP11 and Media Player Classic.

I knew it worked before, but I had no idea what I had changed. I started searching again and after a few tries, ended up on this thread: Quicktime movies in Vista MCE. The key thing to take away from that thread is:

Hi there

I’ve had the problem of after installing QT alternative, it will play .mov files quite happliy in mediaplayer 11, but doesn’t get picked up in Mediacentre (this is on vista, when i had MCE2005 it went fine)

Any obvious reason/fix?

Thanks

Just found the answer on greenbutton,.com:

You need to install Quicktime Alternative. This has a DirectShow Quicktime plug-in that will allow .movs to play within Media Player or even Media Centre. However, for the .mov files to even appear in MCE, you need to make the following registry edit:

In HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mov create a REG_SZ called “PerceivedType” and name it “video”.

Worked a treat. (one has to ask why Olympus made there cameras to record video in a format used by about 5% of the population – if you are a PC fiddler like most of us then we’ll find a way around it, for the vast majority it’ll be no holiday videos on the MCE machine).

The trick is to create a new String Value, name it PerceivedType and give it a value of video. So I thought, what if I did this to the other file types I wanted. I went ahead and added this string value to .mp4, .ts, etc. and now they ALL show up and play in Media Center. Of course you have to get the codecs to get it playing in WMP before you can actually get it to play in Media Center.

Update:
Now if I can only figure out how to get non DVD files to show up in my DVD library.

February 4, 2008February 5, 2008

Message From Your Heart – Heart Beats

So I was checking out this year’s Superbowl ads and saw this one: Kina Grannis – Doritos – Commercials. You might know Kina Grannis as the Digg Girl after she made this song/music video: Gotta Digg. Anyway, she won the Doritos contest by having the most votes online so she got a full minute ad during the Superbowl, advertising her new song Message From Your Heart, which is apparently now available on iTunes.

Anyway, I was browsing through Digg earlier today and came upon this site that linked to the full version of her song (and maybe her entry to the Doritos contest): Doritos: Crash the Super Bowl Contest – Song: Message From Your Heart – Artist: Kina Grannis. Anyway, I found her method of making the beating heart sounds by tapping twice quickly continuously on the guitar was ingenious! I have no idea why they removed it from the Superbowl commercial, but I especially liked that part of the song. Having her say bum, bum, bum, bum, bum… as the heart beat sounds isn’t bad, but I’d prefer the tapping on the guitar.

Tap-Tap, Tap-Tap, Tap-Tap, Tap (repeat)

Just awesome!

UPDATE:
Speaking of which, you can check out the 2 new HD Movie Trailers that were advertised during the Superbowl:

February 3, 2008February 3, 2008

Weekly Top Posts (1/27/2008 to 2/2/2008)

Here’s this week’s top post:

Previously…

Wow! Both the top 2 spots have been replaced! The #1 spot was taken over by the past several weeks’ #3. However the #2 spot was taking over by a new post: Book Rental… which had an interesting thread post requesting a book rental service. Of course I think a library perfectly satisfies Selekta’s request, but I was even more amused that services like these do exist and are advertising on the radio.

February 2, 2008February 2, 2008

More RAM! Good, right?

This past week I ordered more RAM. How could I pass up on HP 1GB DDR2 PC5300 RAM that was less than $3 a stick (after rebate of course).

Anyway, my Vista Media Center PC has been upgraded from 2GB to 4GB now and I have 2 spare GBs right now which I had planned on putting into my older file server (which only had 1GB). Unfortunately, it turns out only half of my memory was correct (pun not intended). I recall specifically that motherboard support 2 kinds of RAM, but I was thinking DDR and DDR2. However when no matter how hard I try to push the RAM in, it wouldn’t go in, I realized that the little notch did not line up and that’s when it hit me that this motherboard only supported DDR and the old SDRAM.

Also, for the longest time, my Abit IL9 Pro (the motherboard in my main box and my Vista Media Center PC) would only show 3200MB of the 4GB RAM when it was POSTing. I thought that was weird, but didn’t really care so much since neither XP 32bit nor Vista 32bit was able to use more than 3GB. I finally got myself one of those USB floppy drives this past Christmas and was able to flash the bios. It now shows the correct amount of RAM: 4096MB. It also enabled some annoying sleep feature where it would constantly blink my power LED when it’s asleep and the LED is super bright. I’m contemplating on duct taping that LED or just unplugging it.

