The most-publicized caution, battery life, has been a non-issue for me.

The most-publicized feature, 4G via WiMAX, has also been a non-issue, because the coverage isn’t quite what I hoped.

Other than that, my concerns and anticipations of problems had been needless, and the surprises have been good. I’ve come to think of the Evo as the best (for me) pocket computer I can imagine in today’s marketplace, and a good mobile phone, as well.

Let’s get the two most talked about items, battery life & 4G via WiMAX, out of the way first.

Battery Life

The first data on battery life I saw was positive (“We know what you’re thinking, though: what about battery life? Amazingly, …”) in the May 19 Engadget review. However, the same day, Walt Mossberg was reporting Sprint 4G Phone Hits New Speeds, but Battery Lags. That day, still a couple of weeks from my own hands on experience, I accepted those as different experiences due to different usage and expectations.

Nothing since has made me think much differently. I was concerned about battery life, so I ordered a cheap second battery. While waiting for the off-brand battery, I tried to see how long the battery would go with minimal usage, just my normal phone usage. I was able to get three days out of a single charge. That’s not much worse than I was used to with my pocket phone (LG Muziq), so I started thinking that I would be OK with battery life.

After the extra battery came, I fully charged the original battery, set it aside to be my spare, and have used the off-brand battery ever since. With my normal usage habits, including powering down the phone when I’m sleeping, I usally go two days between charges. Only once, after a long day of heavy phone usage, camera usage and my grand-daughter’s game playing, has the phone asked to be recharged, after 13 hours use that day.

The most comprehensive review I’ve seen are the 13 pages from AnandTech on June 28. The page discussing battery life leads off “There’s no other way to put it: the EVO 4G has terrible battery life.” The data there doesn’t contradict my experience. But that reviewer wants perfection — the last sentence says “While I’d be willing to carry something the size of the EVO, I’d need it to be perfect in order to make that tradeoff.”  I’m not expecting perfection. With hardware in general, and certainly “phones” like these, one can always wait for something cheaper/faster/better. I don’t see anything currently available that would be better for me than the Evo. Droid X, though a littler newer, doesn’t seem any better. I ponder about the iPhone 4, but only ponder.

4G via WiMAX

Click on the top map above and you’ll see the coverage at my home, light green to indicate some WiMAX signal, but not the dark green to indicate strong signal, with big patches of white (no signal) nearby.  The other map is a broader picture of our part of town, mostly dark green, but noticeable patches of white and light green.

Though I can use and appreciate the WiMAX in some places, it is mostly artificial, in that I mostly would either not use my pocket computer in those places, or would choose WiFi over WiMAX in the places where I would use the Evo. Most of the places where I’ve really wanted to use WiMAX, the signal just hasn’t been strong enough.

Sometimes it seems the Evo is trying to use WiMAX when it should accept that the WiMAX signal is too weak and revert to 3G. To avoid that apparent phenomenon, I usually leave the WiMAX turned off, turning it on every few days when it seems like it might really be useful. Then I wonder why Sprint is charging me the extra $10/month for 4G, but rather than protest I hope for the day when the coverage here is comprehensive.

All the “little” things

To me some of these are a much bigger deal than battery and WiMAX concerns. They make Evo a good pocket computer for me.

Display

Both the size, 4.3″ diagonal and resolution, 217 pixels/inch, are a delight to me. I can’t imagine anything physically larger that would still be a pocket computer, until flexible displays become practical, if they do. I’m typing this report on a screen with 99 pixels/inch. Looking at photos and videos is so much more pleasant with the Evo’s higher resolution. The difference is dramatic enough to make me curious about the iPhone 4 “Retina” display, at 326 pixels/inch, but not curious enough to go looking for one.

