richardirvine.com

Category: meta

  • Simple guide to burning an .AVI to DVD in OS X 10.4.11

    Here’s how I burn .avi files to DVD. For a guide to why this guide exists, scroll down. You can click the pictures to make them bigger.

    1. Get ffmpegx. It’s free and marvelous. Install and follow all the instructions.

    2. Open your .avi and set it to convert to .mov. I accepted all the default settings, seems fine. Push encode. Wait while it does its thing. You can queue up multiple files and leave them overnight if you’ve got heaps to do.

    Screen.jpg

    3. You’ll now have a file with a ‘.avi.ff.mov’ suffix. You’re halfway there.

    4. Open Toast (I’m using Titanium 9). You could use iDVD, but Toast is heaps faster (and iDVD’s had its’ chance as far as I’m concerned).

    5. Choose the video submenu and DVD / Video disc.

    6. Drag your ‘.avi.ff.mov’ file into the burn area. You can drag multiple files if you’re burning a TV series. Insert a blank DVD (or burn an image) and hit the big ‘burn’ button.

    screen2.jpg

    7. The file will encode for a few minutes, then burn for a few minutes.

    8. Viola. You now have a DVD you can play in a DVD player.

    Why?
    I’ve been trying to perform this seemingly simple task (I’ve got a DVD burner. I’ve got .AVIs. WHY WON”T YOU WORK?) for weeks now.

    I had early success with iDVD, then it all turned to custard, with my cool side-loading DVD slot ejecting blank disc after blank disc.

    After MUCH messing around with free downloads and other stuff that didn’t work, here’s what worked for me. I’m using an intel iMAC with OS X 10.4.11. Good luck.

  • Bloody focus

    You should read Merlin Mann’s Better post. It’s a superior articulation of my goal this year: to contribute more and consume less. I’m the world’s best procrastinator. I also love the net. That’s a very, very dangerous combination, and I’m trying to redress the balance.

    I have this blog and sportreview.net.nz – I do them because I want to improve my writing, make cartoons, it’s a lot of fun, and because you never know what opportunities will come. I get a lot out of it, and I think (hope) my sites are getting better.

    With a new baby my time is a lot more valuable than it used to be – I’ve got stuff I want to get done – and not much time to do it. I really want to crack on at work, too. So all you non-blog digital activity – it’s time for a review based on a) what I get out and b)time suck factor

    RSS reader – My ideal RSS feed is a post every other day or week or even month, as long as it’s one I want to READ. That’s your barrier to entry, team. Rands in Repose is pretty much the model. I’ve had times when my reader is showing over 500 items – not going to happen. Public Address, 43 Folders, the Onion and AV Club stay. Out go Boing Boing (overrated) and Wired (I’ll just read the magazine online from now on, thanks) and all Gawker blogs, except Lifehacker’s top posts feed. Every other link blog is cut, except Jason Kottke and Waxy links, I like their signal to interesting ratio. Stays (with drastic spring clean).

    Facebook. With auto-decline of invitations, and blocking alerts and noisy people, you can be on Facebook quite stealthily and take advantage of its’ best feature – keeping up with people. On notice.

    Twitter. Deleted account – Yeah I tried it for a couple of months, but I still DON’T SEE THE POINT! Gone.

    Last.fm. Low maintenance. Plug in ipod and scrobble tunes. Check stats. That’s a useful tool (when it works). Stays.

    Del.icio.us. Invaluable. Low maintenance. Stays.

    Flickr. The best photo sharing site – and I’m kinda committed. It’s easy to use, so it stays.

    Next step goals would be having a crack at writing fiction – and more *actual emails*. Proper one to one emails are becoming as rare as letters. There’ll always be a place in my life for really some solid fucking around on the ‘net – it’ll just be a little more focused.

  • Revolution #3

    So I decided to lose the hair. I sashayed along to the Barber down the road and browsed the fishing and trucking magazines for a bit while a Dad and both sons all got the same haircut. I got in the chair,  and asked for the #3 all over – the barber in the next chair leaned in and said “Hold your horses – have you got permission for that?”

    I’m happy with it – it’s an absence of a haircut, really. I call it the ‘given up’. The sideboards should be a bit easier to control now, I’d say.

  • Me in other places

    Here’s what I’ve been up to while neglecting this here blog.

    I thundered in on the recent truck protest, and the Auckland International Film Festival on the Aucklandista

    Graeme from Sportsfreak kindly published my nostalgic wallowing on the day we beat the Aussies in 1999

    I did a couple of awesome (ahem) cartoons on sportreview.net.nz: Calling 101 and Martin Johnson phones it in

    Twittering, veeeeeery sporadically

  • 1001 books and films you must see before you die

    Inspired by Jason Kottke, I’ve been through 1001 books and films you must see before you die and ticked off my reading (28) and viewing (215). It’s fair to say I’ve seen more of the films than read the books on these lists- I tend to read more contemporary lit, and the list focuses more on classics. There’s some glaring ommissions. And while I enjoy Brett Easton Ellis – Glamorama? Hmmm.

