wysereeser.com

A long long time ago in a basement far far away ago (can you tell I’m seeing Episode III on Thursday) I installed the Xvid codec. One problem, something happened with the default MJPEG codec that caused those video files not to play. Not necessarily a huge deal except that the digital camera we use encodes AVI’s in MJPEG. So all the short little clips we’d take of our son in the moment, we effectively weren’t able to play unless I took it into a video authoring application. I did find a codec some time ago that was a demo and I was able to view the videos, but the demo expired and I haven’t bothered to find a new codec. There are a ton of sites out there relative to various codecs and I oddly enough had a hard time finding the proper one that I needed. Finally this morning, whilst I was watching Episode I as a refresher I might add, I stumbled across another site that had a listing for an MJPEG codec. I installed it and am able to play those clips again. I couldn’t tell during the install if the file was a demo or not, I’m thinking not. But at any rate it seems to be working pretty well.

Wordpress by default doesn’t come with a way to set up notifications to people who ’subscribe’ to your site for updates when you post them. I found this plugin that is suppose to help in that regard. Something’s not quite working with it at the moment. It seemed like it was set up, but there’s an odd problem with how its expecting includes to happen. I’d spend more time on it, but I’ve already slacked off too much this morning.

So I’ve been meaning to switch over to WordPress for some time now. I wanted to play around with different things before making the transition on our ‘live’ site, but in the end I decided to just go ahead and get the stuff up there.

The topic of wikis has come up repeatedly around work the last couple weeks as possible grant/research opportunities as it relates on online education. My sense is that a lot of work has already been happening in this area, but it was interesting to find some growing alternatives and different plays on the wiki theme.

The Wikimedia Foundation has a lot of projects that are expanding on the idea. One of the more interesting, from my perspective, is the Wikimedia Commons project.

I’m shocked that I’ve never come across this particular application before, but am amazed. Moodle is basically a course management and delivery system that is developed in PHP and a whole bunch of other ’stuff’. I would love to spend the rest of the day fiddling around with this thing, but with the boy on the way I should probably spend today working more toward getting things taken care of here at work before I vanish to take care of him.

IGN got their hands on a Revolution controller development kit. Description and impressions inside.

Apple cleverly sets up The Apple Store with a double-take ‘decoration’ to promote the new iPod Hi Fi.

Microsoft revealed today that it will not support EFI booting for Windows Vista on its launch. The news will be a shock for owners of Intel Macs who had hoped they would be able to dual-boot between Windows Vista and OS X. Intel Macs only support booting via EFI.

iPodMame lets you run MAME games on your iPod. This guy build an arcade cabinet for his Nano. Pretty funny.

In a research report on Portalplayer, analysts have cited independent confirmation that a redesigned video iPod will be launched at Apple’s 30th anniversary announcement. Along with a bigger battery, lcd, and HD, analysts expect the price to be around $400-$500.