“Keyboard”

I didn’t know what to think before I tried the on-screen keyboard. I didn’t think I’d miss having tiny physical keys and knew that a pocket computer couldn’t have big enough keyboard for touch typing. I’d gotten used to the on-screen keyboard of my i300 easily enough, without learning Graffiti, so I thought I’d be OK but clumsy without a stylus. Learning to use the keyboard, with just my fingers, has been faster than I expected, though I’ll usually rotate the Evo for landscape keyboard unless what I’m entering is very short.

Google integration, Android, HTC Sense

With Evo’s Android, I expect good fit with Google, and that has been true as far as I’ve explored. Besides search, I mostly use Google for Reader, and Reader works OK in mobile mode for skimming tens of headlines (actually groups of 15) at a time. I don’t use Gmail much, but will probably use Gmail a little more as time goes on and I become more dependent on the Evo. Having Google Maps in my pocket has been useful a few times. But I really haven’t explored Android or HTC Sense very much so far. That is an endorsement from my perspective — as an end user I haven’t had the need to explore the software much. Eventually I will, but because I want to, not because I need to.

Camera(s)

“Faster/better/cheaper” applies to cameras, in particular, cameras built-in to computers and phones. The Evo’s built-in cameras suffice for almost all my purposes. The still photos are about as good as the pocket camera I bought last year, with lack of optical zoom being the main limitation. For video, the Evo is definitely preferable to my “marvelous toy” (AIPTEK MPVR+) of three years ago. Optical zoom and 1080p are the main reasons I think of separate cameras now.

YouTube (Flash)

Browsing Android phones at a Sprint store earlier this year, I was dismayed about the absence/clumsiness of YouTube support. So I was expecting to have to deal with that when I got my Evo. But YouTube HQ was already in place, and works just fine. Other Flash video doesn’t work, but I don’t have much need for other Flash video, and will probably just wait for the Evo to have Android 2.2 and Flash 10.1.

Apps

My daughter was dismayed that I’d had the Evo for more than 24 hours and still hadn’t downloaded any apps. I don’t think she was impressed that I responded by getting ConnectBot (SSH client) and AndroidVNC (a.k.a. Android VNC Viewer). I hadn’t tried SSH or VNC on a phone since the i300. They both seem to work just fine. I’ve even tried using vi after logging in to a Fedora machine with ConnectBot, knowing that the on-screen keyboard would make it very hard to use vi normally. That I was able to use vi at all seemed worth celebrating. ConnectBot is mostly for SSH tunneling, at least in my current thinking, and handles that well to the extent I’ve tried it with VNC, IMAP and SMTP.

I’m still behind the curve in downloading apps. Since I haven’t explored many of the factory installed apps, and what I’ve explored has met my needs, I’m not likely to be much of an app consumer. I did download “Barbie in a Mermaid tale” for our grand-daughter — she and our daughter like to play that.

Mail

Ever since I’ve been handling mail servers for myself and others, I’ve been a fan of IMAP for mail servers. I’ve been less of a fan of most mail clients’ handling of IMAP. The only two clients I’ve ever really liked with IMAP, particularly with regard to handling of folders, are Netscape Mail and the Outlook Express lineage of Microsoft options, including the current form, Windows Live Mail. I’m pleasantly surprised by the handling of IMAP folders by the Evo mail client.

Multitouch

Reading about the lack of multi-touch in Android had been one source of trepidation, unnecessary trepidation in my Evo experience. Multi-touch may not be present in all of the apps, or as fully featured as in other environments, but seems OK in the browser and the PDF viewer. AndroidVNC doesn’t seem to have adopted multi-touch yet, presumably because the APIs are relatively new to Android, but does have discrete zoom buttons.

More to come

Froyo

Before I got the Evo, I thought I’d be impatiently waiting for HTC to update from Android 2.1 (Eclair) to 2.2 (Froyo), if for no other reason than to have Flash support. Since the Evo YouTube HQ support seems just fine, I’m simply curious about 2.2, not impatient. Now is probably a good time to start taking a closer look at how Android and HTC/Sprint software all fit together on the Evo.

