DJ Mixing Software

My brother who operates a sound system dropped his PC at home for repair. The PC boots fine but when he launches the DJ mixing software he was using, the computer suddenly reboots. Took me a few days to shoot the trouble. The problems is a mixture of bad hard disk partition and memory. The hard disk has 2 partitions, the one where the OS was installed is doing fine but the one where the tons of MP3s are stored is damaged. So every time the music software is launched, it accesses the bad partition and crashes. There was also problems in some parts of the memory. So the hard disk and memory were thrown to the waste basket and replaced.

As for the DJ mixing software, I installed a small free software from Native Instruments, whose bread and butter are high-end music software that cost lots of dollars. Fortunately, they also offer a free player formerly called Traktor Beat Port Player but is now called Beatport Sync. The major difference is that Sync has an online capability which enables the user to connect to the internet and buy music. I don't really need the connectivity stuff, just the playing and mixing parts. So I used an old download of the Beatport Player. The player is great. It has two decks and a sync function. The catalog and search functions are also useful. After installing it, I loaded the PC with more than 3,000 mp3s from my collection and have the software load them in its catalog and analyze each song. It took the software 20 hours to finish the analysis which is just figuring out the BPM of each music.

And while hunting for a good and free mixing software, I stumbled upon MIXX which has a white interface and looks promising. I'm still test driving it to see if it fares better than Beatport.

By the way, i'm not really into this DJ thing. My players of choice are - the good old Winamp and VLC.

Recently

The Kite Runner - never read the book. The film is good. It reminded me of my "burador" days back when I was the same age as the kids in the film.

I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry - Adam Sandler in a comedy film about same-sex marriage. The last two Adam Sandler flicks I saw before this one were serious ones and amazingly he acts good in serious roles. Check out Reign Over Me and Punch Drunk Love for proofs.

Live Free or Die Hard - saw this one before inside a bus on a trip to the city. I thought the one I downloaded is the Unrated Edition with bloods and cursing. It's the same sanitized version.

I'm Not There - a artsy Bob Dylan flick where he was portrayed by six different actors including Richard Gere, Christian Bale, Heath Ledger and Kate Blanchett. Took me three installments before I finally finished watching it today. I pause the video a lot to check out real bob Dylan videos on youtube.

The Earth is missing on my Google Earth

When i opened Google Earth tonight, i was alerted that a new version (4.3) is already available. I promptly updated to see if my small town already has high resolution image. But when i opened Google Earth after the update it turned out that not only is my town missing but the entire earth suddenly turned invisible. All that remained are the yellow outlines of the countries. Weird.

I tried uninstalling the application and then I downloaded and installed it again but the same problem persists. I miss Earth.

Update: Problem solved. Apparently, my PC is not using the OpenGL 3D engine which is the default setup on Google Earth. So i switched to Direct X. The option is in the Tools menu. Earth is beautiful.

PPTminizer - minimize Powerpoint presentation and Word documents

This software is useful when uploading or e-mailing powerpoint presentations or word documents. sometimes the original files are just too big making it hard or slow to attach to emails or to upload.

PPTminimizer reduces PowerPoint and Word files by up to 98% of their initial size using an intelligent compression technique. The software preserves the original file format so files can be edited without having to unzip them. The optimized files, without any quality loss, are then much smaller, safer and ideal for sharing. Mailboxes, servers and networks are relieved and loading time is accelerated.

The website offers two flavors of the Freee version. The quick trial offers 5 free optimizations and the Comprehensive trial, which requires registration, gives away 12 optimizations. So after those free trials, your only next choice is to buy the software.

So, my next assignment would be to hunt for a really-free kind of this useful stuff.

The Slip - Nine Inch Nails' New Album Available for free download

Apparently, there's a business model in giving away free music. NIN's newest album, The Slip, as well as the previous one called The Ghost I-IV are available for free at the band's website nin.com. You can even choose the file types. The physical version of The Slip will not be available until July, and based on the band's previous experience, the album will sell even if it's freely available on the internets. I hope more bands will follow Trent Reznor's example.

