One of the reasons I use a mac at home is because it’s been so much easier to edit/convert audio and video formats.  True I could use Windows and buy software like Adobe Premier but with apps like iMovie and iTunes being native in OS X  the mac is a ‘no brainer’.

However, I came across a windows freebie that could be useful to home home video and audiophiles. Format Factory is a freeware PC app that appears to be a bit of a swiss army knife in A/V conversion terms, it’s features include:

iPod/iPhone/PSP/BlackBerry and Zune file formats supported; conversion of all fomats listed to and from MP4/3GP/MPG/AVI/WMV/FLV/SWF;  to and from MP3//WMA/MMF/AMR/OGG/M4A/WAV; to and from JPG/BMP/PNG/TIF/ICO; ripping DVDs to video files; ripping Music CDs to mp3/aac  plus the abiltiy to repair damaged video and audio files plus a ton of ther stuff.

And,  it’s freeware if you can put up with a tiny bit of ad support.

Continuing on my (SAD) obsession for remotely controlling computers the good people at Logmein are looking for beta testers for their iPhone/iPod Touch client.  If you are not familiar with Logmein it’s similar to Microsoft’s Remote Desktop and Apple’s Screen sharing\VNC but includes a VPN, so the secure tunnelling means the bad guys will struggle big-time to hack your traffic and access your PC or mac.

But what makes it a no brainer for me is the fact that every lunchtime I can drive my home iMac at from behind a very tight corporate firewall using a locked down PC.  No messy port re-directing, no restricted access webpage warnings, no faffing about with ssh,  logmein just plain works, just like  back-to-my-mac ought to have…

So my Nokia E51 feels like a slender version of the iPhone thanks to it’s sleek design enhanced by lashings of black and shiny  chrome, but of more interest to me is the pure geek-goodness of stuff like I can use this puppy as a 3G to WiFi router thanks to an app called Joiku HotSpot, a sort of tethered modem on steroids.

But, in my mind what often lets many Nokia phones down has to be the ‘clunky’ User Iinterface,  comparing a Nokia S60 to an iPhone is not unlike comparing the old DOS program XTREE to Mac OS X.  Navigating the phone is still sometimes bewildering to me even after 5+ years practice whereas the iPhone effectively has just 2 UI levels, apps you’ll use every day are  ‘in your face‘ whilst backroom settings are tucked away out sight though still are only a click or two away.

UI screenshot..not too shaby eh.

Cue Myphone, an iPhone style UI for S60 phones such as the E51, N95 etc.   OK, so it’s not a touch screen but it still lets me launch my 12 most frequently used functions with ridiculous ease, with my lesser used apps just a click or two away using the intuitive iPhone/iPod Touch style page menu.

‘Mutton dressed up as lamb‘ maybe, but for €9.99 a vast improvement…

I’ve just been watching  David Gilmour’s 2006 ‘Live in Gdansk‘ gig filmed at the Gdansk Shipyards marking the 26th Aniversary of the creation of the Solidarity movement.

I was amazed to see how many young people were in the 50,000 odd audience, and the 40-strong string section of the Polish Baltic Philharmonic Orchestra really was the icing on the cake.

You can view an hour long selection of the concert on BBC 4 on September 27th & 29th, worth recording, believe me.  And, if you’ve grown up with ‘the Floyd’ you’ll probably get a lump in your throat when hear the late Rick Wright singing the intro to ‘Comfortably Numb‘

Shine on Rick…

Just spent a fascinating weekend with the Camel Trophy Owners club camping just outside Ledbury.  I worked  for the Camel Trophy Comms team from 1997-2000 in Mongolia, Sweden, Chile-Agentina and Tonga-Samoa so I had a ‘VIP’ invite from the club (still slept in my tent though, best night’s kipp in years!)

I was gobsmacked by the attention to detail the Club members put into vehicles ensuring the were the exact spec as when our people on the events drove them.  What amazed me even more was how they knew the history of many of the vehicles right down to the number of times they’d been errr…. ‘inverted‘ ; who drove them and the UK road-going registration numbers.

Myself (Stumpy Knob) , Richard Mumford (Comms Director), MikeSeal (Flipper), Al Shaw, Peter Beardow, Richard Barr and Andy Cook had a fab weekend and even managed to get in a spot of off-roading in Richard’s Disco.

Thank you Camel Trophy Owners Club, we had a ball!

My crappy camera-phone pix here …

I bought one of the new iPod Touches last week and was rather surprised to learn that when I used google maps ‘locate me’ button I was rumbled  within about 100 metres.