Travel

I’ve not gone on any trips with Evo yet. I’m expecting that having a pocket computer will make me much less likely to bring out a laptop in airports, etc. On the other hand, the Evo’s (extra $30/month, so far not purchased by me) portable Hotspot capability may be attractive in terms of both convenience and avoiding airport and hotel WiFi charges.

Videoconferencing

I haven’t tried Qik video chat — I don’t know anyone to call with Qik! I’d really like to try Skype on Evo, but my impression is that Skype won’t be offering video calling on Android/Evo any time soom. I keep seeing intriquing reports about fring, and it appears that a production release of fring for Android is available, so I’ll have to give fring a try.

Development

I’m assuming I’ll have to build an app of my own for Android/Evo, if for no other reason than to say “Hello World!”, but it will probably be a while before I do so.

But right now, I need to respond to all the text messages that are making my Evo beep at me…

As I’ve become increasingly enamored with WordPress, I’ve been waiting for this day, the day that WordPress 3 is (finally) ready. As I’ve waited, I’ve also thought of “jus’ press” as analogy appropriate to WordPress, beyond (just) the word “press”.

In the almost 3 years since I started with WordPress, I’ve mostly thought, as many do, of WordPress as a blogging tool. Last year a friend, Ryan Owen, asked me about using WordPress for a general web site we managed together, a site with many static pages in addition to more dynamic “blog” pages.  My knee jerk reaction was that WordPress couldn’t do things he and I were used to doing with HTML and CSS. To some extent that reaction was true, but also false due to my ignorance — WordPress 2 was far more general and flexible than I realized. With the capabilities of WordPress 3, some of which have been available for a few months on WordPress.com and available in beta versions of WordPress 3, WordPress is a very compelling application for general purpose web site development.

As I used WordPress 2 more, and browsed through the capabilities I wasn’t using, the flexibility and generality gradually became apparent. I’d read various endorsements, and noticed the broader acceptance of WordPress, especially the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital. (Note the WordPress login page at http://allthingsd.com/wp-admin.)

Early this year I joined a committee established to sort out web strategy for the PET Project. The many existing sites were not coordinated with each other, not keeping up to date, in general not providing the web presence we needed. A typical reaction was along the lines of “I wouldn’t know the sites were related to each other without seeing the Mercy in Motion video.” One person had a strong vision of revamping the sites with a Joomla!-based portal system. However, the expense and organizational complexities of adopting that proposal had left it foundering. Driving home from a meeting in San Antonio in late March, I started pondering a more incremental approach.

At first I tried to see what I could do quickly with Joomla!, without any prior Joomla! experience. Though I could imagine using Joomla! myself, and could understand how it appeals to web professionals, I couldn’t imagine a viable learning curve for the typical content provider without a significant investment in infrastructure and training. That investment made the expense of the foundering proposal seem an underestimate, if anything.

Then I thought back to Ryan’s question, my knee jerk reaction, and my subsequent learning. I started looking at WordPress as a general purpose content management system. Articles such as WordPress vs Joomla vs Drupal encouraged me in this direction.

I started prototyping WordPress-based sites on WordPress.com. The progress was rapid and exhilarating.

However, I started becoming aware of the restrictions at WordPress.com, especially the inability to use <FORM> tags. Since some of the existing sites made use of <FORM>, I started replicating the prototype sites with WordPress 2.9 on my own server.

Though the overall progress and improvement was undeniable, the differences between WordPress.com and separate hosting became apparent, especially in choice of themes and widgets. Themes that worked great at WordPress.com didn’t work at all with separate hosting. Themes that worked great with separate hosting weren’t available at WordPress.com. Widgets available at WordPress.com weren’t available, or didn’t work well, for separate hosting. Other desirable widgets aren’t available at WordPress.com.