    I’ve seen a lot of the films from the 00s, 90s, 80s and 70s, but it trails off fairly dramatically after that – but the list seems pretty fair. If you fancy doing the same, let me know in the comments, I’ve marked my favourites with an ‘*’, just so you know.

    (more…)

  • Del.icio.us – where to-dos go to die

    I’ve been using Del.icio.us since April 2005, and saved 2200 pages to the site. Recording and tagging my web travels is great, stopping all those wonderful links from slipping into the digital never-never land. Firefox makes link getting really easy, with Apple or Ctrl – click I get a good eight or ten tabs open in no time in a light surfing sesh: Apple-click! Ctrl-click! Apple-click! You should see me go. Then it’s a simple tag – release with the del.icio.us extension. No problem.

    Trouble is, now my Del.icio.us page is more or less a dumping ground for stuff I’m never going to do – I’ve got 605 ‘toreads’, 415 ‘toblogs’ and 95 ‘todos’. There’s even 27 tobuys – unlikely, to say the least. When I do get some web-reading time, I’ve got plenty of material just waiting, and all those links are bloody handy for link-blogging, but still – it’s the digital equivalent of a tire fire.

    Languishing further down there’s loads of tags with one site each, like bobbyfischer, cohenbrothers, gambling, ikkahalso, and nationallampoon (along with bolg, bloggign, and bloggin – mis-spellings are very popular with me).

    What I really need to do is sit down one weekend and re-tag them all properly. But hang on – what kind of douche-hat loser seriously contemplates expending valuable leisure time re-arranging tags for fun? I mean, I saw Revenge Of The Nerds. I keep on expecting a hairy gaggle of Jocks in cardigans with big letters on them to come around the corner and hit me with a keg. Or something.

  • Lad’s weekend

    Last weekend, 6 old friends drove to a remote Coromandel bach for a weekend of hard-drinking, bullshit-talking good times only possible when partners stay at home (no offence!).

    It was a brilliant, save the PS2 plug non-compatibility SNAFU. The best bits were:

    – The fridge:

    n529588185_424429_5246

    – Unashamed, unapologetic and unmuffled farting was definitely on the menu. Mixed blessing, this one, in fairness

    – Meat and potatoes was the order of the day, cuisine wise. I did cop a load of flack of buying Rosemary at the supermarket, though

    – Winning the golf was nice – Coromandel golf course is a neat little track, and they didn’t mind us playing as a six

    – The sunset on Saturday:

    n529588185_424433_8095

    – Especially heartwarming to see the chaps quickly revert to a pack mentality once we started playing Mexican, descending like wild dogs on anyone DARING to drink with the wrong hand, use first names, or caught making false accusations (if you’re my Facebook friend you can see all the action). I didn’t even get my usual ‘dice hate me’ hammering, and all liquids enjoyed stayed on board. That shit’s beautiful

    Massive thanks all around, esp the providers of said bach. Looking forward to next year alright.

  • Cat on a hot mac keyboard

    IMAGE_033.jpg

    Now you know who actually writes this stuff

  • Unplugged in Opito Bay

    opito

    I went off the grid for a few days with my girl. As I left the office on Friday, I wrestled with my conscience – does the laptop come or stay? With my T3G card, I get reasonable  connection pretty much anywhere – but that’s not really a holiday is it? It wound up staying.

    So, apart from a couple moments of PDA email weakness, I was unplugged. And it was great. Spent quality time. Got loads of reading done. Ate well.

    Learnings? NEVER check work email while you’re away, it’ll only stress you out – there’s not much you can do about it, is there? And what about returning to 500+ unread RSS items? Time for a good old trim, methinks, going through that seems too much like work.

  • It lives!

    Aaaaand… I’m back. Since January, I’ve been mostly blogging at sportreviewnz.sportreviewnz started with links to sports stories I found interesting, and reviewing my old sports books. Then I started doing my sporting ‘cartoons’ (I always put that in quotes. It doesn’t seem right to include my farking around with photoshop, powerpoint and swearing in the same genre as what Tom Scott, Bill Watterson and Charles Shulz do/did).

    There were two World Cups this year, Cricket and Rugby, and I started writing satire – I really enjoy this, NZ sport takes itself very, very seriously indeed and needs more stupidity, I say. Here’s one of my favs. And another. And another. And another. One more. Some of them got pretty random and got no reaction, like the All Black body parts and ‘Tagotown. I thought they were funny. Heh.

    Right now, I’m a little burned out on it. Real life work keeps getting busier also. I’ve dipped me toe in the water here, and it’s OK, but I’ll stick to the ‘keeping up with me mates’ angle rather than the ‘OMGZERS, I got BIG MOTORBIKE, Come RAce ME and BUY me a DRINK’ stuff.

    What about all the other stuff in life, like my new imac, my tightfisted approach to buying movies and music, and the sad fact I’ve spent much of my free time in the last week re-genre-ing my itunes library? Where does that fit on a shoddy sports parody blog? It doesn’t, so I’m getting the band back together here on Chartered Trips. I’ve missed it, and it’ll hopefully kickstart more writing on the other channel too.

    Update : I’ve just looked through the archives, and this blog has only ever had one comment! What a beauty.