Category: Product Reviews

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Geeky/Programming Product Reviews

HowTo: Edit .MOV QuickTime Files

Well, I did a little research, and probably the best bet (sadly) is Quicktime Pro. So I put out the 30 bucks and got it. Was able to crop my video, and compress it (from 250 MB to 9 MB!!)

Quick how to crop a mov in Quicktime pro

1) open Quicktime and the movie
2) Window->show Movie Properties
3) highlight the “Video Track”
4) click on Visual Settings tab
5) make black square with white border gif in paint (white will be deleted when masked)
6) “choose” button, find gif and load to that square, extract and your movie should be cropped
7) extract audio and video tracks

Quick how to compress a video in Quicktime pro

1) File->Extract
2) choose a compression
3) export

It seems to be Apple just doesn’t make it very intuitive to use Quicktime Pro, I just hate the interface. Oh well, it worked.

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Life Product Reviews

Starbucks – 2nd Office, and Barfly Mag

I have really never been to a Starbucks before, aka “I hate coffee”. Well, there are tons of them around my apt, and since I have T-Mobile hotspot on my phone plan, I might as well use it. Today I ventured out to a nearby Starbucks, laptop in hand.

Since I don’t really like coffee, I decided to try their new Orange Creme Frappuccino. Whoa, good. But $4.05! It was pretty empty when I got here, and I had some issues getting on the Internet. Not sure, I had them reboot the router, and it worked. Pretty nice, air conditioning, music in the background, people sitting around, and I can get work done at the same time. There are power outlets scattered around (not enough in my opinion), and since it was empty when I came, I got a table close to an electrical outlet.

Since moving to Portland, I am contracting, so I have been working out of my apt, so now, I have a ton of “2nd offices” two or three within a few blocks of my apt, depending if I want to walk East of West. Next, to find some good local shops with reliable Wi-Fi as well.

And for the after work Internet fix – bars with Wi-Fi. There is this awesome site, Barfly Magazine, that lets you search on location and amenities at pubs around PDX, and here is the search for Wi-Fi. If you want air-conditioning, etc, you can filter it all out there, pretty sweet.

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Geeky/Programming Product Reviews

Data Recovery – Where Did My Files Go?

Right before I left for Portland, I was moving some files around on my USB hard drive, and I noticed something was wacked, like 100 GB was in use, but I couldn’t see any files! They had disappeared.

Well today I finally got around to recovering the files. I tried 3-4 different products at first. All of them let you download a demo and see what you can recover. The one I have used before – OnTrack – doesn’t even work on Vista, so that was out the window.

I finally came across one called GetDataBack. It showed EVERYTHING that I was missing. The others showed partials or not even some folders I had, just weird. GetDataBack is nice too, once you do a scan and it finds everything, you can save that recovery session, close the program, and come back, and you don’t have to rescan everything again. My scan took 3.5 hours to complete, so this was a nice feature.

The hardest part about everything is just moving data around, I didn’t have enough free space on my main drive to restore everything at once, so I had to restore some, and then move it over the network to my other machine, then go back and restore more, rinse, repeat.

GetDataBack set me back 70$, but it was worth it to get all my music, documents and photos back. I can tell you this, once I am done moving everything around, I am backing up everything online.

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Product Reviews

PGE: Portland General Electric – Online

Today I set up my electricity at my apt. Well, one thing that was different than the past was that I did it all online. Instead of calling and waiting for 30 minutes on hold and giving out all my info, I filled it in online and submitted a start request. Pretty easy and convenient. Being new to Portland, and coming from Minnesota, this is the first time dealing with anyone but Xcel Energy. Portland General Electric seems pretty cool, and they sponsor the local baseball field (PGE Park – but I suppose, Xcel has the Xcel Energy Center :))

PGE Park

Overall – a good experience.

http://www.portlandgeneral.com/

 

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Geeky/Programming Product Reviews

New Windows Live Writer (Beta 2)

I just installed the updated Windows Live Writer  – man this is the best tool I have seen in a long time. It really makes it easy to publish blog posts. If I would have had it like 3 years ago, man 🙂

 

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Product Reviews

Open Pandora rocks

I have listened to Pandora here and there for a while, and it is ok, I just hate having a browser open, and I wanted to integrate my Last.FM profile info and put the song in MSN Windows Live Messenger. Pandora on the web just wasn’t doing it for me.

I heard about Open Pandora a while ago but never checked it out, but decided to the other day, wow – cool application.

I recommend that you check it out!

Open Pandora: http://openpandora.googlepages.com/

 

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Product Reviews

FeedDemon 2.5

Fired up FeedDemon today and it told me there was an update to 2.5 – I went for it. Seems like a lot of nice improvements

One that really stuck out was the Dinosaurs: Feeds that haven’t updated in 30 days. I removed a ton of feeds that haven’t updated in over like a year.

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Product Reviews

USB Enclosures are Cool!

I received my USB enclosure I ordered this week. Goodbye old 300 MHz server eating up juice and raising my electric bill, and hello new external hard drive on my desk, that I can turn on and off when I need. An extra 80 GB – nice addition.

Here is the enclosure I bought.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817155224

 

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Geeky/Programming Product Reviews

Mobile GPS: Google Maps for Mobile vs. Live Search for Mobile

This evening, I hooked up my Pharos Bluetooth adapter with my Microsoft GPS and synced it to my T-Mobile Dash. I hopped in my Vibe and cruised around town, so I could test out the GPS capabilities. In the past, I have used Pocket Streets and Trips (I don’t think newer versions of Streets and Trips have the Pocket Version anymore though, I have an older version – I have used the laptop version with the GPS, it works well), and Virtual Earth Mobile. As I don’t have those installed currently, I decided to try two new products. Google Maps for Mobile and Live Search for Mobile.

I’ll start off by just saying, that getting the Bluetooth GPS working can be tricky. I paired it with my Dash, then set up a COM port so I could utilize it within applications.

Live Search for Mobile was pretty easy to set up. In the settings, there is a place to pick the COM port, I chose the one I set up, and then went to the maps, and chose an option for “Center on GPS”. In a few seconds, I was watching myself (as a little red arrow) on the screen. The road maps are good, slightly out of date, but the aerial maps are really bad. Black and white even. On to the next test.

Google Maps for Mobile: the maps are nice. The aerial maps are really good for Central MN, but the thing is, as much as I tried, I couldn’t get the GPS to start within the application. There must be something funny with the way it looks for the GPS, so in all reality, I didn’t test much with GMM.

Now that I have my GPS paired, I want to get mologogo working again, but their site is down, something with a DNS issue. Has been down for a week or so. Once I get that up, maybe I will make a page here again or a sidebar widget that shows my current location. The one goofy thing is, the charger for the Bluetooth unit is kind of wacky, if I remember, my PSP charger worked better, I will have to dig into that. My car has 112V plugin, so that is cool.

I can’t wait for the day when you can get 3D GPS like Virtual Earth 3D or Google Earth, or even Bird’s Eye on your mobile, sync’d with GPS, you will never get lost.

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Geeky/Programming Product Reviews

Orb 2.0: Trying it out again

A long time ago, I tried out Orb right when it came out, and it was cool, seemed buggy. Yesterday I installed Orb 2.0, flashy new Ajaxy type site now, and a few more features. Still doesn’t work well over mobile data. I have to turn on Wi-Fi on my phone to get any good speeds/buffering. Even then the videos/movies audio is always ahead of the video. Listening to mp3’s over it is pretty good though.

Just another tool for the media toolbelt.

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