Internet Marketing, Make Money Online

I've been thinking of getting an iPod to store my music collection, and now I don't need to think about it anymore, Santa got me one for Christmas.

Funny how these things work, most electronic devices come with a detailed manual that I never read, but the iPod doesn't come with one at all, so what happened, I stuffed up copying my music onto it!

It was only after a 7 hour long sync with my music folder that I realised iTunes had scanned the entire drive and loaded every sound file it could find, yikes, I had no idea I had half that stuff on my pc.

I also expected it to come with an install disc, but no luck there, 37mb later on a dialup connection, followed by that 7hr sync, I was nearly in tears, all I wanted to do was play with my new toy.

After that frustration though I must confess I love my new iPod. Music sounds nice and crisp, my Trance and House music collections pound away nicely, and amazingly Andrea Bocelli, Acker Bilk, Garth brooks, Enya all sound really good.

I even tried connecting the iPod to the Hi-Fi through a spare set of input channels but the output seems quite limited in range, the Bass tones sound reasonable but mid tones seem to lack clarity. I probably did something wrong. Maybe the EQ settings on the iPod weren't configured correctly.

It will be interesting to see how the FM transmitters work, but unfortunately Santa wasn't able to get one of those, apparently the elves were struggling to keep up with demand. Them's the hazards of small town living.

Now I just need to tidy up my tags and resync, I just hope it doesn't take another 7hrs.

Have you ever used a digital camera to shoot video footage, then convert the resulting .avi's into a dvd using some basic dvd authoring software? Often when I'm bored I pick up my Palm z22 and write a few pages of dribble, most of which gets deleted, but the other day I noticed one of our digital camera's has a movie mode. Actually most cameras have a movie mode, so I shouldn't have been surprised, but its something I've actually never thought of, most often I use a digital camera for taking stills.

The Fuji Finepix camera is an s5500, its an older camera that we've been thinking of giving to a friend, anyway it records .avi files in either Pal or NTSC, and with the option of 640 or 320 resolution. Our camera has a 512mb xd card in it, which gives a little over 7 minutes of video. I decided to have a play with it, boredom makes for strange experiments. Afterwards I thought the experiment might actually be worthwhile, we've got quite a few friends who have digital camera's but don't have a video camera, and when we start travelling the world it might be months or years before we see family and friends again, so I thought if I can play with the technology I might be able to put together a basic how-to for our loved ones so they can take a few minutes of video footage and send it to us.

Shooting the video is a no-brainer, although the Finepix really needs a steady hand and slow panning. I loved tha fact that the color balance and correction were automatic and even in a darker room the video came through nicely - quite different from still mode where darker rooms really need the flash.

Hooking up to my PC I copied all the files into MyVideos, than watched them all in media player. They are actually quite usable. Of course just having the avi files on your PC does not a movie make, so I opened windows movie maker and imported a couple of the files. For free software this is amazingly full featured. Drag the avi onto the timeline, add title and credits, choose transitions between clips, very easy stuff.

I saved my file as a high quality pal video, then opened it in media player and voila, my first home movie using a digital camera. But this is where the awkward part comes in, no ability to convert this to dvd. I hope MS add that function to Vista when its released. Otherwise you will need to download an avi to mpeg2 converter, or buy some professional dvd authoring software.

Bit of a shame really because it does mean I'm going to have to give my little project some more thought before I can create my how-to for friends and family. Most of them use Windows and won't have any software for authoring dvd's so the project might consume a fair bit of brain power on my part to make it quick and easy. Otherwise they just won't bother, and then we'll never get any video from them.

As an aside, I guess I could always convince them to buy a mac, the iLife suite wouldn't have a problem creating a dvd with chapters and menus from the avi's that a digital camera produces. Ooh, as an extra aside, somewhere around 12% of my site visitors use mac's, so I'm expecting you guys to comment and tell us Windows users how good iLife really is. Personally I'm thinking of getting one of the new black macbooks instead of a new Windows laptop.

I got a blog chain message the other day from Robert and its taken me a while to think through what I wanted to write. The chain message seems poorly constructed, but in fact its given me a lot to think about, and I think a few of the Serendipity people might be interested in my thoughts. Also I've had conversations with friends and former colleagues over the last few months about the direction of the Internet and consumer computing, and whilst I won't divulge who these people are, perhaps some of these conversations will have an impact on the way this entry is written. Garvin, lead developer of Serendipity has also replied to this chain message.

So without further ado, I shall begin, but be warned, this is going to be a long entry.

Do you use the Serendipity blogging engine?
Yup, and proudly so.

If you use Serendipity, why did you choose it?
Many moons ago when I first started blogging I was an avid reader of Slashdot, and the thing I always liked about their design was the photo-realistic category icons. I chose Serendipity because I wanted my first blog to look similar to slashdot, three columns with header and footer and also category icons. My first attempt at a blog actually involved writing my own asp script, it was very basic, didn't have a comment facility or rss feed, and frankly I was never happy with it. I'm not a programmer, I tend to kludge together bits of code and then force this bit to work with that bit. I'm sure you'll agree, not a solid base for a blog engine. My next step involved hunting through all the blog scripts I found at hotscripts, notice the Serendipity entry is very out of date. I think I downloaded every asp or php script and tried them on my local test server. I quickly moved away from the asp scripts, not because of the scripts, but because of IIS.

Having settled on scripts that would run on the Apache webserver my choice seemed to revolve around Wordpress, Serendipity, Nucleus, and a couple of others that seem to have disappeared since then. I won't dwell on my reason for not selecting the other scripts. My decision to go with Serendipity came down to the fact that it supported three column templates and category icons by default, and the forum community was the best I came across, and still is in my opinion.

The funny thing is that my reason for choosing Serendipity probably seems a really stupid reason now, especially since I don't even use icons on my site, and from discussions with other Serendipity users, I don't think I've come across anyone who shares the same reason as me, which proves a point I've been making for the longest time. Blogging is a deeply personal experience, we all have different reasons for doing things and different needs that must be satisfied.

Once I started customising Serendipity, it just seemed natural to keep using it, and since I started learning Smarty (the coding language used in s9y templates) I was able to do even more with my templates and now I feel like it would be a waste of all that learning to change to another engine. I have produced a couple of Wordpress templates (released elsewhere without credit), and a few Blogger templates, but Serendipity remains my first love

These days my reasons for sticking with Serendipity are much more detailed, and also give me a lot of personal satisfaction. Being invited to become a moderator on the forums was a huge acknowledgment of my small contribution to the project. Read More