No Warranty Expressed Or Implied http://johnp.net/blog Lisp, synthesisers, Web 3D & stuff. en Copyright �a9; 2011 John Pallister 60 Wed, 29 Oct 2008 04:34 GMT me@johnp.net PyBlosxom http://pyblosxom.sourceforge.net/ 1.4.3 01/10/2008 Exporting H.264 video to a Nokia 6234 as MPEG-4 via QuickTime Pro apple/qt-export-to-6234 http://johnp.net/blog/apple/qt-export-to-6234.html Via Tim Prebble's blog, some nice video podcasts by Christopher Willits from XLR8R TV. The story so far:

  1. Part 1 (Ep. 42), the basics.
  2. Part 2 (Ep. 46), using Ableton Live.
  3. Part 3 (Ep. 52), a MIDI pickup and a GR-20.
  4. Part 4 (Ep. 74), recording at SnowGhost.
  5. Part 5 (Ep. 82), automation clips.

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):


Video export settings.


Audio export settings.

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.)

]]> Wed, 29 Oct 2008 04:34 GMT 1.467GHz G4 Upgrade apple/fastmac-upgrade http://johnp.net/blog/apple/fastmac-upgrade.html 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... ]]> Tue, 10 Jan 2006 22:21 GMT Mbox CoreAudio driver for Tiger is here apple/mbox-coreaudio-now-available http://johnp.net/blog/apple/mbox-coreaudio-now-available.html 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. ]]> Tue, 06 Dec 2005 10:44 GMT Dashboard widgets for music apple/widgets-for-music http://johnp.net/blog/apple/widgets-for-music.html createdigitalmusic.com, who have a roundup of Konfabulator and Dashboard widgets for music makers. And there's Amnesty, which frees your widgets from that grey parallel world and lets them live on your desktop. ]]> Thu, 04 Aug 2005 12:09 GMT Mmmm, upgrades... apple/upgrades-etc-links http://johnp.net/blog/apple/upgrades-etc-links.html dual G4 1.6GHz CPU upgrade and a Radeon 9800 Pro video card for my Quicksilver Power Mac. (My uni-N revision, apparently, is 11.)

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. ]]> Fri, 15 Jul 2005 00:47 GMT Tiger-related browsing apple/tiger-links http://johnp.net/blog/apple/tiger-links.html review of Tiger on Ars Technica. The guy mentions Path Finder as a replacement for the OS X Finder. It looks like upgrading the video card might be a good move, also.

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. ]]> Thu, 05 May 2005 02:50 GMT My First Mac apple/my-first-mac http://johnp.net/blog/apple/my-first-mac.html RCN Associates are selling some Quicksilver 2002 PowerMac G4s (800MHz, 256K L2 cache, CD-RW drive) for NZD395. So I bought one. It seems to have survived the brutally disinterested treatment of the courier, and I am now trying to install OS X on it. It took me a while to notice the eject button on the keyboard, though.

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. ]]> Sat, 30 Apr 2005 01:24 GMT