Updates and Ads

Today, I released a free, ad-based version of my WeGoIgo app, known on the market as "WeGoIgo Lite." I know I love free apps myself, and don't mind wading through ads, so I thought I would bring that option to users of my own app. The users of the paid version of my app will always have precedence over those of the free version (They are paying money, after all!), but I don't plan on crippling the free version by removing features-- hopefully this is good news to everyone. I do reserve the right to include games/go problem sets ONLY in the paid version, as a thank you-- but I haven't gotten to that point-- I'll let you know when I do. To clarify, the paid version is still on the market, and still is ad-free. The "Lite" version is must to give people another option.

In other news, I've released several updates since the original upload, with a few changes, several fixes, and a couple of new fixes. 

Full change log until now after the break.

WeGoIgo

I just released my first Android app onto the Market today, called WeGoIgo. I wrote a pretty detailed description about it on the Market, so I won't waste too much space here, but I wanted to put this here as a placeholder. Any future posts about the app will go under the tag WeGoIgo. Anyone who came here from the link on the Market may feel free to comment on this (or future) posts with feedback.

Screenshots after the break 

Jump breaks? What?

Long time no see! Happy way-belated New Year's and whatnot.

So I just discovered that blogger finally supports jump breaks. This is the stuff that some news sites/blogs have where they say "More after the break" and there's a link with "Read more" or something. I've always wanted that for this blog, because coding stuff tends to take more page real estate than I want it to, and now I can. So, maybe I'll post more. Who knows.

I've been up to various things since the last I posted. Some more latte, lots of coding.... In particular, I've been working on my own custom forum software. Its purpose is not to be more sophisticated or even as sophisticated as, say, phpBB, but to be lightweight, quick, and with nice features. It's tailored to forum-based role playing, which I do with my friends. To this end, it loads new replies to topics in real time (more or less) and supports drafts of posts, so you never have to worry about losing your post again!

I also finally went through and abstracted the network stuff from my series tracker, so I'm one step away from freeing the thing from my old, crappy TCP library which it had been entrenched in. (Also, it should be a bit more efficient and quick, though not noticably so.)

I'm sure there's more, but that's enough for now

PS: The more on the jump breaks here: http://buzz.blogger.com/2009/09/you-might-as-well-jump.html

Latte art 29 & 31

These are fairly old, but I'd forgotten to post them, and randomly decided to go ahead and do that.

Enjoy!



Latte art 29 -- Rosetta

Latte art 27

Poured 27 Sept 09 -- Rosetta.

I finally have my camera, so after a long break I was able to snap a shot of some latte art. Great timing, because this might be my best one yet :)

Enjoy!

Start your Mediatomb transcode where you want!

One issue with using Mediatomb and transcoding to watch videos on the PS3 is that, if your network cuts out, the video stops, and you have to start all over again. Oh yeah, and Mediatomb doesn't support fast-forwarding for transcoded files.

Luckily, both programs I've been using to transcode support a "start offset" setting. For VLC, the commandline flag is "--start-time" and for mencoder it's "-ss".

Sure, we could edit our transcoder script every time we want to start somewhere other than the beginning, but that's a pain in the butt, especially if it's in a write-protected directory and you have to sudo.

Mediatomb + Mencoder

In my previous post on Mediatomb, I was using VLC to transcode the videos with the subtitles attached. This works the vast majority of the time, but sometimes the subtitles contain non-standard symbols, such as the curly quotes (They are the ones that are curved inward toward the text, unlike the standard quote symbol which is strictly vertical; I'm not sure what these are actually called) or an ellipses character, that you might see when using Microsoft Word. Unfortunately, VLC doesn't seem to support these characters (at least, my version doesn't) and instead of silently ignoring them, it leaves off any line containing them. Consequently, some shows end up with lots of un-subtitled parts, which can be a problem if I watch a Korean show, for example, as I don't know much more than the very basics.

What I'd been doing was using a script to temporarily strip out these characters into a separate file, keeping a copy of the original to be replaced fifteen or so seconds later, once the fixed file had been read. This works pretty well, but then of course you're often missing quotes, apostrophes and ellipses. Furthermore, this also sometimes failed miserably, resulting in the subtitle file being completely erased. In addition, I came across several videos that VLC simply refused to play.

My solution? Switch to mencoder. It was temporary at first, but now that I've uncovered the subtitle options and gotten them to display as I like, I'm much happier. So far, I've had no problems with videos not getting playing, and it even reads the characters that VLC choked on!

Enough talking, let's get down to business!