Still Here, Wish You Were

Yes, I'm still here, just not blogging most of my "shared hyperlink" posts which are being pushed along the Twitter lines these days. Did I mention I'm tweeting? Yes... follow me at http://twitter.com/mrated. I highly recommend installing Twhirl for all your Twitter needs, it makes so much more sense that way.

How To Have An 18 Movie Marathon In 2 Hours

Today my 3.5 year old was restless and scratchy so I started playing Shrek on my PC for him while I was updating Mood Stones. I saw the other 2 Shrek movies sitting there on my media hard drive and thought I'd try a little experiment.

What you see here is a screenshot of 18 movies playing at the same time on my dual monitor setup (2 x 4:3 CRTs). The system tray shows I had 21 windows open but the other three were hidden underneath somewhere and I couldn't get to their play buttons. My PC had no problems playing all 18 movies and even mixed the various audio streams out through to my 5.1 speakers with the AC3 (Dolby Digital) outputs even mixing correctly. I was a little surprised with that one. This would sure be an easy way to have an 18 film marathon... you'd be done in a few hours.

My next test was to see how my PC would handle multiple HD videos. I kicked in all 6 Star Wars movies which I just happen to have in 720p and they played with no troubles at all, again with the 6 distinct audio streams being mixed nicely.



(click for full size images, excuse the JPEG compression)



Just a few years ago you'd have struggled to play one high definition video now you can play six HD or 18 SD videos ACROSS THE NETWORK all at once and still have spare CPU for solitaire in another window.

I was running low on free RAM with the 18 videos playing (plus 3 more loaded ready to play) but the 6 HD videos didn't seem to worry Vista much. When I install Windows 7 on my PC I'll have to retry my experiment, especially seeing as MPEG4 decoding is now part of the OS.

FYI, my hardware specs:

CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (not overclocked)
RAM: 4GB
LAN: 1,000Mb/1Gb Ethernet
OS: Windows Vista 64
Video: ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB
Audio: Onboard Realtek HD Audio
Codec: K-Lite Standard pack using WMP Classic.

I'm Attempting To Tweet

Attempting to Tweet frequently. Using Twhirl. Can only type like telegram now. Follow me.

http://twitter.com/mrated

American Muscle, Old Vs New

There's been a trend in recent years for US car manufacturers to return to the glory days of the late 1960s and early 1970s with their super powerful gas guzzling muscle cars. The retro designs are very American and tend to invoke strong feelings for or against them.

I personally like the look of the new cars although the Mustang's rear end looks odd and the Challenger's big chin is worrisome. At the 2009 Detroit auto show the Camaro Black was looking like a superstar, makes me want to burn dinosaurs!

To show how similar/dissimilar the "new" designs are from the old designs I've put together this easy to see side-by-side comparison. Enjoy. (click for larger images)

Dodge Challenger


Ford Mustang


Chevy Camaro


Here's the Camaro Black in all its hotness, thanks Autoblog!

Editing ID3 Tags With Vista

I'm not sure how widely documented this feature of Windows Vista is but I use it frequently and thought I'd pass on the info.

I sometimes acquire MP3s in various formats and more often than not the ID3 tags are either incomplete, incorrect or just not there. ID3 tags are metadata stored with the audio data as part of the MP3 file and include information such as the track name, the artist name(s), the cover art and plenty of other things.

Well, before Vista you had to edit the tags with third party software, through Winamp or Windows Media Player (WMP) or whatever media player you use which wasn't too bad, so long as the software updated the files then and there. Winamp does this but you can only edit one file at a time while WMP lets you edit multiple files at once (e.g. album title) but it delays updating the physical files until later which is a pain if you want to transfer them to an external device for example.

So here are my simple steps on cleaning up ID3 tags using Windows Explorer in Vista and finally adding album art of a decent size using Windows Media Player.

Step 1

Firstly, make sure you can see the ID3 tag information in Explorer. Go to the folder with your MP3 files, select "Detail View" then right-click the titles of the columns. You can click on the "More..." option to get the complete list as shown in this screenshot. I like to select "#" (the track number), "Name" (the file name), "Size" (file size), "Type" (what type of file it is), "Title" (the song title), "Artists" (the album artist), "Album" (the album title), "Bit rate" (the bitrate of the MP3 file), "Genre" (the genre of the music) and "Year" (the year released).



