Massive movie conversion

Xilisoft DVD Ripper is a pretty awesome tool. I ripped hundreds of DVDs to my hard drive over the past couple of months and now I’m converting them to MP4 using DVD Ripper. It reads ISO and VOB files so you can simply drag and drop the entire movie. Plus, it can do multiple movies at the same time. CloneDVDMobile is only able to convert one movie at a time. That machine will be running at full speed using all four cores to tear through those movies. Soon, my NCIS collection will be ready to watch on my iPad. AVI is a great video format, but it seems that MP4 is becoming far more usable and universal.

Bridge over troubled water

So that’s what a mud bog looks like. The recent rain has created a mud pit at our property. It tried to swallow a Lowe’s truck the other day and it tried to eat me today. The clay makes it a ridiculous mess. My rudimentary attempt at covering it with rocks, trees, hope and dreams may not be enough to keep us from getting stuck again. Looks like we’ll need to fill it in and build some sort of bridge to get over this muddy patch. This Carolina Clay is some wet and sticky business.

A few minutes with Artisteer 4.x

Spent some time with Artisteer. There are some parts I like, and others I really don’t. I don’t like that it doesn’t start out with a standard blog layout. It also tries to make it look like a magazine with columns and blocks and the text flowing in all manner of chaotic ways. I just want the standard look and feel of a blog. I like the way it used to look and these new ones are a little too flat for my liking. I’m sure it can all be changed and tinkered with, it will just take time. I don’t like this idea of jamming as much text onto the page as possible and turning the page into a treasure hunt as you try to find the next block of text. It might be good for SEO, but it makes for a damn hard read. I will update my sites using 3.x and then tinker with 4.x as we […]

The first day of Fall

The season has changed, quite literally. Of course this means Halloween, my favorite holiday, is right around the corner. Time to carve, blow up and set fire to some pumpkins. Epic orange destruction will soon be close at hand. I’ve also discovered I need a Polaris RZR XP. That is an awesome piece of machinery. Sure, it’s a glorified golf cart, but it’s a 4 wheel drive golf cart with massive independent suspension and a top speed of 40+ mph. I should take that to the grocery store and cause some urban havoc. "If I can just find a parking space!!!"

Let us prepare for iOS6

Time to fire up iTunes and backup the devices before iOS6 comes along. It’s the not the OS that’s the problem, it’s all the software updates that come along. Sure, they get update and work on iOS6, but that doesn’t mean they keep working for the previous OS. My original iPads won’t update to iOS6 and the last time all the apps updated a bunch of them broke and wouldn’t work on the previous OS. Nothing says fun like an app you can’t use anymore. Time to make the backups…