I’ve been using this table with a program called Pixelmator as it’s an alternative to photoshop for performing some touchup work. Lately I have been into creating black and white photos and then painting in  only part of the color. I have an app do to this on my iPhone called Colorsplash. But using Pixelmator with the tablet is a bit more fun.

Since it is essentially a digital piece of paper I thought it would be cool to create a digital signature that I could put into an e-mail so my name actually looks like it was written by a real person. But I have really crappy handwriting. I am not really sure I should be doing something like that.

Here are 3 drafts I created on my tablet.

My handwriting looks like chicken scratch. But it could be the fact that I am still getting used to the tablet. I think this will requite a bit more trial and error. But so far I am loving this tablet.

Life has been treating me pretty well the past few months. I haven’t had much of a chance to update the blog. I did update the wordpress blogging software. Added a plugin that will grab all of my tweets and post them on the site.

But I hope everyone has a great 4th of July weekend. Would anyone want to read a review on the iPhone 4 or any other piece of technology that I own.

Honestly I have just been feeling a bit overwhelmed and I just need to rearrange parts of my life to get into the swing of things. I really want to get back into the gym thing but life has made that hard. But lately I have been working on archiving the media that my family has created over the years. It can be a long process to watch a tape and sit there with a notepad and mark the parts of the recording that I need to fix later. So I do a tape or two a weekend and almost have all of the tapes recorded that are worth saving.

I am going to work on a bit of a clip show and post it on my personal blog. But again all of this requires time and I don’t find myself wanting to spend it on my laptop as much as I used to. So I will make a clip show a priority of mine.

I also would really like to get back into podcasting again. Get a few other guys or maybe some girl to get on Skype with some microphones and beat out a 30-40 minute show maybe twice a month. Doesn’t really have to be about by dating life as I have had a serious girlfriend for almost 3 years now. Again just more time.

So look forward to a clip show and will see about starting up a podcast again. I stopped at 12 episodes and recently just got delisted from iTunes.  Sad times indeed. But please follow me on twitter if you want to keep up on the pulse of Tristan. http://www.twitter.com/tristanpipo

Hope to hear from you soon.

But the title of this blog post doesn’t really mean anything. I was listening to iTunes and had it on Random and Octopuses Garden came up on iTunes. For some reason it inspired me to open up MarsEdit and write a click little blurb.

I have been working on converting all of my families home video tapes to a digital format. I must say it has been a rather intensive process. A bit more expensive then I imagined.

The first expense was the Elgato Video Capture device. Scored that for $84 off Amazon with the free 2 day shipping ala Amazon Prime. Another expense was actually getting a VCR. My girlfriends mom had one to lend me. It works pretty well. It has some tracking issues so I ordered another VCR off ebay and now have two VCR’s on my desk.

I remember being a kid and thinking VCR’s could possibly be the coolest thing ever. Now they are just large annoying black boxes on my desk. I picked up the other VCR for $30 from eBay. The lady that was selling lied to me on its condition. But it works as expected.

Also I needed a place to save all of this video as most videos come up after compression to be 2-3GB of data. Then a DVD version ends up being another 4GB or so. Then I make 2 different formats m4v and Divx AVI. Not really sure how my family is taking this. But oh well I am happy to have digital copies of all the tapes. But this all takes up space so I now have 2 1TB Firewire 800 HDD. I have 2.5TB of data hooked up to my laptop for all of these home movies.

Good times. Well I better get back to work. Just thought I would blog some random thoughts.

This prompted me to write up a long detailed e-mail on good backup tips and some free tools and general good advice about saving data. I didn’t get a thank you. I didn’t get one response.

E-Mail is my thing. I love e-mail I find it 100x easier to solve problems with an e-mail then a phone call. I am always on e-mail. You send me an e-mail it gets forwarded to my Mobile Me account which instantly puts it on my iPhone and boom I know you sent something and i will get back to you ASAP. To make things easier for my family I setup a Google Group so that you can just send an e-mail to 1 address and everyone gets it. But people seem afraid to use it.

Here are the current stats on the group.

185 Tristan
118 Mom
49 Aunt
31 Grandpa
31 Uncle
27 Cousin
20 Family Friend
20 Alex
15 Family Friend Old Account
14 Grandma

This has been up for over 2 years and doesn’t seem like it’s getting that much use. Getting people involved in the discussion on things like planning birthday’s is near impossible. My girlfriend her family seems to have e-mail and planning family events in the digital realm down. I don’t get why it’s so hard to reply to an e-mail or click a link and fill out a form.