So I know that XP can’t utilize all 4GB of RAM in 32bit mode, but the number was much smaller than I had anticipated.

On XP, System Properties only shows 2.87 GB of RAM. I’ve already enabled PAE (Physical Address Extension) and 3GB. From Memory Support and Windows Operating Systems:

Windows XP Professional and Windows Server 2003 Memory Support. The maximum amount of memory that can be supported on Windows XP Professional and Windows Server 2003 is also 4 GB. However, Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition supports 32 GB of physical RAM and Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition supports 64 GB of physical RAM using the PAE feature.

The virtual address space of processes and applications is still limited to 2 GB unless the /3GB switch is used in the Boot.ini file. When the physical RAM in the system exceeds 16 GB and the /3GB switch is used, the operating system will ignore the additional RAM until the /3GB switch is removed. This is because of the increased size of the kernel required to support more Page Table Entries. The assumption is made that the administrator would rather not lose the /3GB functionality silently and automatically; therefore, this requires the administrator to explicitly change this setting.

The /3GB switch allocates 3 GB of virtual address space to an application that uses IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE in the process header. This switch allows applications to address 1 GB of additional virtual address space above 2 GB.

The virtual address space of processes and applications is still limited to 2 GB, unless the /3GB switch is used in the Boot.ini file.

On Vista, System Properties only shows 2,943 MB of RAM, which comes out to be about the same amount in XP. However, I couldn’t find a way to specify the /3GB switch since Vista has a different boot loader.

Given that, this all comes down to I/O mapping limitations in 32-bit Windows OS and you basically only have ~3GB of accessible memory. Oh well. At least they get to run in dual channel mode, right?

P.S. I’ve finally installed the last hdd into my file server, so hopefully my many months old blog entry will be finally posted.

February 1, 2008February 2, 2008

Expected Downtime

Got this email earlier this week:

Due to continued space and power constraints in our primary data center, we will be moving the “randy” cluster to one of our newer data centers.

This move will begin Friday, February 8, at 10PM PST, and is expected to last up to 8 hours, until Saturday, February 9, 6AM PST. All web servers, mail servers, file servers, and MySQL servers in the randy cluster will be unreachable during this time.

The following web servers will be off line during this move:

alexander arkanoid attila baht bam bob bomberman breakout caesar centipede contra cornelius cortes crack cruisin cssmania deblume defender digdug dinar dinero dollar donkeykong ellipsis euro fidget forint franc gage galaga gap go grant guilder happy herod ikari ike io ivan jezebel joust karnov katamari khan klax korben kroner lamlam leeloo lei limbo-randy limbo-randy2 limbo-randy3 lira lucky mark marvin morgan napoleon nexus nimitz orbital pacman paperboy patton peso pizarro pound qbert quid rhod ruble rupee rygar scagnetti schilling scipio shekel slaughter slimy tetris ugh ultima venice vex vito wasabi yen yoda zorg

If your site is on any of these servers this message applies to you.

Also, if you check the “Account Status” button on the upper right hand of the webpanel ( https://panel.dreamhost.com ) you should see your cluster under the section “Your Email Server:”.

We do apologize for this inconvenience. Rest assured we will do everything possible to keep downtime to a minimum.

If you have any questions regarding the server move, please contact our support team.

On the other hand, we’ll be moving to a newer data center. Hopefully that’s a good thing and some of the problems I’ve experienced such as the 500 Server Error would be rid of. So brace yourselves!

January 29, 2008January 29, 2008

Weekly Top Posts (1/20/2008 to 1/26/2008)

Here’s this week’s top post:

Previously…

I was going to say we have a 2 new entries that’s reach top 10 status, but it appears Screen Cleaners was already top 10 for the past 2 weeks. I had initially thought it was popularized by the fact that someone had posted this on Digg: ~~Click if your computer screen is dirty.~~ (mirror / full screen), which currently has almost 15K diggs.

The one that hasn’t ever reach top 10 status is Free Outgoing Calls. I guess free is always good. 🙂

January 29, 2008February 3, 2008

Book Rental…

So these past few weeks, I’ve been hearing this commercial on the radio touting that they’re the Netflix of books, where you pay a monthly subscription and you can rent out 2, 3, or 4 books at a time. There’s no late fees and the books are mailed to your door. This struck me immediately as very odd since this sounds like a service that wants to replace the library which is a FREE service.

