I was just cleaning up around my computer and I got annoyed again because of the utter lack of common sense hardware vendors seem to have in their choice of AC adapters (I’m not the only one, Douglas Adams wrote about it before). I made a list of all the devices in a radius of 3m around me:
| Brand |
Product |
Plug |
Volt |
Ampere |
Watt |
| Apple |
Airport Extreme |
(proprietary) |
12 V |
1.8 A |
22 W |
| Apple |
Mac Mini |
(proprietary) |
18.5 V |
4.6 A |
85 W |
| Apple |
iPhone charger |
USB + mini USB |
5 V |
1.0 A |
5.0 W |
| Asus |
EeePC 1000H |
Coax |
12 V |
3.0 A |
36 W |
| Canon |
Selphy ES1 Photo printer |
Coax |
24 V |
2.3 A |
55 W |
| Dell |
Latitude laptop (old) |
(proprietary) |
20 V |
2.0 A |
40 W |
| Iomega |
External USB disk |
Power DIN |
12 V |
1.5 A |
18 W |
| Jabra |
Bluetooth Jawbone headphones |
(proprietary) |
5 V |
550 mA |
2.8 W |
| Jabra |
Bluetooth headphones |
mini USB |
5 V |
180 mA |
0.9 W |
| Logitech |
Bluetooth headphones |
Coax |
6.5 V |
250 mA |
1.6 W |
| Netgear |
Cable router |
Coax |
15 V |
1.2 A |
18 W |
| Netgear |
External network disk |
Coax |
12 V |
5.0 A |
60 W |
| Nintendo |
Gameboy |
(proprietary) |
5.2 V |
320 mA |
1.7 W |
| Nokia |
GSM Charger N-series |
Nokia plug small |
5 V |
890 mA |
4.5 W |
| Nokia |
GSM Charger pre-N-series |
Nokia plug big |
3.7 V |
355 mA |
1.3 W |
| QPS |
Digital photo frame |
Coax |
12 V |
3.0 A |
36 W |
| Trekstor |
External USB disk |
Coax |
12 V |
2.0 A |
24 W |
| Tulip |
Laptop |
Coax |
19 V |
3.4 A |
65 W |
Continue reading ‘AC adaptors: standardize, please’
I’ve had my iPhone for a week (loving it!) and of course I want to make custom ring tones for some of my contacts. I figured out how it worked from posts like create-free-iphone-ringtones-using-itunes-in-windows but I developed my own workflow:
1. Find a source file
- I typically start from an existing MP3 file. It might be a CD I have ripped to MP3, or a soundtrack from DVDs or other sound bites. I also have a collection of accapella samples that are a nice source.
2. Create the 15 - 30 sec tone in MP3 format
- You don’t need a 5 min ringtone, just 15 to 30 seconds will be enough
- I use Audacity (with the LAME MP3 encoder add-on) to load the full source MP3 file, trim out the piece I want and then add a fade-in and fade-out.
3. Export to MP3
- I then export the file to an MP3 file of 128kbps. You don’t need better quality than that anyway. If you want, you can convert the file to mono here, or it can happen in the next step
- Result: ringtone.mp3
4. Convert with ffmpeg to MPEG4 ringtone
- I prefer using the command-line ffmpeg for transcoding of audio and video.
- The simple way of doing it:
ffmpeg -i ringtone.mp3 -y ringtone.m4a (.m4a stands for MPEG4 audio, ffmpeg will see this extension and use default settings for the conversion.) Afterwards you then have to change the extension to .m4r (MPEG4 ringtone).
- The detailed one-step-only way to do this:
ffmpeg.exe -i ringtone.mp3 -ac 1 -ab 128000 -f mp4 -acodec libfaac -y ringtone.m4r
5. Open file with iTunes
- Just double-click the file, that should do it.
The lazy way:
let’s make a batch file that will automatically convert the first 30 seconds of any MP3 file into an iPhone ringtone:
SET INPUT=%1
SET NAME=%INPUT:.mp3=%
SET OUTPUT=%NAME%.m4r
echo CONVERT %INPUT% to %OUTPUT% ...
ffmpeg.exe -i %INPUT% -t 30 -ac 1 -ab 128000 -f mp4 -acodec libfaac -genre Ringtone -y %OUTPUT%
I know, there are so many ‘funny’ videos you just have to share with your friends. So you send them an email. But for god’s sake, not with a 5MB movie in attachment! For all you know, he/she might not even be able to play that MOV/WMV/XVid movie anyway. Don’t send a movie, send a link!
WHY EMAILING VIDEOS IS BAD
- Email makes big files bigger
Binary files (like videos) are encoded, or rather exploded, by your email program (Outlook/Hotmail/Gmail/…) as text-only Base64 MIME attachments. Your 5MB file is transformed into a 6.85MB text file before is sent. Email is a very inefficient way to share videos with several other people.
