Twenty 20 Cricket at the Oval

We went to a Twenty 20 match at the Oval last year and it didn’t quite live up to our expectations. This year however, we had a much better time. We were in line with the wicket so we could see what was going on and we were not sitting in the sun! Come to think of it, not frying in the sun might have had a lot to do with our satisfaction. Now for the bad news: Surrey lost to Sussex (counties in England, btw).

Using Sony Cybershot Movies with iDVD

The short answer: Use Quicktime Pro and export it to a DV Stream.

My Sony DSC-T1 camera is fantastic and I cannot recommend one enough. It starts up almost instantly, takes great quality pictures and movies and is so slim that you usually forget it’s in your pocket. However, I ran into my first problem last week. I had taken a trip to Korea and wanted to make a DVD of it. The pictures were effortless and the slideshows made in less than an hour but I couldn’t figure out how to get the videos on the DVD with sound. Every format I tried either wouldn’t import into iDVD or it would import but without sound. I finally stumbled upon Jim Heid’s answer for solving the same problem in iMovie. He recommends a free tool called MPEG StreamClip which works quite well if you don’t have a QuickTime Pro key. So on to the details.

1. Open the MPEG video in QuickTime Pro. I’ll assume that you can handle this step on your own!
2. Select the File->Export menu 
3. Choose “Movie to DV Stream” from the Export section of the new window 
4. Click on the “Options…” button
5. Set the video and audio options to match the format of the DVD you are making 

The video and audio options were quite new to me. I found that 48KHz locked audio worked quite well. I’m not sure exactly what locked audio is so if anybody can let me know I would appreciate it!

I hope this helps anybody making their first jump into DVD authoring. Now, take a look at one of my videos of what real sushi is like.

Smuggling Drugs Into Space

Can you believe the nerve of some drug runners? They found crack (Note: the title of the story was ‘Crack Found in Space Shuttle Foam’ before – honestly!!) stashed on the space shuttle. I’m curious to know how they got the crack into the foam. I found out that this isn’t the first smuggling operation with big plans. Drugs have also been found:

• In Shuttle Fuel Lines
• In an Airplane’s Wing
• In Antarctic Ice
• In a Russian Nuclear Reactor
• On the Deck of a Tanker

How do they find these? Are there drug sniffing dogs that patrol the space shuttle? What about the one on the ocean floor? Do they train dolphins to find drugs or was it just blind luck that they stumbled across it during a routine submarine patrol? Also, how much demand for drugs is there in space?