Viewing Subtitles on VLC Media Player

The last two divx flicks I watched - 10,000 B.C. and Lust, Caution - needs subtitles. The people in 10,000 B.C speaks good english but some speaking parts uses unknown languages. Lust, Caution, directed by Ang Lee is in Chinese. Torrents of foreign language films are often bundled with an .srt file which is the file for the subtitle. To be sure if a torrent comes with a subtitle, you should look at the file name. There's a code thing going on in the torrents world. If there's something like [sub] somewhere in the torrent's filename, then a subtitle is included, either on the film itself or as a separate .srt file. If there's no subtitle file included, never worry. there are lots of websites offering free subtitles for downloaded movies. Try here for some samples.

And since i'm a VLC fan, here's how to make the subs appear on the video:

1. Open VLC media player.
2. Open the divx movie.
3. Click on Settings....then Preferences.
4. Click on the small arrow button before the Video option to expand the video settings.
5. Click on Subtitles/OSD
6. Click on browse next to the Use subtitle file text box.
7. Browse and select the .srt file of the movie you are watching.
8. Click OK.

That's it. The subtitle should appear after a few seconds. And while you're into foreign language viewing mode, try these titles: The Orphanage, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and Pan's Labyrinth. Happy viewing and reading!

Sine + Wikipedia = my new habit

I've just noticed that every time I finish watching a movie (mostly on an old laptop), I immediately check out the film's wikipedia page. Sometimes I even check the film on wikipedia first before watching it but mostly it's movie first, wikipedia second. I prefer the wiki than the imdb site. The reason why I do it is I want to know more about the story behind the film - how it was made, how it fared with the critics - and to learn more trivia. I'm a sucker for the-making-of thingy. Here are the last two flicks that I watched:

The Golden Compass. A fantasy film set in a parallel universe where people's soul in the form of animals (called "daemons") live outside their body. The battle of the two talking polar bears strikes me as funny. What i learned from wikipedia: This film almost bombed in the US and caused a restructuring in New Line Cinema's organizational chart.

This film lives in the same neighborhood as Narnia. I think this would be my last serving of films with talking animals for the year.

10,000 BC. It's like Apocalypto with mammoths, saber-tooth tigers and big chickens. What i learned from wikipedia: Two companies recreated prehistoric animals. To cut time (it was taking sixteen hours to render a single frame) 50% of the CGI models' fur was removed, as "it turned out half the fur looked the same" to the director.

Internet Crawls

Last night, i tried connecting to the internet via the Smart network using a cellphone as modem. I used the bundled Nokia PC suite to connect to the network. Our town's cellsite is not G3 enabled so the connection is still via the good old GPRS. Boy, it was the slooowest internet connection I ever experienced in my entire life. I gave up opening yahoomail after 15 minutes. Browsing is almost impossible. I hope it never happens to you.

Ultimate Boot CD

No, it's not a PC game. It's my number 1 tool of trade when troubleshooting PCs and laptops. I've been using my scratched burned copy of UBCD for quite a while now and it's a source of troubleshooting joy, both for me and whoever is the owner of the PC i happen to repair, or destroy.

The Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD) is a free suite of tools in a bootable compact disc. It includes

memory checkers, CPU stress testers, system information tools, boot managers and tools for hard drives, partitions, password resets, and more.

You can download this baby from this website. And since the CD is now going the floppy disk way, the latest innovation with this very useful tool is, of course, UBCD in an USB drive aka USBUBCD. Makeuseof.com has a nifty tutorial on how to port the UBCD in a flasdrive. Just go here.

I haven't tried this thing yet, so i can't post a review. I'll try it the next time my neighbor's PC conked out and he yells for my help.

Last Week's Movies

Alien Autopsy - a film starring Ant & Dec about the famous hoax "alien autopsy" film by Ray Santilli. The film flopped on release, taking back less than half of its budget.


Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (released in some countries as Harold & Kumar Get the Munchies) is a comedy film released in 2004. The plot revolves around the two title characters, who decide to go to the fast food restaurant White Castle after smoking marijuana, only to find themselves on a series of comical misadventures instead.

