Category: Geek

In between two birthday parties and various football games (U-M loses to Toledo?!?! ND loses, Redskins lose, MSU wins, good weekend for football) and other stuff, I hacked away at some computer stuff too.
Last week, I spent a lot of time trying to convert videos to watch on my iPod Touch. I figured that with winter fast approaching, I’d probably be riding the bus more often on those occasions when I wimp out on riding my bike. As such, catching up on all the stuff I have on Tivo would be cool to do while passing the time. Alas, all my efforts were frustrated by the fact that every video converter I tried managed to freeze up my computer.
I initially thought the problem was with a failing hard drive, so I spent part of the week backing up everything on the hard drive. I then checked the hard drive for errors, but it came back with no problems reported.
My next thought was that it was a heat problem. This was partially confirmed when I ran a tool called SpeedFan that monitored my CPU’s temperature. During one video conversion, the computer locked up with the CPU at a temperature of 98 degrees Celsius! That’s 208 degrees Fahrenheit, 4 degrees away from boiling water. In other words, hot! So, I popped open the case to take a look, and I discovered that every outlet vent of my case was covered in a layer of dust, preventing the fans from pushing air out, and trapping the hot air inside. I cleared out the vents, and while doing so rediscovered the fact that my CPU fan had a knob I could use to crank up the speed a bit higher, thus cooling the CPU even more effectively.
After this cleaning routine, I was able to grab a show off my Tivo and encode it into an iPod-friendly format. It was a little bit jittery, but not too bad. I’m going to play with the settings a little bit more to see if I can smooth it out some, but I’m calling the geek weekend a success as a result of getting it to work once.
It just goes to show you: if your computer is freezing up, the most likely culprit is the simplest one, overheating. Occam’s Razor in action.
Oh yeah, and did I mention, I succeeded in the One Hundred Pushup Challenge! On Saturday night, I powered out 100 pushups! I am still shocked that all my hard work paid off and I accomplished my goal.

I’m going to have to take a break from this tonight, since it’s getting so frustrating, but for the past couple of evenings, I’ve been trying to convert some videos into an iPod Touch-friendly format. There are a couple of reasons for this: I could potentially catch up on Tivo viewing while riding the bus; I could get an AV cable for the iPod and hook it up to the crappy DVD player we got (it is very finicky about accepting DVDs to play) and then have stuff for the kids to watch on those long drives to Michigan for the upcoming holidays.
This is not going well. I’ve tried just about every converter in the book and every single one of them freezes up somewhere in the middle of the conversion. Of course, most of them seem to use the same encoder behind the scenes, so this doesn’t come as much of a surprise. But it’s still frustrating. I’m beginning to wonder if it’s not something where my computer is limited in what it can accomplish. I even thought I heard an ominous clicking coming from the hard drive last night (luckily I backed up all my important pictures and music, as well as our Quicken files, so I shouldn’t lose too much of importance if something craps out. Still, my project has now turned into scouring the computer for things that need to be backed up.).
The one bright side of all this is that I discovered a true gem in the App Store: Mocha VNC Lite. It’s free, and it allows you to use your iPod Touch (or iPhone) to connect to a VNC server running on your computer. That’s all geek-speak for saying that you can remotely control your computer via the iPod. That’s pretty cool for when I don’t want to sit in front of the screen watching a conversion tick through slowly. Instead, I can connect via the iPod and watch on its screen as it ticks through slowly. Once I get it set up properly, I could even connect to my computer at home while sitting at a Starbucks somewhere.
So while I still have to figure out the video conversion thing, and I’m still trying to work out a way to sync my wife’s Palm with Google Calendar, I’ve still managed to get some fun things working. Oh, and the iPod is also pretty good at playing music.

Almost a year ago, I had completed my latest freebie spree. Unfortunately, it took nearly all of that year to see any results. But I finally got my $500 Best Buy gift card last week, and promptly used it to order Wii Play, an 8GB iPod Touch, and preorder Guitar Hero World Tour. I was able to pick up the Wii Play at my local Best Buy (Ellie loves the cow racing game), and hopefully the preorder of Guitar Hero will arrive not too long after it’s released at the end of October. The iPod Touch arrived on Friday, and I had a lot of fun playing with it over the weekend.
The good: I can use any open wifi hotspot to get online. This includes my house, any Starbucks, and apparently some areas around the Smithsonian. The last two came in handy for getting directions from downtown to a church in Arlington where Lisa had Daisy Scout training. The “find my location” thing is super cool and works very well. It uses known wifi hotspots to figure out your current location and give directions based on that.
The bad: My old iPod used a Firewire connector to charge via the AC adapter. The Touch only uses USB so the adapter doesn’t work, and the only way to charge is through the computer. 8GB is good enough for now, but I had to take some music off to make room for apps I downloaded.
I was also able to set up my GMail through the Mail app and used NuevaSync to feed my calendar. The one problem I’ve run across is that, not having Outlook on my computer, I have no way to get calendar data from my wife’s old Palm m100 onto Google Calendar or the Palm. Well, that’s not totally true: there is CompanionLink, but I don’t know if it’s that important to spend $30 on the software. So if anyone has a free solution for me, I’m all ears.
All told, I’m very happy with the Touch, and looking forward to playing with more apps, as I’ve only had a short time to play in the App Store so far. I’m also checking out how to convert video to the correct format to play on the Touch, so that maybe I can catch up on some stuff that’s recorded on my Tivo. So far though, that’s been a frustrating experience and the converters I’ve tried repeatedly crash before finishing the conversion.