Computer Knowledge. Gadget. Anime. Design. Dance. Hong Kong Life. Stuff like that.

1.30.2006

Yahoo Note Pad Widget does not support Japanese

I just found out something lame about the Yahoo Note Pad in Yahoo Widget: it does not support unicode. Or at least the Japanese I entered became monster characters after I save it and reload the NotePad again. That's lame.

Japanese input in Windows XP

I was trying to figure out how I can switch to different mode while inputing Japanese on Windows XP using Microsoft Japan Input System(MS IME 2002). I figure out that, under English("A") input mode, I can:

- Use F7 to get to convert Hiragana to Katakana.

However, I am still trying to find a way to easily switch between Hiragana to alphabat. Sure I can go to "Regional and Language Options", under [Language] tab, select "Settings" and then click the [Key setting...] button to set a hot key for "Switch to English (United States) - US" and "Switch to Japanese - Japanese Input System (MS-IME2002)". But that doesn't seem to be a common convention.

And then I figure out that under the "Properties for Microsoft Natural Input 2002" dialog, and then click "Mixed Input" tab, I can set all sort of hotkey to mix English and Japanese.

All these need some time to master, but at least I found out where to start :-> .

P.S. Hey I just found out that I can switch between Kana input mode and Alphabat input by pressing Alt-~. Here's the quote from a web site:

o become an efficient typist, it is important to know the best ways to switch between different input methods. Hold down the left ALT key and hit the left Shift key to rotate among the activated input methods. On the Japanese input method, use Alt + tilde (~) to Switch between hiragana and direct input.

Great info!

Also this web site shows how to add Japanese input feature in the system.

1.29.2006

Another stupid USB mystery

I found that among two of the USB card reader that I have, only the one that takes Memory Stick Pro card (the newer one) works when all my USB Driver related items (USB card reader with external USB harddisk) plug to the USB hub.

Again, I got the result by trial and error :-<.

On the bright side, now I can exchange stuff among all these devices at ease. Gees, I have so many USB related medias.

USB Harddisk. Always a mystery to me.

I found out a strange thing today: I have to plug both of the powered harddisk (Look A6 OTG harddisk and the old SamSung 80Gb hard disk) to the USB 2.0 Hub instead of directly connect to the USB port extended from the motherboard. Once again, using USB harddisk is all about trial and error. Sigh.

Video Music at their best

The three directors, Spike Jonze, Chris Cunningham and Michel Gondry, defines the best music video directing in the last 10 years, and now their work is being released in three collections:
- The Work of Director Michel Gondry
- The Work of Director Chris Cunningham
- The Work of Director Spike Jonze

And more information from this site.

And on the note of music video, the site supposed to allows you to watch video online, but seems like it's not work. Sad.

A Super Nintendo game that I missed


I am not a relly hardcore old school gamer, but I have to say that the old school games does have some appeal, and the fact that I can enjoy almost all the old school games on my PC without leaving my desk is the biggest appeal. I came a cross a site that reviewed some oldschool games, and found a game called Wild Guns looks very interesting. Guess I will give it a shoot when I have time.

Proxy solves my ndsbbs problem

I was wondering why I have problem connecting to NDS bbs so for several days, but didn't have time to resolve it. I finally got some time today, and found that some how I cannot access the site unless I use proxy. Luckily my friend told me this Free Proxy web site, so I picked this 202.88.211.57 IP with port 80, and I can now access the NDS BSS site with no problem. I still have no idea why I was blocked, but .... who cares.

1.28.2006

Gee, I wonder how to download Flash (.flv) video

Everytime when there's a new video or streaming video file format available online, people will figure out a way to download the video stream. However, I still haven't found a solution to download Flash video from a web page. I only found the following sites so far, and looks like I need to do more investigation later ...

- FLV Player updated
- 讓收費網站去死吧
- 下載Google Video

1.25.2006

Max OSX86 10.4.3 Kicking ass on DELL Optiplex GX280

I have OSX86 10.4.3 installed on my office machine DELL Optiplex GX280, and it was very sweet. iLife 06 and iWork 06 run without a hitch on the machine, and since they are native software, they run very well.

Thanks to the hacking community.

Strange, the failed rm files worked on my office machine

Regarding to what I mentioned two days ago about how 2 out of the 3 of the .rm video file my dance teacher sent me couldn't be converted? Well, I tried those files on my office machine, and they all can be converted by Pocket-DVD Studio. So I am starting to worry that it was the River.Past.Video.Cleaner.Pro.v6.8.0.51117 that messed up my home machine and made the two real video file under convertable.

Need more investigation on this. Maybe it's the matter of reinstall the RealAlternative Codec. (But then I already reinstalled storm codec :-< )

Also I still have problem finding a way to extract the audio track from real audio file :-< .....

