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26
October
2006
Recently I have bashed togther a windows based PVR system which records straight to Divx, which you can see in action here, that’s the background.
So yeah I was bored of getting up to use the keyboard to navigate around mplayer. So within five minutes I had a bluetooth HID (Human Interface Device) profile for my mobile phone, which maps the relevant phone keys to the computers keyboard. Quite niffty eh, who needs one of those pesky “one for all remotes” anyway?
You can download the hid profile here to try yourself, if you have Mplayer of course. You’ll have to bluetooth the file to your phone for best reults. I use the Sony Ericsson W810 walkman phone and the Belkin 10m bluetooth USB dongle, which actually still allows me to control mplayer from downstairs, even though the PC is upstairs!! Oh you may also need the screen image which is here.
Welcome to Lazy Town!
The joypad left and right jogs playback by 10 seconds, up and down by 60 seconds with the centre button being play/pause. Volume control is mapped to the phones erm, volume control buttons and there’s a range of niffty actions in there like playback speed of 4 times normal speed, the ability to go full screen, to cycle frame dropping modes, to bring up the OSD, to mark EDL points for advert breaks and the list is almost endless. Mplayer is extreamly flexible in its control, I just got tired of using the computer to control it that’s all. Hey it’s fun to play with stuff like this too.
The playback in GB-PVR is rubbish which is why I use mplayer, mainly because I know a heck of a lot of those little tricks you can do with filters and -vf this -ovc that.
Cutting out the adverts
It doesn’t stop there, oh no, I have a collection of mencoder scripts, which will to take a recorded TV show from a suitable PVR system (such as GB-PVR), set edit points to an EDL file when I press the ” i ” key, which I have to refine and clean up. The “chop” script can use the EDL file to skip over time periods, say from 300 seconds to 500 seconds, thus cutting out adverts it can then transcode and change the bitrate and aspect of that TV show and clean it up by adding blur or sharpen filters. Why do this? So I can cut out the adverts of course and set the aspect to work on a widescreen TV downstairs, when burned to a data DVD. Our DVD player can play Divx files and those scripts produce files which work in Windows Media Player as long as Divx is installed. It’s also nice to clean up file sizes and squish as much as possible onto a DVD.
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28
September
2006
I just found a nice workaround to get RSS content from a news source which may not publish RSS feeds. Why not use Google news? By stating the source id in the search box you can easily craft a search page which can be output to RSS … nifty eh?
I will be away from home for a week and would like to keep in touch with a news website, which doesn’t have RSS. I’ll only have a slow GRPS connection on my mobile phone, so getting an RSS feed for this site was not only fun but useful too.
Take a look at the search page for icBirmingham and notice you can subscribe to this content through the google news service. The resulting RSS feed I found is here. Never go without RSS news feeds ever again.
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21
September
2006
This is a topic I will expand on in the future, it started when I wanted to create an enhaced podcast without Apples iTunes, which was compatible with every mp3 player out there. Currently as it stands creating an enhanced podcast in iTunes produces a file which cannot be played back on any device and takes away the universal compatability which allowed podcasting to rise to the levels it is at now, which was before iTunes came along.
Recently Mell over on the Glastonbury Podcast allowed me to send in an audio clip explaining how I looked at the alternatives such as the SMIL file format and even the BBC’s developments in inserting chapters into MP3 files. If you would like to hear my thoughts on this, head over to the Glastonbury site to download the podcast.
Here’s the rough example I was hand coding with SMIL, you’ll need Realplayer for the chapters to work as it does use non standard seek commands, but hey it works, would be ideal if I had a better solution for quicktime.
If by any chance you’ve come here from the Glastonbury Podcast, please do leave your thoughts here on this post, using the comment form below. Thank you for listening / reading and hopefully this willl be the basis of a service which may allow fellow podcasters to create their own non-iTunes enhanced podcast, with chapter markings and slideshows, maybe.
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13
September
2006
Not more new cool stuff to keep up with? GeoRSS, yes subscribe to feeds based on location, why didn’t I think of it?! See the site. So hmmm, how to encode xy coords into RSS feeds, maybe a wordpress plugin? Yes indeed there is.
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11
September
2006
Do you know what would be a really nice feature of Firefox 2? The ability to undo the action of closing a tab. The amount of times (like just now) that I’ve closed a tab and then actually thinking “I didn’t want to do that”. It would be great if I could edit undo the tab closure, maybe perhaps by having firefox dig into the history and making suggestions as to which tab it was.
Nice to have, not piority, but nice.
