Greetings from somewhere in the Caribbean Sea! I’m on Mass Maritime’s annual training cruise aboard the T.S. Enterprise, and we’re currently steaming through the Caribbean on our way to Panama. On board, when we’re not busy with maintenance or training, we spend a lot of time watching movies. I keep my movies on a Western Digital 500GB external hard drive, and I have quite a large collection that I’m always looking to increase. Videos that other people have are often in a variety of different formats. Luckily, VLC plays all of them. I first discovered VLC (also called VideoLAN) about two years ago, in the package repo for the Linux distro I was using at the time. I tried it out, and was immediately impressed. In addition to supporting every media format I threw at it, VLC can also transcode and stream natively. It pretty much appeared to be an all-in-one solution for my video needs. I have found the transcoding feature to be especially handy on board the ship. I keep all the videos on my hard drive in DivX format, so it is sometimes necessary to convert a video I get into this format. VLC makes this really easy, with the wizard. It makes it equally as easy to convert videos from DivX to other formats, such as iPod-compatible MPEG-4. We have a wireless network on board that allows us to access the shipboard e-mail system, as well as the Internet when we have a shoreside connection. I haven’t tried it yet, but I plan to test out the streaming feature on our network to see how the bandwidth is. I’m planning on posting a few basic tutorials on how to do some of my most frequently used features in VLC within the next few days. Stay tuned!
From January 6th until February 26th I’ll be at sea on the T.S. Enterprise for Sea Term. We only have a limited satellite e-mail system, with no access to the Internet. I plan to continue making regular posts, but due to the limited access I have onboard they may be less frequent. If you’d like to know more about Sea Term or would like to follow the trip, I’ve set up a blog specifically for Sea Term which you can find at seaterm.christiaanconover.com. You can also e-mail me using the contact form found on the Sea Term blog.
As an avid Wordpress user, I have come to rely heavily on some of my plugins. Occasionally I’ll browse the Wordpress.org plugins section looking for cool ones to try, but usually I stumble across them trying to solve a problem or make my life easier. I’ve come up with a list of the ones that I find the most useful, or that are cool and worth having anyway.
I’ve gotten a number of e-mails in response to a comment I made on a post about installing Wordpress on GoDaddy hosting. Given the response I’ve gotten, I thought it was a good idea to provide my PHP.INI file that I’ve set up to other people looking for this. You can download it below.
The file is a complete PHP.INI file with all the configuration options you’d find in a full PHP installation. I’ve changed a few key settings that I found most important, such as max upload size and post size, allowing for high resolution photos to be uploaded.
If you have questions or suggestions about other ways to customize this file further, please leave a comment on this post. Thanks.
I’ve been using Azureus for years as my BitTorrent client, but I’ve been increasingly dissatisfied with its performance. I often had trouble getting downloads to start (even with no proxies or encryption enabled), and it was hogging system resources it didn’t deserve. It’s become more bloated with each new release, and it got to the point that I didn’t even want to use BitTorrent anymore because my client was frustrating me so much. Then I discovered Deluge, and that all changed.
I switched hosting companies at the beginning of December, because I needed hosting with a little more power and flexibility than I had. I looked at some of the hosts listed on the Wordpress site, which all seemed like good options. Then a friend of mine recommended Dreamhost, so looked it up, and was impressed by just the numbers I saw:
I just discovered Qik, and it makes me want a phone with a data plan even more. Ever since I got a camera phone that could record video, I’ve wanted to find a way to have live video streams, or ultimately have video calling. Well, Qik has finally answered the call for live video streaming.
I have decided that in the year 2008, I’m really going to make my blog a priority. I’m resolving to add a new post at least every other day, and will hopefully be able to make it every day. That’s why between now and January 1st, I’m going to devote time to coming up with new topics and post ideas to provide fresh content to readers on a regular, frequent basis. I’m planning to make some posts between now and January 1st as well, so don’t worry, you won’t be left hanging for a week. Not anymore, at least.
What do you plan to do differently with your blog in the coming year?
This coming week officially starts final exams here at Mass Maritime. However, many teachers have decided to either give their final exam early, to alleviate the stress of having all finals in one week, or to give the last test of the semester. As a result, the past two weeks have found me busy studying for tests and finishing projects. All this has resulted in a lack of updates to my blog, due to a lack of time both to find new topics to write about, and to actually write about them. Once the semester ends, I’m planning on getting back into the updates, and plan to publish a lot of updates before I ship out in January and February. I may be able to make a few updates while at sea, but most likely my efforts will be focused more on my Sea Term blog. Stay tuned for new posts after this coming week.