Ready for total geekery?

This is the last thing in the ED. Four phones, four girls. Who owns which?

UPDATE: Proof below the fold.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 10:00 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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One of the drivers new this year to F1 is named Kamui Kobayashi.

That name is interesting. In Realbout High School there are four people who can control a kind of psychic energy they call "kamui". Ryoko, the heroine, has a comparable power they refer to as "shinki" which could, I suppose, be translated as "spirit of God". Anyway, I wonder if Mr. Kobayashi can shoot fire out of his fist the way Shizuma can.

(I haven't been able to figure out how kamui is spelled in Japanese, so I don't know what they think that word means.)

UPDATE: Wikipedia says that kamui is the Ainu word for divine beings e.g. kami.

Our friend the driver spells his name 可夢偉. But the kanji don't make any sense read literally. (As is usually the case for kanji used in names.)

UPDATE: Not an auspicious start to his season today, but also not his fault. He dropped out of the race in lap 11 due to a hydraulic problem with his car.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 08:07 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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I probably ought to send the iPaq back, but I don't really want to. Even if the only thing it's good for is watching anime in the bedroom, it's still kind of cool.

With no serial access to the iPaq, and with no other device around here which can read and write the CF, then it suddenly sounds like 32G of the 64G storage on that thing is useless. But I figured out how to move files from the SD to the CF.

But man, it is slow! Yesterday I converted the 12 episodes of Macademi Wasshoi and put them on the SD. Now I'm copying them (2.3G) to the CF. It's been two and a half hours and it isn't through yet.

Oh, well; it's not like I need it for anything else. In the mean time I'm doing some more conversions. I just finished converting Negima ala Alba and now I'm converting Aika Zero.

I would convert the first 14 eps of Railgun except that ep 10 from Chihiro has lousy sound, and I don't want to use Ayako. There's a batch just posted which I'm downloading which contains Chihiro's versions up through ep 19, and that includes fixed versions of some of the episodes, so I'm going to wait until that is done and convert the first 14 eps from it. And I think I'm going to do all of Realbout High School.

When you're using about 300 MB per episode, you can fit a hell of a lot into 64G of storage. This much won't even make a dent in it.

And I think I'll rip ep 9 of Kamichu.

UPDATE: Three episodes of Negima ala Alba totalling 953 MB. How long do you think it took to move them from the SD to the CF?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Vista at 07:50 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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         CF rd    CF wr     SD rd   SD wr 
laptop   45 MB/s  19 MB/s   17 MB/s 15 MB/s
axim     11 MB/s  300 KB/s  10 MB/s 150 KB/s

Pete shows us a picture of the desk of an anime producer, and then a picture he claims is of the desk of a computer programmer.

Ha! I say. Ha! It's obviously phony. It's too clean, for one thing. And there isn't any stack of empty soda cans!

On the other hand, I like the producer's desk (even though I find figmas to be really creepy).

UPDATE: An old programming maxim: "A clean desk is the sign of a sick mind."

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in linky at 06:50 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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This XKCD describes what I feel like right now.

I cannot figure out how to get the iPaq to reliably connect to Alcyone. In fact, at this point it won't connect at all. Plugging it in does nothing whatever.

It occurred to me that I somehow got mixed versions of the drivers, so the thing to do was to uninstall everything and start from scratch. Only problem is that the uninstallers... don't. Or not completely. So stupid me, I tried manually removing some stuff. And it didn't get reinstalled afterwards.

It occurred to me that what I really needed to do was to roll back from backups and start clean, using the backup from Wednesday morning just before the iPaq was delivered.

But when I tried to do a restore on Alcyone using the special boot disk, it wouldn't. It couldn't find Deneb. I remember running into this before.

There are three blocks of IPs reserved for LAN use. One of them is 10.*.*.*. One of them is 192.168.*.* which is what I use on my LAN. I can't remember what the third one is, but last time I figured out that it's what the restore CD expects to be used. Since Deneb's IP is 192.168.1.2 the restore CD couldn't find it.