I finally got my grandma hooked up with a Jitterbug cell phone. That is the oddest phone I have ever seen. Only cell phone I had ever used that has a dialtone when you flip it open. And that everything on the phone is either “Yes” or “No” Do you want to call Tristan?

My family has a ton of videotape so I got the means necessary to work on converting them to the digital format.  My desk is kinda loaded at the moment. Two Apple laptops got some VCR’s going here and just piles of technology at the beck and call to get all this done. Here is an picture of my desk at the moment.

Sent out an e-mail for that no response not a person in the world seems to care. I tested out the technology with my High School Senior Slideshow. I wasn’t in it but it was the only video tape I had around the house.

You can view that at the following link North Kitsap High School Graduating Class of 2001 But I would be careful. It’s 46 minutes of a slideshow of people you probably have no clue about. It was really just a visual test to see how well it worked. I also changed the audio to be a bit better quality.

But I hope to get on this project there are tons of funny. (Well I would find funny) videos that we recorded over our childhood years. That I would like to convert to a digital format. I don’t think I would want to convert them to DVD. Since would be easier to grab a video file and make a DVD if you so choose.

But anyways I guess I just wanted to rant that my family doesn’t use technology in a way that seems to be the most productive. Or seem to care about any of the efforts that I put forth into helping them. But what do I know. It’s late I am going to bed thanks for reading.

But I am still I am never sure what I can talk about or mention. People say “How have you been since I have seen you last” I could talk about my trip to Maui which was awesome. Or the video I made with my sister that at last check was almost up to 400 hits on YouTube. But all I can ever seem to find myself talking about is work. Nobody really cares about work. It’s something we all do. We all have different jobs but it just seems easier to talk about.

I could talk someones ear off about all things tech. But I always assume people would find that boring. I think I need to quit thinking of myself as boring. I need to just assume that if someone asks what I have been up to that I should just tell them. I will also do a better job of telling the readers that still come to TristanPipo.com and now that these get imported in Facebook those readers as well.

But as January winds down to a close. I hope everyone is ready for February and the lovely marketing holiday of Valentines Day where single people feel guilty about not having a mate and people in relationships worry about not making their partner as happy as they could be.

I would love to hear what’s been going on with you since our last chat.

You used to walk up turn on the sink pump out some soap. Grab some paper towels out of a normal dispenser. Dry your hands toss it in the trash and move along with life. But for some reason people decided to get greedy with the paper towels, water and soap. We used to have an awesome system like this.

But we went from having the greatness of taking care of things ourselves. To the man saying “Hey there! thanks for spending some money in our store. But we don’t trust you to dispense the proper amount of soap water and paper towels”

Now you walk into the toilet take care of business go to wash your hands you need to maneuver them under some sensor. Then hope the water turns on. Or you have the sinks with the push down button and you get a teaspoon of water and it shuts off. Most soap is still manual. The soaps that are not you get the same problem with the sink. Find the sensor and hope you get some soap. But my gripe with bathrooms is the paper towel dispenser since they have switched to an automatic system.

You have seem them right? They look something like this.

You run your hand under this thing and you get some paper. Has anyone ever found that the amount of paper you get on your first swipe to be worth anything? This is supposed to save money or something is all I can figure. But just seems to make the overall bathroom experience a very crappy one.

Instant Rimshot Drum

I love that sound effect. Always good for a laugh. But I feel like all this germ phobia has gotten out of hand. Nobody wants to touch anyone or anything and it’s just making life shittier overall. I think we need to ditch all the automatic crap in the bathroom. Because the only thing left is toilet paper. I don’t want to be sitting there for minutes running my hand underneath the dispenser getting two sheets at a time.

Some Tech Specs : We captured this on December 14th 2009 at various locations around my hometown of Kitsap County, WA. I used a Flip Ultra HD camera for all of the video and we went to various locations and I would capture my sister dancing from 15-30 seconds depending on the location. The video was inspired by the “Where the Hell is Matt” video which you can see here.

The music is Praan and you can grab it off iTunes at the following location : http://bit.ly/91XPu4

I edited the movie on my MacBook Pro using iMovie 2009. Which made it incredibly easy to do. I captured about 58 minutes of video in various locations and had to cut it down to 4 minutes and 29 seconds to match the other video. If you have any questions I would be happy to answer them leave them in a comment below. I am not sure if we will do this again next year but who knows what the future holds.

