Uh oh looks like in June of 2010 i posted pictures of my first (and only at the time) son and said that he was my "favorite son". Wile this was true in June of 2010 it is not the case now.

I have 2 sons and they are both amazing, I love them both very much and wouldn't want one to run into this website 20 years from now and see that post without a follow up!

Here are a few pictures of them from this past Fall.

I have ordered my new Apple TV and while I wait the 3ish weeks for it to arrive I have been working to get my Movies library converted from AVI to a nice apple friendly MP4 format. I did a bunch of searching and exploring and found the best solution was to use the HandBrake Command Line Interface and run a batch process through the terminal on my entire movies directory and convert all my files without individual file interaction.

What the following process will do is scan the "source directory" for all AVI files and one by one re-encode them from AVI to MP4. This is a timely process but completely unmanaged as once you get the files in the proper source directory and start the batch process you can walk away.

I have started the batch on my AVI directory of 204 items and am waiting for the final results. The files that have been converted thus far have been perfect.

Follow the process below to run the script:

Download the HandbrakeCLI from here

Place the HandBrakeCLI file in the "Source Directory" where you have the movies you want to convert.

Create a new directory for the destination files to go

Copy and paste the following lines into a terminal window changing the source and destination directories to match your directory structure.

sourcedir="~/Movies/source"
destdir="~/Movies/destination"
cd "$sourcedir"
for i in *.avi; do
./HandBrakeCLI -i "$i" -o "$destdir/${i%.*}.mp4" --preset="Normal"
done

This is my first post from the blogger app on my iPad. Testing 123


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This is my first update from my brand spanking new iPhone 4.

It was a long hard road, including trying to go to the mall on launch day without a pre-order only to find a 3 mile long line. Then going back to the apple store later that day to fine that they were sold out of non pre-ordered phones. My next choice was to place an order with apple.com and wait 3 painful weeks.

I got my shipping notification on Saturday the 10th and was super excited only to find that it was shipping from China and that the estimated delivery date was still July 15th.

I had been watching the FedEx site all week waiting for the arrival of my little gem. Today was the day, i got up early and check the status to find that it was out for delivery! I made sure Bethany would be home to receive the package and called or texted her every hour from work to see if it had arrived. She would inform me every time and very regretfully that it had not. I am not sure if it was sympathy or if it was that she was regretful that she new that i would be calling her again shortly.

Then I got the call, Bethany called me to tell me that ..... u guessed it ... the Fed Ex guy had rang the broken door bell and left a failed delivery attempt note on the door! SADNESS!! So I had to wait another 4 painful hours until I could go pick it up from the FedEx distribution hub. 6:55pm I was at the door of the FedEx store and by 7:05 I FINALLY had my new baby in my hands. I took it home and set it all up. Then we heard fireworks! Yes, thats right, the entire community was sooo happy for me and my new iPhone they actually had a fireworks display set up for me! Bethany and I ran outside and I took my trusty new gadget with me to film the show. After all if they are gonna put on a show just for me then I had better film it so i can prove it to future generations! Once filmed I downloaded and installed the new iMovie app for the iphone and made some edits, added music and a title and am uploading it here for everyone's viewing pleasure. I am still learning how to use that app, it is not as "out of the box easy" as I had hoped but i am sure it will be easy once I figure it out.

It has been a long time coming but i finally got around to cleaning up my Picasa library and updating my online albums. Check them out, Nicholas is getting sooo big!

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With my new Hackentosh up and running on my secondary 160 gig hard drive and everything working as intended it was finally time to merge that data over to the 1TB drive and blow away everything windows on my desktop. I didn't want to have to go through the painful process of reinstalling osx since I already spend the day doing that last month. I did some searching and found the amazing and simple SuperDuper! app would do exactly what I needed.

Not only was this application simple to use but it is FREE. All I had to do was launch the app, choose my source drive and choose my destination drive and sit back and watch the magic happen. It took several hours to copy everything but I just ran it overnight and when I came down in the morning I had an exact duplicate of my OS drive.

Next I just had to run the EFI boot tool on the drive and reboot. I now have my fully functional hackentosh desktop completely windows free and fully operational.

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I am posting this blog with my iPhone on a new Apple BT keyboard now that iPhone OS4 supports pairing BT keyboards with iPhone devices. I like the fact that i can type faster as i would on a laptop but i am not sure the function is a keeper yet. I will have to try some of the office apps out there to see if it is worth just toting a BT keyboard to a meeting to take notes as opposed to my netbook or laptop.

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