Pure justice.

JBQ has made known that he works on Android at Google. I don’t know of any details, neither I ask, as I won’t be told anything more than that anyway. The only thing I know is that food at Google is as good and as plenty as it’s rumored to be. Last night was the only night in the week that we had dinner together. Since Monday JBQ had both lunch and dinner there. He seems to be very happy though, he is very excited about the job, the people and the prospects, and ultimately, that’s all it matters.

Which is why I am taking him out for sushi tonight. Huh!

God damn it.

As I wrote a few days ago, I spent days putting together my indie rock collection on iTunes with album art. Some of the covers comes from iTunes itself, and some of it added manually after searching for the right album art on the web. Right now, 99.5% of the songs on my iTunes *have* album art when viewed via Cover Flow.

And so I decided to put some of that music on the iPhone (about 6% of the overall collection). I create a new playlist, I put my favorite songs in there and then I sync the iphone. But for about 1/4 of the songs on the iPhone, they are without a freaking album art!

Going back to iTunes, browsing songs that on the iPhone have no album art, I CAN SEE the album art on Cover Flow. Right clicking one of these songs and doing a “get info” however, reveals that there is no album art associate with that song on that dialog, EVEN if when selected on iTunes I can see it on Cover Flow!

And yes, I had add album art for the vast majority of these songs either one by one (on the last tab of its “get info”), or by selecting multiple songs from the same album and drag n dropping the album art on their common “get info” dialog, or by using iTunes itself to get the art automatically. But it seems that the internal architecture of iTunes is not very cohesive, so depending how album art was added, it will behave differently when synced, or whatever.

Bloody piece of shit. Get it right already.

This is scary stuff. Not that NSA cares what millions of normal people are doing every single moment while connected on the net, but they do have the possibility to dig dirt if they choose to go against you for one reason or another. The interesting thing is that they do all that in a way the masses don’t really care. Look in UK and their surveillance cameras for example. While they are everywhere, and everyone knows about it, it’s hardly a problem to go about your business. Until there is or it’s going to be, that is. The founding fathers wouldn’t be all too happy about where the world is going to.

You got that shiny HD camera recently and you want your footage to show up on Vimeo HD, correct? Follow this Sony Vegas Platinum/Pro guide on how to setup your project settings, and how to export from it in a way that Vimeo re-encodes your footage as 720p HD. The following exports are also compatible with the XBoX360, YouTube HD, Sony PS3, and if you export in MP4 at 23.976 frame rate and lower bitrate, the AppleTV too.

1. Project Settings

On Vegas, it’s very important to have the right project settings before you start editing. From the main menu select “Project Properties”, and a new dialog will pop up. In there, click the right outmost icon called “Match Media”, the one that looks like a yellow folder. From there, select one of the files you will be editing with, and click “open”. Vegas will now automatically fill up most of the project settings for you, after analyzing the video file you picked.

After it does that, you need to do a few changes manually to that dialog: For the de-interlacing option select “interpolate”, and for the Quality option select “Best”. You can save a new template with these settings, so each time you start a new project with the same kind of footage, you can just pick it from the list! So, after your project settings are set, click “Ok”, and edit as you would normally do. Save often.

- Special Cases (not applicable for the majority of users)
*IF* you shot in PF24, PF30 or PF25 modes (which are non-default modes, found only on Canon HD cameras and a few Panasonic ones), you must check this project properties tutorial instead, and then come back here.

2. Ensuring visual quality
After you have edited, select ALL clips in the timeline (e.g. by using the SHIFT key), right click, Switches, Disable Resample. By disabling resample we ensure no ghosted image (especially if you used slow-motion).

3. Exporting with Vegas Platinum: Windows Media WMV

For the “Movie Studio HD” and Platinum 7/8 edition of Vegas, WMV is the only workable solution as it’s the only “delivery-grade” encoder that allows user customization. To get the WMA 9.2 audio abilities you need to install first Windows Media Player 11 for XP (Vista/Win7 comes with it), and then follow the visual guide here to export in WMV. The only thing that might need adjustment is the frame rate if you shot in 25 fps PAL, or if you shot in true 24p. This WMV export works great with the XBoX360 too. Important: If you are using Vegas Platinum 9 instead of versions 6/7/8, prefer to export in Sony AVC instead of WMV, as shown in the SonyAVC link below. Movie Studio HD users should use WMV.

4. Exporting with Vegas Pro: MP4 h.264/AAC

If you have Vegas Pro 7/8/9 instead, you can export to h.264 either by using MainConcept’s or Sony’s h.264 AVC encoder. Use this visual guide to export to MainConcept (recommended method), or this one to export to Sony AVC. The only thing that might need adjustment is the frame rate if you didn’t shoot in NTSC, or if you shot in true 24p. Please note that if you are getting crashes during rendering, you must go to Vegas’ Settings, click the video tab and lower the number of threads to “1″. These h.264 files work with both the XBoX360 and the PS3 too.

5. Conclusion

So, after your rendering is complete with one of the methods above, simply upload the resulted video file to Vimeo, add the comma separated tags “HD” & the model of your camera (e.g. “HV20″), and in about an hour’s time (depending on your uploading internet speed) it will be available in glorious HD through the web browser. Please note, you will need a really fast computer to get HD Flash video playback smoothly on your web browser. If Vimeo does not re-encode your HD video in HD mode, it means that either one of their encoders crashed (it happens regularly, so you will have to leave them a message at their forum and ask them to fix it for you), or you are already used your “1 HD video per week” allowance that Vimeo enforces to their non-paid users. Finally, I recommend you allow users to download your videos, as it’s nice to be able to get our hands to the original higher bitrate/quality version and enjoy it via a proper media player, or the Xbox360/PS3/AppleTV on a big HDTV.

Using these two tools I re-virginized my 1.0.2 unlocked phone and upgraded to 1.1.1 (and left it locked, although jailbreaked). I am waiting and see if a jailbreaked 1.1.1 can be upgraded to 1.1.2 without iTunes requesting re-activation before I go for it. Right now I can use it with my AT&T “pay as you go” SIM but I am not able to activate via iTunes as I don’t have a valid 2-year iPhone account.