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.