Category Archives: Entertainment

Converting video files

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My daughter wanted to watch on the TV some music videos that a friend sent to her, but the problem was that some of the videos were on WMV format and our DVD player only supports DivX (in fact I think that no players with support to those formats exist, yes, I checked on Amazon).

An option was to see the videos on the computer (my computer has a bigger screen and I have the codecs to watch those formats on Linux), but the experience is not the same. So I started a search for a converter but the ones I found were for windows and these days I don’t trust anymore the free software for windows, in fact I don’t have a windows partition.

Then I found AlltoAvi and problem solved!. AlltoAvi is a software project that can be used in Linux and Windows. In Linux I only needed to install mencoder and worked flawlessly.

To convert a file you need to enter the directory where the files are located, filetype, subtitle and audio track IDs, bitrate desired, the codec you want to use to convert and the width and height of the output.

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Late Hot Fuzz

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Hot Fuzz

I saw in the newspaper that today opens in Mexico city the movie Hot Fuzz, which is a good movie to see but the reason of the post is to point the time it took to get this to movie theaters in Mexico.

This movie was released in Ireland and UK on February!, obviously is a British movie but was released in USA and Argentina a month later, then why took 8 months to be released here??

I saw this movie on May, because since April I found out about this movie from a video of The Fratellis (Baby Fratelli) which shows parts of the movie and the song is part of the soundtrack. after the trailer I decided that it was a movie I definitely wanted to see.

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3D feed reader

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When you think on a feed reader you assume that it will show the articles in a chronological ordered list, because we are used to see the information in 2 dimensions, but, what happens when we add a third dimension?.

Voyage feed reader

That’s what they did with Voyage a feed reader made in Flash. This is the type of application perfect for Flash, maybe you can do something similar with Java but I don’t know if it would be as light in resources as this one.

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Master Chief papercraft model

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To make the wait for the release of Halo 3 more tolerable you can try to build this papercraft model of Master Chief.

The model is 13″ tall, has close to 2100 faces (over 800 faces for the gun), and is composed of 42 pieces (+ 10 for the gun).

The PDF files with the model and instructions are here

This is the creation of billybob884 and looks like it’s not the first creation, in the gallery you can see other papercraft models like Conker, Mr Satan, the RingWorld and more.

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What I’ve been reading

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During this long time without posting anything in this blog, at night I have been (re)reading some interesting books that I’d like to recommend to you.

This books are of the cyberpunk genre and although it’s fiction the stories and what happen to the characters or what they do is based completely in real techniques and risks in the computer security area, which is one of the areas I’m really interested in and is part of my day job even when nobody in the office has any idea of what is possible and the implications if we where attacked by some. And I won’t even mention the procedures that are recommended to be followed in such a case.

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Dragon Wars

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In only 18 days it’s supposed to be at the theaters the movie D-War/Dragon Wars on USA and the trailer looks good, but lately you can’t tell from the trailers if a movie will be worth watching or not.

The theme (dragons) is not new or original, one recent movie about the same was Reign of Fire and it was a really disappointing movie, so I hope this korean movie is good.

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unusual contests

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Last weekend I saw a couple of posts about championships and contests, but not the kind you are thinking about, these are “unusual” at least for me and shows that there is a market for anything you can imagine.

The first one is the Rock Paper Scissors World Championship which got a post in Techcrunch , I’m still thinking the reason why it’s on that site but, that leads me to the other contest I want to write about.

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