Step 2

Now you can select the files in the list and edit the general information such as the Album Title, Album Artist, Genre and Year. To do this, just select the files and you'll see the aggregated details in the information bar at the bottom of the window. Clicking in any of these fields allows you to edit then save the details. Be careful you don't overwrite the track number, track title etc. as it will update all the files at once. If you want to edit a single file, just select the one you want and follow the same steps.



Step 3

Before adding album art, just check to see if the files already have them. In Windows Explorer set your view to Large Icons. If the files just have the default blue musical note icon instead of album art follow these steps to add it in. This will embed the image into the MP3 so when you transfer it around to various places you'll get the cover art. I usually get a 500x500 pixel image from Google Images, just search by artist name and album title, to serve as the cover art as WMP's 200x200 images are too small and badly compressed for my liking.

This is where we head over to Windows Media Player. Right click your folder and select "Add to Windows Media Player list" or "Play with Windows Media Player". Once you have WMP open go to the Library tab then select Now Playing in the left tree view. If the files haven't been added to your music library yet you'll see the Rating stars are grey, wait until they're all solid before continuing or you could get yourself into trouble (I've had WMP crash if it's trying to add cover art while adding tracks to the library).



Now select all the files, right click any one of them and select "Advanced Tag Editor". Once that's open go to the Pictures tab and press "Add...". Select the JPEG you'd like to use as cover art making sure you set it as "Cover (front)" then hit OK. It may take a few seconds to update all the files and if one of them is playing (or was the previous track played) WMP will do it's whacky postponed update.



Head back over to Windows Explorer and hit refresh, you should now see each file has the cover art as its icon. If you want you can delete the system files that were generated (selected in the screenshot below). I like to keep folder.jpg so when I view the folder in icon view I get a nice image instead of a pile of images.



Done!

I know this isn't the only way to do it but it's the way I do it... hopefully it doesn't change too drastically in Windows 7.

Sony To Post First Loss In 14 Years

According to news.com.au's sources in Japan Sony, the electronics giant, will be posting its first loss in 14 years. Sony is expected to "post an operating loss of ¥100 billion" ($1.6 billion AUD) due to falling demand and a stronger yen the Nikkei business daily reported.

Personally I'm only surprised it hasn't happened sooner. Sony have a tendency to come out with wonderful new gadgets that cost an arm and a leg then not bother advertising them or they sabotage themselves in other ways.

Back in the day I bought (for a ridiculous amount of hard earned cash) the first "portable" MiniDisc recorder, the MZ1. It was huge but dear to my heart but not once did I see a Sony advertisement for MiniDisc other than on English soccer jerseys. By the time other people knew about MiniDiscs the MP3 revolution had arrived burying what could have been a large money spinner and really a handy product.

Now we have the PS3 which is leaning heavily on its Bluray capabilities to convince people that it's worth twice as much as an Xbox 360 which does essentially the same thing. Obviously not everyone is convinced.

It's about time Sony had a big rethink. Maybe they should use Microsoft as an example after all the positive hype around Windows 7 compared to the negative hype surrounding Vista prior to release.

My New T-Shirts

For Christmas this year Santa brought me three Threadless t-shirts (after I'd bought my own) and here they are (click for larger images)...

No Peeking (my 3 year old son got a matching t-shirt)
Captain Awesome
My Life Is A Game (A New Stage)

Wireless Renewable Energy Device Charger

OK, the title of this post may be a little misleading but a whole bunch of funky devices are being shown off at this year's CES including a rather gaudy but highly useful wind/solar USB charger and Powermat's wireless charging mat.

The wind/solar charger looks a bit like a personal fan but actually works the other way around and if it's not windy enough you've got the rather large solar panel on the front (weird place for it?). This made me think of putting something like this on your bike or even your car to capture the wind as you pedal/drive... but then again you could probably just put one of those wheel things on the rim like the old fashioned bike head lights.

The second item, the Powermat, is a wireless charging technology where you just place your device on the mat and magically it starts charging up. There's a video in the link above if you don't know what I'm talking about.

