Nerdy Nigel
Stuff for Nerds
Australian Government 2.0 a Big Fat Fail
Nov 17th
Well it had to come out sooner or later. Hiding behind that thinly veiled Gov 2.0 policy is nothing more than just the head of state, head of country or head of whatever group is under you participating in social media. All other employees are completely blocked. That means, no facebook, no twitter, no myspace, hell even the Gizmodo home page is blocked. And don’t get me started on Google services.
Take note politicians, the public are fast becoming tired of these obviously two faced press releases. Time to face facts.
http://www.itwire.com/it-policy-news/government-tech-policy/43276-gartner-grades-gov-20-a-fail
Picture courtesy of Twitter: The Famous Fail Whale
Broken Pits Here, Broken Pits There, Broken Pits Everywhere
Nov 16th
Telstra - Broken Pits
The NBN is on the way to delivery and so is the sale of Telstra infrastructure which was once previously owned by the taxpayer valued at approximately $11B AU as it stands.
During my travels around the Brisbane area what is becoming increasing familiar is the yellow tubular temporary fencing that Telstra use when there are works happening on pits and trenches on footpaths or where there are damaged pits awaiting recification.
I have started to take notice of the damaged pits in my area and some of them have had the yellow fencing in place for well over 6 months. Within a 500m radius from my residence there are at least 3 damaged pits that have been sitting for months with the barricade around them.
Telstra are holding off on maintenance as much as possible so once again the taxpayer will be paying for rectification of the pathways that they once owned.
I sincereley hope that Sen. Conroy has allowed for funding of cable pathway rectifications works in that $43B.
Seems like a bit of a co-incidence to me.
What do you think?
Convert DTS to AC3 on Mac OSX
Sep 7th
I have been compressing my DVD’s and Blurays for years to a format that plays on my various media players. After purchasing and falling in love with the Apple TV interface I decided to use it as my primary media playback device. This unfortunately led to the problem of the Apple TV being unable to playback a DTS soundtrack. Up until recently I have been running Windows in a virtual machine just to run some simple buggy applications for the conversion. This process was time consuming and very frustrating.
I decided to do a search to try a find a reasonably easy process on OSX. I found a few different methods but most out of date with broken links so I decided to compile my own howto combining information from many sources. I will try to link back where possible.
Here we go.
Step 1
Install Xcode from Apple. Signup here and register as a developer if you do not have an account.
http://developer.apple.com/programs/register/
Download Xcode when you are logged in and install the default configuration.
Step 2
Install CMake
mkdir /tempcd /tempcurl -O http://www.cmake.org/files/v2.8/cmake-2.8.2.tar.gztar xvzf cmakecd cmake-2.8.2./configuremakesudo make install
Mirror of CMake 2.8.2 here.
Step 3
Install Aften
cd /tempsvn co http://aften.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/aften Aftencd Aftenmkdir defaultcd defaultcmake /temp/Aften/makesudo make install
Step 4
Install libdca
cd /tempsvn co svn://svn.videolan.org/libdca/trunk libdcacd libcdasudo ./bootstrapsudo ./configuresudo makesudo make install
Step 5
Install MKVToolNix
The easiest way to do this is as per the MKVToolnix site and to install MacPorts
Download MacPorts from here
Install the package and restart Terminal.
Now install MKVToolnix using
sudo port install mkvtoolnix
Mine took about 15 minutes to install the dependencies required and to install MKVToolnix.
Step 6
Install the final mkvdts2ac3 script.
You can get it from here.
I also have a local copy here.
Remove the .txt extension if you use my local copy.
Place the script in your /usr/local/bin folder.
cd to the download location of the mkvdts2ac3.sh scriptchmod 755 mkvdts2ac3.shcp mkvdts2ac3.sh /usr/local/bin
All done.
Now you should be able to convert your mkv files with a DTS soundtrack to AC3.
In the terminal, cd to a folder where your mkv file is and run
mkvdts2ac3.sh yourfile.mkv
If you do not want to keep the DTS file use the -n flag.
Good luck.
The iAbbott Launches
Aug 16th
Just happened to stumble upon this golden video on YouTube.
I had a laugh anyway.
Unbelievable Bigpond Plan Changes
Jul 25th
Unbelievable Bigpond Pricing 25/07/2010 - Image credit Bigpond Website
***Update***
Well it looks like the pigs weren’t quite flying yet. After further investigation it appears the devil is in the detail.
BigPond Multiple Product Benefit – You must be eligible for the $10 BigPond Member Benefit plus have one other eligible service on your Single Bill, with a combined monthly access fee of at least $89 (based on the 12-month broadband pricing for customers with a full service fixed phone). Eligible additional services are a BigPond Wireless broadband, FOXTEL from Telstra service or Telstra post-paid mobile.
Which means that the starting price for the Bigpond Elite 50GB Liberty plan is $79.95 per month. Funny that the plan details are on a page with 49 plan in the link. Bit misleading isn’t it Telstra? But that just normal from them.
Are my eyes deceiving me? Is it a blue moon? Is that a pig flying? All these are valid questions when I see the current pricing on Telstra’s Bigpond page.
Telstra pricing is typically out of this world and I don’t mean that in a good way. I am certainly surprised at the current pricing offered by Bigpond today.
I am currently with iiNet on their Home 5 plan which gives me 70gB Peak and 70gB Off Peak for $69.95 per month when bundled with the home phone.
For the same price I can now get 200gB of data (including uploads) from Telstra. That is simply unbelievable pricing from Telstra who have always typically been 50% more expensive than their competitors.
What will be interesting is if Telstra Wholesale also drop their pricing appropriately to other providers or if it will take the usual court case to kick Telstra into gear.
Congratulations Telstra on finally being competitive.