Filed under: Blog, Code | No Comments »
3
September
2006
I’m in the process of setting up my own planet!! This is a fantastic way of bringing together people who blog about a particular subject, like skin cancer.
Last night while meeting up with the guys I used to live with at Univeristy, Jono mentioned that he had seen some of the awareness stuff I had been doing on the moleaware site and gave me a run through something called a planet. A planet is a series of web scripts which trawll through a list of peoples blogs and brings a copy of their recent blog entries into the planet. Usually blogs have an invisible file, usually called an RSS feed, which you can hook into to be notified of new blog posts, a planet uses these feeds to populate the planets homepage.
I know there are many bloggers out there actively talking about their experiences with Melanoma, and possibily using those personal publishing spaces to raise awareness. Trouble is unless you are searching for a blogger who writes about melanoma, chances are you won’t stumble across what they have to say. As soon as Jono showed me a planet I suddenly saw that this would be a benefit to spreading the word about melanoma and early detection.
Many melanoma bloggers, either have no comments or in some cases you might find a melanoma blog with the first words reading “unfortunatly this person passed away this year” and that’s sad because that person had something to contribute, but maybe didn’t get the exposure to an audience. So I’m on the look out for blogs and in particular I would like to add to the planet people who really want to push this up the agenda, because there are so many myths about skin cancer and so many people with personal expereinces about it to bust the myths that we could really make a difference.
Maybe, just maybe some planet inhabitants might get the chance to publish at moleaware.org.
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25
July
2006
So during the development of this site I was able to draw on a vast base of code which could add new things to my site, which simply couldn’t have existed if the system I was using was locked down and the innards kept secret. There are bits of code and the like known as plugins for the framework my site is built on and they give you extra features.
I used a plugin called “custom anti spam” written by a guy called Peter (link to the plugin site here). It worked great on my development machine but as soon as I uploaded to my live site, the plugin broke, my host didn’t support the features that the plugin needed. I had the code so I tinkered with it and added a work around using a function which was only basic and was less fancy than the newer function, but it fixed the problem. I then thought about blind people trying to use this feature so while I was there I also added an idea to make it so that blind people could hear an audio description of what was being displayed on screen. You can see the results by dropping into a comments page.
I dropped onto Peter’s site and other people were having the same problem as me, so in the spirit of things I gave my changes back. Yesterday I sent Peter the code and today he has released a new version with my changes and linked to my site. This is what we mean by free software and by that we don’t mean as is money we mean as in freedom. I can fix a problem I see and give it back, Peter gets a new release and all those people trying to solve the problem now can just go get the new version, also if I kept my changes to myself, when Peter gets a new version out I’d have to redo that work because only I would have known about the change. Smart people do open source!
I love free software, don’t you?
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15
July
2006
Ok so I’m getting into this whole geotagging thing, sitting here thinking about Google maps and Web Picassa and seeing the future of browsing online photo albums in the same way a few of us can already find websites based on physical location. I’m thinking that it’s the one big advantage Google would have over Yahoo’s flickr, which at the moment is miles ahead of web Picassa. Picassa is Googles photo managing suite, which recently had a limted test version of an online tool, linked in with the Picassa desktop software.
Why geotagging photos and Google? Well because if you are Google and you get your users to upload photos with a tag to say where they were taken, suddenly you could map those photos, so as a user you could browse by location. Going on holiday, want to check out the hotel? Perhaps you’ll be seeing a friend in a new city and want to check out some snaps before you set out? You put out a java application for mobile phones and suddenly users can browse the area they are in and see photos of places which they are thinking about going to see.
It would be a bold move for Google to open up their API and allow it to be used by flickr, but then again someone out there could write a mash up quickly enough to do this. One to watch for sure.
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12
July
2006
With PDF Adobe gave powerful tools to people without a clue about how to allow information to be easy to reach! A PDF is not a content management system, mind you some people pay thousands of pounds just to be able to attach a file thinking that’s what a CMS is.
I just got one message to anyone who runs a government website, any information website. Look if you have a map or a basic image to put on your website, just don’t put it in a PDF, what’s the point, it’s like wrapping a mini roll in tin foil just to make it look shiny. It’s an image so upload so it as a JPEG, there’s a way to embed an image onto a page so I don’t have to download a file, the image tag! While we are here why not take the text of the PDF, usually bullet points and put it in an unordered list which would also appear on the webpage, there really is no need to be having an attchment that you make us download, really stop it now, it’s annoying!
Yeah PDF for downloadable leaflets and things which are meant to be printed, by all means please do, but not for one image, and certainly not as the absolute only way of looking at a map of car parks in a town centre. It really is not the right thing to do, really!
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