Recently, I've been trying to get to grips with this Brave New Digital Future that I've been hearing so much about. I figured that, seeing as I do this for a living, I should probably try and engage, interface, interact, give face time, connect and generally be a bit proactive about...oh, I don't know. Some buzzword or other.

That's why I joined Twitter and it has proven to be moderately useful in providing inspiration for the rebirth of Noodle. Wwwitter has had a few thousand unique visitors and several nice reviews (as an aside, I always find the best reviews have a sprinkling of exclamation marks and the worst have a smattering of question marks). The only real issue I have with Twitter is that in order to truly get Twitter, you need to follow the right number of people. Too few and it's like overhearing someone having a good conversation on the telephone – "Yeah, and that was only the first colour!" – too many and checking your feed is like sticking your head into a sugar-rushed playgroup – "I like ham!", "Ha-ha-ha!", "@everybody Look at me, look at me!"

This connected, emergent, digital whateveritis is also the reason I joined LinkedIn. I am, however, having a hard time trying to figure out what on earth it is. Is it "Your CV online"? I already have that. Is it "Facebook for business professionals"? Surely the business professionals who sign up to LinkedIn are already on Facebook so...why? I don't accept the argument that Facebook is for your fun side and LinkedIn is for your serious side. If it's online, it's out there in the public domain. If you are embarrassed by the possibility that someone from work might log into facebook and see "Jane Fakename joined the group 'LOL, I got drunk and dropped my mobile in the toilet'", the most obvious course of action is to not join that group, no?

I'm straying from my point, however. I had a look at LinkedIn. It keeps asking me for my goals, my objective, my "Specialties in Your Industries of Expertise". What is it asking? I always thought my goal was "Get old, fat and happy". The way I figure it, if I can do that, I've won whatever game the goal counts in.

Maybe it's just not aimed at people like me. Then again, I am a "Digital Media Professional" or at least, I play one on TV. I even have the word 'Manager' in my job title. I should be slap-bang in the middle of the target demographic, no?

Ugh. I need to become a pioneer in anti-social media.

And after a six-month hiatus, I'm back at the blog. Coincidentally, for the same six month period I stopped studying Japanese. Pretty much the day I got back from Tokyo, I put away my dictionary and didn't open it again until yesterday. Still, I'm back now and I'm starting private lessons again tonight so sit down and I'll make you a cuppa.

So, what's been keeping me away from the blogs and books for the last six months? Loads of stuff, to be honest. The new job for one: Digital Media Studio Manager for Whitespace. I wish I could say it's like herding monkeys just because I want to use the phrase "just like herding monkeys" but as it is, it's more like...managing a digital media studio. Or something like that. Outside work (but still within the geek realm), I've been working on Wwwitter, a cool little tool to show twitter discussions about a web page. Regular readers will of course recognise this as a direct copy of noodle but using someone else's content. It turns out that was all that was required to grab the attention of the internets.

The biggest thing to keep me busy, however, was getting engaged to my beautiful lady, Jenni and all the organising that entails. Well, all the organising Jenni's been doing and the confused nodding from me that entails. I'll try and post when I have more details but the big day is 12th September. Don't worry if you haven't received any kind of 'save the date' notification or anything, Jenni's sent hers out, I've just been a bit slow.

So there we are, It's my last night in Tokyo and I've definitely got that Case feeling. Standing at my hotel window with a jar of sake, face lit up by the flashing neon outside. Behind me, the room has a cold glow under the light from my computer screen. Unfortunately, the laptop doesn't contain the Dixie Flatline but it's close enough.

I never did find a Chiba chop shop...

Those who know me will know that I have - using the parlance of the modern kids - mad skillz when it comes to video encoding and transcoding. I'll happily admit to wasting far too many hours learning the finer points of ffmpeg, mencoder and vlc, combining them with all manner of shell scripts, web interfaces, cron jobs and the like to set up my own mediacentre, video RSS feeds and shared video chatrooms (currently in maintenance mode).

So imagine my combination of frustration ("it should just work") and elation ("ooh, a challenge") when I discovered that my shiny new Mylo is extremely temperamental when it comes to video. I had assumed PSP-friendly video would have been fine but it turns out I was wrong. Any slight variation in frame-rate, bitrate, frame-size, aspect ratio, codec or container and I'd get a lovely "Sorry, the Mylo doesn't support this format" error (but in Japanese).

Anyway. In case you're interested, here's a shell script:

#!/bin/bash
ffmpeg -i "$1" -y -threads 2 -map 0.0:0.0 -f mp4 -vcodec xvid -b 768 -aspect 4:3 -s 320x240 -r ntsc -g 300 -me epzs -qmin 3 -qmax 9 -acodec aac -ab 64 -ar 24000 -ac 2 -map 0.1:0.1 -benchmark "$1.MP4"

call this from the command-line with the path to the file you want converted and 10 minutes later, your Mylo-ready file will be sitting next to the original.

I'm really only posting this here because in about 6 months, I'll have forgotten all about this and, given my current luck with technology, all my computers and all their backups will have simultaneously formatted themselves.