Random Sequence

In my previous post, I talked about wanting to write a script to see how far I can squeeze 110GB worth of media (photos and videos). I wrote the script the quick-and-dirty way, in PHP. When people think of PHP, they think of web pages, but PHP can equally be used for writing your everyday scripts, just like Perl or Python. The script resizes all photos to a maximum width/height of 1024. I found this provides maximum size reduction for the photos without sacrificing the viewing quality in full photo mode on my tablet (screen resolution: 1280x800). Obviously it will affect the quality when zooming in, but I rarely do that when flipping through the photos. Since I haven't got a tablet with retina display yet, I am not sure how that will fare, but for this exercise, I am sacrificing quality for size. For videos, I use handbrake-cli to transcode all of them to MP4 with a maximum width of 640. Again, this reduces the size drastically, improves compatibility (since all Android tabl

We have a family NAS where we keep all kinds of stuff. Well, actually it's an old laptop that functions as a server, with 3 x 3TB external USB HDDs attached. I run all the standard mirroring and backup on the laptop, and one of the HDD is shared over the network for everyone to dump their stuff into. Like most family these days, we take photos and videos on a number of different devices. The smart phones, digital camera, DSLR etc. Even the kids have their own cheap digital compacts. And the devices have evolved over the years. The photos have mostly stayed JPEG, with the resolution increasing steadily. The videos, however, are a different story. Starting from the V8 (which we converted to XVID AVIs) to a Sony (which produced MPEG-1 files) to a Casio (which gave us H264/MOV files) to the current-gen Sony (MTS format), there's an incredible number of video formats we have to deal with. On top of that, we do scans of old photos and slides, the kids' artwork etc. These are al

When I am doing the Fast Diet , I frequently experience long periods of calm after a brief period of hunger pangs. It is as if the body has gone into hibernation, and I am left well alone to carry on with my daily routine. This is most apparent the morning after the diet day, when I could usually skip breakfast and have a late lunch. I am reminded of what my diving instructor told me during training many years ago, that feelings of suffocation after a brief period under water is not due to lack of oxygen, but due to the buildup of carbon dioxide in the blood stream. This means you are not going to die (yet), and with knowledge you should  try to suppress the panic, remain calm and find a way out of the current situation to surface. Hunger is mostly the same thing. It makes us uncomfortable and compels us to eat to rid ourselves of the discomfort. Worse, we have come to associate a lot of other feelings (both positive and negative) with eating. So we eat to make ourselves feel bette

I have bought quite a number of car MP3 player/FM transmitters from DealExtreme and other similar websites. A car MP3 player/FM transmitter is a device that takes a SDHC memory card or a USB memory stick and plugs into the car cigarette lighter socket. It plays the MP3 files stored on the memory card/stick and transmits that as FM signal to be picked up and played by the car stereo. It is a nifty and convenient device because not all car stereo can play MP3 files, or be able to accept a memory card or stick. Also such a device is very portable. You can simply plug it into any vehicle eg. a company car and it will play all your favorite music. Other alternatives exist eg. bluetooth, but they are simply not as straightforward and universal as this solution. After all, you'd be hard-pressed to find a car without a cigarette lighter plug. The perfect car MP3 player/FM transmitter should have the following characteristics/features: Emits strong FM signal Remembers last

Having just spent two full holiday weeks with my kids, it occurred to me this morning that raising young children is the ultimate test in anger management. You know the lines. Address the situation, not the other person. Bring change to yourself first, not to the other person. Easy on paper, very difficult in practice. With adults, it is often easy to blame it on the other person. After all, he/she is a full-grown adult, why can't he/she be more mature, rational, have a good grounding in the facts etc.? With children, you can't pin the blame on them anymore! They are what they are at this age. You can't expect them to be mature or rational! But we still lose our cool, and that's a perfect reflection of our own emotional management skills. Therein lies the ultimate test in anger management. We have to change ourselves to address the situation, and that ain't always easy,  because being human means we resist change with all the might we could muster. Failure

In terms of body hacks, the Fast Diet probably ranks all the way at the top for me. I first read about it in the papers and found the technique rather intriguing. Could something that simple actually work? Besides the book, it didn't really have anything fancy to sell. No secret formula, patent-pending ingredient, celebrity endorsement etc. A few weeks later, at a whim, I started to try the diet on myself. At this point, I have not read the book yet. I just started restricting my diet two days a week to 600 calories. And I wasn't too particular with counting the calories either. I simply looked it up on the smartphone and kept a rough count through the day. Sometimes I prepared the food specifically for myself. Other times, I simply ate a smaller portion of whatever the wife had cooked. One or twice, I actually broke fast midday as unexpected commitments cropped up. I also wasn't particularly keeping a keen eye on my weight during this time. Ironically, I didn't

Again, I am writing this down more for my own future reference, with the hope that it will benefit others Googling for this info as well. ComboFix is a relatively unknown but surprisingly good anti-malware tool. I had in the past received a number of computers from relatives/friends that have been infected with malware. The general characteristics are that the machines boots OK into Windows, but runs erratically eg. displays fake error messages, prevents you from running certain executables, logs you off after awhile etc. In my experience, it was impossible to get the existing antivirus software to perform a proper scan, or to install a new antivirus software because the system ran so erratically. Offline antivirus software that runs off a CD didn't help much either. I have a collection of them and none of them had helped on the computers I was trying to fix. Enter ComboFix, which was able to get the computers back into good enough working condition so that I can reinstall t

I flashed my Nexus S to CM10.1 recently and found that the A2DP streaming stutters so badly to the point of being unusable. Some googling reveals that from Android 4.1 to 4.2, Google swapped the Bluez stack that was used in Android since 2.x and replaced it with a stack contributed by Broadcom . This replacement has apparently created more issues than it has solved. Anyway, I am back to CM10 (based on Android 4.1.2 with the Bluez stack), and all is well again. So if you use A2DP as much as I do (I listen to podcasts, 1~2 hours a day), you have been warned!

I recently bought an Android-based media player: the Minix Neo X5 . It came with the original firmware , which had issues playing the MTS video files that my digital camera produces, so I promptly upgrade to the latest ver 011 of the firmware. That solved the MTS playback issue, but the firmware itself was not very stable and hang quite frequently. So I promptly installed Clockmod Recovery , followed by the CWM version of Finless V1.2b . Now everything is fast and stable! Next, I needed an SMB server on the media player so that I can manage its content from other PCs in the house. Surprisingly this turned out to be harder than I thought given the hackish nature of Android. SambaDroid was quite easy to install and work with. Unfortunately, it does not support files > 2GB in size. This is quite a major limitation given than many media files these days are > 2GB in size. Samba Server turned out to be a dud. Despite having root access, I couldn't set it up so that it is a

I have an MKV video file (H264 video, AC3 audio) whose volume I need to normalize. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any lossless way of normalizing the AC3 audio track. So I found out the general (lossy) way of normalizing the audio track of any video file is: > ffmpeg -i input.mkv -vol nnn -vcodec copy output.mkv nnn = 256 (no change) nnn = 128 (half the volume) nnn = 512 (double the volume) etc. This should work for any video file format that ffmpeg recognizes. In addition, I can use the -map commands to remove any unwanted subtitles. > ffmpeg -i input.mkv -map 0:0 -map 0:1 -ac 2 -vol nnn -vcodec copy output.mkv This tells ffmpeg to only include track 0 (video) and 1 (audio) in the output file and ignore the rest.