TechLifeBlogged

No idea if this post will even make it on-line.

UPDATE 1:50PM 21 April: The post is showing up in my list of posts at blogger but now RSS update yet.

Screen shot showing the last update of my rss.xml file against the current time:

UPDATE 3:30 21 April: So the post made it to my blog at 2:14PM. Here is the timestamped RSS.xml:

and the time stamp on this html file

Hard to tell at the moment if it is Blogger or my FTP server. The 2 comments on my recent article on the Russian-Alaska tunnel are showing up on the front page of the blog but are no where to be found when you try to click through.

UPDATE 3:36PM 21 April: Just noticed that non of these updates appear on the blog page. Screenshot:

However they do show on blogger:

Update 8:43pm 21 April: The updates still not showing up on the blog. Trying a republish via Blogger.

The time between posting and the post showing up on the blog is LONG. I can't seem to quantify it at the moment. Haven't heard anything about a delay. Very strange.

Same for comments. I just approved one and it hasn't shown up yet.

Strange things afoot at the Googleplex.

Posting at 1:29PM pacific

BuyYourFriendADrink.com is a new site where you can buy a drink on line and send the equivalent of a gift certificate to your friend. This can be sent to email or cell phone. Friend then shows the code to the bartender and viola, you friend gets a drink! Only works in participating bars. So far they are only in and around New York City.

Bloomberg: Russia plans to build the world's longest tunnel, a transport and pipeline link under the Bering Strait to Alaska, as part of a $65 billion project to supply the U.S. with oil, natural gas and electricity from Siberia.

The project is known as the TKM-World Link

My buddy Randy is going to use it for a future RV adventure. What about you? Personally a tunnel to warmer climates than Siberia makes more sense as a vacation spot but taking your own vehicle to Europe could be pretty cool.

I haven't done much with Yahoo! Pipes since it was released back in February. I posted about it back then. It has come a long way and seems much more robust.

I decided I'd create an aggregated feed of various tech news sites. The Pipe combines the feeds then filters the feeds based on Title, Description, and content analysis. The Content Analysis module analyzes the text within each feed item. It will try to find significant words or phrases. Filtering on the content analysis should help filter out similar stories so that I can concentrate on reading more new content. The down side to that is that sometimes you want lots of articles on the same topic because then you get other perspectives. Not that big a problem because the browser is a click away and if I want more I'll find more.

What might be interesting is a reverse of that where you get some kind of count based on content analysis. It would work even better if you could look at a larger time frame of feeds. Like, say, a day. This would essentially be a meme tracker, showing you commonly talked about topics. I haven't found a way for Pipes to do that yet.

Here is my Tech News Aggregator by TechLifeWeb.com

Uses the following feeds:
TechCrunch
TechMeme
eWeek
BBC News - Technology
News.Com
Wired - Technology
TechDirt
PCWorld
PC Magazine
ExtermeTech
Engadget
Gizmodo
Federated Media Tech Blogs

Subscribe to the RSS

A buddy of mine sent me a link to dnScoop the other day and I completely forgot about it until Randy mentioned it today. 

dnScoop attempts to estimate a value for an established website or a domain name by using factors such as:

• Links pointing to the domain
• Popularity of the domain
• Age of the domain
• Pagerank of the domain
• Traffic to the domain
• and more...

techlifeweb.com has been around since May of 2006. They say it's worth $7236.

TechLifeWeb.com is worth
$7,236

How much is your site worth?

...Google paying $3.1 billion for DoubleClick ain't chump change. What's it gonna mean? Well, everyone is speculating and some think it may spell antitrust.

Randy Morin has some links to the thoughts and jawing of various pundits around the 'sphere: The DoubleClick Story

Randy says it'll bring in higher end advertisers to the Google network. Fine by me.

Here's a site that lets you put in all the bar codes for up to 8 club cards and print them out on one handy card. Nice way to slim down your wallet.

justoneclubcard.com

via: lifehacker

Twitter, Jaiku, what's an early adopter to do? Get both, monitor Jaiku while you post to Twitter.

Jaiku has some interesting features in that you can add RSS feeds to it. So for example if you post to your blog or you del.icio.us account you can have the post show up in the stream over on Jaiku.

Because of that cool feature you can take the rss feed of your posts from Twitter and put them on Jaiku. This effectively lets you post to both services at the same time. It has the added advantage of letting you use IM to post to Jaiku since it doesn't allow that natively.

Here's what to do:
Sign up for both services
Then got to twitter.com/yourusername
At the bottom right you'll see a link that says RSS. Click on that.
Now, that is the feed for any posts by you AND your friends. It looks something like:
http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/1234567.rss

If you want ONLY your posts you need to slightly modify the rss feed:
http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/1234567.rss

Now go over to your Jaiku account

Log in
Click on the Settings link (top right of the screen)
Click on Manage your web feeds
Click the link that says "Add another Atom or RSS feed."
Paste in the feed you found from Twitter and click the Find Feeds button
Once the page comes back saying it found the feed you need to click the Add Feed button (critical)

Viola! Now your posts to Twitter will be automagically picked up by Jaiku. Only problem is I haven't figured out how long it takes before Jaiku polls for updated RSS feeds.

