remember the battery I bought on Ebay from China for my laptop? well it arrived less than a week later and after conditioning it for a bit I came to the conclusion that it is giving a new life to my computer! On the first test I did I managed to get 4h worth of battery!!! Unbelievable.

Now don’t rush into conclusions and think that Ebay is the safest place to be, I just came across an Ebay scam where someone forked out $36.000 for an email address thinking they were buying a playstation3!!! Crazy stuff

today I passed my second order through ebay. Technically it is the first one since the first time in only used Ebay to find an second hand Aeron reseller in London and I bought the item from the physical shop itself.

It took me a bit of time to realise it but Ebay is not just the auction house. Some people use it as a payment platform and sell stuff at a fixed price just like a normal shop. To find out you can just do a search and when you see mentionned “Buy now” then it is very likely that this is an Ebay shop. The normal caution applies, do a bit of research first. Does the price advertised seem extremely low? Does the seller have many good reviews? Do all the review come from the same country and written in the same language?

I am always very scared when buying from China but this time it looked right and my laptop definitely needs a new battery. The item is meant to be delivered in few days, stay tuned, fingers crossed the battery will be at my doorstep in few days.

long time no see. My Palm T5 has replaced my chunky Filofax for nearly 2 years now but few weeks ago i discovered a new use for it. Watching movies!!!

I was first drawn to the T5 because of the wide screen which is great for browsing large Excel and word files but also do draw in the Tube but it never occured to me that since it is powered by a fairly powerfull processor I should be able to watch good quality videos like H264 or Divx.

I nearly got seduced by the Video Ipod after visiting the local Apple Store few weeks ago but the battery life is pretty crap, the screen is way to small and let’s face it. Apple products are not for computer geeks like me and seeing my girlfriend Alicia being pissed off at her Ipod helped me to stay away from the dark side.

Microsoft is about to release Zune, a nifty toy with a wide screen but hey, I already carry around a mobile phone and a Palm so I did a bit of googling… few hours actually and eventually found TCPMP.

TCPMP is a freeware that plays Divx, Xvid, but also Sorenson and H264 and in full screen (480*x)!!! How cool is that? With Autogordianknot, my new computer only takes 30 minutes to encode any DVD to 480*X which I set to quality 60 and the sound to 128 VBR. I can normally put about 4 or 5 movies on a 2Gb SD card.

Battery life is the obvious issue and I can only watch 2 movies back to back which is still good enough for commuting. Palm released the TX last year. It is supposed to have a brighter screen and better battery life. Too bad it doesn’t look as sleek as the T5 but I will probably give it a go very soon.

One thing though. Playing H264 and AAC files with TCPMP is a copyright infringement for sure but also I am not too sure if it is still legal to use TCMPMP since its creators are now selling a commercial product based on it.

featured “The Curse of the Were Rabbit” and “Studio Soi” showreel

Just to give a bit of balance with my previous post 😉

I can’t stand those crappy Flash encoded videos. First the quality is bad, second the colors are completly off and third, not being able to watch a video frame by frame is just plain silly for animators. [this is actually the reason why I ripped all my DVDs and now enjoy watching them frame by frame using VirtualDub]

Luckily some guys came up with a plugin for Firefox that will allow you to download the videos onto your hardrive as flv files that you will then reencode using some software whose name I forgot… Don’t worry I will give you the links when I come home.

Olive