It’s been a while… oh well. I discovered today that in Mac Finder, say you want to listen to an audio file sitting on your filesystem. I used to crank up iTunes just to listen to the audio file, then shut down iTunes. Today I discovered you can use the “preview” feature of Finder to listen to the track without having to start iTunes! Just select the track in Finder that you want to listen to, and press Space. Hows about that.
Did you realize you can buy a bag of straight cereal marshmallows from Amazon? Well you can… and I’m not sure whether that’s a good thing or a horrible, horrible thing.
This is a quick and simple tip, so if you were expecting a multi-part epic on programming Tetris in Emacs Lisp, you’re out of luck and besides, Emacs Lisp Tetris is already included in GNU Emacs:
M-x tetris
Have you ever wanted to quickly reduce a contiguous sequence of spaces on a line to a single space? I know I have. There’s a shortcut for that:
just-one-space
The default keybinding for it is perfectly adequate for use without tweaking:
M-SPC
Note: Since Windows usually treats Alt-Space as an accelerator to access the Window menu, I have gotten into the habit of accessing this binding via ESC-SPC.
UPDATE 2: After months of playing videos on my Hero, I have further tweaked the settings below for best compatibility. Additionally I highly recommend mVideoPlayer for video playback on an Android handset.
UPDATE: After receiving my Hero and playing around with many more video clips, I improved these Handbrake settings. It seems that the Hero’s threshold for playback is greatly predicated by the stream’s bitrate, and its limit appears to be around ~1100kbps. Therefore the original settings below frequently resulted in a stream beyond this threshold once the stream had been muxed with audio. After tweaking the video and audio bitrate settings below slightly, I’ve watched a variety of movies and shows on my Hero without any playback issues.
In anticipation of the release of Sprint’s HTC Hero next month, I borrowed a T-Mobile myTouch 3G we have lying around the office for testing. My goal was to find the best video encoding settings with Handbrake. After trying a variety of profiles, here were my favorite settings for space and playback quality:
Format: MP4
Video Codec: H.264 (x264)
Framerate: 29.97 (NTSC Video)
Video Quality: 700kbps Average bitrate
Picture Size: 480x320 (Keep Aspect Ratio)
Output Settings:
- Web-optimized
- 2-pass encoding
- Turbo first pass
Audio Codec: AAC (CoreAudio)
Audio Bitrate: 128kbps
The source file was a 22-second clip grabbed with a Panasonic DMC-ZS3 (AVCHD, 720p, 15mbps, 60fps), and the transcoded video ended up at 3.1MB on disk. If you’re wondering why I used the “web-optimized” option, I have very good reason: the resulting file is suitable for smooth streaming from my Pogoplug at home, over Comcast basic internet!
I also gleaned the following important bits of information:
As another data point, my overclocked 768mhz Sprint Touch Pro couldn’t even decode the resulting video at half-speed! Stupid Windows Mobile…
This is for anyone using a Mac keyboard with a Windows PC (I highly recommend the newest slim Mac keyboard) desiring their left Windows and Alt keys to function properly:
If you are a lazy, bad person, you can simply copy and paste the following code into a new text document, save it as “swap.reg” and double-click it to automate the above instructions:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout]
"Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,03,00,00,00,38,00,5b,e0,5b,e0,38,00,\
00,00,00,00
Note: Reboot required.
…for only $89.99 with their weekend promotion! Sigh, what grand times were those, when anyone with deagle and a hefty dose of caffeine could bunny-hop their way to internet-stardom.
[32-bit Linux]
me@u32:~$ ./sizes32
sizeof(char): 1
sizeof(short): 2
sizeof(int): 4
sizeof(long): 4
sizeof(long long): 8
[64-bit Linux]
me@u64:~$ ./sizes64
sizeof(char): 1
sizeof(short): 2
sizeof(int): 4
sizeof(long): 8
sizeof(long long): 8
[32-bit Windows]
C:\Users\me\Downloads>sizes32.exe
sizeof(char): 1
sizeof(short): 2
sizeof(int): 4
sizeof(long): 4
sizeof(long long): 8
[64-bit Windows]
C:\Users\me\Downloads>sizes64.exe
sizeof(char): 1
sizeof(short): 2
sizeof(int): 4
sizeof(long): 4
sizeof(long long): 8
Last week I found myself despondently in search of good coffee 4 hours outside of Chicago, finding only fields of corn and soybeans. Then to my amazement, I happened upon the Innkeeper’s Coffee cafe and roastery in Galesburg, IL and tried their “best iced coffee evar” which I discovered to be extremely aptly named. Highly recommended if you find yourself out in that neck of the midwest. Not only that, but I was elated to discover there wasn’t a single Starbucks in the little town!
