Category: computers suck
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less than 100 CDs to go …
1492 Artists / 999 Albums / 15245 Tracks / 34.9 Days / 62.12 GB
(and here’s me thinking I had about 2000 CDs, too)CDs that wouldn’t read: 0 (so far). That’s not to say that there weren’t some difficulties (copy-controlled CDs can go die, glitching and gronking in my drives) and my oldest CD (XTC’s Skylarking, my copy of which I think has just turned 20) had a ton of retries.
Lost CDs: Thomas Dolby’s Aliens Ate My Buick is somewhere in the house, but nowhere I’ve looked.
Found CDs: My long-lost promo copy of the (Portland) Decemberists’ Picaresque, which I thought had vanished in a road trip to Missouri. It was lurking in a long-forgotten portable CD player in the bottom of a storage bin.
Pleasant surprises: that freedb is generally better than it used to be.
Peeves: copy-controlled CDs (see above); flappy cardboardy cases that only have the title on one spine; oversized CD cases (Japanese imports, I’m looking straight at you), dark blue text on a black background, idjit freedb submitters who insist on Band, The syntax or worse, submit whole albums called sdfsdf;aefhsdf; bonus DVD “premium” releases (who watches these?).
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an appropriate use of company time
$ pbmtext Hello | pnmcrop | pnmtopnm -plain | tail +3 | tr '01' ' #' ### ### ## ## # # # # # # # # # # ## # # ## ###### # # # # # # # # #### # # # # # # # # # # # # # ## # # # # # ### ### ### ###### ##
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song counts
1332 Artists / 774 Albums / 12074 Tracks / 27.1 Days / 47.34 GB
— and the sad thing is, this would barely half fill a current iPod. -
why does firefox crash so much on windows?
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ripping dvd audio with Ubuntu
With more than a little help from How to Rip DVD audio to mp3 or ogg — Ubuntu Geek, here’s how I’d rip audio from a DVD:
for f in $(seq 1 12)
do
transcode -i /dev/sr1 -x null,dvd -T 1,$f,1 -N 0x1 -y null,wav -m $(printf "%02d" $f).wav
done
Your track count and device name will vary. You’ll note that I caved, and used the annoying $(…) syntax instead of good old-fashioned backticks (which some youngsters will claim are deprecated, but I claim as job security). WordPress munges those badly, so we’re stuck with the ugly.
You could use livemp3 to convert to mp3s (if I remembered to upload the version that handles wav files) under controlled circumstances. -
m4a2mp3
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emusic: where Canada still means more expensive and second-rate
I’m not going to get all Swindleeeee!!!!! about it, but I’ve noticed a few things missing in the new emusic Canada site. I lost all my MP3s in the break-in, but I thought I’d downloaded all of the ones I’d bought from emusic a couple of days ago.
Not so. For unexplained reasons, I got humming The Whole House is Singing, and I thought I needed to listen to some Alasdair Roberts. Couldn’t find it in the share, so I went back to emusic to download it again, and rats!, it’s gone. So here’s some music I’ve paid for, but now emusic (champions of no-DRM) can’t make good on their promise to let you re-download everything you’ve bought.
(I’ve also noticed that most of the Deva Premal tracks [hey, they’re Catherine‘s] have gone, but have had no compulsion whatsoever to hum them …)
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gimp windows crash
If you find that GIMP for Windows crashes frequently, try installing the GTK+ for Windows Runtime Environment. It seems to fix many of the instabilities for me.
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rockin’ the plastic: four turntables and an mp3 share
Now I’ve got the Soundbridge set up to share from my server, I’ve been ripping CDs like crazy. I’ve got two drives on my Ubuntu box, and hooked an external CD drive to my laptop, so I’m rocking four drives at once. After years of using Grip, I converted to Abcde this weekend. What I really like about it is that I can run multiple copies at once, and it very nearly things right (aka “my way”) out of the box.
By the end of tonight, I should have about 6700 tracks on my share, and a bunch of CDs in storage.
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oh yeah, that’s what I’m talkin’ about
This is my work PC running Firefly Client, serving my music from home. Who needs to install and manage local music libraries now? -
default means default, microsoft
When I’ve specified the default e-mail signature, I shouldn’t have to click on another drop-down called default to make it appear in my Outlook message:
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combines the snark with the useful
Down for everyone or just me? helps you tell if a site’s working, or if it’s just your router. I could’ve used this earlier in the week, as I frantically fiddled with my router until I noticed the crew working on the pole line …
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bbtrackerwpt – create GPX files of named waypoints from bbtracker
I like bbtracker -it’s a very simple GPS track logger for the Blackberry. It has (at least, at the current version) one problem – you can’t create waypoints in the way that most GPS applications would expect. You can, however, name trackpoints – so I wrote a little perl script to extract all the named trackpoints from an exported GPX files, and save them as waypoints.
Download bbtrackerwpt – converts named trackpoints from bbtracker GPX into waypoints. You’ll need XML::Simple for this to work.
I imagine this script has a limited audience, and quite likely a limited lifetime. The author of bbtracker has said they’d provide waypoint support in the next version. You know me and patience, though …
If I remembered more XSLT, I’d have done this the proper way. As is, I create XML using Perl
printstatements. I’m probably okay, as the name field is the only piece of free-form text, and I do some rudimentary escaping of characters that XML doesn’t like. The output seems to validate, which is more than the GPX that bbtracker produces does. The length of your GPS track may vary 😉 -
wordpress can’t count: my 2000th blog posting
I was all exited about my 2000th post, because the dashboard is showing:
So I decided to tabulate my entries by number, and discovered that I really have 2261 (well, 2262 now) blog entries. This is the real story:
The numbering seems to have gone sideways in the last 1000 entries; entry #1000 is, as they say, what it is.
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I don’t know what it did, but I wish it hadn’t done it
Outlook has now decided that I need all my e-mail text in huge. I have no idea why.
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rsync to an NSLU2
My only real complaint with my Linksys NSLU2 is that it doesn’t have a very accurate clock. Tools like rsync expect identical timestamps, or flag source and destination files as different. This causes most of your files to be rewritten, even though the source and destination are in fact the same.
This fixes it:rsync --size-only -av src dest -
this is me hating on Office 2007
MS Office’s menus may have been a mess, but that’s no reason to replace them with something equally complex but different.