I need to get this fixed. What I need to do is to find that other block (anyone know what it is?) and change my whole LAN over to use it.

But given that I couldn't roll back Alcyone, then it occurred to me that maybe I could get the interface software installed on Arcturus, the XP machine I use for torrents. Nope.

On Arcturus I got caught in Adobe hell. Seems that the installer needs Flash 8+. I tried installing Flash, but in order to do that Adobe insisted on installing its download manager first, and that process locked up. I have no idea why.

I tried installing it using FireFox, and succeeded. Only problem is that doing so didn't also install Flash for IE, and it looks like the installation disk is using the IE common libraries in order to reach Flash. The fact that Firefox had it didn't help; the installation disk wouldn't run.

It's not like I need to sync multiple times per day. In fact, the only reason I need it is that it's the only way to get software installed onto the iPaq.

Fortunately, I did manage to get TCPMP over there before everything went sour, so it can still be used as a remote video playing device. But without the sync software running on something, the device is crippled.

The make tree keeps getting bigger. I don't know if I can deal with this.

UPDATE: I found a place on Microsoft's web site where I could download the installer for ActiveSync 4.5. Turns out that the version which is on the CD won't run on XP anyway. So I downloaded and installed ActiveSync 4.5 onto Arcturus and... it can't see the iPaq.

The iPaq doesn't even show up as undifferentiated external storage, the way my camera does. Irrespective of any fancy drivers, that's supposed to work. It's almost as if the USB port on the iPaq is dead or something.

I also downloaded the latest version of Windows Mobile Device Center and installed it on Alcyone. No effect at all.

I have another idea. Very, very unlikely to make any difference, though. I'm using the cable they provided, which connects to a big wide connector on the iPaq. The iPaq also has a mini-USB connector, and next time I go to the store I'm going to buy a cable which can connect to that, and see if it makes any difference.

Very unlikely, but miracles have happened.

I'm near to sending it back, though. I didn't spend $380 on this just to get a hand-held video player.

UPDATE: Nope, the mini-USB doesn't make any difference.

I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that the USB interface on the iPaq has died. When it's plugged in to either computer I can't see any indication that there's anything there.

Even if nothing else works, when it's plugged in it should show up in the explorer as an attached storage device, like a thumb drive or like my camera. It doesn't even do that -- on either machine.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Vista at 11:00 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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Just some random stuff, in part so I myself can find them.

The user interface of the iPaq is enough different from Windows to really confuse me. It's not like the Jornada, which was WinCE. WinCE really did follow standard Windows conventions, but this OS, whatever it's called, changes things.

One thing is that the boxed X icon in the upper right corner of the screen doesn't terminate the current app. It's equivalent to "shove into the background", but it leaves the app running. There's a frame you can get into which shows all the currently running apps, and permits you to kill them, and yesterday afternoon I drove myself nuts trying to find it, and couldn't. Just now I did again.

On the default screen, one of the lines shows the amount of free memory in various places, plus has a mini-control for the screen brightness. If you double-click that,  one of the tabs is "Running Programs". That's where you go to turn off Windows Media Player. That's also where you go to make sure that ActiveSync is running, because if it isn't, you can't connect to the PC with the USB cable.

I also leave TCPMP running. That way I can use the file explorer to look at the SD card (which is where I'm storing anime for the time being) and double-click a file and have it start playing immediately.

Watching an anime on this device is nicer than I expected it to be. In physical terms it's still a rather small screen, but not intolerably so. Using it with headphones the sound is very good. And when I was sitting on my couch, it was in some ways better than using the big computer.

There are a lot of cooling fans here on the computer desk, between Regulus and Deneb and Alcyone, and that creates a kind of background of white noise, what I'm used to calling a "noise floor". When I was sitting on the couch I was far enough away to not have that, and some of the silent parts of the sound track really were silent, like they ought to be. If I watched it in my bedroom it would be even better yet.

Kayle, I would definitely appreciate hearing how you have networking set up.

