Gibbs' Rule #9: Never go anywhere without a knife.
Since taking up residence at Toomey's Rent-All Center I've pretty much found carrying some sort of pocket knife to be a necessity. For a long time I was carrying a CRKT folder but after a bit of an accident left the belt clip badly bent I ended up having to search out a good replacement.
Enter the Skeletool CX (pictured).
The Leatherman Skeletool is a pretty nifty multitool that's high on function as well as appearance. It sports a short serrated knife, pliers, bottle opener / carbineer, as well as some wire cutters and an interchangeable screwdriver.
It's very sturdy and super light weighing in at only 5oz.
I'm usually worried about the condition of knives on multitools but the blade on the Skeletool is excellent. The CX has the 1/2 serrated blade and I was happy to find it super sharp when I opened the package. The blade is a bit short (at least compared to my old CRKT folder) but is more than adequate for my needs.
At $70ish it's not cheap but is worth the investment if you're in the market for a barebones multitool.
I was recently faced with the task of converting an old home movie into a series of YouTube-esque clips for use on the site Geni.com. Back when I was considering a small video game review blog I had played around with video conversion and editing but ultimately let it slip by due to lack of time. The challenge of converting these old home movies was just enough to push me back to learning the process.
After having the VHS transferred to DVD (something I realized I can probably do at home with my DVD recorder and some creative cable work) I set out on the task of finding the right clip and putting together the first video.
I'm not going to go too in-depth and instead just provide a quick walk through of the process.
The DVD transfer wasn't protected the way most commercial DVDs are so I was able to just browse through the DVD contents in Windows and select the .VOB files that make up the movie. In all there were four so I copied them to my hard drive and then set about researching the conversion process.
Because Windows Movie Maker doesn't accept the VOB files (even when renamed to MPEGs) I had to get them converted to .AVI first. This is where a quick lifehacker search and several downloads came in.
Ultimately I found Any Video Converter to be the best option for making the conversions. It's got a drag and drop interface and allows you to simply set it and forget it. After selecting the four VOB files taken from the DVD I set Any Video Converter to convert to AVI and took a little break. In my case it took about 30m per video to get the conversion done which didn't seem to bad.
For those wondering about cost Any Video Converter is offered in both a free and paid version. I'm using the free version which works just fine.
Once the video's were converted I opened up Windows Movie Maker and just went from there. Movie Maker is a pretty simple tool to use and is included in all versions of Windows. Just import your video and everything else is pretty self explanatory.
In order to comply with the new Google AdSense Terms I've gone ahead and added a Privacy Policy to Bill2me.com.
It should come as no surprise that this I have no intention of doing anything malicious to my visitors but I think that Google's new requirement that each of it's AdSense serving sites should include a Privacy Policy is appropriate.
If you're interested in reading the new AdSense friendly Privacy Policy you'll see it linked in the footer as well as in this post.
In the last two months I've had my LCD TV die and my Laptop die.
It turns out that the laptop crash was the result of a faulty heat-sink. After shipping it off to Gateway and waiting for two weeks I've learned that Gateway is unable to fix my 2 year old laptop - they don't make that type of heat-sink anymore apparently so Gateway has offered me a brand-new PC at no charge.
Lesson - always buy the extended warranty if you can't fix it yourself.
Last night my HD TV burned out. It's gonna take about a week to get someone in to fix it but thankfully it'll be fixed free of charge thanks to an extended warranty I bought from Best Buy because ... I knew I couldn't fix the TV myself.
Bad things always happen in 3s so now I'm just wondering when exactly my third thing is gonna happen - whatever it is I hope I bought an extended warranty.