November is usually the month where the world is winding down. Getting ready to bundle up for the holidays. I am really excited for Thanksgiving. I was listening to this podcast called No Agenda and they were discussing Turkey. They were talking about this thing called Heritage Turkey’s so I decided to order one of those for the family thanksgiving. They are the “original” style of Turkey and they are supposed to taste amazing. So looking forward to that.

Today I had the carpets in the Pipo Palace shampooed. It had been a while since it had been done and it really brought some new life back into the place. Taking a little longer to try then I expected. So having a rather chill Friday night lounging around the bedroom updating the world via laptops.

The household has 2 Mac Laptops a Mac Mini and Raleigh uses some old 2003 Dell. I can’t say I understand why she keeps that thing. But I bought a new laptop last June to replace my old Powerbook G4 that I bought in September 2004.

Other then that work has been rather insane. Everyone is drinking from the fire hose lately and it seems like patience is wearing a bit thin and we are hoping the holiday lock downs mean we get a little break for a short while.

Raleigh and I are heading to Hawaii in December so look forward to tweets and facebook pics of that while we are away. If you don’t already follow me on twitter you can check me out at http://www.twitter.com/tristanpipo

But I wish everyone a great weekend and I will work on getting back into this blogging thing and lay some social commentary on the line soon. Next weekend I will be heading back to Poulsbo, WA to go to my mothers art gallery. If you would like to grab lunch or something let me know.

Tristan Out.

We have arrived at October. It has been a rather interesting month so far. My schedule changed at work which has been nice. I got moved to 10-7 last October and was told I would only be on that work schedule for 3 months. Here it is next October and finally getting it changed back. Which is awesome on my end.

Coming up this weekend the girlfriend and I have a fall party to attend. With one of my girlfriends coworkers which should be a good time. I always dig carving pumpkins getting drunk and making scarecrows. I will be posting pictures to Facebook most likely or perhaps my tumblelog. Which if you care to find it’s located at tristan.tumblr.com it’s also a nice aggregation of everything I do online.

But anyways it’s getting a bit late. I think I will hit up a little Beatles Rock Band before I go to bed.

Hopefully everyone has a great week. Send me an e-mail or text message let me know what you are up too.

Later went to the Apple Store and played with one and just couldn’t justify the switch to AT&T at the time and the $499 & $599 price tag. When the iPhone 3G came out just over a year later I had to have it. Then a year later the iPhone 3GS came out. Getting video and a compass didn’t seem worth the upgrade to me at the time.

So iPhone released OS 3.0 and now 3.1. Tomorrow we get MMS which I have had on my phone for a while now but the copy and paste has been awesome. Especially when adding all of my shipments to my Delivery App. I highly recommend Delivery Status Touch. But I do have some complaints about the iPhone.

If I get a text message my phone alerts me and shows the name and says “Text Message” seems like it gets angry sometimes and I never get the text message but that doesn’t really concern me. What I don’t like is how I get notice that I get a new e-mail but I don’t get any notice on the lock screen when I get an e-mail. I need to unlock my phone. Tap the mail app and then I get to see who sent the mail. I would rather have a notification like the SMS alert for e-mail as well. I understand not everyone would want this so it would nice if you could shut that off as well. It would also be cool if I could have an updated weather forecast on the locked home screen.

Other then that the iPhone has been evolving rather nicely and I have been pretty happy with all the updates. Picture messaging comes out tomorrow. I have had it on my iPhone for 10 days or so now. I have enjoyed it so far. I have tried every hack on my iPhone.  I have Jailbroken, Unlocked, MMS, Tethering if there has been a guide for it I have done it.  Jailbreaking is cool and all but it doesn’t seemed like I have ever gained much from doing it. Other then changing the theme on my iPhone and a few funny apps. I keep thinking I should jailbreak 3.1 to try out the Google Voice App.  Speaking of Google Voice. I am loving that service. I like it better then Grandcentral when they were the dudes in charge. Mainly due to the new interface.

But that is all not much going on really. Weekend is almost here.

I picked up a Flip Ultra HD video camera so that I can record all kinds of awesome videos in HD.  You can check out my adventure the the grocery store here.

http://gallery.me.com/tristan.pipo#100087

But other then doing the life thing. Started going back to the gym. Nice to get back in the groove after a few years of vacation from it. I haven’t lost that much strength and the belly is slowly going away.

But next week I am on vacation and I won’t have any cell phone or internet access so hopefully the world doesn’t blow up while I am gone. It will be odd turning on that vacation auto responder I haven’t used that ever since I got gMail back in 2004.