Finally installed Mac OSX 10.4.3 on my home machine,but ...

I was so stubborn that keep trying to install OSX last time. I finally got it working, and it's all because the Sky 8x DVD+R disc (burned at 4x) was not recognized properly in all 3 of my DVDROM drives. I had to reburn the image in a Imagtion DVD+RW disc as 2X, and then the Poineer A10 DVD drive had no problem installed the whole thing.

Unfortunately, even after the OS installed, I still experienced RANDOM Restart (the system suddenly hanged with a warning message asking me to restart). I tried and I tired and couldn't make it work. Sigh, I guess I may better off just rollback and install 10.4.1 :-< .

1.24.2006

Mac OSX86 Successfully installed on DELL Optiplex GX280

I spent a whole night last night trying to install Mac OSX 10.4.3 for Intel on my home machine, and it was a big failure. The installation was stopped in the middle of the process and cannot be completed. I suspected that I have some harddisk that is not compatible with the OSX installtion.

Maybe I need to unplug some hardware and try it again :-< .

On the other hand, VMWare installation was a success, although there's still no sound, and the speed is like ultra slow.

The best installation success was on my office desktop machine. Not only I got the high resolution screen, I also got sound on this build of installation, and perfromance seems to be slightly increased too.

1.22.2006

Video file conversion is such a pain

I thought converting Real Media files (.rm,.rmvb) is the only file conversion hell that I need to deal with. I didn't realize that converting Quicktime file to .avi or .divx is also a pain by itself.

After a few attempts to find conversion tool, I found this River Pass Video Cleaner with this tutorial about how to make it work.

The first thing I found out is that I need to fully install it install on just create a green version from installed. I, of course, figured it out by trying it myself.

Then, I need to reinstall Storm Codec. Rm was being recognized then. In fact, I found out that with StormCodec, Video Past Video Cleaner is equally capable to handle Real Audio file. Nice.

But when I convert the QuickTime to xvid, I got a tiny file (1Mb) which crashed the Classic Player. I work around this by first choose Xvid, and then bring up the option screen, and choose Default. Convertion success with OK size. Problem solved.

But finally (now) I stucked at a point. I have three real video file. One got successfully converted. Two failed. In fact, the two failed one successfully played on the media player, but failed on both River Past Video Cleaner and the Pocket DVD Studio.

So ... yeah I am stucked.

I tried 10.4.3 and it does not work on my machine.

I download the Mac OSX x86 10.4.3 build 8f1111 patched with Wesley's patch and tried to install it on my machine. It didn't work, and I got a cross in the front of the screen in the middle of the bootup. Geez .... I wonder why :-<

Quick guide about playing NDS ROM

My friend was very interest in getting Nintendo DS with SuperCard, which allows you to play Nintendo DS games by downloading ROMs from mainland China web sites. Here some info that can help you making the decision.

The "Doctor card" I used is called SuperCard. The best thing about SuperCard is that it uses regular SD and CF (Compact Flash) card to store games (ROMs). If you have digital camera, you should already have this kind of flash card at home.

Here's the web site of SuperCard. They upgrade their firmware frequently:
http://www.supercard.cn/chn/index.htm
Cost: about HK$300

There are two kinds of SuperCard, one for SD and one for CF. I prefer CF card version simply because the firmware for CF version is slightly better written (based on the programmer's blog).

Besides SuperCard and a flash memory card, you also need a card that bypass the NDS slot projection. It's called PassMe2. The PassMe1 only works with certain old model of NDS, and I only have PassMe1 because my console is older model. The PassMe2 card should support ANY NDS model regardless of version.
Cost: about HK$120

Finally you need the NDS console itself. There's one from the original dealer and one from some gray market dealer. Price difference is just $40. So I recommend the original dealer version.
Cost: about HK$950.


Assuming that you want a 1Gb card to store ROM (from 8M to 128M), you cost of getting your gear will be:

Nintendo DS : $960
PassMe2: $120
SuperCard: $300
1Gb CF flashcard $480

Total: $1860

I suggest you to read more about the NDS Rom scene from these web site:
- http://tvgame.yesky.com/flash/ : Tons of photo guided tutorial about how to play ROM on NDS.
http://www.ndsbbs.com/thread.php?fid=6 : Great discussion forum. But ... it's not accesssable today.... I wonder how...
http://www.gbgba.com/down/index.html : Download NDS ROM
http://www.chinagba.com/down/ : More NDS Rom download

1.21.2006

My Flashcard reader and USB OTG HD cannot live together at the same time

Once again, strange computer hardware setup drive me puzzled, and most of the time I just have to figure out the pattern and live with it.

For instance, when I have the flash card reader plug to my desktop computer, the system refuse to recognize the Look A6 OTG removal harddisk. But after I unplug it, the system can see the Flashcard reader again.

