I recently purchased a black Creative Zen Vision:M portable media player, in the hopes of preserving my sanity while on trans-Atlantic voyages to and from Baghdad, and keeping myself focused during my long and boring cardio workouts.

I previously owned a Creative Zen Micro, which I had a great experience with. However, I spent 20 hours en route home from Baghdad and found myself desperate for some video to pass the time; when I got home I discovered the Zen Vision:M was now widely available, and ordered one immediately.

As I prepare to depart for Iraq, I’ve developed a renewed interest in ripping DVD movies from Netflix into DivX format, which is more easily stored on a hard drive or DVD-R for easy replay later. To that end, I initially turned to a tutorial, How to Rip a DVD to MEG4/DIVX, which involved several steps, including installing and running a cracked DivX codec. Needless to say, I was underwhelmed.

Then I stumbled upon ImTOO DVD Ripper Platinum. I downloaded a..erm..eval copy from a torrent, and did a test rip. It runs surprisingly slowly on my P4, and its support for ‘hyperthreading’ and ‘dual core’ consists of ripping two chapters at once in separate processes. Since this doesn’t help a single, long chapter finish any quicker, I regard it as lame and kludgy.