Computer Bliss

In response to my co-worker Brandon's recent post about his computer upgrades... and possibly a little follow-up to my previous post about the MacBook Air...

I used to have two machines in my office with a total of 6 hard disks and about 300 loud fans spinning in them. One was a desktop, running a development virtual machine and a generic office/web applications. The other was a bare-metal development box for doing hardware development.

They've been replaced with a 17" MacBook Pro. It runs my development environment in a virtual machine (which I simply copied over from the previous machine, how nice!). It also allows me to do some crazy things like plug it into our gigabit network and use optical discs. Then, I moved my hardware box into our engineering lab and connect to it via RDP when I need to access it.

The result? My office is completely silent. I can bring the MacBook home (or anywhere) and have the actual development environment from work right there, no VPN, no VNC. It's also a fully-functional computer, no sacrifices. Not to mention, I get to use MacOS!

If I don't want to bring a whole full-size MacBook Pro somewhere (like the places a MacBook Air would go), I still have the iPod Touch which does a great job of running a web browser and reading email.

Trouble with audio sample rates and SX Servers

One of the things I've been hearing from our support guys at Tightrope Media Systems is a lot of people have legacy content that is 44.1kHz audio that they would like to play back on their SX Server. The server, however, requires the standard DVD sample rate of 48kHz. This leaves everyone sad.

To help, I built a simple little utility that uses ffmpeg to fix the audio inside an mpeg2 file to be compatible with an SX Server. It's a little Windows app that you can run, drag a batch of files and folders onto and it will do its best to process the files to make them work on the SX.


Download FixMpeg
Read More about FixMpeg at my software site