Now, the point of this post is that we need some convergence here. If we could get the renewable energy into a wireless form factor we'd be laughing. Any takers?

Fallout 3 Left 4 Dead?

Looking back over the games of 2008 there were a couple of stand-outs with one sticking out like a sore thumb, or should I say a severed thumb. Left 4 Dead is fun to play in campaign mode with 3 buddies as you take on thousands of killer zombies or in versus mode where you can become one of the "boss" zombies and try to stop the survivors.

On the surface it's a brainless (pun!) shooter but when you get into it you need to really think about your strategies in order to survive, especially when you start playing on the harder difficulty levels. You need to stick together as a group, or in pairs at the very least, as the tables can turn in a second as a Hunter can take you down and rip you to shreds in an instant.

Then when you get into a versus game and you play as the infected your strategy flips from survival to ambush. Again working as a team here really makes a difference. If you go off on your own the survivors can easily fend you off but if you team up with the 3 other infected players you can take out all 4 survivors in short order. One of my favourite tactics is to have a Boomer vomit on or explode all over all 4 survivors (the bile attracts the horde). Then while the horde is attacking the survivors the 3 other infected players can attack.

One of the best aspects of the game is that you're not a super-human shooting machine or a futuristic warrior that just powers through the opposition. You get a real sense of being in peril and can even die during campaigns (you're magically resurrected if time permits as another survivor trapped in a closet). Without your teammates you're not going to last long and you breath an actual sigh of relief when (if!) you escape at the end.

L4D runs on a suped-up version of Valve's Source Engine and it runs really well. I was scooting along at high framerates at 1600x1200 with everything set to maximum but don't let that make you think it looks bad. While some of the textures are obviously low res the overall look of the game is dark and moody and in some places quite scary.

The screenshot here is of our little team of survivors posing in front of one of the many zombie movie fanboy references. This one is a lawnmower with lots of chopped up zombie bits as seen in Peter Jackson's Braindead... watch the click on YouTube if you have the stomach for it.

It seems as though I'm not the only one who thought L4D was a great game with the title winning more than 25 awards so far. Well done Valve, now how about some more maps?


While I'm talking games, I finally finished Fallout 3 over my Christmas break. Just over 40 hours of gameplay took me through so many environments, missions and landscapes in this crazily detailed post apocalpytic world that it's hard to believe it was all one game.

I played it on my PC after struggling to decide which platform to use as it's primarily a first person shooter and I had a blast. It ran like a train at 1280x1024 (yes, I still use a 4:3 monitor) with pretty much everything bumped up to maximum.

The best thing about Fallout 3 is that it was set in a refreshingly different world to all the other games around at the moment. It also didn't take itself too seriously with plenty of little jokes here and there including a crashed UFO complete with dead LGM and alien laser pistol.

Fallout 3 was a well realised and highly polished game, especially considering what it might have turned out to be if it had been finished back in 2004. It loaded up amazingly fast although it did have a tendency to hang on my system.

The best thing about it was that I actually finished it. I spent easily twice that time in Oblivion (Bethesda's previous game) and was stuck trying to complete the main story line.

Watch Phone Makes You Look Like A Dick Tracy

It's hard to find something that screams "nerd" more than a watch that does something other than tell the time, well maybe a pocket protector but that's not my point. Calculator watches, radio watches, TV watches and now phone watches.

While they're not exactly new this is probably one phone watch that you might consider being seen in public with and don't let its name fool you (LG call it a wrist phone), it's still a phone watch.

It's quite chunky as far as watches go but according to Engadget does a whole lot more than you'd think. The GD910 will start production later in 2009, featuring 7.2Mbps HSDPA, Bluetooth, speakerphone, video calling, voice recognition, an integrated music player, and a touchscreen. Not bad.

Size Matters: A New Flash Memory Format

You might think that the image to your left shows a regular SD memory card and I wouldn't blame you for it but next time you see it make sure you act like Sherlock and spot the "XC" underneath the regular SD logo.

