I have varying degrees of success when syncing Nokia phones to my Mac. Usually, everything works well as long as you have a phone that’s been out for at least 2 months. However, there was always one issue that wouldn’t go away: all-day events in iCal turned into 00:00-23:59 meetings in Nokia Calendar. These are hardly the same thing. Luckily I found Ali Rantakari’s blog post on just this subject.
Since everyone seems to use their own little codec for video you can’t always view them on your macintosh straight away. I had this problem with my father’s Casio digital camera movie files. It appears that others have complained and Casio has listened. The download and installation instructions can be found here:
Casio AVI Codec for Macintosh
If you have QuickTime PRO it is easy to export the video into a more widely supported format before posting it.
A friend of mine, James Marzano, directed me to a Tutorial on Fake Model Photography. The idea is to take photos of real life and manipulate them in PhotoShop so that your mind thinks it is a picture of a miniature model. I haven’t tried it yet but James did and his first photo is shown below. It’s of his kitchen and is really convincing, don’t you agree?
The short answer: Use Quicktime Pro and export it to a DV Stream.
My Sony DSC-T1 camera is fantastic and I cannot recommend one enough. It starts up almost instantly, takes great quality pictures and movies and is so slim that you usually forget it’s in your pocket. However, I ran into my first problem last week. I had taken a trip to Korea and wanted to make a DVD of it. The pictures were effortless and the slideshows made in less than an hour but I couldn’t figure out how to get the videos on the DVD with sound. Every format I tried either wouldn’t import into iDVD or it would import but without sound. I finally stumbled upon Jim Heid’s answer for solving the same problem in iMovie. He recommends a free tool called MPEG StreamClip which works quite well if you don’t have a QuickTime Pro key. So on to the details.
The video and audio options were quite new to me. I found that 48KHz locked audio worked quite well. I’m not sure exactly what locked audio is so if anybody can let me know I would appreciate it!
I hope this helps anybody making their first jump into DVD authoring. Now, take a look at one of my videos of what real sushi is like: 
You may know that I’m not a huge sports fan so a post on the topic might be a bit surprising. I don’t follow football regularaly but it’s pretty difficult to not be excited about the World Cup games when you live in any country in the world but the US. Businesses close down. Pubs fill up. Faces are painted. Everyone is wearing sports gear but you’re not surrounded by chavs. Overall it’s just a great time.
I thought that I would be able to treat myself and some mates to matches in high definition television for the first time. We could see two out of the three matches in glorious detail. Only one had to be watched in the blocky and blurry resolution that’s been around since the 1950s. Can you guess which one? Of course it was the England match.
We still managed to have a great time and cheer on England to a win. We had a great BBQ and I can’t really complain. From tomorrow I’m looking in to why I can’t get BBC in HD and I hope to have it all sorted out as soon as possible. In time for the USA match tomorrow is doubtful, for the Korean match on Tuesday is possible but I’ll be at work and Thursday we’ll probably watch it in the pub if we can find a place to stand. So I guess I don’t have to be in too much of a hurry about it.
Americans are already familiar with the improvements that highdef broadcasts give you but the UK is only launching service now. You can get it on Sky and a mere 450 of us are trialling the broadcast in London. I felt lucky when I was selected but the wind fell out of those sails on yesterday. Hopefully I’ll be able to watch at least one England match at full resolution!
Come on England!
It’s only fair to provide some impressions of the high definition TV (HDTV) service. At first we weren’t that impressed but I think it’s because we were just too picky and looking for very specific details. We settled in to the first half and were quite shocked when we switched back to the standard definition TV (SDTV) during halftime as a comparison. All of the sudden, everything looked blocky and blurry. We really couldn’t believe that we had to watch the England game like that! It is something that you just get used to after a while and forget how good it is. What I could have done without was watching the sweat pour off of Jim Rosenthal’s face. At the start of the halftime broadcast he was dry as a bone but mere minutes in and he was dripping wet. We went back to the SDTV broadcast and you couldn’t notice a thing at all. Announcers must hate HDTV!
Now, for the Americans who might not realise that a game with contestants from all around the world is actually happening, you can view the BBC World Cup 2006 Schedule. USA is ranked quite highly this year so you should tune in! The games are being broadcast in HDTV to the US too as far as I know.
Date: 25 Dec 2006