David Lowry

What happens in Edinburgh… Generally ends up on the internet. So they claim. Here’s my input.

Many times through the weekend the iPhone with its data access provided the answers to many questions, most of which I have forgotten, but on Sunday night Sarah McF asked me to prove the iPhone could answer all questions. That which was posed: what weight was the original Wispa bar? Wikipedia and Google could not, for all their worth, tell me anything other than that the re-released Wispa bar is 36g and supposedly slightly smaller than the older. However…

New Wispa weighs less than the original?

Thanks for your enquiry about Cadbury Wispa.

I can confirm that we have not changed or altered the size/shape or recipe of Wispa bar.

The bar size matches exactly the same size as when it was last on the market (for info 125.0(L) x 30.85(W) x 16.7(D)mm).

The recipe is the same - it was matched to what was last on the market and tested by a taste panel internally. It is a blend of Cadbury dairy milk and a little bit of dark chocolate.

Thanks for your feedback.
Cadbury Consumer Relations Department

So there you go, Wispa bars are the same size and weight as the originals. And what happens in Edinburgh ends up on the internet.

So ferries are ok.
Busses are crampt, smell like on-bus toilets, and take far longer to get places than they should.
Ayr is dull and a very wet place.
Ayrshire, similarly, is rather dull full of sheep and precipitation of a cold variety.
I hope it snows in Edinburgh tonight.
And we haven’t reached Glasgow yet.

… but of course I do feel like I’ve been unfairly treated by a harsh education system…. sigh

http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7773974.stm

And well within time too

How did you do?

For several legitimate reasons I have occasionally got the need to push a video ustream, one of which is the Giants Live webcast which is our live game night broadcast and DVD shop for the Belfast Giants.

Now that the plug is over, back to the topic.

Pushing Video or Music Files to Ustream

It’s really quite easy. As most of you (5,6?) know uStream is an on-demand free web broadcasting solution which takes the usability of youtube and makes it live. One thing it isn’t made to do is broadcast ‘content’ just live material.

It is however fairly simple to spoof uStream into thinking it is receiving a webcam and a microphone respectively for vision and sound. Two simple applications are all you need: CamTwist and SoundFlower. CamTwist manages videos, slide shows, flickr sets and desktop views into a pretend webcam which uStream automatically picks up as an option. Soundflower is an Audio Driver which presents itself as an output option for your sound applications, and an input device for uStream to recieve from.

So to play a movie file (your own or non-copyrighted content of course) open it up in CamTwist and it will probably play automatically. Choose ‘SoundFlower 2ch’ as your output device in ‘Sounds’ and away you go. Broadcast your uStream channel and the two apps should appear as Sound/Video options.

Voilà.

Oh, and it’s my birthday tomorrow. Possibly going to the empire for Blues/Jazz some night this week as an ‘event.’

This pilot show should be going out tonight of Summer Madness ‘FM’. Catch it on the summer madness website from 9 PM. I’ll be doing the broadcast (probably…)

http://www.summermadness.co.uk/festival/view.php?tag=&id=67

# Brrrr-ing brrrr-ing

Hello David speaking

> Stephen?

No, David

> Oh, well don’t pretend to be your dad

I don’t tend to

> Is this line secure?

As much as you’d expect

> That one usually throws people

I’m used to answering it

> OK. So is your dad there?

No

> Well, don’t answer the phone.

I don’t tend to.

#Click.

There comes a time when you can be given too much information.

97 of your friends have updated their profile pictures…

7 of your friends wrote on X’s wall

What use is that to anybody?

Final Cut Express seems by default (or maybe I did it) set the default Render frame rate to 50% to speed up the NLE previewing process.

These render files however are the same ones that are used to put together the ‘finished product’ if you don’t use one of the Quicktime Conversion options.

If your output (to DVD or whatever) is choppy and you think the frame rate is possibly messed up the easy way to check is to pause your Quicktime movie, then use the left and right keys to move through frames. If each pair of frames is the same then you have not got a full output. To resolve it, go to your User Preferences screen, click Render Control and select 100% from the Frame Rate drop down.

I did fix this problem several months ago, but seeing as I am waiting for something to render I thought it was an opportune moment to write it down.

—–

Update: pssst don’t forget to try deinterlacing if your video looks rubbish

Do you see the yellow icon in the bottom right of your screen?

It means you have updates. They make a bad experience less bad. Click, click ok, restart. Done.

Make your life, tomorrow, easier.

Poppies. Credit http://www.sxc.hu/profile/micromoth

I watched the BBC’s My Family at War tonight, of which there is a series running all week. It was about Rolf Harris and Kirsty Wark as they traced their ancestor’s steps in Northern France. I believe my great grandfather John Balfour served in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers in the Somme.

In the show which will be available on iPlayer tomorrowThe show which you can watch here, Harris talks about how his father never talked of the war. My great grandfather died when I was about 15 and I was told he’d never talked about his experience.

The closest I ever heard was when we went to France in the heatwave year of 1995 (or was it 1996?) he was shocked and appalled that we would want to go to such a horrific place. Harris, via War Records, found that his father’s tin hat (which had a shrapnel mark in the skull) did not show a glancing blow, but a wound which nearly ended his life. He saw the horrors that were caused by the huge underground explosions which helped break the trench warfare, at the cost of 10s of thousands of young lives in an instant.