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.
Just finished reading Traffic. Really enjoyed it.
At the movies for Bolt with Maze. So fun that she digs movies.
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.
Refill Products, Reduce Plastic Waste
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.
Joining M4V Files is Painful
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?