I came across a simply, but really useful plugin WP Mobile. It provides a much lighter version of WordPress blog for users of mobile devices such as cell phones and PDAs. Since I am a rather often guest of my own, and on many of this occasions I use my smartphone, I decided to install this plugin and link to the mobile version of the site from the navigation menu at the top. Feel free to bookmark it too.
Category: Technology
I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.
iPod problem. Logitech solution.
I love coincedences. It was just a couple of days ago that I wrote how much I hate the headphone wires that come with iPod. Today I am looking through the list of new items at Think Geek, and guess what I see –
Logitech Wireless iPod Headphones
Probably there are other options available on the market too…
iPod did some good too
I am trying my best to be objective and open minded. I am not always good at it, but at least I’m trying. The other day I wrote a somewhat negative post about iPod. Ok, and a few negative comments too.
Because I try to stay open minded and because I don’t want to become an always complaining gramp, I try to find positive sides too. I thought about the iPod issue a bit and I think that obviously there is a good thing about it too. And not just some theoretical crapy good thing that is good for some abstract iPod user, but a really good thing for me and you.
iPod hype has increased the popularity of podcasting.
What good is in podcasting? Well, I happen to think that podcasting is a good idea by itself. It is one of those applications that make Internet more popular with the masses. And that’s a good thing. Podcasting, in turn, increased the popularity and common knowledge of such modern technologies as feeding (RSS and Atom) and audio compression (mp3 and ogg). That’s another good thing.
So, with iPod, as with any other thing there is good stuff and there is bad stuff. I found both. Now is your turn.
dvdrip problem on Fedora Linux 4
I said it before and I will say it again – dvdrip is by far the best graphical user interface for ripping and encoding DVDs on Linux.
dvdrip provides a user with simple, but powerful means of controlling a whole bunch of command line utitilies that have a gadzillion options each. Instead of scrolling through the manuals and Googling for examples, one could just click around with the mouse and use many sensible defaults.
I’ve been using dvdrip for a few years now and I never had a problem. That is until I tried to run it on Fedora Linux 4. I have to say that I installed dvdrip with all the requirements using yum. I guess most of the software came from FreshRPMS.net, but I am not very sure.
Anyway, when I tried dvdrip on Fedora Linux 4 I ran into problem. It was ripping DVDs just fine, but it didn’t want to encode them. I was getting all sorts of errors mentioning absense of codecs that I knew I had and segmentation faults that are always not so easy to explain.
With a few Google queries I found out that the problem wasn’t in the dvdrip itself. It was in the transcode utility. You see, yum installs transcode-1.0.0 for Fedora Linux 4. This version of transocde is not very stable yet. The solution to the problem is to downgrade to transcode-0.6.14, which comes packaged for Fedora Core 3. As soon as the old transcode is in place everything works smoothly as always.
iPod got it wrong
Let me say this once – I’ve never had an iPod and I’ll probably never have one. I appreciate the fact that some people find it convenient, modern, groovy, stylish, fashionable, and whatnot. But for me it brings nothing new, so I’ll just stay to my own set of gadgets.
Looking at how many people gladly use iPods on a daily basis and praise it as the best thing since sliced bread, I feel like bringing in this negative comment. Even without using iPod once, I can point out to one thing that is so very wrong with it. And that is:
Meters of wires.
C’mon people! It’s the 21 century. Wireless communications are blooming. Technology is making yet another circle to become even smaller. Why is it that the coolest and newest gadget has two meters of wires a piece? It is inconvienient, looks terrible, and plain dangerous. Haven’t we already learned this lesson with headphones for cell phones? Apparently, we didn’t.