skettle.com

There was a guy in the supermarket today with the new iPhone. “Nice phone,” I told him.
“Thanks,” he said, “I got it today.”
“I know,” I replied.

I got 9 out of 10 correct on the San Francisco Bay Area TV Trivia Quiz.

I’ve been watching reruns of this old show on the History Channel, History’s Lost & Found, a sort of where-are-they-now of historical artifacts. I can’t get past this idea that it’s just a shopping list for a super-villain from the future with a time machine. Someone should check and make sure all that stuff is still there.

I’m working on a theory that uses socks as the factor determing how I regard someone. I can’t think of a single group of people that I care about that don’t wear socks in the normal course of their day.

People who don’t wear socks:
Indigenous people.
Surfers/beach people.
The homeless.
Hippies.
Third-worlders.
Double amputees (legs only).
Vice cops from the 80′s.

I think I might be on to something. I don’t really care about any of those people.

I’m writing a blog entry from my iPhone. I might just be the biggest douchebag I know.

I couldn’t log into my WordPress installation, and it seems to have taken me about eight months to finally get around to figuring out what the problem was…

Actually, I don’t know what the problem was. I removed the plugins from the directory on the server, and it finally started to work. It’ll probably be another three years before I get around to figuring out which plugin caused the problem. No matter- I really just wanted to try out the new WordPress iPhone App.

Anther Simple Answer to a Specific Quesion:

As part of my ongoing obsession with converting and storing video on the Mac, one of the obvious tools I’ve looked at for converting from .avi files .mp4 files QuickTime. Assuming you can get your video to play (hint: http://www.divx.com/), Quicktime Pro has an Export feature that produces very acceptable video using the H.264 codec.

Since there didn’t seem to be any mechanism for batch processing, I looked into using Applescript to automate the task. I found numerous examples online that almost did what I needed, but nothing that was exactly right. In every case, the format was wrong, and the script in question did way more than I wanted. So here’s the bare bones, stripped down AppleScript code for…

…saving MPEG4 export settings to an external file:

tell app "QuickTime Player"
    tell first movie
        save export settings for MPEG4 to file "Users:yourname:MPEG4 Settings"
    end tell
end tell

…and converting an .avi file to an .mp4 using a saved external settings file:

tell application "QuickTime Player"
    activate
    close every window
end tell
tell application "QuickTime Player"
    open "Data:Upload:Harvey Birdman - 4x02 - Incredible Hippo.avi"
    if (can export front movie as MPEG4) then
        set theTime to duration of front movie
        with timeout of theTime seconds
            export front movie to ("Data:Upload:Harvey Birdman - 4x02 - Incredible Hippo.mp4") as MPEG4 using settings file "Users:yourname:MPEG4 Settings"
        end timeout
    end if
end tell
quit application "Quicktime Player"