Toren writes to tell me that his experience  is that AllToAVI is the only reasonable tool for what I'm doing. It certainly works for me, albeit not all that rapidly. I discovered that when you choose the "bits per second" value you aren't limited to just the ones in the pull-down menu. The highest choice there was 1000 kbits per second, and at least for the first pass I'd like it to be bigger than that. So I manually entered 2000, but I might use even higher values in future. (2000 yields a file that's about 370M, and presumably minimizes additional codec artifacts.)

He also mentioned that it doesn't saturate his dual-CPU machine. I took a look at the task manager, and what's happening here is that AllToAVI itself is saturating one of my four CPUs, and something called "mencoder" is saturating a second one. So why not him? He hasn't answered me back yet, but I conjecture that he was manipulating files on an external USB drive, and was probably transfer-rate limited. I've been doing my conversions using one of the internal HDs on this computer, which are fast SATA. (Alcyone has two 500G drives.)

This thing is a Barbie Doll. I'm already beginning to lust after some extras. A desk stand for it, for example, would be really nice. I could permanently wire it to USB and the power brick and not have all the damned cables getting in the way constantly.

I need to come up with a name. "Steven's PDA" (which was what the setup program defaulted to) is really boring. Maybe I should name it "Uiharu". (Except that's not an astronomical name.) I suppose I could use Pollux, but that's a snore.

I am tempted to go with Uiharu. I'm not obligated to remain consistent in my naming.

UPDATE: This is what it looks like when playing video:

Except that the flash makes the screen look more washed out than it really is.

UPDATE: Interesting. There's a "product tour" app on this unit. One of the pages offers some physical specifications. The weight is 188.5 grams with battery. The OS is Windows Mobile 6.0. The Wifi (which I'm not using) is 802.11 b/g. The Bluetooth (which I'm also not using) is V2.0+EDR. The battery is rated 2200 mAh.

UPDATE: The main frustration right now is that I can't get connected reliably. When I plug the cable in, it ought to synchronize immediately. ActiveSync is running on the iPaq and the sync program is running, but they ignore each other, and I can't figure out why.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Vista at 07:42 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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The 32G CF I ordered just got delivered. I'd forgotten how large CFs are. But more to the point, it turns out the iPaq can hold one CF and one SD at the same time, and use them both. So the SD I already had will continue to be of use. That gives me 64G of storage, should I need it.

Since a CF has a parallel interface, is it faster than SD, which is serial? I'm guessing that the answer is "not significantly" because the limiting factor is the speed of the memory chips.

UPDATE: And now to try to fill up some of that space. Wonderduck recommended AllToAVI and VirtualDub as ways of changing files to something I might be able to play.

VirtualDub looks like it understands a bazillion container formats, but MKV is conspicuous by its absence. AllToAVI does understand that one but it seems that it wants to make two passes. But let's see how it goes.

UPDATE: I may be forced to actually read the documentation for AllToAVI (gasp!). I'm using the first episode of RealBout High School as a test, mainly because it was ripped from the R1 DVD and has two audio and three subtitle tracks plus being narrow screen.

The first two times I tried converting it, the conversion process bailed out half way through. Oddly, it didn't give me any error message; it just quit. The resulting fine played fine, except that the audio and video were hugely out of sync.

I decided that the problem was that I'd said it was 29.997 fps. So now I'm redoing it at 24.99etc fps and we'll see how it goes.

The good news? It got the right audio track and the right subtitle track and converted the subtitle to a hardsub, all of which is exactly what I want.

If I can get this one working, next is the first episode of Macademi Wasshoi. That one is wide screen, and I'll want to see if it works converting to 640*360.

UPDATE: AllToAVI is threaded and it is fully utilizing two of my four CPUs. It's still not very fast, but that's OK. It's set up to make batch conversions possible, so I could set it up in the evening and let it run overnight.

UPDATE: The way it looks now is that the reason you have to make two passes is that the first one is about simplification. The output remains H.264, but the way I'm setting it up, the output has hard subs and a single audio file. Then you process that one again through the program, and this time you can change the codecs.

