So there we are, It's my last night in Tokyo and I've definitely got that Case feeling. Standing at my hotel window with a jar of sake, face lit up by the flashing neon outside. Behind me, the room has a cold glow under the light from my computer screen. Unfortunately, the laptop doesn't contain the Dixie Flatline but it's close enough.
I never did find a Chiba chop shop...
Those who know me will know that I have - using the parlance of the modern kids - mad skillz when it comes to video encoding and transcoding. I'll happily admit to wasting far too many hours learning the finer points of ffmpeg, mencoder and vlc, combining them with all manner of shell scripts, web interfaces, cron jobs and the like to set up my own mediacentre, video RSS feeds and shared video chatrooms (currently in maintenance mode).
So imagine my combination of frustration ("it should just work") and elation ("ooh, a challenge") when I discovered that my shiny new Mylo is extremely temperamental when it comes to video. I had assumed PSP-friendly video would have been fine but it turns out I was wrong. Any slight variation in frame-rate, bitrate, frame-size, aspect ratio, codec or container and I'd get a lovely "Sorry, the Mylo doesn't support this format" error (but in Japanese).
Anyway. In case you're interested, here's a shell script:
#!/bin/bash
ffmpeg -i "$1" -y -threads 2 -map 0.0:0.0 -f mp4 -vcodec xvid -b 768 -aspect 4:3 -s 320x240 -r ntsc -g 300 -me epzs -qmin 3 -qmax 9 -acodec aac -ab 64 -ar 24000 -ac 2 -map 0.1:0.1 -benchmark "$1.MP4"
call this from the command-line with the path to the file you want converted and 10 minutes later, your Mylo-ready file will be sitting next to the original.
I'm really only posting this here because in about 6 months, I'll have forgotten all about this and, given my current luck with technology, all my computers and all their backups will have simultaneously formatted themselves.
I found this Ema (votive tablet) in the grounds of Meiji Jingu last month. A month of playing around with various cyphers has yeilded no results. It's not a straightforward substitution code so frequency analysis doesn't work, I've tried substitutions with an increasing or decreasing offset, backwards and forwards alphabets...
Obviously the person who wrote it wants to keep it a secret so we probably shouldn't probe further but...anybody got any ideas?
Originally uploaded by thingsinjars on flickr
After some shuffling around of code and some gradient paint-bucket in Photoshop, the translation widget is done. Remember, of course, that you need a Sony Mylo to use it. Unless you just want to download it, unzip it and have a look at the code, that is.
You can also download it from the official widget gallery. I'd be interested to find out how well/badly it functions on a non-Japanese Mylo. I have no idea about the language capabilities of other versions.
Okay, it's time to accept I have a coding problem. A sickness, an obsession, if you will.
I was sitting in my kitchen studying Japanese, my shiny new Sony Mylo sitting next to me. I was enjoying having the opportunity of having my computer switched off (seeing as I can just switch on skype on my Mylo). I found a word I didn't recognise in my notes. My paper dictionary was over the other side of the room. Surely there must be a way for me to look up this word easily...
This is the point at which you can spot the obsession. Any normal person would have opened up the mylo, launched the web browser and looked up the word online. Job done*. I, on the other hand, fired up my laptop, downloaded the reference documents and tech specs of the Mylo and spent two hours writing a Japanese-English dictionary widget for it. It's fully functional and translates between English, romaji Japanese and kana Japanese. I'll upload it here and on the official Sony Mylo Widget gallery once I've come up with a cool name and a shiny logo.
It's a sickness, I tell you, a sickness...
* [edit] In retrospect, a normal person would have just walked across the room to get the dictionary.
