George Bush Ragdoll thingie. If he comes to a stand-still, you can drag him around by catching him. Hours of fun.

Possibly the most useless web browser EVAR, uBrowser renders pages as a deformable, rotatable texture on a plane, sphere, cube or flag. It can display pretty much any page that Firefox can. Fun, but ultimately useless!

This picture is really really impressive. All created using a mouse in MS Paint and with other images for reference - no copy/paste, no tablet, just a mouse and too much time. This page details some of the techniques used.

After a bit of experimentation, I’ve found some decent settings for converting video for my iPod. I typically convert with the intention of playing back on TV, so I ‘ve tried to find a nice balance between size and quality. I use Videora Converter on Windows and for Linux/*BSD, I use a small bash script I wrote (it just feeds filenames to FFMpeg):

#!/bin/bash

IN=${1}
OUT="${IN}.mp4"
LOG="${IN}.log"

ffmpeg -y -i ${IN} -r 29.97 -vcodec xvid -s 480x272 -b 900 \\
-bt 2 -acodec aac -ac 2 -ab 128 -f mp4 ${OUT}

That’s a video bitrate of 900kbps, audio bitrate of 128kbps; framerate is forced to 29.97fps in order to eliminate A/V sync issues and the encapsulation is set to MP4. It’s not exactly broadcast quality, but it does the job. An episode of Lost, for example, comes in at around 300MB and is perfectly acceptable, quality wise, when output to my TV.

Right, Home And Away is stupid at the best of times, but this week’s burglary storyline has to take the biscuit for being both stupid and slightly offensive at the same time. The burglar in question, you see, was described as having red hair, a beard and being a bit smelly. Also, he spoke with an Irish accent, officer.

It’s a wonder his victims didn’t mention his aran jumper and wellies. When the guy was caught, it turned out that they were right about the red hair and beard (not sure whether or not he was smelly) but the witnesses were wrong about the accent: it sounded distinctly Oirish to me.