Well, today I had a properly chastening experience. I had a small item, but one that was very important to me, and which I thought had been stolen by someone I thought I was close to. This was about 5 or 6 years ago, and has coloured my perception of that person and thus our relationship suffered.
Well, today I was going through an old bag and guess what? There was the item. I've spent the afternoon feeling very foolish and sad. Yes, I suppose I should have spoken to the person in question years ago, but I had no proof of anything and I'm not confrontational by nature. Maybe I should have given them the benefit of the doubt, but this wasn't the first time I felt they'd abused my trust, more the final straw. I guess I now need to do what I can to make this right.
It's been a fairly sombre weekend, actually - one of my team at work had a bike accident on Saturday, which was pretty serious, but fortunately he's relatively OK. We're also going to miss some good friends of ours who are moving about three hours drive away. That's going to be particularly tough on my wife, who's been particularly close to L. They're a highly changeable pair, though, so we're hoping they'll be back for Christmas!
Monday, 25 August 2008
Thursday, 24 July 2008
Approaching Geek Nirvana
I have recently made several discoveries which;
A) have made my delight at Linux almost complete
B) have made my Nokia n810 make total sense, and
C) have made me realise, as if I ever doubted it, what a total geek I am...
These really centre around media management. Obviously, I bought the n810 as a "productivity" tool, if not for work, then for personal email and the like (I'm writing this on it now, in a crowded Jubilee line train). But, equally obviously, I was hoping for a bit more in the way of entertainment than is officially advertised by Nokia.
I've messed about with video transcoding before, generally for my PSP, which on Linux has historically been a messy, two-step process. The holy grail was always insert DVD, press button, come back in a couple of hours and transfer file to device. Well, I've finally cracked that one with a program called k9copy running under Kubuntu Hardy. I had to mess about with codecs and bit-rates for a while, but after discovering that a home screen applet called Omweather was responsible for my stuttering video on the n810, rather than a lack of horsies under the hood, I've settled on 2-pass XviD at a VBR of 700 with the width set to 400 pixels. Audio is mp3(lame) at 128kbs. This produces good quality, stutter-free and compact (~500mb for a feature film) files. I'm still getting the odd issue with breaks in the file, which is annoying, but overall it's a pretty good solution. On my Samsung Q45 laptop, DVDs transcode at about real time. I use mplayer on the n810, which is basic but functional.
Next on the agenda was mp3, or should I say "music". I ripped all my CDs to 320kbs mp3 some time ago in the belief that preserving as much of the original recording as possible was a good thing. OK, but that takes more space to store, and more processing power (hence battery) to decode - neither great for the n810. So, I decided to try out this new-fangled Ogg-Vorbis codec. My gosh. At 128kbps (vbr) I find it hard to tell apart from the original CD, never mind the high bit-rate mp3. I've hacked my iPod with Rockbox so that it plays Ogg, too, and then spent a few weekends re-ripping everything. I honestly can't believe how they maintain the sound quality and channel separation at such high compression. Running Kagu on the n810 gives a decent (not perfect) jukebox.
The final piece of the jigsaw is transcoding recordings from my Topfield freeview recorder. This is even more convoluted than ripping DVDs. Toppy is connected by an (incredibly slow) USB connection to my Asus wl500g router. That little bad boy's running an FTP server which makes the Toppy appear to be on the network. So, the first stage is to FTP the data file from Toppy to the laptop (around half of real time plus a bit - slow, as I said). Next, we need to demux what is effectively a transport stream into audio and video components, then remux and transcode. Well, ProjectX handles the demux, which is pretty quick, then I found that AVIdemux does a great job of remuxing and transcoding. The hq PSP preset (again XviD at around 700kbps if I remember) works very well on the n810 screen. The beauty of all this is that, when I get a spare half day, I can write a script that does all this automatically and schedule it to run, say, after the American Football finishes on 5, so that the recording's ready for me to take to work in the morning. Or I can run it remotely from the n810 via ssh onto my laptop at home. It's geeky heaven.
Gosh, well that was a dull post! Hopefully something more entertaining next time...
A) have made my delight at Linux almost complete
B) have made my Nokia n810 make total sense, and
C) have made me realise, as if I ever doubted it, what a total geek I am...
These really centre around media management. Obviously, I bought the n810 as a "productivity" tool, if not for work, then for personal email and the like (I'm writing this on it now, in a crowded Jubilee line train). But, equally obviously, I was hoping for a bit more in the way of entertainment than is officially advertised by Nokia.