Fuzzywuzzy posted this screenshot:

book rental service? – Selekta

was just thinking. my sister does -alot- of reading, and spends like $1000 a year on just books alone. most of them she reads once then never looks at again. is there any kind of like…video rental store but for books? would make things alot cheaper, plus once one person has read the next person can get enjoyment from it etc

And this prompted me to blog about it. I don’t exactly recall the name of the book rental service that was advertised on the radio, but BookSwim sounds awfully close. There was also Booksfree.com, but I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the one that was advertised on the radio. I understand libraries can sometimes be horrible, but as library gets more and more modernized, I can’t see a book rental service as hardly useful. The libraries here in Seattle allows you to reserve books online and when the book is ready for pickup, it sends you an email.

I talked this over a bit with RayAlome, and there are some downsides to the library:

Books have due dates (usually ~2 weeks). They can typically be renewed, unless it’s new or someone else has reserved it.
There might be a long queue for new books (i.e. Harry Potter), but just like Netflix, I don’t think a book rental service can guarantee you’ll get new releases immediately either, but they might be faster than the library in getting you the book.
You have to actually go to the library to pick up your book, instead of having them mail it to you.

I also found some problems that a book rental service has that a DVD service doesn’t. First, books comes in different shapes and sizes, while DVDs are a 1 size fit all. Therefore packaging material needs to be customized or be highly flexible. Books aren’t exactly light either, though with medial mail, you can still ship 2lbs for under $3. However, that might mean it’ll take up to 8 days for the book to get to you and going back also takes that amount of time. I don’t see them having warehouses in different parts of the country set up like Netflix, since they’re barely starting, but maybe they’ll have some sort of agreement with USPS or UPS to have faster shipping for cheap.

We also talked about the Amazon.com Kindle, but that’s a story for another time.

January 27, 2008January 28, 2008

Lost Camera?

I just read this article and was very happy with the outcome: Photo clues lead to camera’s owner

Sitting on the back seat was a nice Canon digital camera. Gunderson asked the driver which previous passenger might have left it, but the cabbie didn’t seem to care. So Gunderson brought it home and showed it to her fiance, Brian Ascher. They decided that the only right thing to do was to find the owner.

… (A lot of detective work) …

Ascher soon got an e-mail from a woman named Sarah Casey, whose sister Jeanette works at Playwrights. Suddenly everything Ascher had seen on the camera came to life.

The Caseys recently had hosted relatives and friends from Ireland. The group included their friend Alan Murphy, who had journeyed to Florida with family before heading to New York, where the clan stayed at the Radisson. (Their Noel was not the Noel whom Ascher e-mailed.) Murphy ended the trip kicking himself for leaving his camera in a cab in the twilight on New Year’s Eve.

If you have time, it’s definitely worth it to read the entire article to see all the detective work that went in to figure out they were a group of Irish people, how they visited some amusement parks in Florida, how they figured out which hotel they stayed at, how they contacted someone in Ireland, how they located the bar they were at, how they eventually found the owner who lives in Australia (updated). Stuff like this always makes me happy to see that some people are willing to go the extra mile to help others.

But this got me thinking. Many people have lost camera over the ages and before when you lose a camera, that’s probably 20-40 pictures in that roll of film. However, now when you lose a digital camera, that can be hundreds or thousands of photos, and just like how when a hard drive dies on you and you haven’t backed up your important data, it’s that sinking feeling that kills you and you regret what you could’ve done to prevent the data loss.

Of course not everyone is going to be as nice as the folks in the article. Even if it ends up with some honest folks, they’ll probably give up the search after a week or so.

So what can one do to aid the finders to locate the original camera owner?

What most people typically do is probably add a name/address/phone tag to the camera, sort of like your luggage, but that’s just tacky. At first, I thought I’d just take a snapshot with my info such as email and phone number, lock that photo and never delete it. Then I thought what I can also do is create a text file on the the memory card and name it something like “If You Found This Camera, Please Read This.txt” or “Owner Information.txt” and include my name, my email, and my phone number (including international codes). You can also include your address, but I thought that was giving away too much PII (personally identifiable information), especially if it lands in the hand of someone not as honest.

Just wanted to share my thoughts with you guys.

