Recycling the Lifedrive
After getting the iPhone, my wife and I had some toys that went into obselescence. One of them was my old Palm Lifedrive. Although the touchscreen was getting a little worn out, it still has a lot of life in it. It has a decent battery life, a bright 480X320 screen just like the iPhone, wifi, bluetooth, and a 4GB hard drive.
I ran across an interesting program - TCPMP. It has since been discontinued, but here's a link to the Palm version: TCPMP
I loaded up the Palm with videos for my son, and bought a cheap $4 set of headphones for him. I even have the car charger, so he can watch videos on long car rides.
The only downside was that it can't handle some files with high bitrates (above about 1000k/s). I use Avidemux to transcode the files and resize them to the Palm's native 480X320 resolution.
Devin Reads
Devin memorized the book "Where is my mother?" by P.D. Eastman. This clip shows him reciting a few pages.
Devin Does OMT
We were all hanging out at Kevin and Ian's house one evening - giving each other treatments, when Devin jumped up and started cranking on my neck!
WordPress 2.5
Once again, another post about video in WordPress. "Why so much attention on the subject, BigBri?", you ask
I'll tell you... I've spent hours upon hours testing and migrating between different plugins for embedding video. I guess I'm a hard customer, because I want flash videos, quicktime, and WMV to work flawlessly across all browsers.
I was excited to see that WordPress includes some hot new ways for handling and embedding your media. Unfortunately, my excitement turned to dismay as soon as I tried to actually use it.
First, let me say that I had a blog that I hand coded in HTML before I ever started using WordPress. Back then, I used a folder on the server called /media that housed all my images and such. When I migrated over, I just continued the tradition of FTPing my files up to the media folder and hard coding the links. Eventually, I grew fond of the idea of doing everything with WordPress, so I let it handle all my junk in the wp-content/uploads/ folders. This is awesome for images when you want a thumbnail, or if you want to just put an image straight into your post.
Video and WordPress
You may have noticed some videos in my posts lately. Video has become so ubiquitous on the web lately, I had to keep up. One of the problems I had was that our camcorder has a great widescreen format, but a lot of the flash video services like YouTube don't display widescreen formats very smoothly.
I tried a WordPress plugin called Viper's Video Quicktags for a while, but I had a lot of problems. While it displays things great in IE, WMV videos were broken in Firefox! I looked at the problem on the developer's website, and he/she had this attitude like: "Some video formats might not work well across platforms, but it's really hard to make things compliant everywhere and I really don't care so I'm not going to try." Great attitude!
Finally I found another WordPress plugin that does what I need: Coolplayer. It works great and does everything I need. Hopefully I'll have some videos of Devin in the snow soon!
Lunar Eclipse
Lara took some photos of the eclipse and made a little video slideshow from it. A few of the photos at the end had long exposures and got a little fuzzy, but it's still pretty cool.