RipIt is a great small app to quickly rip a DVD to your harddrive. However, it uses ffmpegx which can only utilise two cores.

Handbrake goes nuts. It uses as many cores available and can rip discs from DVD to mp4 on the fly (without having to rip to harddrive first).

Of course you have to click a couple of buttons (source, then start) with Handbrake, whereas RipIt can rip without any clicks.

Here is the CPU log of just RipIt (notice the 150%):

Now, here is Handbrake:

Results:
Handbrake 33mins, 743mb
RipIt 1hr 58, 1503mb

Handbrake wins. Flawless victory.

Sorry but this has really suddenly annoyed me. Just *everyone* wants to wear the latest in cool and neat desgin, Superdry…

Superdry clothing is then new Bench.

They need to go on http://www.latfh.com/

To cut the story down to bare facts – i first ordered the Nokia E71 at the start of November from Amazon Market Place. A month later, no contact from the seller and i’ve been ripped off. Well, the dude tried to rip off Amazon. I’ve filled a claim for my money back which i shall hear back from shortly. Since the filling, I’ve bought a new one, direct from Amazon. Yesterday i received an email saying it had shipped, and then moments later (literally) it turned up. Think the email was delayed as it stated it was shipped on the 27th.

And was I happy. Although i was at work and couldn’t really drill into all the features. Never before have I been that excited over a phone. But there was so much build up to it, and after using the iPhone for almost two years, my tactile sense has been virtualised and abandoned. I’ve been in dire need of a click to know i’ve pressed a button. And boy does the Nokia E71 have buttons.

Apple hate buttons. In fact, they acknowledge this with every product they make. Making them minimalistic as possible. And it looks good too. However, there is a downside to having minimal buttons. For example, the iPhone has four mechanical buttons. Sleep, Vol up, Vol down, and Home. The touch screen is used to have virtual buttons and control the device.

This is a horrible way to type though. Touching an area on a piece of glass to activate a function has no physical feed back. It’s the exact same idea as those horrible see-through calculators from the late 80s. The buttons wouldn’t respond if you didn’t touch them precisely and you had to look at the calculator all the time.

Nokia E71 has a full QWERTY keyboard, cramped it may be, but surprisingly usable. I’ve only misspelled a couple words so far.

BTW, this shouldn’t be taken as “I hate iPhones, i hate Apple”. I still have my iPhone and will probably keep it to use as an iPod touch. It’s a great device for surfing the web. Safari is the best mobile browser out there. Perfect for what the touch screen interface is designed for. Same with iTunes. Best mobile media player with beautiful cover art. There are also games on the iPhone are amazing. But when it comes to writing emails, attaching documents, downloading unknown file types, having a filesystem to do this all – iPhone is left for dead. Also, when i refer to iPhone, i’m talking about my iPhone 3g. Not the latest iPhone 3gs, as that costs about 3x the amount of my Nokia and runs a bit smoother than it’s predecessor.

Here are some of the features i’ve been missing from my iPhone and that Apple will probably never bring:

• battery life – since charging it last night and using it all today, making calls, texting, checking email, using bluetooth, it’s at about 85% capacity
• you can tell it when to check for work emails, mon-fri, between the hours of 8am and 6pm)
• it turns off things that drains power when it about to run out of juice, such as data comms (bt/wifi/3g/gps/email) and screen brightness, leaving enough juice to make and receive calls
• text-to-speech – reads messages (not email though?), menu items and announces who’s calling when the phone rings.
• maps – seriously, awesome. Apple did a great job at google maps, but what they failed at is caching. If you go out of reception or roam, you don’t get any maps or they’ll cost you. Nokia allow you to download (for free) most of the world. UK files are about 230mb, whereas NZ is a paltry 17mb. Included with maps is turn by turn navigation for proper GPS navigation (car usage)
• message notification – a light flashes when a message hasn’t been read.
• applications such as Fring! (VOIP) allow you to use VOIP over 3g/edge.
• can take videos
• has a flash on the 3.2mb autofocus camera
• the home screen has information displaying calendar events, latest messages etc
• voice dialling is pretty accurate
• hspda modem
• web page loading and downloads are very fast compared to the iPhone (even though it’s the same network/account)
• there aren’t any cutesy riffs/sound effects. All notification’s can be customised.
• voice quality is awesome, crystal clear phone conversations
• paring with OS X was fine, although PC suite software is Windows only currently, however they are developing a Linux and OS X version which sounds like it will be out early 2010
• PC suite was surprisingly awesome for a Windows application

The downside of things i’ve noticed are:

