Thursday 30 December 2010

Questions on Inception

So if killing yourself in Limbo gets you back to reality, why does Fisher and Ariadne go back to level 3 and Saito and Cobb seem to go straight back to reality?

Why does Arthur not wake up from level 2 as the van falls off the bridge?; he would have got a kick, and so would have been awake; I can understand why the rest would not be awakened, as they were in a dream within that dream.

Why do they run out of time in level 3; they are delayed in level 1 by security, which limits the time of interrogation to 1 hour rather than all night - which seems to be achieved in a short space of time, but then on level 3 they have run out of time as they miss the first kick. Therefore why did they run out of time?


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:UK, Shoeburyness

Tuesday 28 December 2010

Ripping DVDs to iPad

Trying to rip a DVD in Handbrake, on Mac, so I can put on my iPad, I did it with the default settings, and when I transferred across via VLC it was playing at a choppy framerate. Via trial and error, creating single chapter encodings I thought I'd cracked it. Sadly when I did the whole movie it was still choppy, and freezing, when played on VLC on the iPad, even though it played fine on the Mac.

So I tried transferring it via iTunes, and it works perfectly. This is a shame regarding VLC's playback, I hope they sort it out.

The settings that I chose which seem pretty good are;
- Choose the Universal Apple preset
- choose the framerate as 25 fps
- keep the quality at about 60%
- From the audio tab, remove the AC3 track
- If the movie has subtitles remember to choose the subtitle track and burn it in
- On advanced set the settings as in the following picture;






For 1 hour 42 minute film this created a video of 1.22 GB.

Note that whilst ripping the DVD the status at the bottom has a fps value. This has no relation to the Framerate that you preselect, so I am pretty sure that this is the number of frames being processed per second when encoding the DVD.






I got the settings from here.

Remember to create a new preset with the settings.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:UK, Shoeburyness

Thursday 23 December 2010

iPad apps re-ordered problem

Whilst trying to resolve the iTunes username/password issue I tried rebooting. The iPad forgot all the folders I'd created, mostly re-ordered all my apps, and removed stuff I'd put in the dock.

This was very annoying; it was the first problem I've had with the iPad. Considering the amount I've used the thing, maybe that's not too bad.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:UK, Canvey Island

iTunes apple ID is not available

So I got the error, "the apple id is not available" on my iPad. A quick search gave this; http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=869968 which points in the direction of here http://iforgot.apple.com/ to reset the password. This is not the first time this has happened. It didn't let me use the my previous password this time, unfortunately. Presumebly Apple have a reason for resetting my password. Oh well.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:UK, Canvey Island

Tuesday 21 December 2010

Content curation on Twitter and Facebook could be cool


"We’ve already heard that YouTube is in talks to buy a video production company, but it wouldn’t be a surprise for the likes of Twitter or Facebook to play a more pivotal role in harnessing its data to present relevant news and content to its users. What if Facebook had a news landing page of the trending news content that users are discussing? Or if Twitter filtered its content to bring you the most relevant and curated tweets around news events?"

From Mashable

Now how brilliant would that be to have curated news from Facebook and Twitter.

Another idea on the same lines would be to have YouTube creating it's own News videos, or content in general.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:UK, Essex

Sunday 19 December 2010

Making your Facebook public URL show something

When not logged in, my public Facebook URL wasn't showing my profile, but just an error message. To sort out do the following;

Account > privacy settings >





Under "Applications and websites" click "Edit your settings"
Next to "public search" click "edit settings" button



Tick the check box to enable public search



So now with facebook.com/kevgordon

Now publically I get;


And internally give;



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:UK, Essex

Saturday 18 December 2010

Free iOS developer books

Check out the free iPhone developer books Apple has made available for free via iBooks;

Object Oriented Programming With Objective-C
Cocoa Fundamentals Guide
The Objective-C Programming Language
iOS Technology Overview
iOS Application Programming Guide.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:UK, Essex

Saturday 11 December 2010

Bonkers train fayre

I just got a train from Shoeburyness to Basildon. For a return its £5.20, for a single the fayre is £6.20. I'm only going one way. How can it ever make sense to have a return cheaper than a single? Its bonkers.

Location:UK

Wednesday 8 December 2010

Publishing to Twitter via BlogPress on iPad

I suspect that if you don't save to draft first it doesn't do the publish to Twitter. This is a test to see


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:UK

Finding someone's house number

I needed to know the house number of someone I regularly visit so I could send them a Xmas. I visit them every week, but have lost their address, so don't know the actual house number, even though I go there every week - so I didn't want to have to ask them for their address. However I managed to find their address, and this is how;

1) First I got the street name from navigating there on Googlemaps and Googlemaps street view.

2) Then I got the postcode from the Royal Mail website here;

http://postcode.royalmail.com/portal/rm/postcodefinder;jsessionid=JXP2FDD1CSQPAFB2IGIUQ3Q;jsessionid=JXP2FDD1CSQPAFB2IGIUQ3Q?catId=400145&gear=postcode

This gave me the postcode and the number of houses on the road.

3) Then I used 192.com people search. First I tried the name and town and there was a match, with all other info blanked out - you need a premium account of £120+ to get the rest of the information. So then I tried typing in street and postcode as well. So then the premium results revealed all the parts of the address I typed in. So I tried guessing the house number, but that came grayed out. What I wanted to know is if I guessed correctly would it show the house number, so I tried on an address I knew, and it did give the house number. So I started with a number halfway and worked up, and eventually I guessed the correct number.

N.B. During this I ran out of free searches on my iPad, then I swapped to my iPhone, and it allowed me to continue. And so I managed to obtain the house number without paying £120, awesome.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:UK