Newsbites

Monday News: A Carnival, Tidying Up, Chinese New Year and our 1st Martian Reader

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What you’ve missed here…

  1. Saturday Bytes: WMV to FLV and FireFox’s Causing Me Frustration
  2. Technorati: Why you should bother, how you do it, and the ‘dark side’
  3. NetWork Solutions: How YOU can gouge your customers in 10 steps or less – a case study
  4. and our new Advice Column: Your House Is Not YOUR ATM Machine

For the advice column, simply drop your email to us (anonymously, if you wish) and I’ll write InvestorBlogger’s response with some suggestions.

And now the news…

Monday is here, the first day of our holiday at Chinese New Year! Yesterday, we spent the whole of yesterday reorganising the school offices. I had to finish rewiring the computers, too. But it’s done, and the new network will work nicely, I think. One PC will be devoted to running the printers, another to running the network, another to running the photocopier, and another to running our IntraNet Blog, I hope.

So, though we use a local network at school, we’ve distributed services across every PC except the notebook to maintain as much of a system as possible should one PC die. I had intended to network everything to just one PC, but then thought perhaps that wasn’t a good idea if there should be a hardware problem. So our services are distributed to minimize impact of broken systems. BUT we don’t have any extra capacity at the moment which is a pity.

The New Carnival 10th Edition and the new host

New Carnival 10th Edition

Yep, it’s out on the new blog, and posted with 21 good stories, and most of the junk removed. I took a huge paring knife to cut out duplicates, irrelevant stories, popup articles, etc., But I’m glad, the edition is good. Next time, we’ll feature a new section: Chinese New Year is approaching, posts that make special reference to that will be given their own featured section!

Chinese New Year: A time to tidy up

Chinese take a lot of time to clean up before the New Year (February 6th this year!) and I’ve really gone to town to clean up my own clothes closet! But I’m so untidy and disorganised that it took me more than 12 hours to put everthing here…

P1000559

into here…

P1000561

and it’s done now… But it was a challenge! And it’s not particularly neat and tidy, but it is sorted out now! What is the secret to being organized, please tell me!?

Amazon’s Big News: Downloads go International!

You’ve got to read this story about Amazon’s announcement:

Amazon MP3 is the only retailer to offer customers DRM-free MP3s from all four major music labels as well as over 33,000 independent labels. “We have received thousands of e-mails from Amazon customers around the world asking us when we will make Amazon MP3 available outside of the U.S. They can’t wait to choose from the biggest selection of high-quality, low-priced DRM-free MP3 music downloads which play on virtually any music device they own today or will own in the future,” said Bill Carr, Amazon.com Vice President of Digital Music. “We are excited to tell those customers today that Amazon MP3 is going international this year.”

I’m skeptical, because their definition of the term ‘international’ may only include Canada, the UK, Japan, France and wherever else there is a localized Amazon site. But here’s hoping.

What’s that guy on Mars doing?

CNET is carrying this picture recently taken from Mars courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell University of a 2″ man.

123manonmars550x401

Nasa has finally taken a picture of a Martian: he (or she) is obviously squinting at the ASUS Eee PC with the 7″ screen while browsing InvestorBlogger dot com. What else could the Martian be doing? Suggestions in the comments please!

Upcoming Stories

These are some of the stories I’ll be posting several stories in the next few days:

  1. What I did with my money
  2. Security and WordPress: Beefing Up Security for your Blog
  3. WPBanners: A Fuller Review – Good Value or not?
  4. Blogging: Usability Improvements

Do check back this week to see which is posted.

Saturday Bytes: WMV to FLV and FireFox’s Causing Me Frustration

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After yesterday’s marathon posting about Technorati, I’m taking it a little easier for this weekend. I do hope that for those interested in blogging you find the Technorati posting useful and informative .

Some other posts that I have done this past seven days include:

Firefox’s disappearing Visual Editor :

I’ve been using my wife’s notebook with a Chinese XP install and Firefox, but recently, it’s been giving me a lot of headaches with disappearing toolbars. Unfortunately, my favorite blogging software is currently not working on that platform either. So sometimes when I’m watching a movie, I like to write my blog. I was just watching Robin Williams in the Movie “Man of the Year” and I was updating my movies on the school site to FLV formats, after killing my YouTube account.

missing visual editor

It’s gone, and this was on a more regular system! Mmm… I wanted to blog the movie, too, but the wretched toolbar just wouldn’t not appear, and I don’t really like the Code Editor as it’s rather sparse for my taste. Increasingly, even on other English XP machines with FF 2.0.11 installed the toolbars are occasionally ‘forgetting’ to appear. Mmm. There seems to be a myriad of causes, too. Anyone?

Converting to FLV for embedded videos

Turning WMV files (from my YouTube account) into FLVs was driving me nuts, until I realized it was my patience (or lack of) that was causing 90% of the problems. In fact, once I just let the system work, the Riva FLV Encoder worked perfectly, and rendered them much better than I could have expected. Take a look at the FLVs on my school site. Riva Encoder and Riva Player are reliable tools that I have used to make FLVs for some time, and they seem to just work.

Riva FLV Encoder

Riva says: “Transcode your existing videofiles to the advanced Flash Video (FLV) format with this free Riva FLV Encoder. After selecting a source-file you can easily transcode it into Flash Video using one of the presets or your custom settings.” I didn’t fiddle with the defaults, and it worked. If you need to work with QT formats, though, you will need to purchase the more expensive version.

stoik

For those tougher WMV files, converting to AVI was sometimes necessary, so I worked with several pieces of software that made life hard, but STOIK Video Converter 2.1.1 worked a treat, too. Again, if you want to work with certain file formats, you may need to purchase the licensed version. The free version worked for me well enough, but since it was so muss free, I’d recommend upgrading. Stoik says of the free version: “Convert AVI, WMV, DV files in all possible combinations. Pick up one or multiple source video files, select output audio and video settings using preinstalled or custom profiles, and convert to single or multiple output video files. Now supports DivX + MP3 AVI, Windows Media 9, multiple file conversion, and file merging.”

I’ve never liked the license method for Quick Time or the fact that it behaves in certain ‘annoying’ ways on my PC, including autostarting, that I’m not convinced upgrading to Apple QT pro is the way I want to go… But I’m always keen on opinions from you guys! Anyway do check out the students’ own performance, written, directed and performed by my own students ! They did a fantastic job! I just wish my video editing and movie taking skills were better!

[flashvideo filename=http://www.nozkidz.com/wp-content/movies/BobandPig2.flv autostart=”false” height=”360″ width=”480″ /]

And that’s it for Saturday’s post. I’ll be posting a little more on usability and how to make your blog more visitor friendly!