What does the XC mean? Well in teh Queen's Marketing Speak the X stands for "extended" and the C stands for "capacity". The "extended" in this case translates as a theoretical maximum of 2TB of storage with an access speed of 300 MB/s. No, you didn't misread those figures, it says two Terrabytes and three hundred Megabytes per second.

Engadget says that the new tech "relies upon Microsoft's exFAT file system and stores more than 4,000 RAW images, 100 HD movies, or 60 hours of HD recording with a transfer rate of up to 300MBps. The first batch of retail cards will hit before March with read/write speeds up to 104MBps in unknown capacities, though certainly less than 2TB on day one."

Of course we can't expect these things to be cheap but damn, 2TB in your pocket!

Hydrogen Fuel Cells Are Not The Answer

Recently Top Gear had a segment on the "world changing" Honda FCX Clarity, a commercially available (in California and Japan) hydrogen fuel cell car. The hyperbole spewed forth during the segment was over the top even for Top Gear. Statements about how this car is the single most important thing to happen to automobiles in the past 100 years, or that it makes all battery electric vehicles obsolete were thrown around with gay abandon. Jeremy Clarkson, famous for "dissing" plug-in electric/hybrid vehicles among other things, was in full agreement with James May's assessments that this car is basically Jesus with wheels.

It annoyed me no end and actually prevented me from falling asleep for an hour or so as their biased comments kept bouncing around in my head. Sure, hydrogen fuel cell cars are a step in the right direction (i.e. away from oil dependence) but to liken it to the invention of the internal combustion engine was just too much for me.

Refuelling

What most boggled my mind was May's joy in finding that he had to stop every 250 miles (~400 km) in the Clarity to fill up on liquid hydrogen at the few and far between filling stations at a cost similar to what we pay for petrol. Surely if we're going to have a revolution in motoring it won't involve making things worse for us by opening the door for a whole new generation of cartels and corporations to rule our driving.

Currently I travel around 450-500 km in my Nissan Pulsar per tank and I despise having to divert from my route just to fill up, and that's with petrol stations all over the place. My vote goes to whichever technology means I don't have to keep stopping at some third party establishment where the unit price fluctuates hourly. Imagine if the local store had a sign out the front showing how much a litre of milk was going to cost you if you bought it right now.

The Power

Ahh, but the hydrogen fuel cells emit only water as a byproduct but BEVs use the electricity from the AC outlet and where does that come from? This is one of Clarkson's oft repeated BEV-bashing comments and is based on the fact that most household power comes from polluting sources like coal, natural gas, nuclear power etc which is totally true. Unfortunately for the Clarity electricity is required to produce the hydrogen that it needs, as are the raw materials the hydrogen is ripped from. Once the hydrogen is prepared it still needs to be shipped and trucked to fueling stations which uses up even more energy.

Wikipedia says that "As of 2006, 49.0% of the electricity produced in the United States comes from coal, 19.4% comes from nuclear, 20.0% comes from natural gas, 7.0% from hydroelectricity, 1.6% from petroleum and the remaining 3.1% mostly coming from geothermal, solar and biomass.^[32] When hydrogen is produced through electrolysis, the energy comes from these sources. Though the fuel cell itself will only emit heat and water as waste, pollution is often caused when generating the electricity required to produce the hydrogen that the fuel cell uses as its power source (for example, when coal, oil, or natural gas-generated electricity is used)."

Surely the best answer would be to cut out the middle men and use the electricity directly and via the billions of AC power outlets around the world. Or even better, get yourself a nice solar panel set up in your house to charge your car for free.

Batteries

The Clarity and other fuel cell vehicles don't require batteries for storing power. Batteries are the biggest cause for concern in BEVs in that they take a while to recharge, they don't hold the charge long enough, they're heavy and they're made from finite natural resources such as zinc, nickel and other metals. There are a few points here that I'd like to address.

Charging Time

During Top Gear's test of the Tesla Roadster in the same episode, the statement was made that it would take 16 hours to charge the car's battery pack completely. As part of Tesla's response to the review it was said "that the 16-hour recharge time quoted by Top Gear is an absolute worst-case scenario - sort of like filling your gas tank using a thousand Dixie Cups full of petrol." The Tesla website says it can take as little as 3.5 hours with the High Power Connector which you'd install in your garage at home. Countries with higher voltage AC, like Australia's 240 volt, 50Hz power, will be able to charge their cars faster.

