These Lootz Need to Go On a Diet

My parents hadn’t seen me in a while, and saw fit to shower me with some phat lootz. Normally whenever I visit, they’ll insist on buying me a shirt or something, but this time I received several expensive silk ties (since I have to wear ties to work now). That by itself was pretty awesome, but then I somehow ended up with a slick black 60 GB Video iPod.

I’ve never had an iPod before, but from seeing Bunky’s Nano, I know enough to leave it in the box until the protective case arrives.

A word of caution to prospective buyers: Scratches and smudges accumulate quickly, and they really show up on the black version. Blemishes are par for the course for all iPods, but they are much more noticeable on this big-screen iPod, especially since the display will be stared at for several minutes at a time. While watching the latest episode of Desperate Housewives, we kept noticing a sliver of a scratch in the middle of the screen.

One thing that I was excited about was the possibility of watching some anime on the iPod. First off, it is a pain to find a converter that will change .mkv and .ogm files to the .mp4 format, and then the subtitles are often too difficult to read. This varies from file to file, but in general only DVD quality subtitling is even legible. I was going to settle for Juuni Kokki dubbed, but alas only episodes 1-14 were in the .ogm format, with the rest being in .mkv format. Looks like I’ll be sticking with American shows then. I suppose it’s just as well.

As for video on a 30GB model, we were pretty disappointed with the 2 hours, 31 minutes we got playing back an iTunes TV show. You should expect a video-only battery life of about 4 hours on the 60GB version; the extra battery life makes the 60GB version a coveted item, particularly because it’s still slimmer than the 4G iPod. However, battery life will always be an issue with a video device.

I may also try converting the videos into another format, and hope for better results.

The new iPod supports H.264 and MPEG-4 video in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov formats, which means your iPod will play the videos offered by the iTunes Music Store and those hand-wrought videos you’ve properly encoded. Apple’s QuickTime Pro 7.0.3 (or an application such as iMovie or Final Cut Pro that takes advantage of QuickTime’s encoders) provides the best chance for success in this regard. Within QuickTime Pro’s Export dialog box you’ll find a Movie to iPod (320×240) option that exports videos in the H.264 .m4v file format compatible with the new iPods.

The next challenge will be ripping tons of CDs and uploading my music to the iPod. This will probably take a rather long time at first. I read that the iPod can play .mp3, so that should at least cut down on some of the prep time, as I won’t need to convert any files to a new format.

Vectorz

Ok I lied about not posting, as I am totally a blogging addict. Anyways, I’m excited about the possibility of reading up on an anime-specific tutorial about Vector Tracing. NegativeZero has done some very impressive traces of various anime caps, and made them wallpaper-worthy.

However, I’m not interested in tracing caps personally. I want to learn to more quickly trace my own sketches so that I can have cleaner lineart without the high amount of pain that I currently associate with “inking”. Large curves, especially on higher resolution images, are hard to trace cleanly without paths, but I never really got the hang of using Photoshop paths. I’d like to see how it works in other programs, and gauge how much of a speed improvement it would give. After all, once the sketch is done, it should not be difficult to lay down the vector paths.

Either way, it’d be nice to see how the process works. I’ve moved away from the cell-shading style because of how annoying it is to do cleanly, but I bet it’d be a lot simpler with vectors!

Outta Town

Probably not as many updates over the next few days, as I’ll be out of town visiting family. Stay safe and happy!

Oh yeah, redid the layout. It looks a little nicer, but the comments are no longer AJAX and the <br /> tags don’t seem to work correctly on the various art posts.

C4 Battery

Last night Bunky frantically called me to tell me to check out the battery on her Dell Laptop. Why? Because apparently the battery can overheat and combust.

The recall is the biggest in the history of the consumer electronics industry, The Times reported this morning.

Analysts have estimated the recall could cost more than $300 million and expect at least a portion of the cost to be shouldered by Dell.

I heard that Sony will shoulder the other half of the burden. Boy, their hardware sure isn’t having much luck these days. Anyway, go to www.dellbatteryprogram.com to see if your crappy Dell’s laptop battery has also been recalled.

Personally, I’m excited. Batteries give out with time, as the number of charges is limited, and Bunky’s laptop battery has been sucking lately. Soon she will have replaced the battery and the keyboard for free, all within the last 6 months. My hope is that she will give in to her desire for a desktop (so she can play Sims 2 on a computer with a real video card), and I can annex her laptop to install Ubuntu on it.