Well hope to here from everyone soon drop me a line.

I check out the hits on the site and people still come here which is encouraging. I am sometimes shocked I still have people that read this when I never post pictures of myself and I don’t really pimp out my site anymore. Since I finished school and joined the workforce back in 2006 it’s like life has gotten busy. But I am not really any busier then I was back then. It’s just that I work on a computer all day. When I get home I don’t want to touch the computer. Finding time at work to blog is close to impossible these days. So consider yourself lucky.

So it’s May. My birthday is in May. I found out yesterday that my 15 year old step niece gave birth to a baby boy. So now I am a Step Great Uncle. My step sister is married to a guy that is a year younger then me. He is now a grandfather at 24. I am 25 now and I look back at my life. I rewind a decade and look at life. All I can think about is that I was a dumbass compared to now. I hope that kid does okay. I am sure when I am 35 I will look at 25 and think “Man, I was a dumbass at 25″. I think people need to think about that more often. I also think that logic should be applied if you ever think about getting a tattoo. 10 years from now I will probably think this was a stupid idea.

But Birthday’s are never my thing. My girlfriend keeps asking me. “So what do you want for your Birthday?” I have no idea what I want since she told me no DVD’s or Video Games. Well that is all that I really want. I am still wondering where the new wallet I was promised for Christmas is. I ponder just buying it myself but I feel like that’s not the point.

I am the type of person that found out at an early age that you are hardly ever given anything and hand outs should not be expected. You gotta bust your ass for everything. I wanted a Playstation 3 I saved pennies and went out and bought the thing. I remember chopping wood as a child for the neighbors to get $20 to buy a Seattle Mariners hat. I chopped wood over an entire weekend for 6hrs a day for $20. They got a sweet deal and my 9 year old ass thought I was making a ton of cash. When I was 19 I looked back at that moment and thought I was a complete dumbass for getting so little money.

So I have no idea what I want for my birthday. If you would like to pick up a DVD or a Blu Ray you can get that info from my Amazon Wishlist Page. Just search for Tristan Pipo. There are not many. Though some girl on Facebook from the Philippines said I was her cousin. I said no but she has a cousin named Tristan Pipo who lives in San Diego. I recall seeing this info before back in 1996 looking on ICQ people search and there was another Tristan Pipo from San Diego, CA. I hope to one day meet this fellow. But until then I sit casually and lurk as my new facebook friend updates with pictures.

I look at the blog and I really need to get working on the fonts it is pretty hard to read. I will see about working on that sometime. Need to bust out the MacBook Pro and hack it up with some CSS action.

So I have been reading about this whole Swine Flu thing. Seems like another plot to install fear into people and keep them controlled. 13 cases in Washington State at time of this posting. 13,000 people on average die of the Flu every year. So far 1 person in the USA that was from Mexico and 2 years old with no immune system has died. Not like you had much of a life at 2 years old but thanks for fueling the stupid panic machine. Seems like everyone is recovering from the illness here in America. So I am confident that everything will be fine and all the idiots and hypochondriacs will be put in there place eventually.

On that note thanks for reading. I will work on being in touch. =) You can always follow me on twitter. twitter.com/tristanpipo

So I thought I would give a quick update on what is going on around the Tristan circle of life. Last week I ordered a Tivo. This thing has been a pain in the ass. It took a week to get here. But there have been 2 major causes of frustration.

1. The Cable Card Experience.

So in order for the TivoHD to work you need to get a CableCard from the Cable Company. In the Seattle area we have Comcast. Usually for most of my issues I either hop on the Comcast Chat or get on Twitter and send a note to @ComcastCares. So my first try was with the Chat. I got one guy saying that I could just drive to the local Comcast Office and pickup the cable card. Slide it into the Tivo and drive home and call Comcast. Sounds good to me.

Some time passes…..

Tivo is actually coming now so I hop on Comcast Chat again and get a new person they tell me I need to schedule a tech to come out and install the card for a fee of $25. Previous guy told me I could do it myself.

The process of installing a cable card is basically moving one flap down and sliding in a PCMCIA card into the device. Didn’t seem $25 worthy to me. But I do recall charging people at Best Buy $160 for Hard Drive and OS Install.

Now that I had a conflicting argument from two different people. I hopped on twitter and sent a note to @ComcastCares I got the following reply.

