I’m updating an app to make it easier to subscribe to a podcast in your listener app of choice, and am trying to see which URL schemes work with which apps. So far, I have: podcast:// — opens in Instacast 2.x — podcast://www.aalgar.com/the-sarcastic-voyage-podcast.xml pcast:// — opens in Apple Podcasts, [or Instacast 1.x on iOS 5.x…
SalwI’mey HutmaH Hut
To celebrate my friends’ podcast, Post Atomic Horror, hitting 100 episodes, I translated 99 Luftballons into Klingon. Because, SCIENCE! Please note that I am not a native speaker of the Klingon Language, so several evenings with Okrand’s Klingon Dictionary let to this probably-horrible translation. The complete lyrics (with english translation): poHlIj’a’ (do you have time)…
The Future of Widescreen iPhones
A Puzzle
In the course of transferring film (24, or for our purposes, 23.976fps) to NTSC (29.97fps or 59.94 interlaced fields per second), we get what’s referred to as 3:2 Pulldown. What happens is that we get three fields from one frame of the film, two fields from the next, and repeat this forever. So, for frames…
Ripping Blu-ray to iTunes on Mac
This is a little thing, but as it took me a while to hit on the best combination for my needs, I thought it might be useful to others. Of course, make sure that ripping the movies that you own on Blu-ray for your own personal use is actually legal in your jurisdiction.
That assumed, you’re going to need a Blu-ray drive. No Mac currently ships with one (Steve Jobs’ “bag of hurt” statement continues to hold sway), so you’ll have to add it yourself. I have an internal drive that I put in the second optical bay of my Mac Pro, but if you have a more compact system, my understanding is that there are external drives that will work just as well (though I don’t have personal experience with those).
I use MakeMKV to rip the Blu-ray movie to a Matroska Video File. Just pop the disc in the drive and once it loads, click the “Open Blu-ray Disc” button.
It will scan the disc for all of the available tracks, and present them to you. The first thing I usually do it right-click on one of the checkboxes and choose “Unselect all”, since usually I only want one or two tracks, at most. You can usually guess which track is the main movie by it being the largest file size (here, 31.5 GB) with a decent number of chapters.
Final Cut Pro Survey
Apple asked me today how I liked my Final Cut Pro. Aside from a few multiple choice questions about apps and formats and what I do for a living, these were the essay questions: Why are you very dissatisfied with Final Cut Pro X? I have used Final Cut Pro 7 for years in a…
Post Atomic Horror Unofficial Star Trek™ Episode Guide
Hey, did I mention that I launched an iPhone app in the App Store a couple of weeks ago? I don’t think I did. The Post Atomic Horror Unofficial Episode Guide is a fun and humorous guide to the all of the Star Trek™ adventures featuring the original crew. It helps you keep track of…