It reminds me of the rabbit's digestive system.

I just recoded that other one, and the new file now shows as MPEG-4 (XviD) for video and MP3 for audio. And now to see if it'll play on the iPaq.

UPDATE: And it works beautifully with TCPMP. I think we have a winner.

One of the physical controls on the iPaq is an 8-way rocker switch. When I have the display in landscape mode and am running a video in TCPMP, then one direction on the rocker switch controls the volume. The other does 5-second skips forward or backward. The center button is play/pause.

Which is really nice, especially when you're in full screen mode.

UPDATE: So how much did the battery get drained by watching one anime episode? Beginning at 100%, when I was done it was 94%. Which means I could watch hours of video without running out of battery power. (Assuming that the readout is linear.)

And since the file I played was 200 MB, I could fit many hours of video on the 32G SD.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Vista at 10:58 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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I'm trying to get networking up so that I can try to run Windows Update.

Using IE on the iPaq, I can load the default page on my server here, which is also the gateway to the internet. That means I'm into my LAN. Unfortunately, though, no matter what URL I use, I always get that same page.

The key seems to be to set up a proxy, but I'm not just sure what I should be using for that. Probably it should be the IP of the server (192.168.1.1). And I bet the reason I'm getting that one page is because it's trying to use port 80 as the proxy. I'm not really sure what else to set though.

UPDATE: Actually, I can get to everything on my server (Regulus). But Regulus is what I get no matter what base URL I use. I'm not getting past Regulus to get out to the internet, and the port is almost certainly the reason why.

UPDATE: Damn. I don't have a clue as to what I'm supposed to do to get networking to work.

I could enable wifi and leech off my anonymous neighbors -- there are something like 15 within reach -- but that's dishonest. And highly insecure.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Vista at 07:46 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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It turns out that in order for the iPaq to connect to the PC using its USB cable, the iPaq has to be running the sync program. I was rather surprised to find out that hitting the "X" icon in the upper right corner of the screen of an app doesn't shut the program down. All it does is remove focus.

Anyway, ActiveSync is an application in the start menu on the iPaq, and you have to run it. Once that was going, it connected up just fine.

I have a 32G SD sitting right here, and just for experimentation purposes I tried putting it in the iPaq. Which ignored it. What with the PC ignoring the iPaq and the iPaq ignoring the SD I was wondering if I'd fried something.

Then it occurred to me that I had formatted the SD with NTFS, which the iPaq probably doesn't understand. So I reformatted it with FAT32, and the iPaq loaded it up just fine. It looks empty, of course, but the iPaq now reports 30 gigabytes of free space. I think I'll transfer one of the Nanoha A's MKV's over now and see if it'll play.

UPDATE: It's got a voice recorder built into it. Anyone care to hear how my voice sounds? Here you go.

UPDATE: My Nanoha A's rip is an MP4 file. When I put one of them in the sync directory, ActiveSync wouldn't transfer it.

It's possible to directly access the iPaq as an attached storage device, and when I tried to copy the MP4 file to it, I got told that it was a file format that the iPaq probably couldn't use. I suspect that the version of Windows Media Player in the iPaq isn't able to handle MP4. I'll try sending an MKV but I bet that won't work either.

The transfer ain't damned fast. It's a 330MB file and it's taking like 5 minutes. It'd probably be faster to unplug the SD and directly plug it into Alcyone for the transfer.

UPDATE: Well, crap.

I copied three video files onto the SD, and plugged it in. Media Player offered to scan the card looking for files, and it ignored all three. Looks like it simply doesn't understand MP4 or MKV.

UPDATE: Someone here recommended TCPMP, so I just tried it. And it's zero for three on the files I'm trying to play. On the MKV's it tells me it doesn't have a codec for H.264. On my MP4 file, it says:

"MPEG4 AAC Audio decoder not included! It was removed from the official install package because of intellectual propertyy considerations."

The Nanoha MP4 plays, but without sound (because of that error). Looks like it does understand MP3, but that's not what I used when I ripped it.

What a pain.