Though the widget limitations were annoying, the theme limitations were more than annoying. And that is how I first became a fan of the new Twenty Ten theme. In late April, I think, Twenty Ten became available on WordPress.com. I gave it a try and liked it. Then I listened to some of Matt Mullenweg’s “State of the Word” May 1:

It was evident that Twenty Ten would be emphasized in WordPress 3, available for both WordPress.com and separate hosting, so I started trying the nightly development builds of WordPress 3 on my server. Finally, we had a theme solution that works well in both environments, WordPress.com and separate hosting.

http://wordpress.org/development/2010/06/thelonious/ and the detailed documentation enumerate the many improvements in WordPress 3, and we’re benefiting from some of those, but Twenty Ten was enough to make us “press” forward.

I didn’t wait for WordPress 3 to be final. http://PETInternational.org/ has been live with nightly builds/release candidates for several weeks. Those versions have seemed good enough. But it is nice to now be using a version WordPress endorses more enthusiastically.

Besides http://PETInternational.org/, we have two affiliate sites live, and others in progress. One of the affiliate sites, based on Joomla!, now mimics our Twenty Ten look and feel! Another Joomla!-based site is contributing content to the WordPress environment.

I have been able to return a favor to Ryan. He’s learned from what we’ve done, switched to Twenty Ten, and made http://RainbowNetwork.org/ fully realized with WordPress, now with my encouragement instead of skepticism.

Back to the notion of “jus’ press”, WordPress has plenty of quirks and inconsistencies — it is far from perfect, but WordPress is better for many purposes than any alternative I see. Like Led watching Uncle Fred, jus’ press. That’s what I’ll be doing.

a.k.a. ”This looks great! But how do I use it?” (silence)

Back in the 90s, Larry Ellison and others were positing the feasibility of the “Internet Computer” a.k.a. “Network Computer”, based on “thin client” hardware and ubiquitous network access to servers and services. Though impractical then, computing along those lines is (becoming) practical today.

For those with sufficient  motivation, Google Documents (a.k.a. “Docs”) and (Microsoft) SkyDrive provide enticing capabilities.

One motivation is sharing files almost as if the people sharing the files are in the same location, using a conventional file server, even though the people are actually separated by significant distances. I’ve been exploring two scenarios, one city-wide and the other international.

Both Docs and SkyDrive operate along those lines but necessarily attempt to integrate with local “desktop” computing (quite possibly on a portable notebook or netbook) via a web browser. Both succeed and fail,  in different ways, with some of the failures likely by design intent.

For example, SkyDrive doesn’t reasonably permit in-place editing of a document, but rather expects documents to be uploaded/downloaded. Likely Microsoft is trying to protect sales of Office, but likely also waiting until support for in-place editing has been sufficiently well developed.

Less explicably, Docs limits file formats to three application surrogates for the Office core, Word, Excel and PowerPoint, plus non-editable PDFs. The in-place editing capabilities are likely more than enough for many users, but not seriously competitive with the full capabilities of the Office (or OpenOffice, etc.) applications.

Docs (though in seemingly perpetual “beta”, like GMail) has been around longer and seems easier to learn, mostly because it requires relatively little interaction with the traditional desktop environment, compared to SkyDrive. So in choosing whether to try to use Docs or SkyDrive one of the first questions is whether or not the limited file formats of Docs are sufficient. Also, though Docs may be easier to learn than SkyDrive, switching one’s thinking from desktop computing to Docs does require effort, and I’ve struggled to get others to expend that effort.

If those four Docs formats are not sufficient, then SkyDrive seems the best available option. The usage model is different from what most people are used to, and requires substantial interaction with the existing desktop environment, so SkyDrive is not easy to learn. But compared to the problems of carrying USB sticks from computer to computer and/or sending USB sticks in postal mail, there is much to motivate the learning.

Sometime this year, Google may provide another option, GDrive. For now, I’m encouraging people to give SkyDrive a try.

