Platformonomics - Sony and the Joy of Craplets – nice rant. The PC industry is so wrongheaded on this point.

Ankur Jain: “I Would Like To Address My Dad’s Character”

OK I’ve experienced codec hell on Windows, and while the Mac is much much better, as soon as you do something off the beaten path, well it gets complicated. I wanted to use some clips from a commercial DVD in a presentation (gasp!) and after wandering around the forums for a while, I bought the Apple MPEG2 codec and then used MPEG Clipstream to rip the entire DVDs. Then I exported to Quicktime and slurped the movie into iMovie. From there I found the clips I needed, created some small projects, and then exported to several formats for PC viewing – and the target PC only has WMP and I can’t change the software load on it. MPEG4 – too much compression, looked terrible. Various QT formats – some look ok but none would play in WMP. Finally settled on AVI as the format – first used the default cinepack compressor with default settings – worked fine but too much compression! Re-cinepacked at the highest quality settings and looked/worked ok. and then redid as DV-NTSC which also looks/works good but is pretty big.

This would all be so much easier if Apple/MSFT could agree on some basic codec loads for their machines.

Not So FAQs » Blog Archive » Adding your own pictures to the Kindle Screensaver – Cool, Ty pointed me towards this. The limited gray scale of the Kindle makes most photos look weak but still fun to play with

I use textile to create all my book links in the blog. as a reader pointed out, this unfortunately doesn’t link very directly to the kindle edition of books. So experimenting with textile below:

* “The Story of French”:amazon – this is a textile generated link just using the title * “The Story of French (Kindle)”:amazon – a text with some kindle wordage. oops doesn’t work, when you paren a word it shows up as alternate text and is not sent to amazon as part of the search string * “The Story of French – Kindle”:amazon – another kindle test. this one takes you to a search results page with Kindle edition first * “The Story of Frennch, Kindle Edition”:amazon – another kindle test. blows chunks, doesn’t find any edition of the book

ok so i guess pattern 3 is the best. it is too bad that pattern 2 doesn’t work.

* “The Story of French”:amazon by Jean-Benoit Nadeau. Interesting to a casual student of language, the contrast between the active central management of French and the organic unmanaged nature of English is interesting. The strong role of Quebec, vs the weak role of France itself in advancing the language was illuminating. I also had never understood the distinction between an etymologic language like English and a phonetic language like French – no wonder English is such a pain to learn. Of course like all books about French culture, there were the requisite protestations about the relevance of French and all things French – this got old. * “The Physics of NASCAR”:amazon by Diandra Leslie-Pelecky. A little disappointing. Some interesting views into the engineering behind NASCAR vehicles but the science explanations are at the 9th grade level. I had hoped for more. * “John Adams”:amazon by David McCullough. Terrific tale of a legendary American. Moving in a way I didn’t expect. Adams thought broadly and was principled to a fault. Didn’t use his governmental career to enrich himself or his family. Endured great personal tragedy with grace. An inspiration.

Flashback: 1975, USC vs. Ohio St - TrojanWire – ahh great pain relived. This is going to be a great game this fall.

Slootweg’s design skills are a bit rusty (and that’s a good thing) – awesome looking furniture and accessories.

GreenMadeSimple: Find incentives, rebates and green business listings in your area – nice resource for finding discounts, rebates, etc for energy programs.

GIANTmicrobes

We make stuffed animals that look like tiny microbes—only a million times actual size!

* bcurtisBLOG » People are talking about water… – nice chart on where all our water goes. Only 13% for household use. A huge amount to thermoelectric power generation. * Tom Evslin on energy policy. Great points – we need a country-wide BHAG with respect to energy – an Apollo-type program. And the government can lead through its own purchasing policies. * Small scalable wind turbines – pretty cool looking. * One man’s experience with solar thermal here in Seattle – the numbers look good. * Ten fastest green cars on the planet – Karl’s car looks awesome * REI trialing solar – I wonder if Fat Spaniel is part of the setup * Solar shingles – love this idea, embedding green technology right into structural materials

TENORI-ON - DIGITAL MUSICAL INSTRUMENT- EACH – love interesting musical instruments, this one looks way cool. Pricey tho

Over at Marginal Revolution. Unfortunately none of them have Kindle editions

Here at another racetrack this weekend, this is great reading about the F1 spying scandal last year. The amount of money in racing is phenomenal – and anytime you have that much money sloshing around, nefarious sh$t is going to happen.