The thing is, the Touch doesn’t have a gps on board and doesn’t talk to cell towers like the iPhone, so how did it know where I was?

The answer (I believe) is  Skyhook, a mapping system that geo-tags mac address of millions of home WiFi home broadband routers.   David Pogue of the New York Times explains Skyhook far better than me in his eye-fi review here…

The other thing is, I don’t live in London or a built up city even, pretty much out in the sticks, the New Forest in fact (err. ..that’s the  green bit on the lower half of the screenshot).   And hey, I changed my WiFi router about 3 months ago, so this could mean a Skyhook gadget-laden car has ‘clocked‘ my gaff recently!

Wow I bet that would get the ol’ privacy Herberts on their high horses.  (Me?  if I saw these folks driving along my street I’d invite them in for a nice hot cup of tea… and hobnobs, and not just normal hobnobs but the really good ones with choccie on top.)

Like many of us these days my inbox would be looking at over 100 new mails each day if I were to buy various potions, lotions and pills that take would my partner to new ‘heights of pleasure‘ presumably by making me look like I’d got a tent pole in the wedding tackle dept.

Luckily google mail has incredibly accurate spam filters so I only ever get to see 1 or 2 of those ads per month if I’m lucky.

So today, being a Sunday and all that I decided the read this month’s Mac Format (a ’squeaky clean’ whiter than white apple enthusiast magazine).   Included with the mandatory Thora Hird-style stair lift ads and free scratch card lottery tickets (win a biro if you spend 5 minutes on our £1.50 per min prize-draw line) was a flyer from Vasolator, a wonder-pill that, taken daily will make the ol’ purple headed trouser snake leap to attention at the merest hint of anything vaguely female (said process currently taking two weeks notice and a blowlamp.)

Thing is, the flyer was tucked inside a highly respectable Computer magazine, Mac Format , errr… a magazine read by people who normally do it with the light off.

Whatever next?  Down ‘ere in the South we already have blue double decker buses in Southampton, maybe Pfizer will start advertising on the sides on them… maybe even giant pictures of ‘limp’ men’s naughty bits too?

Worse still, there must be thousands of guys out there getting brain washed and really hung up about all this bollocks (no pun intended) whilst their partners are really muttering under their breaths “please….not tonight.. oh for the love of God go upstairs and play with your computer or something.. I want to read my book.“

By now we’ve all been bombarded with information about turning LCD computer screens and TVs to standby to help reduce climate change, but what about the cost savings?

I subscribe to a really excellent podcast called Frequencycast which this month has a feature about the costs of running appliances over 12 months.

A couple of ‘teasers’ (poor choice of words but hey..) ….

17” LCD screen used for 8 hours per day - £22.89
WiFi router used 24/7/365 - £7.32

Facts and figures here … (bit of  an eye opener actually)

I have a bit of an obsession with remote control and accessing data on systems across the web with a caveat that it has to simple enough for anyone to use.  FTP used to be the answer but realistically it is unsecure, so these days mobile users who don’t have access to a company VPN may opt for ssh/sftp requiring a degree of technical knowledge.  Alternatively there are excellent 3rd party offerings such as Hamachi that permit easy secure file transfer at around $39 PA.

So one of my other obsessions is doing stuff like this for free whilst keeping it dead simple.  The other day I stumbled across Windows Live Foldershare beta, a rather free nitty little piece of host software for Windows and Mac OS X that allows access to your files in a secure fashion from virtually any platform and browser.  The guest (remote) end doesn’t need any client software to be installed, it’s all browser driver and uses the secure https protocol.

You can even go a stage a further and install the host software both ends and sync machines across the cloud  and even choose files from your server remotely to be emailed out to friends.

Currently it’s in beta with download and registration being free thank to the Windows Live team, version for both Windows and OS X are available.

What to do on a rather wet and cloudy British Bank Holiday?  How’z about remotely tuning ham and short wave radio receivers from all over the world perhaps.

I’m currently using an  Icom receiver system in Ham Lake, Minnesota USA that allows me to tune from the shortwave and local AM bands  thro’ ham and commercial VHF/UHF channels and even local FM radio channels in stereo.

These systems usually have a number of presets that also allow you to tune the radio yourself and whilst the controls are a bit often clunky but you soon get used to them.  To hear the output you just click the  MP3 or WMA button (I’ve marked the example picture with a red arrrow as it’s not always obvious). 

And you can find dozens more of these receivers here..

(expect a few outages/dead inks  ‘cos people just do this for fun with their own kit…)