Some more related reading:

Watch out Google Docs – Microsoft SkyDrive is Coming

SkyDrive, Google Docs, Office Live Workspaces – Compared (suspense music…)

From SkyDrive to Google Docs

Yahoo drops its Briefcase

Cloud Storage’s Killer App… Geographic Collaboration

Much of my time is focused on helping the poorest of the poor in rural Nicaragua, where families subsist on US $1/day income. Red Arco Iris, as it is known in Nicaragua, a.k.a. Rainbow Network in the U.S., provides feeding centers, micro-loans, housing assistance, schools and educational assistance, and physicians and dentists at community clinics.

Of course, computer technology, Internet communication, cell phones, fax machines and other standard office accoutrements enable and facilitate Red Arco Iris staff in the seven regional offices. The staff enablement may be felt indirectly in the communities, but we can be much more ambitious.

Our ”feet on the ground” efforts have little to do with modern technology: food at the feeding centers is prepared on open fires, micro-loan committees depend on hand-written communication, the houses we help build are concrete/cinder-block/tin-roof construction, classes may be held under a shade tree, doctors practice in makeshift clinics, and so forth.

However, modern technology “inevitably” finds its way into direct import in these rural communities, whether it be a television hooked up to hazardous power or a cell phone passed amongst the people. Portable computers are beginning to be present. Internet connections are plausible. 20-year-olds who ten years ago couldn’t attend school are now graduating from high school and going on to college, where the technology needs and wants are not hard to imagine.

Assuming technology incursions are inevitable, are on the cusp of meaningfulness in rural Nicaragua, the questions become “How can technology be positive in these communities?” (money going to the cell phone providers is positive!?) and “How can we facilitate positive technology infusion?”.

Lots of small steps are being made. In days to come, there will be more to say about those steps.

Then I started seeing comments on Wired’s article about Doug Morris, chair and CEO of Universal Music Group, particularly where he’s quoted: “There’s no one in the record company that’s a technologist.” Given all of the technical wizardry of musicians, audio engineers and producers, that disclaimer is hard to accept. For example, I’ve thought of Peter Gabriel as a technologist ever since being dazzled by a concert at the old Austin Coliseum in 1982.

But what is more striking in the article and commentary is the lack of homage to MP3.com. The Wikipedia summary of MP3.com history seems approximately correct. (In searching though http://web.archive.org for charts with Kay Buena’s songs, I discovered archives of MP3.com a little older than Wikipedia’s report of a 1998 founding date.)

Michael Robertson‘s MP3.com (not the c|net one) started to make us aware of “MP3″. But more than that, My.MP3.com seemed a plausible way for the music industry to monetize MP3s almost eight years ago. What would be the fortunes of that industry if significant MP3 sales had started in the year 2000?

Universal Music Group prevailed in stopping Robertson. U.M.G. had another chance to leverage the MP3.com concepts and technology when Vivendi Universal acquired MP3.com but then Vivendi sold the domain to c|net in November 2003 and abandoned the rest.

There were other eulogies four years ago. This week I still wonder what could have been.

P.S. Billboard.biz considers the Wired article a “hatchet job” but goes on “Morris and the other labels need to stop living in the past as well. They need to quit their bellyaching about how digital piracy decimated the business and start communicating the steps they’re making for the future.”

In 1997, when  the concept of CSS was in its infancy (see Celebrating 10 Years with Style), I knew I should pay attention. I bought the first edition of Lie and Bos. But for my purposes, CSS wasn’t ready for prime time. Most web people didn’t understand it. Worse, most browsers didn’t implement CSS properly. (Unfortunately, most browsers are still in the “almost good enough” stage with regard to CSS.)

The startup I had joined was implementing a database backed web application, Recruiter, that was intended to be a software service integrated with customer companies’ sites. It was almost mandatory that Recruiter be able to change appearance to match the customer site appearance. Managing that efficiently across many sites was going to be a challenge. CSS wasn’t yet a viable tool to address the requirement.

