The Perceptus Back Story

The other day I wanted a 5 minute segment from a WMV, Windows Media Video, file. To be more precise, the codecs used are WMA2 for audio and WMV3 for video, according to VLC.

My normal tools of choice for taking clips from video are VirtualDub, and Avidemux. Unfortunately, both of these tools failed on the WMV file. Both could preview the input file, but neither was able to create a new video file that worked. I tried both the fast “copy” method, and the full re-compress method. This didn’t surprise me too much, neither application is known to work very well with Microsoft WMV files, and I think I’ve run into this issue in the past. Both work great for AVI, MP4, and various other files that I’ve worked with over the years.

I really wanted this video clip, so I did some searching for some new tools to use.  I found AsfBin, which is free for non-commercial use. It worked like a charm.  The preview window seems a bit quirky for me, but the resulting file works fine, so I’m happy.

Just a quick reminder, we use PayPal to handle our credit card transactions for Print-Bingo.com, our survey service, PapayaPolls.com, our Ivy DSL services,  and other one-off items.  When these transactions appear on your credit card statements, they will show as PAYPAL *PERCEPTUS.  Surprisingly, out of thousands of transactions, we’ve only had one or two people not recognize a payment to us.

Anyway, this post will hopefully be picked up by search engines to help future customers more easily recognize a payment to Perceptus via PayPal.  We’ll eventually post this on our corporate website too.

Today, I stumbled upon a Bingo Game for $1 at a dollar store. Wow. You can’t buy much for a dollar… so I bought one, hoping for a few laughs.

And I get some.

Here’s a picture of the front of the box.  This box is packaged with a little ~5 inch tall plastic bingo cage roller under clear plastic packaging.

Here’s a picture of the assembled game. Dear Daniel kitten not included – he is borrowed from my sister!

A few minutes after opening the package I realized that this wasn’t standard American style bingo. Here are a few of the deviations:

• There are only 72 balls, not the normal 75 –  LOL, the box says there are 62 balls, I had to count to discover that there are 72.
• The 8 reusable bingo cards with fold down flaps have 24 randomly selected numbers; however, on the card, the numbers are sorted from lowest to highest.
• Numbers do not have a specified column. On one card, 19 is in the first column, on another card, 19 is in the second column.  In theory, 19 could end up even further down the card, but that would be unlikely.

Since these are non-standard numbers, you won’t be able to use standard bingo cards. So, you’re normally limited to the 8 cards that you’ve been provided.  However, using our custom bingo card generator, I have made a workaround.

Click here for numeric bingo cards that use the numbers 1-72 with 14 numbers in each column – with the exception of “O” which has 14 numbers – http://print-bingo.com/card-design/fsqbci.

You can print enough for a small party.  Do NOT mix the original cards with cards generated on print-bingo.com.  The ones from our website generally follow the American format bingo card scheme.  I.e. numbers within a column are randomly sorted and are assigned to a column.

All things considered, it’s a pretty good value for $1, but it’s unfortunate that it’s not quite standard bingo.

PS, the roller doesn’t stay on the mount very well on the arm side. A well placed twist tie holds things together a lot better. Also, a sticker on the back of the  bingo game box says that this game  is either manufactured or  imported by Mountains China Co. Ltd.

Update: I glanced inside the cage after initially publishing this post and I realized that there were numbers past 62 in there! So, I had to count, and the box is wrong. There were 72 balls in my kit. It’s still non-standard! The custom design above has been revised.

The Perceptus Back Story blog was down for an hour or so yesterday while we migrated it from one virtual private server to another.

The reason for the move? It’s about time we install a few WordPress plugins that we’ve had our eye on.  We know that commenting on this blog is awkward – you have to register.  We’ll be playing around with 3rd party logins for commenting.  It might even happen today.

Plus, the old server is destined to be rebuilt sometime in the hazy future – the software on it is nearing it’s end of life.

We’ve recently added Google’s new “+1″ button to print-bingo.com.

We encourage you to try it. We suspect that it will help other users find custom bingo card generating website over time.  Then again, who really knows what Google’s plan with the +1 really are?  And… couldn’t they come up with something less gramatically awkward than +1?