Mental ramblings of a geek dad

iTunes 9.1 key feature: downscaling

jphebert — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 17:32:57 +0000

Apple *finally* included the feature I’ve been wishing for years now – downscaling audio files. In a nutshell, if your file is of higher quality than an AAC at 128Kbps, it will “downgrade it” to this type. This means more stuff on the same device, here is an example based off my iPhone afterdoing the AAC process:

All my CDs are ripped in MP3 @ 256Kbps – big files
A 3:56 track by Muse in MP3 @ 256K = 7.3Mb
A downscaled track by Muse which is 3:53 @ AAC 128K is 3.7 MB
Rough economy: 50% less space for the same track!

Thanks Apple!

Updates!

jphebert — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 14:54:26 +0000

Its been a wild few months since I posted anything here! Life takes over and you have to prioritize – hence the fun stuff like blogging can get left behind. Now that my schedule is clearing up a bit I can indulge again.

Also, we’re hiring at work right now – two developpers and a sales person. For more info please click here.

Top-tier fashion items at discount prices

jphebert — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:41:06 +0000

Not because we work in high-tech we have to look bad all the time, plus our spouses may enjoy this faaaar more than we can. I recently became a member of Beyond the Rack, a Canadian online fashion outlet which sells higher-end brands sometimes up to 70% off. So far I have not bought anything for myself (but was tempted by some Ben Sherman stuff) and we got my wife a Guess handbad at 50% off.

If you like good stuff and like me hate paying top retail prices, check’em out here.

Stormtroopers & Google

jphebert — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:53:03 +0000

Youppi for Montreal Mayor

jphebert — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 19:58:17 +0000

Just came back from voting and when you look at who’s on ballot and what’s been happening with the two main parties (read: corruption scandals), this occurred to me: Youppi for Mayor! The main reasons:

He’s orange (as good as a reason as any)
A vast majority of Montrealers love him
He has no mouth making it harder to lie, cheat or mutter stupidities

’nuff said on the topic of the clowns.

Windows 7 first thoughts & the upgrade process from Vista

jphebert — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:41:30 +0000

I got my copy of Win 7 Home Premium for my wife’s laptop and installed it last night and already installed the RC on an old Sempron 3000 w/1Gb RAM & ATI 256Mb Radeon card.

Collection of thoughts on the two installs:

1- The Sempron box: old PC doing not too much but gathering dust at this point, so I wiped the HD clean of XP and installed the release candidate version (RC) about a month ago. Smooth install, and surprizingly fast operations for a “new” OS on an old clunker. Have not had the chance to mess with it since then but was impressed nonetheless. The ATI card made it so the UI with full-blown animations was working smoothly.

2- The HP Latptop: it’s a Core2Duo with 4GB RAM and 800Mhz FSB, decent hardware running Vista 64-bit and was slower than molasses due to Vista. So did the upgrade thing as I decided to be lazy about it (I usually install an OS from scratch but my wife wanted it back asap so what the heck!). The upgrade process went without a hitch but be advised it took hours. Just be patient. The laptop under Win7 runs smoothly and I have to say significantly faster without changing a damn thing to the apps & hardware.

Overall, Win7 is a really cool OS at first and will post notes as times flies by on how this is going.

Anybody else enjoying 7 and ditching Vista faster than the speed of light?

iPhone 3GS thoughts

jphebert — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:31:46 +0000

Am I ever glad I got this device! I can now check email, surf, play music, watch videos and the usual stuff expected, but what makes this a killer tool is the app store. Going back to a BlackBerry (since I’m not an email power typer) is not possible but I’d love to check out an Android phone once the OS hits 2.0. Enough money spent on gadgets like this for the time being!

iPhone 3GS 32GB: I’m getting one!

jphebert — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 19:52:23 +0000

Check out the specs! I’m drooling.. Will merge my iPod Nano, my cell and my GPS into one.

Star Wars The Old Republic Trailer

jphebert — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 14:11:34 +0000

For those of you (maybe 2 or 3) who read this bog know that Star Wars fan I am, and big fan of the KOTOR game series. KOTOR 3 will be a MMORPG (never played one before) and I can’t wai to get my paws on this one, this trailer should explain why:

DoubleTwist: new sync app

jphebert — Fri, 29 May 2009 12:14:44 +0000

I just gave a whirl to DoubleTwist, a new sync package which can sync up your media to any device (iPod, PSP, etc.). While this is an interesting package, I’ll stick to my trust told iTunes until they release a feature lacking in iTune which to me is a holy grail: dynamically downscale files when sync’ing. All my rips are in MP3 @ 256Kbps, so files are fairly large, and I manually convert to AAC 96Kbps prior to the sync.

I’ll also give it a whirl (DoubleTwist) on my wife’s Blackberry Curve 8900 since its much simpler/ligher than the Roxio one.