Eric Mason . net

Converting iPhone 3GS Videos to play on Samsung Blu-ray Player

eric — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 01:21:10 +0000

Wow, the iPhone 3GS takes nice videos! I recently made a quick video of Murphy at the dog park and noticed that it looks great even full-screen on my 20″ monitor at work. I was curious how it would look on TV, but my Samsung BD-P3600 didn’t like the .mov file the iPhone created. Here’s how I converted it:

ffmpeg -i IMG_0270.MOV -vcodec libxvid -aspect 4:3 -b 4000k -ab 128k mdog.avi

You will need ffmpeg for Windows. I used FFmpeg svn rev 19159

By the way, here’s the video:

Do you have my iPod?

eric — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 19:50:57 +0000

This is a message for the person who found my iPod Nano on an American Airlines plane in May, or otherwise ended up with it. Unless your name is also Eric Mason, you have to know it’s not yours, since it has “Eric Mason” engraved on the back of it. Please leave a comment here if you have it.

Boot EC2 Instances from an EBS volume

eric — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 14:17:48 +0000

Shlomo Swidler has a great writeup on booting an EC2 instance from an EBS drive. In my case I wanted to run our development server only during business hours, and possibly only when someone actually needs it. This way we can save both money and time by running a faster instance type (think Rails unit tests), but only for 1/3 of the time. Since the EBS volume persists across instances, any software upgrades and configuration changes will persist as well.

I’ve been thinking I should figure this out for a while, but it seems Mr. Swidler figured it out for me. Thanks!

Cape Cod

eric — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 18:57:22 +0000

Lay Family Reunion

eric — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 04:58:50 +0000

Costa Rica

eric — Thu, 28 May 2009 13:58:10 +0000

Samantha

eric — Mon, 04 May 2009 14:56:30 +0000

We had a nice visit with Jen’s little cousin Samantha, who was on her first trip to Florida.

Murphy Meets New Friends

eric — Mon, 04 May 2009 14:19:42 +0000

Obama and Chavez

eric — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:51:01 +0000

Brothers In Arms?

Our president laughs and shakes hands with a brutal socialist dictator. The change we deserve!

Tea Party Protest

eric — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 04:08:13 +0000

Lots of people turned out for the Fort Lauderdale’s version of the Tea Party protest against excessive government spending, overreaching, socialism, etc. Most of the protesters actually seemed like normal people. At one point the crowd even started singing “God Bless America.”