I created a set of what I called “appearance modeling” macros in M4, converting from macro definitions to HTML (The Wikipedia M4 page now illustrates use of M4 macros to create HTML, but in 1997 I was not aware of people using M4 with HTML.) Those macros were delightfully effective for Recruiter, and I still use similar macros today for several sites. (See primitives and appearance if you’re really interested. The basic notion is that the primitives are invariant for an application, but the appearance macros are specific to modeling an instance of site appearance. Running M4 against an M4 instance of a page, e.g., chs_bio.m4. yields the desired HTML, e.g., chs_bio.html.)

10 years later, those macros still work, sort of. But they have depended on all sorts of HTML trickery (rightfully!?) despised by CSS advocates. So I spent last month immersing myself in CSS. I’d started to recognize the need when I began investigating Movable Type and WordPress for this and other blogs. But the real impetus was preparing to rework my church’s site to match the appearance and content of a new brochure. Overlapping pictures and similar print-like layout tricks are beyond my HTML skills — if such things can be accomplished with HTML alone, the HTML must be most distasteful. Such tricks are relatively simple with CSS.

At first, I hypothesized that the M4 macros weren’t going to even be useful. I created a home page strictly with CSS and HTML. But as I moved on to other pages, the benefits of using M4 macros to avoid repetitive effort became apparent, as I had suspected would happen. So that site now uses a subset of the macros that used to be used on the site. Using the macros has two benefits. First, reworking the existing pages was much easier for me. Going from the old music page to the new one was part reuse, part creating new styles, part cut and paste from the brochure source files. Second, there are old pages that are unlikely to be reworked, yet still exist in case they remain in bookmarks and search indices. For example, a former pastor’s biography makes sense to retain, but not update. The new version more or less fits with the new appearance, certainly better than the old version.

Now that I am a CSS whiz, there’s also a sense of deja vu regarding discrepancies amongst browsers and their (mis-)implementations of standards. In 1997 it was Navigator 3 and 4 and I.E. 2 and 4 vs. HTML. Today it is Firefox and IE 6 and 7 and Safari vs. CSS. One page that seemed great in I.E. 7, and I believed to be good, or at least, legitimate, CSS/HTML, was a disaster with Firefox. After making that page render decently with Firefox and I.E. 6, the CSS/HTML are kludgey, and it still doesn’t look good in Safari.

Back to Dirty Harry, it still doesn’t look like CSS/HTML are a match for complex print layouts.

And major sites, e.g.,WSJ.com, sometimes still put up broken Flash ads that are more than annoying. One such ad, and a bungled response from customer support, was enough to make me abandon my paid subscription to WSJ.com. I don’t miss the paid content as much as I thought I might, and have never seriously considered reinstating paid status, but I do hope that Murdoch decides to eliminate the WSJ “paywall”. I’ve shed no tears over the NY Times abandoning Select.

So now I’m trying to be a good student of Flash, starting at the beginning. My goal is still facility with Flash video, but general competence with Flash is probably a good thing.

I remember thinking in 1989 that X-Windows was going to be the dominant windowing environment on PCs. I said about as much in “Unix – The Force Behind Personal Computing?” Unix Technology Advisor 2, 2 (February 1990). When Michael Dell read what I had written, he gently suggested I take a closer look at Windows 3.0. History shows Michael was right and I was wrong.

“Karl Z. Wog” is continuing with amateur video production, so I’ve felt the need to bring  my video server capabilities into this century. Last week I started surveying the software options that would make sense with the available hardware and operating system platforms. My thoughts quickly progressed from better solutions with the copy of RealServer I purchased in 1998, to the Apple’s Darwin Streaming Server and QuickTime Streaming Server (QTSS), to wondering how to deal with Flash Video.

I thought briefly about Windows Media, as well, since I do have some old MSDN discs with Microsoft’s software for Windows Media serving, but that seems less interesting.

Though Darwin on Linux seemed plausible, running QTSS on OS X Server seems more pragmatic. I’m assuming that is a simple matter of configuration and de-prioritized QuickTime for now.

That left RealVideo and Flash Video. I tried lots of combinations for RealServer and have most of them working well, so I’ll write another note about those experiences.

