Via Tim Prebble's blog, some nice video podcasts by Christopher Willits from XLR8R TV. The story so far:
You can download nice 640-by-360 H.264-encoded QuickTime movies of each episode (approx. 100MB per video), and I thought it'd be nice to watch them on my Nokia 6234 phone. (These seem to be very popular here in New Zealand; at least, after I bought mine the next four people I met with a 3G phone also had a 6234.)
After reading a useful Nokia article on creating mobile videos, I fired up QuickTime 7 Pro and started exporting the movies with different settings. This is what I came up with for the best results (and about 28MB per video):
The nice thing about doing this myself is that I could keep the audio bandwidth high (so it sounded pleasant) while scrunching the video (so the phone could play it cleanly). The audio bitstream accounts for half the file size.
I would love to have time to actually try this stuff myself. I have a GK-2a pickup and an old GM-70 I picked up on Trade Me; one day I'll manage to get it all set up and have a play. (Perhaps by then I'll have a Graphtech Ghost setup and an Axon AX100 instead.)
I've been reading more about CPU upgrades for my Quicksilver 2002 Power
Mac. The Giga Designs dual units all use 7447As with no L3 cache.
Fastmac have a
1.467GHz single G4 upgrade for USD300 that uses a 7455 with 2MB L3
cache that might well be better value for money. Who knows.
Right, back to work...
I'm a bit late with this (apparently it's been out since September), but
the Standalone
Digidesign CoreAudio Driver 6.9.2cs2 for Mac OS 10.4 (phew!) is now
available. This means that I can use Chris's Mbox on my Power Mac
without having to shell out to upgrade Pro Tools, when I already have GarageBand.
Come January, I plan to stake out a corner of the upstairs room here to assemble my various bits of music gear into something I can use to actually start recording some music.
In the meantime, SMARTReporter looks useful, given that I don't trust the second hard drive. (Via this article on Mac maintenance.) TechTool Pro is apparently very good, also.
Oh, and I've managed to install a Dvorak keyboard layout from this page.
On a completely unrelated note, JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is 'yet another' lightweight data-interchange format. Might be useful at some point.
And Backpack is 'yet another' web application, this one aiming to be a complete personal information manager. These things are getting pretty sophisticated.
In other Mac news, I replaced the Power Card in Chris's PowerBook, and now the battery charges up, but nothing continues to happen when I press the power button. So I need to find out who does hardware servicing for Massey, and send it to them.
Some initial useful-looking links I've found:
Apparently the OS X Tiger upgrade is only available on DVD, so I'd need to upgrade my CD-RW drive, or possibly try an external FireWire drive (e.g. one of my spare DVD drives in one of these). So we might put that off for a while.
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