This post was inspired by Rafe Needleman's post on Webware.com. Rafe's post was good but he missed the bit about the 2 rss feeds.

I'm now techlifeweb on both Twitter and Jaiku

I'm into podcasts both audio and video. Except for live things like baseball games I rarely even listen to the radio in my car any more.

One of the things that I don't like is that most podcasters encode their video for the iPod. I don't blame them. The iPod is the market leader and bandwidth and time are limited. Unfortunately we don't have a video standard as ubiquitous as the mp3 file.

Thing is, I don't own an iPod. Audio or Video. I do own the remarkable Archos Gmini 402. The 402 plays Divx compatible files and wmv files. That doesn't do you much good in a video podcast world full of mov, m4v and mp4 files. Then there is the fact the some people like to encode to different screen resolutions and sizes. Some do 16:9 and some do 4:3.  It's a whirlwind of file types and variables.

What I'm going to show you is how I take all those files and convert them to a format compatible with my player. I've been using this for a month or 2 now and have been tweaking the settings. This technique should work for any player that plays divx including the psp.

I chose divx compatible because it works in my player and other devices I have like my stand alone Divx-playing DVD player. With a bit of tweaking you can get it to encode to other formats as will.

The instructions are for Windows. The tools have versions available for other platforms such as Linux so if you are savvy enough to convert the batch file I'm going to tell you about you should be able to use it on those systems as well.

I'm going to assume you know how to acquire video podcasts. Actually, even if you just go to sites and download the files by hand and put them in the appropriate folder you'll be able to use this technique as well. I'll list a few of my favorite video podcasts at the end of this post.

Tools

To work this magic you need 3 tools. They're all open source and free.

• mencoder - This is the brilliant software that does the encoding. As of this writing, MPlayer-mingw32-1.0rc1 is the latest for Windows. Mencoder comes as part of MPlayer
• xvid codec - You'll want to make sure this is on your PC so you can play the files you create
• My batch file - Described below

I chose to use a batch file because once you figure out how these things work you can easily tweak it. I also like to call the batch file from the task manager so I can use the power of the PC during the early hours of the morning to have everything waiting for me later on.

Additional Documents

If you get into this you might want to refer to these documents.

• HOWTO Mencoder Introduction Guide - Nice overview on how to use Mencoder
• MPlayer - The Movie Player - The most up to date man page (aka help file) for MPlayer/Mencoder
• Batch File Command Reference for Windows 2000 - Suitable for Windows 2000 and beyond. Nice tidbits on all the obscure commands you never new about or forgot.

The Magic Batch File

Below is the text of the batch file. You might want to download it instead of copy/paste in case of line wrap issues. I tried to comment it as much as I could to help explain the options you need to set. You can't just run it. You need to set up the directories you have and make decisions on the options I mention as you read through it. Fortunately you only need to do this once.

Once set up properly, when run, the batch file will check all the directory and subdirectories you indicate and process any video file (.mp4 or .m4v or .mov or .mpg or .wmv). Yes, even wmv. I do that because people who encode to wmv sometimes like to make these huge files that don't always play well on portable devices.

One of the problems with video is that everyone likes to create their content in different sizes. While most video podcasts are 320:240 some can be bigger and some can be wider. Your screen is only designed for a certain maximum. If you look closely at the batch file it scales to 320:-3. That -3 is a special mencoder switch that calculates using the other dimension and the original aspect ratio. This is very important. If you hard code your dimensions and scale you'll end up with people with squished or stretched heads. This magic switch keeps your aspect ratio.

NOTE: See below, I no longer resize the videos because it isn't needed for the devices I use.

@echo off
REM By: Scott Kingery
REM email: techlifeblogged[at]gmail.com
REM Last updated 11:57 PM 4/4/2007

REM Purpose: This batch file will look for mp4, m4v, mov, mpg and wmv files in the input folder you specify
REM and convert them to Divx 5 compatible files using the XVID codec.

REM For this to work on your system you must enter the correct paths to various files.

