Vonnahme family blog

It’s been almost exactly a year we last wrote about Cirdan’s “talking”. His current lexicon, sorted again by frequency:

He actually communicates his thoughts pretty well. It’ll be nice when he can enunciate a little more clearly, but it’s fun to remember his idiosyncrasies. He’s learning language a lot like Beren did.

Lily’s funnest recent word is “weller”, as in “You’re doing that weller now, Cirdan, GOOD JOB!” Shouldn’t that logically be more correct than “better” as a comparative adverb?

Dictated to his mother on March 6, 2008

Once upon a time there were five tan colored mice living on a houseboat on the Yukon River. They anchored it sometimes and went fishing. Sometimes they would put shrimp pots in the ocean. The mice’s names were: Lily, Beren, Cirdan, Nathan and Betsy. And they liked to help. Lily, Beren and Cirdan liked to help Nathan and Betsy with their houseboat work. I have to say that they loved fishing!
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So for Christmas, I received a Coby DP-769 7″ WIDESCREEN DIGITAL PHOTO FRAME with MP3 PLAYER. Pretty cool, right?

I played with (reverse engineered) it a bunch today, trying to get photos and videos to display correctly, and I have several important conclusions:

1. The manual is garbage.
2. Coby tech support doesn’t return email.
3. The real resolution is 720 x 468, NOT 480 x 234 as the manual reports
4. You have to stretch your images’ height at a ratio of 15:13 (115.384615384615 %) to get them to display correctly.
5. The only video/audio encodings I could get to work are xvid for video and mp3 for audio, with an AVI format. I’m a total newbie at that stuff though.
6. Nobody else on teh Internets seems to have paved the way so it’s up to little old me!!!

I’m guessing most of those things apply to their other widescreen products

Here is a sample image I transformed in Photoshop while figuring those things out:

So the procedure for resizing stuff for the frame should be:

1. Stretch it vertically about 115% (see above)
2. Crop/resize to a 720 x 468 rectangle

Here’s the gist of the mencoder recipe (mencoder can accept original files in lots of formats):

Crop top and bottom of a 4:3 video and size to fit the photo frame:

mencoder "original.AVI" -ofps 24000/1001 -vf scale=720:623,crop=720:468 -ovc xvid -xvidencopts bitrate=500 -o "./photoframe/for_coby_ws.avi" -oac mp3lame -srate 32000


To add black regions to a 4:3 video and size to frame for a “letterbox” effect, change the ‘vf’ (video filter) parameter to:


scale=540:468,expand=720:468


And here’s an Action file for Photoshop, to make resizing photos easy. Enjoy!

Gmom writes,

Yesterday, I told Rebel that we needed to find Lily’s little pink kitty. I hooked him up with a leash, and he made a beeline to where Lily had walked, and I found the kitty. He didn’t exactly lead me to it, but he went and sniffed her footprints. It was pretty cool. On Saturday morning when Lily woke up, I had her covered with the giraffe blanket, and she said, “The light color of this blanket is wool. Wool comes from sheep. The dark spots are from a DOG!” It was pretty funny. She was so serious.

And also,

Cirdan had lots of fun with Rebel, and Rebel is really good with him. At one point, Rebel came up close to Cirdan, and Cirdan was taking a close look at Rebel’s eye and his nose. Rebel sat very still, then moved off when he had enough of Cirdan’s attention.

Cirdan has been saying things for a couple of months now. Here is a rough estimate of his words so far, arranged by frequency:

Mama (Mama) — 67,417
Nana (Liliana) — 521
Baba (Beren) — 165
Pbbb (ball, book, or potty) — 142
Maa (match) — 113
Abbaba (Dad) — 84
Hmnh (affirmative) — 58
Gma (grandma) — 6
Dada (Dad) — 4