Horton Hears a Who! (also known as Dr. Seuss's Horton Hears a Who!) is a 2008 computer-generated imagery animated film based on the book of the same name and the fourth feature film from Blue Sky Studios. It was the first Dr. Seuss adaptation fully animated using CGI technology. This also marks the second Dr. Seuss adaptation to feature Jim Carrey in a lead role, the first being 2000's How The Grinch Stole Christmas! for Universal Pictures.

Watch this.

1MB Text Messages is worth 7,489 Pesos

This boingboing post prompted me to calculate how much does 1MB worth of text messages cost:

“The maximum size for a text message is 160 characters, which takes 140 bytes because there are only 7 bits per character in the text messaging system, and we assume the average price for a text message is 5p. There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte, so that's 1 million/140 = 7490 text messages to transmit one megabyte. At 5p each, that's £374.49 per MB - or about 4.4 times more expensive than the ‘most pessimistic’ estimate for Hubble Space Telescope transmission costs.”

Substituting the amount of a text message (SMS) at 1 peso each, the cost of pers 1MB of text messages is 7,489 pesos. That's pretty expensive. Consider this: an 80GB Seagate Hard Disk costs around 1,900 pesos. If you are to fill that disk with text messages, it would cost you 599,120,000 pesos. (Thats 80 x 1,000 MB = 80,000 MB x 7,489). If you could send 1 text messages per second, it would take you 599.12 million pesos and 1,140 years of nonstop texting. Go figure.

Question: the quoted paragraph above was itself quoted from it's original quote. What do you call it, quoteqoute?

***
memehopping:
1. boingboing.net - SMS data rate is 4x more expensive than data from the Hubble

Pangea Day

In 2006, filmmaker Jehane Noujaim wished for a day where people all over the world would unite through the power of film.

Pangea Day is a 4-hour program of 24 short films from storytellers around the world. Films were chosen based on their ability to inspire, transform and allow us to see the world through another person’s eyes.

This event happened early this morning, 2:00 am Philippine time. I tried to wake myself up at 2:00 am using my biological alarm clock but it rang two hours late. Anyway I tried watching the webcast but it looked like a trip-to-jerusalem parlor game that stops every five seconds or so. I thought the internet speed would be fast enough in the early morning to allow a live webcast of the event but I was wrong. The connection speed was slow even on that wee hours of the morning. I gave up after a few minutes and tried the TV. I read on the pangea day website that it would be on Star TV in Asia. Unfortunately, the only cable TV service in town was down. So I went back to sleep.

I first read about this event a couple of months ago while browsing the TED website. I signed-up to host a public viewing event in the college where I work but I later found out that it would be up at 2:00 am where most of us would be dozing off. When I later found out that they will have a satellite feed of the program, I contacted the organizers to ask if I can get the satellite coordinates for a possible broadcast in our local cable TV since I know the owners and I believe they will give time for it. Unfortunately, they answered that Current TV is the official cable TV broadcaster of the show and they can't allow other operators to show it. Current TV is not available in this small town of mine so its a lost. Anyway I decided to watch the webcast instead which, as I've told earlier, is a failure. The program is still online on the Pangea Day website. I still can't watch it. So off to plan B. The program selected the 24 short films shown via youtube, so the films are actually available there. All I need to do is check the titles at the pangea day website, search it on youtube and voila!

And here's a sampler, one of the winners, Moving Windmills, about William Kamkwamba (who has a blog) , a kid from Malawi who built, and still building, windmills based only on a picture in a book. The windmills power their lights, radio and TV and even pumps water for their farm.



I'll be posting more Pangea Day videos in the coming days.

