Jonathan Hensley | The Blog | JHensley.org

Here are some interesting links from today:

• Burn almost any video file to a playable DVD
  Putting any old video file – like the DivX/Xvid-encoded videos you’ve downloaded with BitTorrent – onto a DVD to play on your TV can be a daunting task. There’s plenty of software that tackles this sort of thing for a price, but as a lover of open source software, free’s always my first choice.Luckily for all of us, authoring playable DVDs from just about any video file has gotten a lot easier in the open source community. This week I’m going to show you how to burn those downloaded TV shows to a DVD you can play in your living room using the free (as in speech), open source application, DVD Flick.
• Chinese Doctors Officially Classify Symptoms of Internet Addiction
  The Beijing Health Ministry is soon to adopt “internet addiction” as a disorder along with compulsive gambling and alcoholism in the official diagnostic manual. Doctor Tao Ran, who treats sufferers at Beijing’s Military General Hospital, says the threshold is around six hours a day and one of the following symptoms in the past three months: “yearning to get back online, mental or physical distress, irritation and difficulty concentrating or sleeping.” So, um, yeah, I’m addicted, along with ten percent of users under eighteen in China, according to a study cited by a state official.

Here are some interesting links from today:

• Silicon Mountain Allio HDTV Has Built-in PC, Blu-ray, More
  That new HD LCD TV is great, but you know it really needs? A DVD/Blu-ray player, for starters. Also, if you could toss in an Intel Core2Duo processor and a terabyte of storage, that would be nice. And while we’re at it, I’m going to need a wireless keyboard and mouse, plus a split-screen feature, so I can multi-task. Got all that? Good.
• iPhone twice as reliable as BlackBerry? Dream on
  I love my iPhone and have never felt tempted to return to the BlackBerry, but I was still rolling my eyes at TechCrunch’s report of the iPhone being “twice as reliable as the BlackBerry”. After all, my iPhone crashed in four different applications in a 45-minute period this afternoon.Of course, the referenced SquareTrade study covers hardware malfunctions, not software malfunctions. In this, perhaps it is true that the malfunction rate for Apple’s smartphones after one year is only 5.6 percent, while Research In Motion’s phones crap out 11.2 percent of the time.

  But in day-to-day usage, I’ve found my iPhone software to be far less stable than the ugly-but-reliable BlackBerry software.

• Google can now OCR all PDFs
  Google has a new system that scans Acrobat PDFs on the web for words using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Similar to its process for using OCR to detect words in PDFs that have already been OCR processed, the new system will do the same for scanned documents posted online that haven’t yet undergone OCR.If you have scanned PDFs and are interested in having them converted into text, you can upload the images to your website and take advantage of this service.

  Simply follow the instructions for how to use Google OCR from the Digital Inspiration website

• Top 10 Things to Look Forward to in Windows 7
  While the next iteration of the ubiquitous Microsoft desktop operating system, Windows 7, isn’t a dramatic overhaul of its predecessor Windows Vista, it does fix several sore spots and add a few welcome features. Rumor has it that Windows 7 will drop in the middle of next year, but last month Microsoft released a “preview” tester build of Windows 7. After living in the Windows 7 Preview for a week now, several features and niceties jumped out at me which promise to make Windows a better place to work come 2009. Let’s take a look.

Here are some interesting links from yesterday:

• YouTube to post full-length MGM films
  YouTube, the largest video-sharing website, will show full-length television shows and films from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s archives in its latest step to boost advertising revenue by adding professional programing, the company told Reuters on Sunday.The site, owned by Google Inc, plans to make the announcement about the new partnership on Monday.MGM Studios will kick off the partnership by posting episodes of its decade-old “American Gladiators” program to YouTube on one channel.
• iPhone trumps RAZR as most purchased US consumer handset
  Apple’s iPhone 3G dethroned the top-ranked Motorola RAZR as the leading handset purchased by adult consumers in the U.S. during the third quarter of the year, according to market research firm NPD.The shift puts an end to the RAZR’s three-year run atop the market, with the Motorola handset falling to the second slot, followed by Research in Motion’s Blackberry Curve, LG’s Rumor, and LG’s enV2, respectively.
• iPhones Twice As Reliable As BlackBerries
  The iPhone is twice as reliable as the Blackberry after one year of ownership, a new study by SquareTrade finds. SquareTrade, which sells extra warranties for cell phones and other devices, looked at the failure rates of 15,000 phones covered under its plans. The malfunction rate for iPhones after one year is 5.6 percent, compared to 11.2 percent for the Blackberry and 16.2 percent for the Treo.

In recent news:

• AT&T-sanctioned 3G tethering on the way for iPhone
  In an interview with Michael Arrington at the Web 2.0 Summit, AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph De La Vega let it be known that an official, AT&T sanctioned method of using the iPhone as a 3G modem for a laptop is on the way “soon”.
• Search Engine Optimization Training
  If you’re looking for some SEO teaching and have a spare 30 minutes you might find this video presentation by Stephan Spencer at a recent WordPress event.

In case you haven’t seen one of the 50 different DTV commercials that are on every other hour or you need more information on how it’s going to work… check out this video.