Let Halifax Uncover Your Dream Vacation!

Not sure where you should go on your next vacation? With so many places to choose from, it’s hard to know what destination suits you best. That’s why there’s the Halifax Holiday Matchmaker: find out the “right spot” for you in just a few seconds!

This clever little tool pores over your Facebook profile to figure out your personality, interests, and the activities you enjoy. Then, it takes that information and matches you to a destination city you’re sure to love. Whether it’s Cairo, Istanbul, Venice or Tokyo, you’ll find your dream vacation in a minute.

The Matchmaker goes much further than that: it gives you a super-personalized travel guide that’s filled with the things YOU enjoy, whether that means seeing a match or a museum. The Matchmaker will help you gather loads of recommendations about things to do and places to stay once you’ve arrived. Find info on the relative costs of getting around in the city, see what the weather is, discover great restaurants to check out… even find reasonable hotel rates.

The Matchmaker can even help plan your evenings, highlighting bars and nightlife activities that match your personality and letting you know just how much you can afford to drink each night…

About the only thing this app can’t do is pay for your trip, but Halifax CAN do the next best thing: bringing converted money right to your door–for free. How’s that for making your travel plans even easier? Now there’s no need to visit currency exchanges on that weekend getaway– you can hit the High Street the moment you step off the plane.
Sponsored by Halifax

Encoding Video Files To Portable Devices

Rather than reinvent the wheel, I’ve taken my original RockPod 2008 and combined it into RBT2009. I’ve added extra features not seen in RockPod 2008, such as the ability to encode at different frame rates as well as change the level of the audio track. There are also other changes, but without going into them all, the ‘Video Encoder’ section is aimed at quickly getting your audio and video files into any one of a range of formats.
The first thing you should aim to do here is choose your video codec. As I said up front, the video codec really determines just about everything in a video file – 90% of the data in an audio/video file is video, and it sets the file container and audio codecs that can be used with it. You can choose wither by codec or by device, whichever is easier for you. However, learning the codec options is far better because I can’t include every video-capable device on the list.
Where possible, selecting the video codec will automatically select a suitable corresponding audio codec. For example, if you choose H.264 video encoding, the audio codec option automatically changes to AAC and the file format when you save will default to MP4 – all three will combine happily to ensure you get a workable file at the other end of the process.
You’ll notice that for most settings, the default option is ‘Use original’. That’s because the key to fast encoding is to do as little as possible with the original video on its way through to your desired format. And really, mucking around with it is unlikely to make it better. The only case where that might not be true is when using the Deinterlace switch. Deinterlasing combines interlaced half-frames into single progressive frames to get rid of the comb effect, and it can make a difference on LCD screens.
The last thing that may need some explaining is the audio level shift option. I’ve set the audio amplification factor by default to 0dB, which means it won’t change anything. Move the slider into positive territory and you’ll increase the audio level. Move it to the left and it will reduce the audio level. Don’t go overboard in either direction because too much amplification (or grain) will cause overload distortion and make it sound dreadful.