Now I’m mostly beginning to understand Flash, but it seemed I should write about the rest before immersing further in Flash exploration.

This trip started July 2, thinking that I should (re-)investingate blogging software.

The first stop was considering Movable Type, which was what stuck in my mind as the name of the most prominent current blogging software, but was not much more than a name to me. 

Next was getting used to MySQL, a seeming pre-requisite to Movable Type. I used to be used to SQL Server, which my colleagues and I used for Telecom Analyzer, and to mSQL, which we used for Recruiter.

SQL led to a long side trip, with its own Windows 98 virtual machine side trip, leading to creating an NT4 Server virtual machine, recovering all of the prerequisites to Telecom Analyzer and that application itself. Part of that was just to see if I could recover everything (I seemed to succeed) and part specifically to get old Perl scripts for backing up SQL databases. (I still need to automate backup of things I’ve started putting in MySQL.)

Trying Movable Type also led to trying to understand how to make an M.T. blog look like a companion web site. That’s not easy. At least not as I see it. Movable Type seems to aspire to being the entirety of the web site, not just blogs. The template mechanism for changing appearance and layout seems OK as far as it goes, but figuring out to rework the CSS to match an existing set of pages/site was too daunting for me.

Forging on, the relative simplicity of WordPress seemed an appealingly elegant alternative to Movable Type. Though the appearance matching/CSS/template experience was simlar to M.T. these seemed a little less daunting with WordPress. (However, note that this page does not match the appearance of http://technologists.com/.)

However, a fundamental difference between Movable Type and WordPress is built-in support for multiple independent, but related, blogs, as in M.T., vs. orientation toward a single independent blog, as with WordPress. WordPress MU seemingly bridges this gap.

I couldn’t get the 1.2.3 version of WordPress MU to work at all. I decided to forego the seeming elegance of that version and live with multiple installs of standard WordPress. After all, one install takes “only” 6+MB of disk space and sectors are “free“.

That’s the summary trip report, from initial thoughts July 2 to initial post here August 21.

That is, not until a couple of weeks ago when the Austin City Council honored those who stopped the Charles Whitman shooting rampage at U.T. August 1, 1966. One of the honorees was the great-grandfather of my grand-daughter. I taped the proclamation ceremony off of the city cable channel and used Sony’s “Click to DVD” application to make discs.

The intermediate storage seemed like reasonably standard MPEG (.mpg) files. Click to DVD doesn’t allow editing the files proper, but does allow for logically deleting video segments before the disc(s) are created.

After capturing another tape this weekend, I wanted to upload the segments to YouTube, but needed to edit them first.

I naively assumed the mpg files could be processed with Windows Movie Maker and/or iMovie, but both of those claimed the mpg files were in invalid format. (Not too invalid, since the DVDs were fine.)

After a little searching, it seemed worth trying AVS Video Converter. That handled conversion from the particular mpg format to AVI files that Windows Movie Maker would edit and to MOV files that iMovie would edit. AVS Video Converter worked well enough in the trial version that I paid for a copy. It seems pretty flexible and capable. I have run into a couple of limitations. It doesn’t get the color right in converting an old RM (Real Media) file, and it won’t handle (the now obscure) Vivo format file that I created in 1996.

Both Windows Movie Maker and iMovie would do what I wanted to do, but, given all of the praise iMovie receives, I was suprised that Movie Maker seemed much more efficient. If nothing else, iMovie took hundreds of seconds for import/export tasks that Movie Maker handled in tens of seconds.

It took me hours to figure this all out and get Texas Reach Out on KNVA 54 August 19, 2007 posted on YouTube. Now that I know the ropes, things seem pretty easy. The only problem with the Charles Whitman segment was that it was five minutes longer than the YouTube 10 minute boundary, so I had to split it in two. The resulting posts are at Honoring those who stopped Charles Whitman pt. 1 and Honoring those who stopped Charles Whitman pt. 2.