Broken my iPod Touch again

Well another week goes by, and I break something else. This week it’s my iPod Touch again.

Over the past couple of days, it’s just been hanging and I’ve had to manually restart it a number of time, however tonight it finally broke…big time !

While syncing my podcasts this evening, it flash on and off a few time, and then all I got was the Apple logo…and this is how it stayed for about half an hour…oops.

So, as I’ve locked up my iPod before, I knew that if it locks up, all I need to do it hold the power and the home button down for about 10 seconds, and this will kill it….I did…and it did !

I fired it back up again, and again, for another 3o mins or so it stayed on the apple logo ! Doh !

Finally I decided, “Recovery mode it is…”, fired it up, kept my finger on the home button, plugged in the cable and waited….and waited, and waited. Previously when I’ve put it in recovery mode, it pops up with the “plug into iTunes please” logo within a matter of seconds, but no, a minute later, still the apple logo !…I was just about to give up on it, and book myself in at the apple store, then the happy “please plug me into iTunes popped up ! Phew !

Plugged into iTunes, and it recognized I’d plugged in my iPod in recovery mode and wanted to wipe it…which was fine as I’d only synced about an hour before.

It got half way through the process, only for me to be met with a Error 1604 !, After doing a little reading it seemed something to do with the downloaded version of the OS..

Anyway, me being me, ignored everything I’d just read on how to fix it, and gave it another try…this time it worked !!!

I had to leave my iPod for nearly an hour to sync everything back up, copy across my apps and music, but we are now all back up and running.

One thing I have noticed with version 3 of the OS, it now remembers where all your icons were when it restores a backup ! Finally !…there’s was nothing worse than restoring a backup, only to spend the next couple of days moving your icons back to the places you like them.

Tags: 1604, Apple, apple logo, apple store, apps, backup, big time, button, couple, couple of days, downloaded version, evening, everything, half an hour, home, home button, hour, ipod, ipod touch, itunes, logo, mode, music, number, plug, podcasts, recover, Recovery, recovery mode, running one, something, sync, time, tonight, touch, version, week

ScutterCast

Apologies for no posts for a while, however I’ve been mad busy on one of my other projects.

About a month ago, myself and a couple of my resident posters over at Red Dwarf Forum decided it was time to do a Red Dwarf based podcast. We’ve been discussing who will do it, what we’ll talk about for a while, and last Monday we recorded the first episode.

The podcast itself took about 5/6 hours to edit together, which for me was quite good, as I’m still quite new to all this podcasting stuff.

Below is the software I’ve used to put the whole thing together, there are probably a lot quicker and smarter ways, but open to suggestions

Initial recording was done using skype, and a piece of software on the mac called “Skype Call Recorder“, which does the job well, however recorders all inputs as 1 file with no channel separation. This although good for the job, makes editing a bit of a pain, as we found Antirealism was too quiet, and Ori-Studfarm was too loud. I’m pretty sure this can be fixed quite easily by using hardware, and probably something I will look at as the episodes come along.

Once I had the audio file, it was editing time. I ran the file through Adobe Soundbooth, to hopefully clean up the background hum of a 4 man skype conference call, and attempt to increase Antirealism’s voice, and lower Ori-Studfarm’s. I then went to town on the editing, we recorded around 90 minutes worth of audio, however in the end, there was only around 35 mins used.

Once I had the cleaned audio, it was then time for GarageBand to work it’s magic. Dropped it into Garageband, chopped the audio into sections, then added stab music in between the little breaks. It was time then for the intro music, the intro message from Kyten (thanks to Tony Lunn), the outro music and the background track. I was planning on having just the clean vocals without a backing track, however there was still quite a lot of background humm, and thought the best was of applying a “sticky plaster” was to attempt to mask it out with an audio track.