REM **** Start User editable section ****

REM First you need to set the location of mencoder.exe
REM usually this is installed in c:\mplayer
REM Make sure of the location and put the path here
REM You can download the latest mplayer (which contains mencoder)

REM from http://www1.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/win32/
REM as of this writing the current version of mplayer for Windows is MPlayer-mingw32-1.0rc1

set mencoderloc=c:\mplayer

REM inputdir is the location of files you want converted. Be sure to put in the complete path
REM to the TOP level directory. The script will look for and convert files in all subdirectories.
REM So if you have c:\dir1\dir2\dir3 and you specify inputdir as c:\dir1 the script
REM will convert all relevant files in dir1, dir2 and dir3
REM You can type it c:\dir1 or you can user system variables like %userprofile%

set inputdir=%USERPROFILE%\Documents\My Received Podcasts

REM inplace tells the program what to do with the output.
REM Set inplace to 1 if you want the output file in the same directory as the input file

set inplace=1

REM If you would rather have the output somewhere else, set inplace to 0 (zero)
REM and set outdir to the directory you want

set outdir=%USERPROFILE%\Documents\My Converted Podcasts

REM If you want to keep the original, set backup to 1.
REM Setting it to 0 (zero) will cause the file to be deleted.

set backup=1

REM If you do want a back up, set the directory you want the backups in here.
set backupdir=%USERPROFILE%\Documents\My Backup Podcasts

REM Lastly, do you want to add today's date to the filename?
REM I include this because some places don't include the date in the file name and
REM this makes it hard to know what is new and what isn't when I look at it on my
REM device.
REM Setting incdate to 1 will cause the output to include todays date
REM For example, if an original file is called myshow.m4v and todays date is 18 March the output will be 20070318_myshow.avi

set incdate=1

REM **** End User editable section ****

REM **** DO NOT EDIT BELOW THIS LINE ****

if %incdate% == 1 set TodayDate=%date:~-4,4%%date:~-10,2%%date:~-7,2%_
echo on
cd "%inputdir%"

If %inplace% == 0 Goto ProcessMove
:ProcessInPlace
for /R %%i in ("*.mp4" "*.m4v" "*.mov" "*.mpg" "*.wmv") do %mencoderloc%\mencoder "%%i" -quiet -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:v4mv:mbd=2:trell -vf expand=:::::4/3,scale=320:-3,harddup -oac mp3lame -lameopts fast:preset=medium -ffourcc DX50 -o "%%~dpi%TodayDate%%%~ni.avi"
for /R %%i in ("*.mp4" "*.m4v" "*.mov" "*.mpg" "*.wmv") do if exist "%%~dpi%TodayDate%%%~ni.avi" ren "%%i" "%%~nxi.converted"
Goto PostProc

:ProcessMove
if not exist "%outdir%" md "%outdir%"
rem for /R %%i in ("*.mp4" "*.m4v" "*.mov" "*.mpg" "*.wmv") do %mencoderloc%\mencoder "%%i" -quiet -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:v4mv:mbd=2:trell -vf expand=:::::4/3,scale=320:-3,harddup -oac mp3lame -lameopts fast:preset=medium -ffourcc DX50 -o "%outdir%\%TodayDate%%%~ni.avi"
for /R %%i in ("*.mp4" "*.m4v" "*.mov" "*.mpg" "*.wmv") do if exist "%outdir%\%TodayDate%%%~ni.avi" ren "%%i" "%%~nxi.converted"

:PostProc
If %backup% == 0 Goto DeleteOriginal

:SaveOriginal
if not exist "%backupdir%" md "%backupdir%"
for /R %%i in ("*.converted") do move "%%i" "%backupdir%\%%~nxi"
Goto End

:DeleteOriginal
for /R %%i in ("*.converted") do Del "%%i"

:End

UPDATE 20 MARCH 2008:

Since I originally wrote this how-to a new version of mencoder released. I now use MPlayer-mingw32-1.0rc2 which you can get from http://www1.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/win32/

Additionally, I recommend downloading the additional codec packs from http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html I use windows-essential-20071007.zip
To install the codec pack, simply unzip the file and put its contents into c:\mencoder\codecs (assuming you installed Mencoder in c:\mencoder)

Also, I have updated the batch file as I no longer resize the video. I have left the old line in as examples should you still want to resize your videos.

I hope you found these instructions helpful. Let me know what devices you are using for you video podcasts and if you've changed any of the settings.

All the early adopters are moving to Jaiku now. You can stop talking about Twitter.

Leo Laporte

Robert Scoble

I'm going to see what this one is all about. Haven't got around to Twitter yet.

TechLifeWeb on Jaiku

Microsoft licensing can get confusing. The Windows Server Virtualization Calculator allows you to specify how many virtual machines you will be running, on a given set of hardware, and it will show you all of your licensing options for buying Windows Server.

CNET News.com has a nice video on how to easily create a map mashup using My Google Maps. No programming required and you can make them public or keep them private.

CNet Video

via Jon's Geek Stuff

Let us go forth awhile, and get better air in our lungs. Let us leave our closed rooms... The game of ball is glorious.
--Walt Whitman

That's the true harbinger of spring, not crocuses or swallows returning to Capistrano, but the sound of a bat on the ball.
-Bill Veeck, 1976

Ok, it's still in beta, what else is new. Still...it's here! I just logged into Gmail and was amazed to find out this isn't just one of those things Google is keeping in the labs.

So, you click the new button at the top of your Gmail and Google will print all your messages in beautiful Helvetica and ship it right to your door. Free postage!

Check out Gmail Paper.

Happy April the 1st to you too, Google.