Also some strange issue when I plug the Firewire harddisk to my desktop computer when I already have the M-Audio Firewire Solo connected. I have to reboot, unplug the Firewire Solo in order to get the Firewire harddisk being recognized.

Great sound for rock stuff

I usually use Sonar 5 to record music, and use the Hypersonic sound module for sampling sound. Though I love the sound generated by HyperSonic, I have problem finding the sound that I played before .... until I realize that there's a simple word search at the top of the synthrack screen. For instance, I love the "Power Chords" which gives a nice distorted guitar sound like those you found from Rock Concert. I can easily found it by searching the word "Power".

I can, of course, always be able to go direct to "Electric guitars Distorted" category.


BTW, Mess with the following chord:
Am/E Em Dm G/D

When packing super huge file, use Winrar and "Store" setting

Once again, I learned something new today.

I was trying to backup a huge .dmg file (Mac disc image file) with 6.4 Gb. Since I am too cheap to shellout HK$38 for for Dual Layer DVDR disc. So I need to chop the big file into little pieces.

At first I used Winrar default setting to compress the file into several parts, and it was super ultra slow. Then I realized that I don't really need to compress. All I need to chop the big file into piece.

So under WinRAR archieve setting, I set:
- Compression method = Store
- Split to volumes, bytes = 100,000,000
- Archieve format = RAR

And I got all my 100Mb parts blazingly fast done, and doesn't slow down my machine way too much during the process too (although there's still some performance impact).

Nice to learn something new everyday.

1.19.2006

OSX86 sure is not perfect

I tried install the following software on OSX86 machine, and have the following results:

* iWork '06
- Installation Success
- Failed to start the applications (both Keynote and Page)

* Final Cut Pro HD 4.5
- Failed to install the application.

* Erain Swift 3D 4.5
- Installation Success
- Start up success

* Software For
- Well haven't tried all of them since there's tons of software, but at least the .dmg start out fine.

1.14.2006

Make my Pocket PC more user friendly

Organizing my Pocket PC is always a challenge because some of the files are in the Buildin memory, and communicate that part of memory form my desktop using the damn slow USB 1.1 speed is just killing me. And if you asked why I need to use my PC to ogranize my Pocket PC, try using file browser yourself on a PPC and you will know how big a pain that is.

So I spent almost half a day today to consolidate apps between the SD card and the Build-in memory, and create shortcut so that I can access all my apps from the start menu. All in all I think this is worthwhile a step to make my PPC more useful.

Zen Vision : Maybe my dream finally come true

I always know that the DELL x50v Pocket PC as a media player is not my ultimate portable video player solution since there's no way I can have hold all videos I want to play on the road in a tiny 2Gb CF card. So when I came across the Zen Vision and Zen Vision:M which seems to contain great battery life (4.5 hours) and support tons of format, I was taking notes. I definite will do more research on this thing, and see if I should working for getting on of these. Here's some links:

- Zen Vision Specification
- Zen Vision:M specification
- Creative Zen Vision:M 30GB review
-

Possibility of running Linux on my Pocket PC?

I don't know, but I always have a crazy craving of running a real operating system on my Pocket PC instead of the chessy slow clumesome PPC2003SE OS. I search a bit online trying to find the Linux for PPC thing. Not much hope, with only the following links were found. Still, it's a nice dream.

- Linux for Pocket PC

Easy way to embed a raster graphic in Illustrator CS2

Here's the easy way to embed a raster graphic in Illustrator CS2 instead of maintaining a linkage: just hold Shift key while drag and dropping grpahic file on Illustrator canvas. Simple as that.

An answer to my Illustrator transformation question

Once again, the power of Internet community :-D.

Previously I asked a question about tranforming a raster graphic on illustrator CS2. And here I got the answer:

--------------------------
James Talmage - 7:32pm Jan 10, 06 PST (#1 of 1) Edited: 10-Jan-2006 at 07:32pm

1. Make sure the image is embedded. (Click the Embed button in the Control Palette.)

2. Object>EnvelopeDistort>MakeWithMesh. Enter 1 for both columns and rows.

3. Free Transform Tool: Mousedown on a corner. Press and hold CTRL and Alt. Drag.

How come I can make a rectangle into a trapezoid but I cannot make a JPEG photo into a trapezoid?

Because a rectangle is a vector path. A JPEG is a raster image. The Free Transform tool does not work on raster images. But it does work on Envelopes (which are vector paths), and Envelopes work on raster images.