Penetration

According to internetworldstats.com, the Philippines has 14,000,000 internet users or 16% of the population. So the figures are steadily climbing. Three years ago, it's 9.3%. I don't know if the government has figures on provincial or even regional internet penetration. I like to know how many internet users are there in my province. Or how many internet connections are there. There are lots of sanitary napkin-looking Smart Bro antennas in this town. The service was offered here more than two years ago, immediately when the service was launched. Places like my town where there is no other internet service available is Smartbro's bailiwick. They don't need much promotion or improvement of service because we have no choice. The only other options are either very expensive (satellite internet or the PLDT WeRoam service) or requires above average technical knowledge and crawls slower than a turtle on downers (using your CP as a modem). I was involved in setting-up the very first permanent internet connection in our Province. We went the satellite way and we used to pay almost 20k for the same speed that SmartBro is offering now. So after four years, we decided to pack the dish and dive in the Smartbro waters. Saves us lots of money. Can't complain on the speed. It's not DSL speed but we can manage. As i've said, we have no choice.

I've been hearing rumors that our town, plus the other three adjoining it holds the Smartbro records for the highest number of subscribers. Our local dealer, they say, even received an award or prize for it. A friend working at Samrtbro says that our area really packs a wallop in terms of bandwidth use. It's not a good news because it means more users sharing the same piece of the pie. My piece is getting smaller and smaller and slooower and sloooooweeerrrr.

I hope DSL and wimax consider having a vacation here.

***
memehopping:
1. yugatech.com - Universal McCann's Social Media Research
2. internetworldstats.com

Keyboards 'dirtier than a toilet'

This here's a news! from bbc:

Consumer group Which? said tests at its London offices found equipment carrying bugs that could cause food poisoning.

Out of 33 keyboards swabbed, four were regarded as a potential health hazard and one harboured five times more germs than one of the office's toilet seats.

Microbiologist Dr Peter Wilson said a keyboard was often "a reflection of what is in your nose and in your gut".

During the Which? tests in January this year, a microbiologist deemed one of the office's keyboards to be so dirty he ordered it to be removed, quarantined and cleaned.

It had 150 times the recommended limit for bacteria - five times as filthy as a lavatory seat tested at the same time, the research found.

Full news here

And where would the "mouse" place in the charts?

*****
Memehopping:
1. kottke.org
2. gelfmagazine.com - Toilet Bowls are super Clean
3. news.bbc.co.uk - Keyboards 'dirtier than a toilet'

Smartbro Prepaid

What's with all the running? Hey peeps, you don't really need those 4,500 pesos gadget to connect to the internet. Your cellphone can do that. All you need is your no-so-old CP, a software like Nokia PC Suite and your good old PC or laptop. The same prepaid rate and connection speed applies.

Question: If your connection speed is slow, is it still okay to call it speed? Oh, well.

***
Memehopping:
1. Smartbrp prepaid commercial on TV
2. Youtube.com - Smartbro Prepaid

Kermit the Frog covers Creep

Yay, Creep is one of my all-time favorite sad song. This video is really creepy:



Memehopping:
1. kottke.org
2. youtube - Sad Kermit - Creep

Youtube Find: Captain Disillusion

The CaptainDisillusion's Channel. Just discovered a few minutes ago. The videos in this channel (9 of them so far) are professionally shot and edited. The last one was posted 2 months ago though. I hope the channel's not dead already.

In a world where the content of digital images and videos can no longer be taken at face value, an unlikely hero fights for the acceptance of truth.

Captain Disillusion guides children of all ages through the maze of visual fakery to the open spaces of reality and peace of mind.

Subscribe to get fun and detailed explanations of current "unbelievable" viral videos that fool the masses!

Here's a sampler: The "catching glasses" video explanation. This one explains how the Rayban viral vid on a guy catching glasses with his face in different sorts of impossible way was made.


*****
Memehopping (or how i found out about this post) :
1. wired.com
2. Levi Strauss Scores Viral Gold With Back-Flipping Jeans Clip
3. Guy catching glasses with his face
4. Captain Disillusion

Moonpools and Caterpillars

Moonpools and Caterpillars was a Fil-Am band which enjoyed a streak of popularity in the US and the Philippines more than a decade ago. They even went to the Philippines and performed at the World Trade Center in Pasay. I think I was still in college then and I was lucky to catch the gig. I even bought a Lucky Dumpling tshirt that I was able to wear twice before a friend "arbored " it.

