Posted by Tom Moertel
Fri, 02 Nov 2007 19:32:00 GMT
I recently got a Palm Centro smartphone, and so far I love it. Like
most modern cell phones, it has a built-in camera and takes decent
snapshots and even records short movies. It’s great for
spur-of-the-moment shots when I don’t have my real camera. The
trick – and there’s always a trick when it comes to cell phones – is getting
the photos off the camera and onto my computer.
To get at my pictures, Sprint would prefer that I sign up for their
ludicrously expensive “PictureMail” service. Leave it to weasely
telecom execs to come up with another way to squeeze money from
teenagers: charge them $5 each month for the “privilege” of sharing
their pictures with friends. This fee, of course, is in addition to the
fee for “unlimited” mobile Internet use. I guess picture bits are
somehow more expensive to move over the air than other kinds of bits.
In any case, my next goal after
getting my Centro to hotsync with my Linux
workstation was to figure out how
to download my photos and movies.
After a bit of hacking, I figured out that the Centro stores images in
a typical digital-camera-image (DCIM) hierarchy. For
example, I have a 4-GB microSD card installed in my Centro, and I
store my photos in the “Palm” album on it. This album ends up stored
in the /DCIM/Palm directory on the card.
Using the pilot-xfer program
from the pilot-link project, I was able
to find the directory and its contents. The trick was to use the
sparsely documented –D flag to work with the Centro’s virtual
filesystem. Here, for example, is how I list the contents of the Palm album:
$ pilot-xfer -p usb: -D /DCIM/Palm -l
Listening for incoming connection on usb:... connected!
Directory of /DCIM/Palm...
652 Fri Nov 2 08:17:06 2007 Album.db
292053 Fri Nov 2 09:04:20 2007 Photo_110207_001.jpg
78493 Fri Nov 2 08:17:06 2007 Video_110207_001.3g2
20 Wed Oct 31 12:09:20 2007 Thumbnail.db
Thank you for using pilot-link.
Here, you can see that I have one photo and one movie in the album.
(Movies are stored in .3g2 files that contain MPEG4 video.)
To download the files, I again turned to pilot-xfer, this time using the
–f (fetch) flag to fetch a list of files.
Here, for example, I’ll fetch the image from the listing above:
$ pilot-xfer -p usb: -D /DCIM/Palm -f Photo_110207_001.jpg
Listening for incoming connection on usb:... connected!
Fetching '/DCIM/Palm' ... (292053 bytes) 285 KiB total.
Thank you for using pilot-link.
So that’s the process. It’s kind of clunky, so I wrote a small Python
program to automate it. (I’m learning Python. If you’re a Pythonista, please
consider critiquing my code. I would be especially thankful if you
could point out any helpful idioms that I may have overlooked.)
Here’s how to use the program:
$ get-pilot-photos.py --help
Usage: get-pilot-photos.py [options]
Options:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-s SRCDIR, --srcdir=SRCDIR
VFS dir on Palm device from which to fetch images
-d DESTDIR, --destdir=DESTDIR
Where to save the images on your computer
Both the —srcdir and —dstdir options are optional. If you
omit the first, the program will download photos and movies from the
/DCIM/Palm album. If you omit the second, the program will save the
downloads to a new, timestamped directory within your home directory.
That’s it. The code is below.
Read more...
Posted in hacks
Tags centro, download, hotsync, images, movies, palm, python
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Posted by Tom Moertel
Sat, 07 Apr 2007 16:20:00 GMT
When Amazon.com announced its its Unbox video-download service, I was skeptical. Compared to the reigning champion – the DVD – Unbox looked like a loser:
- Unbox burdened its customers with DRM and the annoyances that come with DRM
- Unbox required the use of a Windows-only player application
- Unbox movies lacked “standard” DVD features such as surround sound, alternative audio tracks, commentaries, and bloopers
The first two points were deal-breakers, so I wrote off Unbox and did my
best to ignore it.
And then Amazon hooked up with TiVo. Beaming movies directly into my
TiVo box eliminates the need to deal with DRM and Windows annoyances.
My two big concerns sidestepped, I decided to give Unbox another
look. I still wouldn’t want to buy Unbox-to-TiVo movies because
they lack the typical DVD extras and would tie up storage
space on my TiVo, but Unbox might be a decent way to rent the
occasional movie – if the price were right.
Is the price right?
