Also, went down to Orlando last weekend and pulled a HUGE car trailer home. It’s super neat; the tongue swings out of the way and you can open both the front and the back (Allowing you to drive all the way through it).

State Fair is this week; I hope to make an appearance.

That’s about it. My life is pretty boring. C’est la vie… du passionne d’informatique.

I figured the best place to start would be this website.  I had some ads on it before, but I don’t want to promote all of those things.  I also don’t want there to be a chance that something can’t be read..

I’m a liar, a thief, and an adulterer.  I’ve screwed up in life more times and I can count.  I’ve screwed up so bad a couple of times that I may never see the end to the consequences.  Despite all of this, I’m forgiven.

Among my friends, I know I have a few good, Christian friends.  Theres also the few I’m not sure about, a couple that could care less, and one that’s used logic to disprove everything about Christianity to himself.   When I sit down to think about it, religion is the one thing we never really talk about it.  In fact the closest we get is by mocking the awful productions on the “Inspiration” channel.

It’s something that I really should do.  I’ve found first hand, time and time again, that it’s far easier to be pulled down from atop a pedestal than to lift someone up on to it.  I’m beginning to understand what I’m supposed to do, but doing it is a completely different story.

Yeah, it’s taken forever, but I’ve been hard at work on some other websites.   Be sure to check out YourH3RO.com and We Void Warranties.

Other than that… theres not much going on. I’ll be sure to update this more often now that it’s back online.

Doing this is a bit of a gray area, legally. I’m pretty sure it hasn’t been deemed “illegal” but it also hasn’t been deemed “legal”. Just an FYI.

So lets say you’re a movie buff with a wall to wall bookshelf filled with DVDs.. or even a movie wimp with just a few DVDs. Either way, they take up space. Space that could be put to better use by things like… Action Figures, Blenders, Elephant Statues or pretty much anything else.

HandBrake First Page

First thing’s first: Go get the software!
You can find it here: http://handbrake.fr/downloads.php
I absolutely love Handbrake. It’s made it extremely easy to back up your dvds. You’ll also need VLC in order to back up DVDs with encryption. You can download it here: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/. Once you get everything installed, you should end up with something like the picture.

Select your dvd from the list. It should take a few minutes and say “Scanning Source” up at the top. When it’s done, it should automatically pick the longest title (which is usually the movie) but I always double-check it against the length printed on the dvd box. Keep in mind that the one in the title length is fairly exact and the one on the box is usually rounded to the nearest minute.

Next you’ll want to go over to the right panel and select your output type. You can pick a variety of devices and output formats, I usually use Apple Universal because it encodes the movie as an MP4 at a pretty decent quality so I can pull it straight into iTunes and watch it whenever/wherever I please. Also, if you’re an audiophile like I am, you may want to go over to the Audio tab and change the bit rate from 160 to 320kbps.

After that, the long part begins. Click the start button at the top. It will take a few hours to convert the movie over (usually about twice as long as the movie, for me). After that, navigate to the output folder (Desktop by default) and you should see your movie. Normally it has a really awful name like “NAME_OF_MOVIE_2347.mp4″ so I usually change it to something I can work with and then import it to iTunes. From there, I go on Google Images and find a High Resolution picture of the DVD art or Movie poster.

Congrats, now you’re free to box up all those shelves of DVDs and watch them off of your hard drive. In fact, I was able to take about 5 shelves of DVDs and replaced it with a terabyte external hard drive. The only real downside to this is that it takes forever to do and you have to have some kind of set top box or computer attached to your TV to watch them. We’ll cover how to pull them in on Xbox 360’s, PS3’s and more later.

Too bad not enough people showed up for Capture the flag.. but we found stuff to do. We messed around with skateboards and bikes… found an unlocked door to a business… chatted with a friendly police officer. We ended up biking and running past his car to see how fast we could get on his radar. Eddie got 13 mph on the bike, Craig got 18 on the bike, and somehow Craig also got 20 mph sprinting…

Anyways, as awesome as it may be, the iPad has received some criticism from people who have said “it’s just a huge ipod touch”.  And a huge iPod Touch it is.  Yes, Apple has added the new A4 processor to the iPad, but when you look inside of it, it’s clear that the main computing components are about the size of – well – an iPod Touch.  There are also two HUGE batteries, which are the secrets to the 10 hours of active use battery life. (Picture courtesy of iFixit.com)

I still haven’t found anywhere to play with one, but the iPad is definitely on my shopping list, especially since I’ve really enjoyed eBooks lately.

While we were up there, we climbed Mt. Pisgah to a fire tower.  We thought there would be some kind of security on it, but in actuality, there was just a sign that said something along the lines of “You can climb the tower if you want, but the forestry department is not responsible for anything that may happen.” We were going to climb it, but it was old and rickety…not to mention that we were at the top of a mountain with the wind blowing, so we decided to just go up to the first landing and take pictures.

We also saw a couple water falls while we were up there, which were cool, too.  I kind of wish we had gotten to go on the trails Ethan had planned on, but the Blue Ridge Parkway was blocked off and we couldn’t get to the trail heads.

Sunday morning, we woke up in time to leave by 4:50am, in time to get to church on time

I’ve got a Power Mac G4 and it wont boot correctly. Whenever I boot it normally, it loads for a bit and a kernel panic comes up. I can, however, boot into “Safe Boot” and it loads fine and I can use it. Since it boots to Safe Boot, i’ve been told it’s not a logic board issue. I’ve also re-installed tiger twice, so thats not an issue. It was running fine before with all of the hardware that’s in it, so it shouldn’t be bad RAM or anything. Does anyone have any other ideas?

It’s the one referred to as “Mirrored Drive Doors”. I told it to do a clean install over the old data, and it did overwrite it. I did not, however, do a disk utility format.
Like I said, it loads Tiger but only in “Safe Boot” so when I tried to do a firmware update, it wouldn’t do it properly from what I can tell. The download page says it will ask to reboot, but when I ran the script, it never did. So I tried to reboot it manually, and it did another kernel panic.
I did figure out after that, that it needed system updates, so I installed it. When THAT asked to reboot, it never got all the way shut down. I left it for 5 hours thinking that it was just configuring updates, but it just came up with a blue screen and a spinning cog for the whole time.
I don’t know what else to try.

Exact Specs of the machine are:

Power Mac G4 (The model referred to as the “Mirrored Drive Doors” model)

2 GB RAM

4 120 GB Harddrives

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger

It’d be great to find a job doing custom car mods.  Or even in-venue audio stuff.  I’ve pretty much decided that A/V is what I really want to do.  It’s pretty much the only thing I can do day after day after day and not get sick and tired of it.  I don’t even mind waking up early if it means I’m going to go get ready for a gig.

I said that thing about cars, though, because I really want to get something like a Camaro and trick it all out.  New exhaust, new paint, tinted windows, underbody lights, a few engine mods, and most importantly: a new sound system.  Theres all this stuff in my head that would just make it a kick-ass car and I want to do it… I just need to find the day job to finance it.