- Rules of Engagement – Videotape Shows U.S. Helicopter Crew Firing on Suspected Iraqi Insurgents, mpeg here – pretty harsh. Looks like one of the guys was waving a shirt in surrender when they killed him; see also AC130 Combat Footage from Afghanistan
Category: Legacy
- Bob Mould (Husker Du) has a blog. Wow.
- The 2004 Edge Annual Question: What’s Your Law?
- Save Apple. – interesting look back at a ’97 Wired article (101 Ways to Save Apple)
- The Killer Among Us – so, chances are we all already have prions floating all over the place in us, huh?
Hey, who knew? O’Reilly’s Using Samba, 2nd edition is included in the Samba docs. On a mac:
open /usr/share/swat/using_samba/toc.html
Browser stats for USC.edu from finals week last December:
Web browser Page views % Internet Explorer/6. 4832922 72.70% Internet Explorer/5. 1130105 17.00% Gecko 242722 3.65% Netscape Navigator/4. 174118 2.62% Safari 155681 2.34% Netscape Navigator/3. 58450 0.88% Internet Explorer/4. 27761 0.42% Netscape Navigator/2. 25670 0.39% OS Page views % Windows XP 3,240,173 49.69% Windows 2000 1,360,074 20.86% Windows 98 853,311 13.09% Mac 470,978 7.22% Windows ME 343,354 5.27% Windows NT 165055 2.53% Windows 95 53,439 0.82% Linux 25,844 0.40% Sun 8,904 0.14%
Gecko-based browsers finally beating out NS4, although it’s still hanging in there with an inordinately large percentage. (combination of user labs, ancient machines, and software.usc.edu)
- Luxeon Star LEDs – brightest LEDs for putting together lighting
- How do you Backlight an LCD?
- fascinating /. thread on living (way)off-grid – I guess the main drawback is that it could be a bit isolating. and finding wifi
- EACCUESheets – 4 types of EAC CUE sheets
- GapSettings – tutorial to use EAC to extract and burn exact CD copies
The proper way to do things? Looks like exporting a non-compliant CUE list, FLACing from EAC, and then batch LAME-encoding on the server end (the hardest thing is doing the metadata transferring). Hmm, can EAC just output a batch-file output?
- No end in sight to dollar’s descent – of course you won’t see these kind of headlines in CNN/Money, back to Wal-Mart citizens, nothing to see here
- Rubin Gets Shrill = latest Krugman Op-ed
In a paper presented over the weekend at the meeting of the American Economic Association, Mr. Rubin and his co-authors Peter Orszag of the Brookings Institution and Allan Sinai of Decision Economics argue along lines that will be familiar to regular readers of this column…
“Substantial ongoing deficits,” they warn, “may severely and adversely affect expectations and confidence, which in turn can generate a self-reinforcing negative cycle among the underlying fiscal deficit, financial markets, and the real economy. . . . The potential costs and fallout from such fiscal and financial disarray provide perhaps the strongest motivation for avoiding substantial, ongoing budget deficits.” In other words, do cry for us, Argentina: we may be heading down the same road.
- My So-Called Blog – Emily Nussbaum writes a long feature on teenagers and online journalling
J.’s sense of private and public was filled with these kinds of contradictions: he wanted his posts to be read, and feared that people would read them, and hoped that people would read them, and didn’t care if people read them. He wanted to be included while priding himself on his outsider status. And while he sometimes wrote messages that were explicitly public — announcing a band practice, for instance — he also had his own stringent notions of etiquette. His crush had an online journal, but J. had never read it; that would be too intrusive, he explained.
- Two Against One – high-school bi-sexual love triangle ends in a murder. TV movie material for sure
- RipDigital – will rip your CD’s for ~$1/CD. OK if you don’t have any neighborhood kids you can pay to rip your music I suppose.
Weekend project: figure out the best way to rip/encode the rest of my CD collection. At this point, I’m thinking that instead of using MAREO w/ EAC (encoding on my WinXP Athlon XP 1800) I should take advantage of my mostly idle (current uptime load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00)Xeon 2.4GHz processor and try to find a good way to encode w/ that. I’ll be doing FLAC, hopefully with a way of retaining in/out points, and then a compact lossy format for the iPod and streaming.
- Rip IMG (WAV+CUE) w/ EAC on PC
- Find/write script to FLAC + lossy encode (~128KBps VBR LAME, or AAC?) — OGG won’t play on the iPod… Will iPod play FAAC LC/M4As? The QT AAC implementation seems to deliver the best quality, but will it run on Linux?
- Lame with Cuesheet Input – a patch that allows MP3 encoding (+ID3 tags) directly from an EAC CUE sheet. Cool. Easier than using cuetools?
- Mausau’s audio plugins for Nero Burning ROM – need to burn FLAC? (don’t know if this can burn FLAC from CUE files though)
- [Flac-users] CD -> FLAC -> CD – shell scrip using cdrdao
- Lossless CD archival / HD playback – no great solutions…
- Cue Creator – perl script that rips w/ cdparanoia, creates CUE files
- Samba File Extension Mapping VFS Module – including decode_flac script, allows automatic decode of flac files if you’re playing say in iTunes over the network (but no metadata?) some comments @ Elsewhere.org
- Lame – perl scripts including Split_wav which will transform CUE files into separate wav files
- Audio::FLAC
Speaking of wireless, my good friend Gordon started a blog and is putting up some good information on large-scale wi-fi deployments.