That depends on how the price of Unbox compares with the price
of my current rental option of choice, Netflix. Both services offer immediate
access to good movies: Unbox by on-demand downloads, Netflix by
ensuring that I almost always have a DVD or two in the house.
To compare Unbox with Netflix, I had to figure out how much a
rental costs me with each service. With Unbox the figuring was easy
because each rental has its own price tag, typically $3.99.
With Netflix, it’s a bit trickier because the rental price depends
upon how many DVDs I rent in a month. I pay a monthly fee of $17.99
and can rent as many DVDs as I want, at least until the infamous
Netflix rate
throttle
kicks in.
To determine how
many DVDs I rent during the typical month, I had to download my
rental history. (If you’re a Netflix subscriber, you can get your
history from the Returned
Rentals page.)
After downloading my history, massaging it into the desired form, and
loading it into R, I generated a
stem-and-leaf plot to visualize the number of DVDs I have rented
during each of the 76 months I have been a Netflix subscriber:
> stem(monthly.rental.counts, scale=2)
The decimal point is at the |
1 | 0
2 | 000
3 | 0000000
4 | 00000000000
5 | 000000000000
6 | 000000000000000
7 | 0000
8 | 000000
9 | 00000
10 | 0000
11 | 0
12 | 00
13 | 00
14 | 00
15 | 0
It looks like I have rented as few as one and as many as fifteen DVDs in a
month. Most months, however, I rent between three and ten DVDs. On
average, I rent about 6.4 DVDs per month:
> summary(monthly.rental.counts)
Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max.
1.000 4.000 6.000 6.408 8.000 15.000
Thus my average rental price is about $2.80 per DVD:
> 17.99 / 6.4
[1] 2.810937
Now I can make my Unbox-vs-Netflix price comparison. For me, it
looks like Unbox is about 40 percent more expensive than
Netflix:
> 3.99 / 2.81
[1] 1.419929
So the price of Unbox is not right, at least for me.
Testing Unbox-to-TiVo rentals
Because Amazon is offering free $15 credits to TiVo owners, I decided
to give Unbox a test drive. My test rental was The Illusionist. Renting the movie was
easy (just one click), and shortly thereafter Unbox automatically
downloaded the movie to my TiVo box. When I played the movie,
however, I was disappointed with the video quality. I easily
noticed banding artifacts, which were distracting
at times. On the whole, the viewing experience was inferior to watching a
DVD.
Netflix still beats Unbox
For me, then, Unbox is still a loser. It costs more and delivers
less than DVD rentals via Netflix.
A note to my friends at Amazon.com
I would be happy to give you my business, but right now you’re not
earning it. If you
want me as an Unbox customer, here is the recipe for winning me over:
- Let me easily download movie rentals to my TiVo. (Check.)
- Offer true DVD quality or better. (You’re not there yet.)
- Sell the rentals for less than $2.80. (You’re not there yet.)
Until then, I’ll have to give my money to Netflix.
Cheers,
Tom
Update: edits for clarity; added tags.
Posted in reviews
Tags amazon, dvds, movies, netflix, rentals, reviews, tivo, unbox
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Posted by Tom Moertel
Fri, 09 Mar 2007 22:40:00 GMT
If you want to get more out of IMDB movie ratings, check out my
IMDB Movie Rating Decoder Ring, now updated with fresher data (as of 2 March 2007).
Posted in statistics
Tags data, decoder_rinng, imdb, movies, ratings, stars, statistics
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Posted by Tom Moertel
Wed, 18 Jan 2006 01:59:00 GMT
The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) is a rich source
of online movie information. The problem is, the true gold is buried
deep beneath the site’s user-friendly exterior and hidden within the
database itself. With a little digging, however, we can extract the
gold, nugget by nugget, and learn about fun statistical tools for data
analysis.
Today, in the first part of our analysis, we will put our intuition
about rating systems to the test. We will decode IMDb “user ratings,”
those numbers such as 6.1 and 7.8 that summarize how the registered
users of the IMDb rated movies on a scale from 1 to 10, typically
depicted as a series of stars on the screen:
We will extract the collective wisdom of registered IMDb users in
order to convert a movie’s user rating into the movie’s standing
within the database. This gives us a good indicator of how the movie
stacks up against other movies in general, and that’s good information
to have when deciding which movies to see in the theater or add to
your Netflix list.
Ready to start digging? Let’s go!
Read more...
Posted in movies, statistics
Tags imdb, movies, R, statistics
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