Category Archives: General

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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Web traffic from image searches

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Checking the stats of the blog for the last 3 months, I noticed that the posts with more pageviews are referred from image searches. The images are from Salma Hayek in Ugly Betty, illustrations of Nathan Petrelli and Nikki from the Heroes TV Series, a test post for uploading images with the image of a Singapore girl, and a solar flare.

Why those images generate significant traffic?, I don’t know the answer but my guesses are:

  • A lot of guys still have a crush with Salma Hayek even after his pregnancy, which is perfectly understandable.
  • The second season of Heroes is premiering in other countries.
  • I really don’t have an explanation to the picture of the girl and the solar flare.

Other post that generated some traffic is the papercraft model of Master Chief. I assume that the traffic of this post is because the popularity of the Halo series for the Xbox 360.

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Applying CPR to this blog

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Photo by Jackson Boyle

Again several WEEKS passed without a new post in this blog.

Why?, well the main reason is procrastination, if we add to that the number of feeds on my google reader account, Digg, Techmeme, my day job, research for my projects and the time spent stuck on Mexico city traffic that would be a good excuse for not posting.

Everyday by the time I finished reading the most interesting stuff, I have some ideas for a good blog post. But I need to justify my paycheck so have to work in the stuff I was hired to do, so I write some ideas on Google Documents, make a mental note, a bookmark, or post something on my Tumblr. By the time I get home I work a little on my side projects, then do some research and suddenly it’s midnight and another day has passed without posting on the blog.

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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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