• headphones are 2.5mm (not the standard 3.5mm) and make crackly sounds
• sound quality for media is horrible
• email was pretty hard to get sorted. After playing with it last night it said, “do you want to install Nokia mail?” even though I thought I was setting Nokia mail up?! Then all of a sudden it worked awesomely.
• Initial setup of networks was frustrating and kept asking “do you want to connect?” but it hasn’t asked me today
• themes are kinda shitty, nothing compares to the iPhone UI

To sum it up, I’m very happy with my Nokia E71. The downsides such as music quality/headphones etc – it’s not a toy like the iPhone. It’s a tool. For more than half the price of an iPhone, and for far more features its worth getting. If you want a smartphone for playing with and being amazed by pinching auto rotating etc – get the iPhone. If you want a smartphone to use for business and not to autorotate (especially when lying on your side in bed reading news) with great features.. get something like this.

here’s the amazing PC suite app (Windows only):

I made the decision to drop my iPhone and go with a phone that i can actually use. The Nokia E71 has many benefits over the iPhone, such as a physical keyboard, longer battery, actually make and receive calls.

It should be arriving within the month, so i’ll post how great it is then.

Until then, check out the review

Updated:
Ali asked me, no.. Ali slandered me before leaving work this evening saying how much i’ll miss the iPhone. Well here’s some reasoning to my decision:

Nokia does everything the iPhone can but has;

• Physical keyboard
• Dual modes (work/personal) to separate work from fun
• Faster 3g hsdpa
• Camera with autofocus & flash
• Flash (lite?) support
• Zip/Unzip
• Java apps
• Longer battery life (6 days heavy use)
• Fully customisable alerts (SMS/mail appear on sleep screen, light glades every 10sec for unread message waiting)
• Proper mail formatting
• Read, Edit save documents

Things I like about iPhone that I’ll miss;

• iPod
• Google Maps (but Google Maps & Ovi is available for the Nokia
• Safari (best mobile browser ever to date)
• Apps, app/music store – but hardly ever use 3rd party apps, purchase over the air
• Interface is awesome

Things I don’t like about iPhone;

• Heavy lag in cold boot (startup time is about 1min 30sec, then about 10sec resting/freeze before login)
• Some lag when multitasking (listening to iPod while composing this message, keys freeze/can’t answer calls about 1/10 times)
• It’s stupid auto orientation (sometimes I don’t want it to go landscape)
• Not very accessible (have to look at the screen to type, have to turn on and unlock to check mail/messages)
• Camera sucks and no flash
• Reception is rubbish for wifi/voice/data
• Can’t save/edit/format documents from mail
• Touchscreen is easy to navigate but cumbersome at times
• Battery life suuuuucks (iPhone can’t sleep to save battery when in standby!?)
• Looking like a bellend typing with one finger, uncontrollably focused on the iPhone

Maybe some of these issues are because my iPhone is jailbroken and or it needs a reset. I accept that. But I end up getting more upset with the iPhone, expecting it to do something which i suppose it’s not really supposed to do.

Things that won’t be good on Nokia:

• Media player won’t be as good as iPod
• Camera is 3.2 but some uploads on flicker look blueish

These reasons made me make my decision.

In summary, i think the iPhone is a great toy/media/web tool. It’s fancy looking and does neat tricks – but when you actually need to do something that YOU want to do, it fails on so many levels.

I’m supposed to be attending a friends party tonight, but she only announced the details on Facebook. This is a bit of a problem as Facebook has currently undergoing “maintenance” apparently.

Yes, most people have a Facebook account, and it’s a great way to announce mass-audience messages – but it shouldn’t be confused with email/invitations. Now why is sending email more difficult than a Facebook invite? Is it the visibility of seeing who’s attending? Is it the avatars/facial recognition? Or is it the open-ness which makes Facebook differenciate from regularass email?

Facelark sucks. Now i’m late, probably.

I despise lazy people.

Royal Mail have failed as a company, and their workers have been pushed to the edge of reason and strike against the company. However, this hurts the consumer greater than the hurting the Royal Mail head honcho.

And in addition to the strike which has been going on for the past two weeks, Royal Mail “cuts prices” on – no longer employing a team to answer phones, but to utilise a voice recognition system (which is fruitfully repugnant) and has no option to speak to an ACTUAL HUMAN BEING. I spent 6 minutes speaking to the female version of HAL, having to repeat everything at least twice. And why the hell do we require voice recognise in these days, especially with the quality (or lack of) of the voice stream on a mobile phone (probably similar to mono 8bit, 11025hz) and then there are the dropouts. I understand that some people don’t have the ability to press buttons, such as dudes who’ve lobbed off their arms.. but why isn’t there the option at the start to say “Say, ‘voice’ to hear options using your voice or press 1 to continue”.