Anyway, I was alerted to this youtube video of the band performing JDL's Beep Beep at Whisky-a-Go-Go. Enjoy!



And here's a bonus, a live performance of Soon.

Chinese Companies Outsourcing to US

Now this is weird stuff. Just when I thought every job in the US is being outsourced to China, this one works the other way around. From the LA Times: Chinese firms bargain hunting in U.S.

Liu spent about $500,000 for seven acres in Spartanburg -- less than one-fourth what it would cost to buy the same amount of land in Dongguan, a city in southeast China where he runs three plants. U.S. electricity rates are about 75% lower, and in South Carolina, Liu doesn't have to put up with frequent blackouts.

About the only major thing that's more expensive in Spartanburg is labor. Liu is looking to offer $12 to $13 an hour there, versus about $2 an hour in Dongguan, not including room and board. But Liu expects to offset some of the higher labor costs with a payroll tax credit of $1,500 per employee from South Carolina.

Spotted via boingboing. Back to work.

Original Deal or No Deal in Manila

If there's a second hand smoke, there's also a second hand TV and it's also as contagious. I'm not into the primetime shows of either the 2 competing networks. I think the shows are all recycled crap. But there's only one TV in the house and we have a democratic process going on in the household. I have only one vote so when it comes to TV time, I always end up watching what the others like to see. That's why I end up following Joaquin Bordado and Dyesebel and Pinoy Big Brother and those gameshow franchises. The shows are actually entertaining.

Anyway, the original Deal or No Deal hosted by Howie Mandel have this Around the world thing where they tape an episode in a country where there is a local version of the show. The first stopover is the Philippines where, ironically, the show no longer runs. And thanks to the internets, the whole episode is in youtube. Check out Part 1 here:



Just follow the links for the rest of the show.

Handling Docx Files

.docx file is the default file format for Microsoft Word 2007. It won't open on older MS Word versions, like the one I'm using (Word 2003) and even to OpenOffice - which is my default document app. Today is the first time I encountered a docx file. A file was emailed to me in this format. First I thought it was an OpenOffice file. When it didn't open I tried MS Word 2003. No luck either. Then it occured to me that it might be a virus, so I google checked to be safe. And that's how I found out about this new doc file with an x. I'm currently loving the free Openoffice so I don't follow MS Office news anymore. I was even surprised when I found out that there's already a 2007 version. Anyway, I resorted to the ever reliable google to find out how to open or convert this docx thing. Reviewsaurus has this list of options:

1. Convert the file using ZamZar : You can simply go on ZamZar.com & then upload the DOCX file and then select the option of exporting it to DOC format.

2. Convert using DOCX2DOC : Another online converter and this one is specifically for converting the files from DOCX to DOC. Visit DOCX2DOC.COM

3. Compatibility pack by Microsoft : You may download the compatibility pack from Microsoft which will allow you to open, edit and save the DOCX format in the older version of MS Office.

4. Convert using the OpenOffice.org : You can also open the DOCX file in OpenOffice.org but that too with the help of the converter. You’ll need to download this extension and then only you’ll be able to convert the file. Found via thedailyblahblah blog.

I opted for the official Microsoft compatibility pack. After downloading, I installed it and presto! the good old Word 2003 in my PC can now recognize the docx-file.

National Treasure: Book of Secrets

Watched the flick yesterday during lunch break. Entertaining. Kept me awake during my most dozy time of the day.

VLC Media Player

My media player of choice is VLC. I've been using it for more than two years now and it pretty much does the job of playing all sorts of media files that I feed it. If you have this app in your arsenal, Quicktime, and Real and Windows media players will have a permanent vacation in your computer. I've been recommending it to friends and they also have no complains.

VLC is a portable multimedia player, encoder, and streamer supporting many audio and video codecs and file formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It is able to stream over networks and to transcode multimedia files and save them into various different formats. (wikipedia)

You can download the free software here.