So I have two people saying the same thing. So I decide to shoot an e-mail off to Comcast Cares. we_can_help@comcast.com I get a prompt reply from a Detreon Roberts. He says they need to schedule a tech to come out. So I accept that answer for the time being.

So I get home that night and make a phone call to Comcast. I get to speak to an incredibly seductive sounding woman named Jen or Jenn. I didn’t ask for the spelling but I wanted info about my Cable Card. She said that I can just go down to the Comcast Office and pick it up. I tell her about all of my experiences thus far. She says “They don’t know what they are talking about. I setup a CableCard for a guy today took 3 mins over the phone” So I e-mailed Detreon back and he says. “You should really get an installer out” So on Saturday the girlfriend of awesomeness decided to partake on the adventure of the Comcast store and we got the CableCard. Came home and installed it and it took about 3 minutes and we were golden.

So I guess I would like to thank the first Chat Person and Jen from Comcast in Washington for being the most helpful. Everyone else needs to think about what they are doing.

2. Upgrading the Hard Drive in the Tivo.

So this was a fun process that I did when the girlfriend was out tending to her late kitty cat Indy. So I was home alone which was probably a good thing because I was incredibly frustrated by a few sources. So I was cranky and just wasn’t a pleasant person.

So the scenario is that the Tivo HD comes with a 160GB HDD which gives you about 20hrs of HD recording. This was not enough for me so I bought a 1TB external eSATA drive hoping I could just plug it in and be good to go. This was not the case as Tivo doesn’t like this idea so I had to hack the box to get it working. So I take the TIVO apart and pull the hard drive. I come to find out that it would just be easier to install the external drive into the TIVO. So I have to take apart this external drive which I didn’t want to do but kinda have to.

At this point I haven’t even powered up the Tivo. So I take apart the external drive and then go to my Computer. I have this Pentium 4 3.6ghz machine I use to just screw around with when I am not using my Mac’s. Luckily I had this thing around otherwise I would have been screwed. So I open up the computer and need to free 2 SATA ports. Currently I have all 4 being used so I boot up the machine and find the HDD that I am not using and power it back off and unplug the two drives. Come to find out that I had these in a RAID 0 configuration so the computer won’t boot. So decide to say screw it all I can just reinstall Windows 7 Beta and just use one drive and setup the other drives later.

So I had to install Windows 7 again to just do what I needed to do. After that process completes I go download the TIVO hacking software called WinMFS.

I then shutoff the computer hookup the 160GB tivo drive and the 1TB HDD. Boot up the machine and followed the instructions located here.

http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/04/17/how-to-upgrade-your-tivo-hd-with-winmfs/

I am always baffled when people ask me questions on how to do things with their computer. Since I can find every answer by googling. See here is how you can do it to.

http://tinyurl.com/d9obnl

So I followed that process and swapped out the 160GB HDD with the 1TB and the unit would power on and then crash. So I said WTF! I spent over an hour reimaging my PC with Windows 7 and the process didn’t work. So I swapped the 160GB drive back in and powered it on. This worked great. So I went through the setup process and then took the whole thing apart again to reimage the 1TB HDD with the above instructions. This process worked but took a great deal longer I was getting a bit more positive messages.

As a note if you are going to use WinMFS with Windows 7. Be sure you click “Run as Administrator” or this whole process will never work. So now with all of that completed I have 141hrs of HD recording and something like 1500 hrs of Standard Def recording.

So I got home at 8pm last Thursday and I didn’t finish with the Tivo Hacking until 1:30am. I was rather cranky by the end of the experience. The girlfriend doesn’t even appreciate the Tivo yet. Hopefully she will and I will get some good appreciatin back.

So that has been my Tivo experience. I must say after all of that work I am now an expert in the process of expanding the storage of the Series 3 Tivo’s.

I am sure there are more important things in the world to focus on. Anyone have any ideas?

All that’s left on the TristanPipo.com website is to change the font’s around a bit and I will do that when I get home with my trusty CSS editor.

I would like to thank Raleigh and Junniper for being my unoffical blog Quality Assurance Team.

Well looks like the fun doesn’t stop around here. I have been getting reports of users getting “500 Internal Server Errors” this seemed to be happening for Firefox, IE, Safari. I did some googling and found out that the error is an issue with the hosting provider I use running out of memory allocated to PHP which is running WordPress. I have made the changes that the other sites have recommended and next time that the services are restarted for this server that should resolve the issue. So hopefully the GoDaddy Support team gets an easy close for the support ticket I opened.

Cheers!