January 27, 2008January 27, 2008

Gallery2 Auto Rotate

For the longest time, I’ve been rotating images on Gallery2 manually (usually using IrfanView beforehand) and then uploading them to my ftp server. Of course I only rotated copies and left the originals intact. Anyway, I got sick of it for some reason today and remember this USED to work where Gallery2 would auto rotate based on the EXIF data.

I tried searching the admin panel, but didn’t really have much luck.

I tried to see if there was a rotation plugin and there was none.

I checked out Jpegtran since it’s the tool used for image transformations (specifically rotation), and there didn’t appear to any problems.

Searching for auto rotate or auto rotation on search engines didn’t really result in anything too useful besides the fact that starting with Gallery 2.2, auto rotate was an added feature.

Finally I found a thread that told me how to enable this. Apparently the place to do this is:
Site Administration > EXIF/IPTC > Rotate Pictures Automatically

Woot! Auto-rotate works! I’m thinking about enabling “Preserve Original on Rotating”, but not sure if I want to do that or not, since I assume when people click on “Download photo”, they’ll might see the photo in the wrong orientation.

January 26, 2008

Lenovo Thinkpad X61 Tablet – Review

Despite some complications in receiving my new laptop, I’ve been fairly impressed by it so far and I can’t believe I’m actually loving the tablet aspect of it.

First some pictures:

Then the specs:

Intel Core 2 Duo L7500 LV (1.6GHz, 4MB L2, 800MHz FSB)
12.1″ SuperView WVA SXGA+ TFT
1GB PC2-5300 667MHZ 1DIMM
Windows Vista Business
160GB Hard Disk Drive, 5400rpm
Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG
Integrated Bluetooth PAN
Integrated Fingerprint Sensor
ThinkPad X60 Tablet 8 Cell Li-Ion Battery

Screen:
As you may have known, the 2 major reasons I purchased this laptop was because it was light/portable and the fact it had a really nice screen. The X61 Tablet comes with 2 types of screens:

12.1″ SuperView WVA SXGA+ TFT, 2×3 UltraConnect II antenna
12.1″ MultiView + MultiTouch WVA XGA TFT

I’ve actually been waiting for over 2 years for the X series to have a better screen than XGA (1024×768 resolution) and when the X series Tablet got the new SuperView SXGA+ (1400×1050 resolution) awhile back, I thought the X series would get get the updated screen in no time. I was wrong and it’s been almost a year and the X series still only has the XGA option. However I figured out why the Tablets were given a better screen. The Tablet screen is noticeably thicker, probably to handle the tablet features and was able to increase the resolution due to that fact.

The screen however is just amazing. The image is super crisp and resolution is drool-worthy. I’ll talk about the Tablet part later in the review.

Battery:
I also opted for the 8 cell battery (over the 4 cell), which made it protrude in the back, but gives me about 4 hours of usage with WiFi enabled at the brightest LCD monitor setting.

The protrusion also made it not fit in my existing 12″ laptop neoprene case. I’m not sure if they actually sell neoprene cases that has an extra inch or 2 depth wise, but if you know of any, please do let me know.

Memory:
First of all, 1GB of RAM is NOT ENOUGH to run Vista Business with all the applications that Lenovo loaded. My memory usage was constantly hovering around 90%. I did have a Crucial 2GB stick of RAM on the way, but while setting up my machine was extremely painful.

When I did install my 2GB stick of RAM (a total of 3GB), memory usage was still hovering around 50%. I’ll probably need to take a look at what Lenovo included later and determine what I don’t need.

ReadyBoost:
I had an interesting experience with ReadyBoost. This laptop actually comes with a SD (secure digital) flash memory card reader. The old X-series came with a CF (compact flash) memory card reader and it worked extremely well with my Canon PowerShot S400. And now that I have a Canon PowerShot SD1000, it’s perfect! But this also meant I can enable ReadyBoost with one of the many SD cards I have laying around. In fact I cracked open a brand new PQI “Hi-Speed” 60X 2GB SD card. However, when trying to enable ReadyBoost, it said the drive was too slow and wasn’t able to enable it. I thought, “Darn! Maybe the SD card reader is too slow for ReadyBoost.”