- You hurt the recipients
Your email will have to be downloaded before the recipient can see it. If he is on a slow connection, this might mean 15 minutes of obnoxious delay before he can continue working, start receiving the emails that arrived after your ‘cute puppy’ movie. The movie, if it is not deleted, will add 5 MB of storage to the Inbox. If his Outlook/Exchange quota is 100MB (not uncommon on corporate email systems), you just ate 5% of all the place he has to store contracts, meeting reports and office gossip.
- You hurt yourself
By sending a 5MB video, you force your email program to upload a 6.85 MB file to your mail server. If you’re on a basic DSL line, this will easily take up to 10 minutes, during which all your other Internet activity will go very slow. You also add a big chunk to your “Sent Items” folder, bringing you closer to your quota limit.
- You hurt the Internet
All those forwarded videos make for a huge amount of unnecessary traffic that eats up bandwidth at ISPs and inspire them to keep prices high. Not that they needed the extra inspiration.
- It’s force-feeding-video, not video on demand
You are forcing people to download the whole file before they can decide whether they want to see it now, or ever at all. Youtube and the other sites have a very easy-to-use ‘Send video link’ form that will give the receipient the link, with a screenshot and the description text. Then he/she can decide when, where, how and *IF* to watch the video.
(Yes, this is less a problem with web-based mail like Gmail or Hotmail)
HOW TO FORWARD A VIDEO LINK
- public, popular movie
Don’t think you’re the first one to have seen this movie. Chances are it’s featured on Youtube, Google Video, DailyMotion, Vimeo, in multiple versions (FR subtitles if that’s what you like), in a format everyone can view, available to send as just a link “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RgL2MKfWTo“. Less that 50 characters for a full 1:14 of hilarious time loss.
- private, ’secret’ movie
Even if you have a movie you recorded/made yourself and want to show only to a limited number of people (”OMG, Britney, you were, like, *so* drunk!!“), then upload it yourself to Youtube, Flickr or Vimeo, put a password on it and send link+ password to those recipients. It will be so much easier for everyone to forward that secret video that no one was supposed to see (”788 views just yesterday? How’s that possible?“).
We thank you.
I have been taking tango pictures intensively for more than 2 years now. Most of that time I’ve been using a Canon 350D with a number of lenses. What’s special about tango pictures? Most importantly, the tango events are in the evening/night with minimal lighting. I avoid using a flash, since it’s unpleasant for the dancers and because the pictures have very sharp and ugly lighting. Another thing is that I don’t use a tripod. I can’t tell the dancers where to move or to stand still, so I go with the flow. The fact that they move also means I need a shutter speed of 1/15s at the slowest; 1/20s is better and 1/40s is comfortable.
All these tips come down to the same: get the fastest shutter times possible while keeping the picture quality acceptable.
#1: take the highest ISO your camera can afford
If you can use sensitivity ISO 800 instead of ISO 100, you’ll win 3 stops. This is the difference between a picture at 1/40 sec (sharp) and 1/5 sec (blurry), certainly with moving targets (and tango dancers do move). Of course there is a trade-off: you loose colour detail.
This is the main reason why you’ll need a camera with a decent sensor, or in other words, an dSLR instead of a regular point-and-shoot camera. Even my 350D gets colour defects at ISO800. When they’re too bad, I tend to convert the pictures to black-and-white or somewhere halfway (by decreasing the saturation).
The camera I’m drooling over now, the Canon 5D Mk II, can take decent pictures at ISO 3200. That’s another 2 stops faster.
Continue reading ‘Five tips for taking tango pictures in dark environments’
I’m currently reading two related books at the same time:
- “Turn the beat around - the secret history of disco” by Peter Shapiro
- “Last night a DJ saved my life - the history of the disc jockey” by Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton
Both speak about a phenomenon of the 60’s-70’s: Northern Soul. It is the unlikely emergence of a subculture of English white working-class youths that only danced to American upbeat soul music. It started in Manchester, the Twisted Wheel club and spread from there.
The original northern soul scene lasted from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, and is considered a retrogressive or revivalist movement based on a style of music created years earlier. At the height of its popularity in the 1970s, African American artists had moved on to newer genres such as funk, jazz funk and disco, so the northern soul scene relied on a finite supply of 1960s recordings.
Continue reading ‘Northern Soul’
I went to Bulgaria in August, and one of the things I remarked there is that standards for advertising are somewhat different over there. One of the champions is Mastika Peshtera (”Мастика Пещера” - a.k.a. ‘the Bulgarian afrodisiac‘). They use scantily dressed women and green striped melons on strategic places to stress the afrodisiac dimension. Imagine this type of advertising in Belgium. What would reactions be?
Continue reading ‘Mastika Peshtera’
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