The final work that needed to be done, was to add the images, I’ve always wanted to do an enhanced podcast, and was the main reason I bought the mac in the first place. This then meant listening to the podcast, listening for key points in the episode review and getting screen shots from this point. This was done with a peice of software on the mac called Snapz Pro X, which allows you to take a screen capture of anything on the screen, as the Cmd+Shift+F3 doesn’t allow you to take screen captures when you are running a DVD.

The final peice of the jigsaw was hosting. As we plan to do all 55 episodes of Red Dwarf (currently 52 + the 3 Easter specials), I made the assumption that these would be around 50Mb each x 55 which would be nearly 3Gb of space, and if only 10 people downloaded, we would need 30Gb of bandwidth.  I took the advice of a fellow podcaster (CarBozman), and went with podbean, as this is a dedicated pocast hosting site, and I can’t describe just how happy I am with this. It gives more stats then I know what to do with, and after a discussion with Tony, we will probably be moving all the other projects to podbean.

That’s it, episode 1 in the bag, and everything set up for episode 2 and the other 53 episodes.

If you wish to have a listen yourself, you can find them either on Itunes by searching for scuttercast, or by going to the podcast site for the Enhanced version or the MP3 only version

Also please check out the newly WordPressed version of www.reddwarfforum.com, many updates on the new Red Dwarf episode.

Tags: adobe soundbooth, antirealism, apologies, background, background hum, background track, backing track, call, call recorder, cast, channel separation, conference call, dwarf, editing, episode, garageband, humm, intro message, intro music, job, last monday, lot, mac, music, open to suggestions, plaster, podcast, posters, red, Red Dwarf, screen, scutter, skype, software, stab, Studfarm, time, Tony Lunn, track, version, while

Halo Wars

Last weekend I noticed that Halo Wars demo was available on the Microsoft Marketplace, and though, it’s an RTS on a console, it’s going to be terrible, but I downloaded, and really enjoyed. I’ve tried other RTS’s on the console, eg C&C, but felt that they don’t work as well as on mouse and keyboard. I’m the kind of person who has groups of units mapped to my 1-9 key for quick select, and like to attack multiple enemies at one..this isn’t possible on the console, or should I say, not as easy as hitting a number key.

So anyway back to Halo Wars, I’m quite a fan of the Halo series, they are probably not the best FPS’s on the planet, however the storyline is pretty good, the characters, weapons and vehicles are memorable, and these are all present in this RTS.

First of all, Graphics, to be honest, the graphics aren’t any better that you would find in other recent RTS’s, they are good and clear, but I can’t say anything wow’d me. However, the cut scenes are fantastic ! I mean really fantastic, think the likes or the final fantasy films, or Flight of the Osiris from the Matrix (Animatrix). Between each level, there was a couple of minutes of cut scene, it was so good, I thought to myself, why oh why don’t they make an animated film, it would be brilliant ! The game I believe is set 10 years before Halo one, so no Master Chief, however there were many Spartans in the game.

Next, Sound, Gorgous, Gorgous sound, the music, was very simular the the Halo series, so as you can imaging when the game got going, so did the music. The sound effects, voices where everything you’d come to expect from the series, and utterly brilliant.

Next Gameplay, this was the most important for me, as I was pretty sure it would suck, hard to control, no where near as good as a mouse and keyboard, however I was wrong ! You can tell this game was designed for the 360, the buttons and control system worked seamlessly, and at no point through the 15 levels did I ever get stuck on which button to press.

All in all, a very enjoyable experience, and can’t wait to get on line and kick some ass. The game has taken me 10hours and 16 mins to beat, however some of that time, I was pretty drunk. The game is only 15 levels long, however there is the online play as well as the skirmish still to do.

1o/1o

Tags: 10 years, 360, amp, animated film, animatrix, c amp, couple of minutes, cut, demo, enemies, fan, fantasy films, final fantasy, flight of the osiris, FPS, game, gameplay, Gorgous, halo, halo wars, halo wars demo, keyboard, kind, Marketplace, master chief, Microsoft, mouse, music, number, number key, Person, RTS, series, sound, sound effects, spartans, voices, wars, weekend, xbox