So I started searching for USB thumb drive. I also have a bunch of those lying around. Found a PNY Secure Attache 2G (MMAR – make money after rebate) and plugged it in. Gave me the same too slow message when doing the speed test. Getting disappointed, I was beginning to give up, but decided give my new Kingston DataTraveler 2GB I had picked up at Buy.com for $1 shipped. Woot! It worked! However having this USB drive stick out like that was rather inconvenient, meaning I had to unplug it whenever I stuck it into my backpack and plug it back in when I needed to use it.

I decided the inconvenience wasn’t worth it and removed the USB drive. However, I did still have some spare SD cards I could try out. I took my spare Kingston 2GB SD card that I have in my backpack and gave it a whirl. Woot! It worked! Now I can have ReadyBoost the way I originally wanted it. I guess Kingston’s a good brand for ReadyBoost if you’re interested in trying it out.

Fingerprint Scanner:
This is one of the coolest things to have integrated into the notebook. The software that Lenovo provides for it is also rather neat. First of all, there’s the logging in. I associated 2 fingers for each account. Left hand logs into my corporate account. Right hand logs into my personal account. So now you know you can chop off my fingers and gain access to my laptop.

Besides that, it comes with a password manager for Firefox. Instead of using Firefox’s default password manager, I’ve opted to use Lenovo’s and what happens is when you’re prompted for a password that it has or you’ve entered a new password, you get prompted to scan your finger so that it will input the password for you. That’s rather neat!

Networking:
Lenovo has also done quite a bit to upgrade their networking software. I’ve always thought their connection manager was neat, allowing me to create zones which will automatically setup the networking device, printer associated to this network, and some other customizations. They’ve gone a step further where if you’re using a Ethernet connection, it automatically turns off your WiFi radio (conserving battery). Little things like these always make me excited.

Bluetooth:
I haven’t gotten a chance to play with the bluetooth yet, but I’ve always wanted it in my previous laptop, so that’s why I opted for it.

Hard Drive:
160GB isn’t a lot, but it’ll manage nicely. Compared to my 20GB hdd previously on my X31, this is a heavenly amount of space. I even bought a 60GB hdd to swap out, but because IBM has this proprietary partition that’s unreadable by anyone else, I’ve been too lazy to actually try to figure it out.

Portability:
This notebook turned out a bit heavier than I was expecting, probably due to the aforementioned reasons such as Tablet screen, larger batter, etc. It comes out to about 4lbs, a bit heavier than my X31 (which weighs 3.6lbs) and over 1lb heavier than the new X61 (non-tablet) which starts at 2.7lbs. However, despite weighing about 4lbs, it still is extremely portable.

Keyboard:
They FINALLY added the Windows (WIN) key!!! They also added the context menu key which is nice.

Tablet:
To clear out some confusion, a Tablet is NOT a touch screen. There’s some sort of (magnetic?) screen behind the LCD and only reacts to the special Tablet pens.

Anyway, I’ve always noted that I didn’t really want a Tablet, or actually didn’t really care for a Tablet, as I don’t particularly find having the ability to write useful. However, this past week has been nothing but fun with the Tablet capability. It helps that I have Office OneNote to play with. Taking notes is actually fun! I can draw diagrams and then email them out as is. One Note has this doodle-to-text converter where it tries to change everything you’ve written into text so it’s better organize. It’s actually pretty good and as I teach it more, it’s getting better.

Then I found out that Office Communicator actually has a writing mode and I was able to write text which would then be sent to whoever I was chatting with. That was really neat!

Here’s one of the doodles I did in OneNote:

There’s 3 buttons on the Tablet pen:

the tip
the side button
the eraser button

The tip was easy to figure out. If I hold it down, it’ll be like holding down left click and dragging. However, I still haven’t figured out the side button completely. I know if I hold down the tip and not move and wait for the circle to form, it would then act as a right click. If I hit the side button, the circle immediately pops out, but I’m not exactly sure if right click is the only action it can do. I can also use the side button to select items in OneNote. For the longest time, I couldn’t figure out how to use eraser button (I didn’t find out it was a eraser button until much later). I kept on clicking and pushing it, but it would have no response on the screen. It wasn’t until I flipped the pen around once by accident and notice it was erasing what I had written in OneNote. I was like, SWEET! I’m still learning the different tricks of the Tablet pen, and if you have any to share, please do!

One thing that is someone annoying is the fact that when I’m writing on the Tablet, I leave fingerprints and palm prints all of the screen, requiring me to clean it everyday. I just end up using Costco’s Lens Cleaner that I use on my glasses.