I've succumbed to the Micro Blogging movement. I figure it's a little easier to keep people posted on various topics by posting a tweet rather than adding a new blog post for small items of information or links. Fell free to follow @allmybrain. I added a Twitter widget to WordPress as well, which seems to work just fine.

I've terminated my sponsoredreviews.com account. It was a fun experiment, and I did indeed receive some cash on the side, but it's just not worth the time I guess. I don't think any readers of this site are actually are interested in the reviews anyway. I tried to write them in a way that was at least somewhat educational, or pointed out how I thought the service could be useful. It seemed to me however that the only people ever purchasing reviews on the site were ISPs or email hosting services. I think readers AllMyBrain.com are advanced enough to find an email provider that works for them and are also probably happy enough with their ISP. On occasion, I would see something I thought actually applied to the community and bid on it. None of those advertisers ever accepted though. Recently, SR raised the amount they take from the advertisers. I figured it was good enough time toss in the hat and focus my energy elsewhere.

Switching hosting providers this weekend. I'm hoping to have a little bit more uptime than my old server was providing.

Let me know if you see any 404 errors or stuff that I haven't transferred over from the old server.

Thanks

Tom from mostynwebsolutions.com has created an ASP YUI Image Uploader backend. Direct Download: YuiExample.zip.

The YUI Image Upload posts on this site contain details on implementing the front end and editor if you're just getting into this.

Thanks Tom.

So a while back we purchased a JVC Everio HD camcorder. I'll skip the commentary on whether or not that is a good idea. For me, the relevant issue is: how am I supposed to copy the MTS (AVCHD H.264) encoded files to my mac and get them in a format that I can import into iMovie and edit.

Here are a few things I discovered on my journey the last few months:

1. VLC can play MTS files. I wasn't able to get the stream converter to export them properly to mov files though. Perhaps there is some setting I missed somewhere, but the formats I tried either had messed up audio or Quicktime couldn't open them.
2. ffmpeg is probably a good option. I couldn't get it to work though. I had the same problems with it that I had with VLC. I couldn't seem to pick correct encodings to get the audio/video to stay in sync.
3. iMovie can import video directly from the camera. If you plug the camera in and import the movies directly into iMovie, that works but you end up with mov files that are larger on your hard drive. Also, if you copy the camera drive in it's entirety to a dmg image, and then mount the dmg file, iMovie can pretend like that is a camera too, and still import the files. I didn't want this though since I didn't want to make dmg files every time I want to import and I didn't want to store mov files.
4. Handbrake does the job nicely. You can queue up a bunch of files and choose a format to convert them too. I found converting to the preset Apple TV settings works pretty well for importing into iMovie.

Hope this helps someone. Skip all those ffmpeg front-end rip off programs that want to charge you money. They are GPL violating programs whose owners are attempting to make a quick buck off something you can (and should be able to) do for free.

Do you like gitk? I find it almost invaluable in merging, branching, looking at old revisions, diffs, etc. I find it annoying that git log is hard to glean the same information. I searched a round a bit and found that git log is quite configurable as to what it outputs. Here is a simple alias that outputs the log with some of the data you'd find by viewing gitk.

 
git config alias.logk 'log --graph --pretty=format:"%h %ae: %s" --decorate --abbrev-commit'
 

You can add --global so you don't have to make a logk alias for every repository.
You can also read the man page for "git log" and change the format to suite your liking.