Jamie Thingelstad

My Nabaztag Rabbit just reported the stock market is “up up up!” It is so very wrong. Wishful thinking?

Trying to resolve a medical bill via several 800 numbers and IVR systems. Going nuts.

Having 200+ DVD’s ripped into iTunes + ubiquitous Apple TV is proving pretty cool. 1TB+ of content + Apple TV = Watching Return of the Jedi in the background just for fun.

Great Thanksgiving! Tomorrow resume 6am walk with the dogs and keep the fitness program on-track.

iDisk not having an iPhone App is just crazy silly.

This Amazon 50 albums for $5 is dangerous for the wallet.

Still not feeling 100% but went to spin class anyway. Glad I did.

Tammy drives a lot of our green decisions in the house. For a long time she’s been using all natural cleaning products. She doesn’t want the chemicals in typical cleaning products in the house, and we all benefit from it. Nearly all of our cleaning products are from Restore Products. I wasn’t even aware of one of the most impressive things that Restore Products does until a recent trip to Lakewinds, our co-op.

Walking down the aisle with household products Restore Products has put a refill station there. We took the three containers that we had of various cleaners and put them into the refill station. It spins the container and when it finds the bar code it knows what product this is and what size. It then lowers a filling tube into the container and you’ve got new product and no plastic waste.

I love this. First, the system is fool proof using the bar code system. A side benefit of using the bar codes is that if you do insert your product and they don’t provide refills for it (happened with one of our bottles) they can collect that information and add it if there is enough demand. Mostly I just love that we can now get dozens, or hundreds, of uses out of the one plastic bottle. We’ve worked hard to minimize our plastic waste and this helps out greatly.

It’s great to see the co-op as more of a refilling station than a typical store. Bring your empty container for cleaning products, oatmeal, flower, sugar and just top them off from the various bins. Reduce waste and keep costs low.

I’ve been processing my entire DVD library in the background on my Mac Pro using Handbrake, moving all the content into iTunes so that it is accessible from the three Apple TV’s that are connected to each TV in the house. I’ve now hit a some of the videos that are on two discs due to length, and joining M4V files is a bigger pain that it really should be.

One of the easiest ways to do it is with QuickTime Pro, and since I’ve got the Pro version I figured I’d use that. A simple copy/paste of one video to the end of the other followed by an Export to Apple TV creates the combined M4V file. With one big problem.

Huh? 205 hours and 44 minutes? Did someone forget to hit the “turbo” button in QuickTime Pro? What’s really crazy is the two source files are M4V H264 files already! Recoding is not necessary, but it seems determined to recode anyway. I guess I’ll just see what happens, but I’m worried the joined file will be poor quality due to recoding.

Any better options?

I didn’t see this covered in any of the reviews of the iPhone 2.2 software but I’m really excited that they really smoothed out the process of updating applications that you’ve installed. The first great thing is that the “Update All” button has reappeared, and with 2.2 it actually works. I’ve updated as many as five applications in one swoop and had zero problems, including some big applications.

The other great touch is that you no longer get the new version installing in another window, and then jumping once the old version is out of the way. It now occurs “in place” where the current application is. It’s a small thing, but really makes the updating process feel solid.

Tammy has wanted to change some colors in our house for a while. If you’ve been to our place you know we are not afraid of color in any way. Our living room is orange, yellow and red.

There are a couple of rooms that she wanted to change and keeping with the green theme she searched hard to find a No VOC paint option that would work. What is VOC? Volatile Organic Compounds. I really don’t know much about this world, but as I understand from her the fumes from VOC’s in paint are really bad for you. And it’s not just the fumes from when you are painting, those chemicals continue to be present for a while and leech into the air in your house.

After much searching she found Safecoat. Safecoat is a No VOC paint, but it goes even further and contains nothing bad. You see, some No VOC paint is only that by label, in that it contains some chemicals that are not good for you but aren’t labeled as a VOC so they can still have the label. Safecoat is pristine in it’s health and eco credentials.

Over the last three days the kitchen has received new paint on the walls and ceiling. Using the Safecoat product was an eye-opener. We didn’t have any windows open while the painting was going on, and there was absolutely no smell in the house. If you didn’t see the paint, there is no way you would know painting was going on. It was really amazing.

If you’re going to do some painting do yourself and your family a favor and use Safecoat. In the Minneapolis area head over to Natural Built Home to get it.

Upgraded to Handbrake 0.9.3 in the middle of my big DVD ripping project. Presets are all different, hopefully better.

GitX is actually nice for seeing branching activity in your project. Also nice to see diff’s very fast.

Looking at ways to do push-deployment of PHP from GitHub.

Frenzic may be the best iPhone game yet. I liked it on the Mac too, but the touch interface is perfect.

At pharmacy. Turns out this problem with my neck is either a staph or strep infection. Antibiotic time.

Today in Review: PHP, Coda, Git, Ubuntu, GitHub, TextMate, FBML. Awesome.