And once again, VLC was put to good use this afternoon when I watched this long (2.5 hours) film directed by Sean Penn. Into the Wild is a beautiful depressing film based on the life of Christopher McCandless, who hiked to Alaska after finishing college, tried to smoke a moose and died in a magic bus by way of a toxic plant. I had my own Henry David Thoreau spell but i never tried getting away from society and living off nature's bounty like the main character in this flick. The film is great. It's been waiting in my backlog folder for more than a month before I finally able to see it. The soundtrack by Eddie Vedder is great. Quotable quote: "Happiness is real when shared". That should be the motto of all the filesharers in the internets.

A MacGyver Movie Coming Soon!

According to this Gizmodo post:

MacGyver creator (and real life inspiration) Lee David Zlotoff announced he has a big budget MacGyver movie in the planning stages.

Yeah! MacGyver was my all-time high school hero. His influence in my life is that every time I do some hacking of sorts, the MacGyver intro music automatically plays in my brain. And so the waiting clock starts...

Of course for me the period between waiting and being able to see a film is like this. I read the news online, wait until the movie is finished and shown theatrically, wait a couple of months before the DVD rip appears on mininova or pirate bay (this period includes trying very hard to avoid downloading the cam or screener version which are still pretty low quality), download the film (takes between 24 to 1 million hours here in our neck of the woods), and finally watching the movie.

And as much as I liked Richard Dean Anderson as the original MacGyver, I hope that his only appearance in this new incarnation would be just a cameo. I mean, Richard Dean Anderson must be pretty old by now.

By the way. MacGyver's first name is Angus.

At the Movies: Batman Begins, The Bank Job, The Orphanage

There's no movie house in this town. There used to be a couple of movie houses but in the early nineties, the last one closed shop and converted to a storage due to lack of audiences. Since then, we locals of this town could only watch movies in the big screen whenever we go to the nearest city. Otherwise, movie watching is pretty much a VHS, VCD or DVD affair. Dibidi rules here. 60 pesos for a 20-in-1 compilation. I used to be a dibidi collector. That was before the arrival of the poorly packaged 8-in-1s or 20-in-1s. Back then dibidis are packaged like the originals. Whenever I go to Manila, a half-day dibidi-hunting trip to Quiapo is always in the sked. I pretty much stock-up a couple of months worth of film binge.

Then I discovered bit torrent and the rest is history. My ISP hates bittorrent. Whenever i run my favorite client, net surfing speed crawls to zero bytes per second. So I usually do the downloading after my internet fix and leave the computer running overnight - with monitors closed for energy saving. I heard that in Japan, you could download an entire film in less than five minutes. I could only dream of that speed. Here in our town, a film a day is really fast. Mostly with my setup, the average is 3 to 4 nights for an 800 MB divx film. I'm not complaining. At that rate I could add one film in my to-watch folder per day. And I only have time to watch movies on weekends. Now I have a 20 film backlog.

This weekend I managed to watch three movies. All in divx encoded .avi files. I'm not in reviewing films I watch. I'll just post this stuff for records purposes. Just like what I used do in college where I have a ledger of every movie I watch and every book I read. I still the lists.

I think Batman Begins came out back in 2005. This is the first time I saw the movie. I thought it was another one of those bad Batman franchise that started with Michael Keaton and ended with Val Kilmer so I avoided it. This one reboots the superhero and I love it. Can't wait for The Dark Knight. The Bank Job is another one of those heist films with all the ingridients thrown in. There are just some added twists and more time was devoted to the aftermath of the heist. The best of the three films i watched this week is The Orphange, a Spanish horror, suspense, drama that is not unlike another fave spanish film Pan's Labyrinth. Gotta search more foreign language films on the Pirate Bay.

Tech Blogging From the Countryside

This is not the Davao or Baguio types of countryside blogging. This is really blogging from the way-out-there place of the Philippines, specifically a town where the first internet connection happened just a few years ago, where there's only one relic of a phone booth and one ATM services the whole province.

And there's geek life in this town. Believe it or not!