soundingblue

Final Cut Studio 2.0.1 now supports AVCHD in Final Cut Pro 6. However, if you’re using a PowerPC Mac, you’re shit out of luck as this only works on Intel Macs.

hmmm..

Christmas came early this year. Meet my new axe, a Gibson Les Paul Classic.

I actually walked into the shop looking for an Epiphone Elite 63 Dot which was modelled after the Gibson ES-355. However, that was not in stock and I started trying out the various guitars in the shop. Being Epiphone and Gibson dealers, everything was pretty much Les Pauls and Gibson styled archtops. The actual Gibson ES-355 was way out of my price since I only had a budget that limited me to Epiphones. However, I’ve never gotten over my old Gibson Les Paul Standard which was handed over a “friend” for restoration back in ‘98 and never did come back.

So we decided to up our budget and see what we can get, still short of the ES-335 but a Les Paul as defnitely doable since they were having a sale. In this end, it was this that I ended up with. Couldn’t be happier with the colour, courtesy of my wife’s good taste.

With the warmer weather arriving, it’s time to get out and get some colour into the winter pale. Googling came up with Mt Alexander Fruit Gardens in Harcourt offering pick your own cherries so it’s off we went. Harcourt is about an hour and a half drive from Melbourne, taking the CityLink toll towards Tullamarine, then onto the Calder Freeway.

“Pick your own” Lewis and Supreme cherries were going at AUD$10/kg while the ready picked ones were $12/kg.

If you need to calibrate the iMac 24″’s screen, use ColorEyes. I use a Gregtag i1 Display v2 and there’s simply no way to bring down the brightness level of the screen luminance to 120cd/m2 when profiling with the supplied software. The lowest the screen would go using the iMac’s brightness control is about 250cd/m2 which is still to bright. ColorEyes will automatically adjust for the screen brightness when calibrating the display which makes viewing much more pleasant. There is a demo version available.

Sambal Kampung - 234 Little Bourke St, Melbourne

How can any restaurant fuck up stir fry is beyond my belief but Sambal Kampung managed to do it.

The service staff there do not even take your orders. There is a crappy piece of photostatted paper where you write your down your order before handing it to the wait staff. Since it was our first time there, I asked one of the waitress to recommend something they are famous for which turned out to be Sambal Chicken on Rice. My wife had the laksa while another friend, the fried noodles.

When dining in Chinatown where you pay less than AUD$10 for a meal, one cannot really expect too much. My dish looked like it was put together by a Uni student who had just moved out and learnt how to cook. Bits of chicken (semi cooked I think), way too much onions and some limp vegetables in what I make out to be a bland tomato-ish sauce.

The laksa did not fair any better. It was almost tasteless. I did not go further. The fried noodle? Well, there were noodles and it was cooked. Nothing special, nothing worth mentioning. Pathetic.

I have forgotten how bad Asian food can get in a Western country. I still remember that bowl of tasteless wanton noodles I had in Anaheim, California when I was 12. It was that bad. Visiting Sambal Kampung in Melbourne brought those memories right back.

Verdict: If you like small servings of badly cooked food at slightly higher than average price, you will love this joint. Else avoid.

Update: Some guy decided that my review did not match his expectations and wrote a profanity laced comment which I promptly deleted. Apparently he loves the food there. Good for him. Maybe the standards have improved but the customer base does leave something wanting.

The easiest way to play most movie formats in Quicktime player is to install [Perian][1]. This is a open source Quicktime component that will support codecs such as Divx, XviD, FLV, MS-MPEG4 v1, MS-MPEG4 v2, MS-MPEG4 v3, DivX 3.11 alpha, 3ivX, Sorenson H.263, Flash Screen Video, Truemotion VP6 etc.

Since this is a Quicktime component, this means that you can watch these movies using FrontRow.

Exactly.

My review of HoudahSpot as seen on MacZOT.com

Spotlight with more grunt. Need boolean queries in your spotlight searches? HoudahSpot allows you to do just that. For example, when trying free up some hard disk space, I could do a quest for files greater than 200mb and limit them to only video files.

NOTE:

If you’re seeing this on June 16, 2006 head over to MacZOT, you might be able to get a Free copy of HoudahSpot

Search easily in Tiger, Mac OS X, with HoudahSpot