In three weeks Funimation is going to release a new version of Nanoha A's and I'm going to buy it. I already have the DVDs but when they were originally mastered the audio for the first three eps was in mono. I'm hoping Funi remastered and fixed that.

I can rip it again and try to use MP3 for audio and see if that works. In the mean time I'm going to try using HandBrake to convert one of my MKVs into an MP4 with MP3 audio.

heh heh heh as if...

UPDATE: Simply amazing. Handbrake won't let me recode the audio.

UPDATE: I can't believe this. It shouldn't be that difficult.

I have a program I bought called "CloneDVDMobile" which is expressly for purposes of taking DVDs and turning the video on them into files which can be played on mobile devices like this iPaq. I tried encoding the first ep of Realbout Highschool using a preset for Windows Mobile Phone, which isn't exactly the same but is identical. It wouldn't let me choose any resolution higher than 480*360.

I tried using the a la carte choices to get what I wanted, and when I finally kicked it in, ffmpeg tossed an incomprehensible error. (CloneDVDMobile is a graphic front end for ffmpeg.)

The preset worked, but it chose the English dub. When I tried changing it to the Japanese sound track, ffmpeg barfed.

It turns out you can't install Windows Movie Maker without getting a whole slew of other shit, like Microsoft's version of live chat, which autostarts and can't be terminated from its own GUI. (If you hit the "kill" icon it minimizes itself to the tray instead.) I killed it with the task manager, and eliminated its autostart. Movie Maker is part of "Windows Live", and the installer is all-or-nothing. (Reminds me of the way that the QuickTime installer automagically installs the iTunes store.)

I'm trying to use Movie Maker to create a video file, but I'm pretty sure it's not going to be any good. It's been running for 15 minutes and says 0% completed.

Oh, and it refuses to minimize itself. When I use the grand-master "show me the desktop" tool, which minimizes everything, it re-opens itself a few seconds later. What an utter piece of shit!

I think it's time to bag it.

This shouldn't be this difficult!

UPDATE: Ah, ain't that cute?

Those pop up all the time when I'm trying to synchronize.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Vista at 04:08 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
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I'm increasingly seeing applications which assume that I have a persistent network connection.

Flash 10 (aka Flash CS4) is one of the worst offenders. I hit the help frame for it yesterday, and my browser popped open. In Flash 9 there was a considerable user manual stored locally, but as of Flash 10 apparently they keep it on their servers, and you get into it through your persistent network connection.

And good luck to you if you don't have one.

Of course, Adobe is legendary for being user surly, and doing things for their convenience, not yours.

I didn't like the new one. The one for Flash 9 you could search for keywords, and navigate easily through the pages, but the online one wasn't so nice.

Anyway, it looks as if Windows Mobile plus the HP goodies all assume something like a persistent connection, too. They didn't give me a user manual with the product, and I can't find one installed on my computer either. I think maybe if I want to find stuff out I have to get to HP's web server, but I'm not sure about that yet.

Auto-update is another plague. For testing purposes earlier, I used Windows Media Player for the first time on Alcyone earlier this afternoon. You have to go through an ungodly  amount of setup before you can play a file for the first time, and most of it amounts to saying, No I don't want WMP to act like iStore thank you not very much. No, I don't want to make an account in the Microsoft media store. No, I don't want to set up playlists. No, I don't want...

One of the choices was how often WMP would phone home to see if there were updates. I think the choices were once a day, once a week, and once a month. There wasn't any "don't do it" choice.

Another app I use quite a lot (Sothink SWF Decompiler) is set to check for updates weekly. Fortunately, when the timer expires it doesn't directly get online. It just pops a nag, which if I say "yes", then phones home. But it's still annoying; I can't turn it off, and the longest duration I can choose is weekly.

Hey, guys, whose computer is this, anyway? Stop shoving things in my face! Stop phoning home without my permission! And stop hosting essential pieces of my apps on your computers instead of on mine!

UPDATE: I was wrong: the iPaq documentation is on the CD.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Vista at 03:20 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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