I've messed about with video transcoding before, generally for my PSP, which on Linux has historically been a messy, two-step process. The holy grail was always insert DVD, press button, come back in a couple of hours and transfer file to device. Well, I've finally cracked that one with a program called k9copy running under Kubuntu Hardy. I had to mess about with codecs and bit-rates for a while, but after discovering that a home screen applet called Omweather was responsible for my stuttering video on the n810, rather than a lack of horsies under the hood, I've settled on 2-pass XviD at a VBR of 700 with the width set to 400 pixels. Audio is mp3(lame) at 128kbs. This produces good quality, stutter-free and compact (~500mb for a feature film) files. I'm still getting the odd issue with breaks in the file, which is annoying, but overall it's a pretty good solution. On my Samsung Q45 laptop, DVDs transcode at about real time. I use mplayer on the n810, which is basic but functional.
Next on the agenda was mp3, or should I say "music". I ripped all my CDs to 320kbs mp3 some time ago in the belief that preserving as much of the original recording as possible was a good thing. OK, but that takes more space to store, and more processing power (hence battery) to decode - neither great for the n810. So, I decided to try out this new-fangled Ogg-Vorbis codec. My gosh. At 128kbps (vbr) I find it hard to tell apart from the original CD, never mind the high bit-rate mp3. I've hacked my iPod with Rockbox so that it plays Ogg, too, and then spent a few weekends re-ripping everything. I honestly can't believe how they maintain the sound quality and channel separation at such high compression. Running Kagu on the n810 gives a decent (not perfect) jukebox.
The final piece of the jigsaw is transcoding recordings from my Topfield freeview recorder. This is even more convoluted than ripping DVDs. Toppy is connected by an (incredibly slow) USB connection to my Asus wl500g router. That little bad boy's running an FTP server which makes the Toppy appear to be on the network. So, the first stage is to FTP the data file from Toppy to the laptop (around half of real time plus a bit - slow, as I said). Next, we need to demux what is effectively a transport stream into audio and video components, then remux and transcode. Well, ProjectX handles the demux, which is pretty quick, then I found that AVIdemux does a great job of remuxing and transcoding. The hq PSP preset (again XviD at around 700kbps if I remember) works very well on the n810 screen. The beauty of all this is that, when I get a spare half day, I can write a script that does all this automatically and schedule it to run, say, after the American Football finishes on 5, so that the recording's ready for me to take to work in the morning. Or I can run it remotely from the n810 via ssh onto my laptop at home. It's geeky heaven.
Gosh, well that was a dull post! Hopefully something more entertaining next time...
Monday, 21 July 2008
Second Thought for the day
On a separate note, it's performance review time at work again... Once more we go through the rigmarole of enforced bell-curves (shortly after the management assertion that there won't be any), and false alterations to objective scores in order to fit the bonus pot.
I assume other people also go through this process with similarly soul-destroying inevitability?
I can't even be bothered to whinge on about it any further.
In sporting news, Claude Makelele left Chelsea for PSG today. Farewell Claude, you were a great player for the Blues, and I have a terrible feeling that your goal tally for them correlated too closely to the number of Premiership titles we won...
England also lost hopelessly to South Africa in the cricket. No surprise really.
No further movement on the Brett Favre saga, but it seems he may be talking to the Vikings. Come on - that's like Marino leaving the Dolphins, or Strahan leavin NY. Speaking of which, I'm holding out a forlorn hope that he may yet decide against retirement...
I assume other people also go through this process with similarly soul-destroying inevitability?
I can't even be bothered to whinge on about it any further.
In sporting news, Claude Makelele left Chelsea for PSG today. Farewell Claude, you were a great player for the Blues, and I have a terrible feeling that your goal tally for them correlated too closely to the number of Premiership titles we won...
England also lost hopelessly to South Africa in the cricket. No surprise really.
No further movement on the Brett Favre saga, but it seems he may be talking to the Vikings. Come on - that's like Marino leaving the Dolphins, or Strahan leavin NY. Speaking of which, I'm holding out a forlorn hope that he may yet decide against retirement...
It's a funny old world
Bit of a strange weekend. I was at a friend's wedding on Sunday, which was lovely. He's an absolutely fantastic bloke, and I wish he and his wife every happiness.
Then, as we were sitting in the church, I had a message from another friend whose mother had been rushed to hospital. I Found out this morning that she died later in the evening. Absolutely tragic.
It's quite hard to handle two such strong and conflicting emotions at the same time, and i think they almost cancelled each other out. I knew that was both happy and sad simultaneously, but I couldn't really feel either one fully. As I said, strange, although that word doesn't really convey what I mean. All I can say is that my thoughts are with them both, for very different reasons.
Then, as we were sitting in the church, I had a message from another friend whose mother had been rushed to hospital. I Found out this morning that she died later in the evening. Absolutely tragic.
It's quite hard to handle two such strong and conflicting emotions at the same time, and i think they almost cancelled each other out. I knew that was both happy and sad simultaneously, but I couldn't really feel either one fully. As I said, strange, although that word doesn't really convey what I mean. All I can say is that my thoughts are with them both, for very different reasons.
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