JET
-------------------------------

Hey, thanks JET! However, there are a few caution items:
- Make sure the mode is in "Free Tranform" mode. You can see the mode status at the bottom of the drawing Windows. If it's not, select the object you want to transform, and click the [Free Transform Tool] button.
- you HAVE TO first MOUSEDOWN your cursor at the corner of the object before pressing the Control key. This got me into headache for a while when I pressed Control key BEFORE mouse down.
- If you wannt stretch with both diagonal corner like JET suggested, make sure you mousedown at corner point first, and then press and hold Control button, and then press and hold the ALT button. You cannot hold control and ALT button at the same time. To transform only one corner, you only need to use Control button.
- One important thing: if you tranform a raster graphic more than one time, then keep in mind that the corner you mousedown should be the corner of the bounding box, and NOT the stretched graphic itself. In fact, it may seem strange that you will stretch the bounding box in order to INDIRECTLY trandform the graphic. It may seem strange it the first place, but once you get used to it it's no big deal.
- The speed of tranformation is actually pretty fast UNTIL you start use direct selection tool, select a corner (a corner of the real bitmap), and then stretch. Once you've done the mesh distortion, it will take a lot of time to recalculate the raster graphic. So try to aviod it unless you really have to mesh a graphic.

1.11.2006

How come I can mesh a photo but cannot reshape it?

I placed a JPEG picture in Adobe Illustrator CS2, and then trying to reshape the rectangular photo into some sort of a perspective polygon. I could not make it work since "Direct Selection tool" (white arrow) did not allow me to select a corner of the JPEG and move the corner point by dragging it. I could easily do that to a real rectangle polygon, though. I used Direct Selection tool to select a corner of a rectangle, and I could move the corner to turn the rectangular polygon into a trapezoid.

This is a bit frustrating. How come I can make a rectangle into a trapezoid but I cannot make a JPEG photo into a trapezoid? In fact, I can twist a photo into some very funny shape by [Object]->[Envelop Distort]->[Make with Mesh...]. But I want some simpler. I just want to free transform a JPEG into whatever polygon shape I like.

The reason I need to do all this mess is because I need to combine a bunch of small photo together to form a big photo, and I need to twist the perspective a bit since the source photos I got was taken with a bit tilted perspective, and this I need to do some reshaping to compensate the tilted angle.

After several frustrated night, I found out that I can accomplish the effect by using [Effect]->[3D]->[Rotate...] and then resize the photo. Not the most intuitive way, but heck at least I can get the job done.

1.09.2006

Tried iPod Nano. Like it, but ...

I tried my work partner iPod Nano this morning, and was very impressed by the look, the weight and user interface. But there's one thing I really have problem with: the sound quality. The lack of bass is a big minus, especially since I listen to house music and Hip Hop a lot.

However, the user interface really is great. You cannot find one that is better.

Cheap printer selling at Hk$299

Last week (Jan x 2006) I went to Golden shopping Center and found a Epson STULUS C45UX printer selling at $299. This seems great consider that some ink cartridge set costs almost the same price.

For more current printer price in Hong Kong, check out this link.

For info, check this link.

1.07.2006

A B-movie called Virgins From Hell

I accidentally came across some description about this B-movie calle Virgins From Hell. Altogether the movie, based on the screen shot, seems like a laugh matter, it always give me some sort of Quentin Tarantino feel. After all, to me, Quentin Tarantino's movies are basically B-movie but done very very well.

A BT site that some may be interest, but not me

My work colleague recommended me this http://www.ydy.com/ and the corresponding http://bt.ydy.com/ to get the latest US series, but I don't seem to find anything that interested me. But again, maybe you do, so here you go.

Finally, a music video worth watching

I was pretty much gave up watching music video these days, which was kind of strange sine I was such a music video junkie back in the 80s and 90s. But music video (means the US and UK ones, since the oriental ones like those from HK or Japan were rarely well produced, let alone creativity) these days just lost the creativity.

Until a while I ago I watched the video directed by Michel Gondry called "The Denial Twist” for the band The White Stripes. Boy, the video is fun to watch. Sure it's a special effect gag, but with very well designed special effect.

And this blog seems to explain how it works. Pretty awesome.

And a bit more abou the video.

By the way, came cross this music video and music blog. A nice one.

More and more worth while listening downlad

There really is a lot of Podcast that worth downloading and listening these days, and I found the ZENCast. What a sweet place to find all the Podcast that worth listening like:
- Revision3 - Diggnation
- Revision3 - Systm
- Photoshop TV
- Buzz Out Loud from CNET
- Engadget Podcasts

ON some other different issue, CES 2006 is here, the biggest trade show for consumer electronic, and you can get all the reports at http://ces2006.engadget.com/.

1.03.2006

DVD Burning nightmare all over again

I thought the DVD Burning failing problem was away from me after I brought the Pioneer A10 DVD Recorder, but I was wrong. This morning I had a .iso image failed to burn at 8x speed. When I tried 6x speed, it was burned successfully.

Does it mean that I should burn .iso at 6x from now on? I guess :-U .....