The general public will have to change their thinking around charging their cars. Currently the thinking is that it is same as filling up with petrol but in actual fact it is a lot more like how you handle the power in your mobile phone. I keep my phone plugged in at work and I have a charger at home. It never goes flat.

Of course, you aren't required to charge the car's battery totally each and every time you plug it in. If you need a quick charge you can give the car enough juice to get you where you want to go. Cars like the Chevy Volt take the idea a little further by having a secondary power source (a small internal combustion engine) to generate the electricity if you get into trouble.

Battery Technology

Battery technology has taken great leaps in the past few decades. Remember the handbag sized battery packs that were required to power mobile phones back in the 80s? How much smaller are the batteries you now find in phones and laptops? Even if we can reduce the size of the batteries by half over the next decade that's a huge leap. Regardless of Top Gear's admittedly ficticious review of the Tesla Roadster, it comes with a custom lithium ion battery pack that gives you up to 220 miles (300 km) per charge which is far more than I'd ever drive in a single day.

Servicing

After the Clarity review, as May and Clarkson dried their tears of joy, an off-hand comment was made that you might never have to take your Clarity in for servicing as it only has "one moving part". Sure, the propulsion system only has one moving part (the electric motor) but what about the wheels, axles, tires, brakes, suspension, steering and accessories?

This is the case for all cars using electric propulsion. Doing away with the noisy and messy internal combustion engine doesn't mean you don't need your car serviced, it just means the service will be easier, cleaner and maybe less frequent.

The Final Straw

May's final statement sums up everything that was wrong with his Honda Clarity review nicely. To paraphrase, he said the Clarity was the most important car in living memory because it was just like the cars we drive today. Fuel-cell vehicles are more polluting, rely on an overblown production, transportation and delivery infrastructure, are more complex than BEVs and with advancements in photovoltaic panels (solar panels), battery technology and newer methods of generating clean electricity maybe we should be trying keep things simple instead of just doing what we've always done.

Doctor Who Is That Guy?

Ever since David Tennant announced that the 2008 series of Doctor Who would be his last, rumours have been flying around the internets about who will take his place as the quirky and near-indestructible Time Lord. So whacky were these rumours that some people believed that Catherine Zeta Jones would be the next doctor.

Well the rumours were put to rest when it was announced during the BBC special "Doctor Who Confidential - The Eleventh Doctor" that Matt Smith (Party Animals) will be taking over as the alien with two hearts when the series returns in 2010.

Matt Smith is the youngest actor to play the ancient Doctor, who will be in his eleventh regeneration when Smith takes over, and was himself only told he'd be the new Doctor at Christmas.

This year David Tennant will star in a few specials similar to the recent Christmas Special which had the cheeky title of "The Next Doctor" and will obviously have to be in some kind of peril by the end of the year in order for Smith to take over.

Amusingly Doctor Who has used the psuedonym "Mr Smith" quite a few times recently.

Pay Attention, Drive Safely

Once again it's the holiday period and people are on the roads driving further, longer and less safely than normal. So far this year Australia's road toll has hit 55 and that doesn't include people permanently injured or families and friends affected by the deaths.

Car Advice has posted a video (embedded below) of a series of road safety ads from around the world some of which are quite confronting (I couldn't watch it all the way through on my first attempt) and all with a serious message.

Most show the effects of not paying attention or speeding/overtaking in unsafe areas and are not for the feint hearted but really, anybody who drives a car should watch these and take heed.

It's also interesting to read through the comments people have left on Car Advice after viewing the video with most people praising the videos.

2009 - Me First Post!

Happy new year everybody. I think I've recovered from our street party although I'm not sure about the farm animals... (I kid!).

Anyway, seeing as nothing else is going on, or maybe the fact that I'm miles away from my RSS feeds, I have to rely on other sources for my news... including this ancient post on The Onion which takes a very serious and difficult sport and makes it sound like, well, a sport.

Man Who Used Stick To Roll Ball Into Hole In Ground Praised For His Courage

Thanks Tim.