Back to my inital point. I’ve bought something online from the UK and have been waiting for it since the 7th of September. It has been in the Royal Mail deposit centre since the 9th. Now it is the 17th of September and the status on the track and trace website says it’s still in the depo centre. Seriously you guys, you suck.

I dislike record companies. People will disagree, but i find they are not too disimilar to pimps who solicit prostitution.

They entice young bands, then squeeze every single last penny out of them until theyre unfit too work then discard them like yesterdays beef.

The record companies also limit the bands creative exploration. Which I don’t like. Music should be about art – not about creating something that will sell like a wet flannel on a hot summers day.

From wikipedia (talking about The Klaxons):

At the beginning of 2009, it was reported that the band had been told to re-record parts of their second album, after it was rejected by their record label. The Sun confirmed that Polydor deemed the record “too experimental” for release, with Reynolds stating that “…we’ve made a really dense, psychedelic record” and that “it isn’t the right thing for us [the band]“.

P.S. happy 1000th post!

There has been so many posts around the internet about Michael Jackon’s death that it actually made the internet dip into a grave of 404’s, 504’s and even 509’s. One site affected in particular was, google news due to an extraordinary amount of search requests for “michael jackson” – the server thought it was a virus or DOS attack so it shutdown temporarily. The server was repaired within the hour.

But that’s not what I’m talking about. Michael Jackson was certainly a hero to many, as there were so many people with & against him during his lawsuit cases – but now the internet is overwhelmed with RIP notices and “oh he was so great” this that and the other.

It seems to me that his death was so sudden for people that they’ve automatically let go of previous feelings (or gained new ones). I dunno. I think many people thought (and have even said) that he’s a “weirdo” and laughed and scoffed at his return to the stage. Now these people are jumping on the RIP bandwagon and are up voicing their opinions (again) about him. Somewhat of a hypocrisy there.

The only thing i have to say about Jackson is “Sorry, I feel I’m apart of piracy because I once bought a cassingle from a store and they accidentally put your full album in the cassette case”. Plus, “Your death was the only news on this morning’s radio news and googling binging the legitimacy of the news i happened to miss the weather report. Thanks a lot.”

RIP wacko jacko

(enjoy some dark humor via contractor.co.uk)

And why should they?!

Microsoft have recently released Bing and there’s a lot of buzz about it. Quite frankly, it does give good results. But is it enough to sway Google?

Unless MS subconsciously adds it in to its browsers (wait, they’ve done that – redirected the msn search address to bing) and include it in their upcoming OS, people will probably continue to use what they know.

I’ve noticed a friend of mine, often typing in google into the address bar, rather than using Safari’s search box. As she’s only really used IE6 before, old habits die hard (yippekaye mf!!). (On another note, she loves Chrome, tabs, and the top sites page).

So on one account, that shows that the term “google it” makes them go to the website Google and use their product.

“Bing it”, “i just binged your name and got your facebook page lolz”, “oh noes, bingz down?!” – Added to the fact the site is ugly as the inside of a freshly used nappie, the name reminds me of the show worst comedy show evah, which makes me frown, Friends – with Chandler Bing! The funny one (apparently). Just laugh when you hear others laughing or wait for the flashing light.

Oh and another thing on design. Great going with accessibility MS. When images are turned off, you can’t see your (probably redundant anyways) navigation at the top. Plus you’ve got some stupid JS image injector which forces that retarded background image in – even if you don’t want images, you’re feed one ghastly one.

End rant.

[update] hah, someone at work just sent an email around referring to MS Bing as Chandler Bing!

This is absurd?!

The other day in “hicksville” Whangarei, (near Auckland, New Zealand) – South African zookeeper Dalu Mncube was mauled to death in the white tiger’s liar.

Two (zoo)keepers went in to clean the white tiger enclosure when the animal attacked one of the keepers.

Mncube suffered injuries to the abdomen and lower leg which involved “tearing” by the tiger.

Ms Kennett said that, despite the best efforts of the other keeper, the tiger wouldn’t let go. Mncube died at the scene before an ambulance arrived at the park.

The tiger has since been shot dead.

Source: Stuff.co.nz/NZPA

Seriously, why kill the wild animal when it was only protecting it’s territory? Would you kill a man if he defended his property?

The only reason I can think they killed the tiger is because it has now tasted human blood? They should release the tiger from whence he came! (And that’s how Buster lost his hand).