String around my finger
A 'blog to remember things I found.
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FWD# 61159
Wed, 03 May 2006
Cartoons, many with a Science bent. Browse the Subject Gallery or in bunches of 10.
My favorite is:
nz017Environmental
Scientists in the Wild West.[...higher res
version...] (no deep linking).
![[...higher res version...]](http://www.nearingzero.net/250dpi/nz017.jpg){kind=link}
Monty Python's Completely Useless Web Site
Welcome to the completely unauthorized, completely silly, and completely useless Monty Python web site!
Contains information about Monty Python's TV shows: Monty Python's Flying Circus and And Now For Something Completely Different; and movies: Monty Python and The Holy Grail, Monty Python's Life of Brian, Monty Python Live At The Hollywood Bowl, and Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.
Includes stills, MIDI theme musinc, sound grabs, and/or scripts. Also a Forum with news and discussions.
A wonderful resource!!
Tue, 22 Nov 2005I needed to re-arrange my collection of photo files. To standardise the file naming, I used the Linux rename utility, part of util-linux.
find | grep AUT | xargs rename AUT aut find | grep DSC | xargs rename DSC dsc find | grep IMG | xargs rename IMG img find | grep JPG | xargs rename JPG jpg find | grep Mov | xargs rename Mov mov find | grep MOV | xargs rename MOV mov find | grep THM | xargs rename THM thm find | grep TIM | xargs rename TIM tim
To split files up by date, I hacked up some Perl, pushdir.pl that looked at the EXIF data (if any) for the creation time or used the mtime of the file, and moved the file to a directory yyyy-mm-dd, creating it if nexessary.
Rotating the image in a file changes the mtime of a file, but not its EXIF timestamp. Copying a file from a camera or memory card may or may not preserve the file creation time, or create funny capitalisation.
Fri, 22 Jul 2005The new movie War of the Worlds (2005) triggered my memory of the "Martian invasion of Earth" radio broadcast.
As expected, Wikipedia had a The War of the Worlds overview and article on the radio play.
The Internet Archive has a newsreel Attack By Mars Panics Thousands with Orson Welles trying to explain away the mass hysteria.
I think this article explains why the radio play had such a big impact. Lots of other good stuff here too.
The The Mercury Theatre on the Air site has a MP3 of the broadcast and a torrent of all their shows. "If possible, please download this instead".
I found the broadcast to be pretty scary. We hear reporters describing the machines atacking, then silence, and later we learn everyone was killed ...
Mon, 18 Jul 2005http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc7/comedy/progpages/goons.shtml
US Goon Show Archive www.goon.org
http://www.thegoonshow.co.uk/
The Goon Show Depository, an exhaustive information resource on BBC
Radio's The Goon Show. The site also contains links to recordings of The
Goons and various other classic BBC comedy shows.
http://www.thegoonshow.co.uk/cds/index.html
170+ Goon Shows transcribed into 32kb/22hz Mono MP3 format.
Plus many other Goon-related recordings, and other British commedians.
http://www.goonshow.org.uk/
Update 18-Jul-2005
Also stocked at shop.abc.net.au including The Goons - Last Goon Show of All on DVD
Fri, 15 Jul 2005
Substantial Non-infringing Use in Peer-to-Peer applications
This page exists to document instances of substantial, non-infringing use (hereafter SNIU) in peer-to-peer (hereafter P2P) networks.
LegalTorrents is a collection of Creative Commons-licensed, legally downloadable, freely distributable creator-approved files ...
Updated 15 July 2005 No longer at http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~arib/SNIU/
Wed, 30 Mar 2005Grokster legal battle gets help from Mark Cuban
Mark Cuban announced that he is funding the Grokster fight agains MGM. The court case--in its simplest form--is trying to lay blame for the illegal distribution of copyrighted materials over P2P networks at the doors of the distributors.
In his blog Mr. Cuban explains how, since digital files became the norm, the power has been removed from the big studios and put into the hands of the independents. Content can be distributed in many different ways, and he argues that this is how it should be: the content is the thing of value, not the distribution. He believes that if Grokster et al lose, "technological innovation might not die, but it will have such a significant price tag associated with it, it will be the domain of the big corporations only."
Let the truth be told ... MGM vs Grokster
"Software doesn't steal content, people steal content."
In the Betamax case, the Supreme Court ruled that a company was not liable for creating a technology that some customers may use for copyright infringing purposes, so long as the technology is capable of substantial non-infringing uses.
It is remarkable to compare the arguments the entertainment industry is making against P2P in 2005 to the ones it made against the VTR (what they called VCRs back then) in 1982.
Tue, 29 Mar 2005SXSW's Torrent of Free Tunes "We wouldn't have been able to do this without using BitTorrent, because this is such a huge file and it would have taxed our bandwidth resources beyond our capabilities," said David Rose, webmaster of the SXSW site.
Fest4Pod - SXSW On Your iPod®!
Add the entire SXSW 2005 Showcasing Artist mp3 library to your iPod® by using one of the BitTorrent files below.
Large - Full Songs
Small - 30-second clips
Rockers Flex BitTorrent's Muscle
With MTV and VH1 now crowded with programs like Date My Mom, The Ashlee Simpson Show and Celebrity Fit Club, there's
little room for music videos, especially from independent artists.
That's why one up-and-coming group, the Decemberists, opted to release its new music video, Sixteen Military Wives, for free using BitTorrent.
"This is an acknowledgement of the cost-effective power of peer-to-peer technology in the service of, by and for the artists," said Adam Eisgrau, executive director of P2P United.
Fri, 04 Feb 2005http://www.fuzzymonkey.org/cgi-bin/newfuzzy/software.cgi
My Photo Gallery is a Web-based photo gallery with support for other filetypes. It is easy to setup and even easier to maintain. Slick-looking image/file galleries and thumbnails are generated on the fly from the directory that you specify. Creating an album is as easy as creating a directory and FTPing your pictures to that directory. A Web administration interface is available, and updating is just as easy. It also includes advanced features such as image logging, resizing, rotating (lossless), extracting EXIF data from digital cameras, and visitor comments. Many other file formats are recognized and given a special icon.
http://yoyo.its.monash.edu.au/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/johnm/photo/index.cgi
Wed, 02 Feb 2005http://www.linux-mag.com/2004-11/diy_01.html
Rip with Grip, including suggested settings.
Encode later with oggenc.
Krename is a great program that allows you to batch rename files. Get it at http://www.krename.net. Read the instructions -- it's an amazingly powerful program.
Note: Also useful for renaming photos!!
Finally, it's a good idea to add the hidden metadata that most music players display when you're listening to a song. For that, you want to use a wonderful program named EasyTAG, available at http://easytag.sourceforge.net.
Fri, 26 Nov 2004http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/
Needed wmsdmod.dll (WMV Screen Codec 2) to play security-111804.wmv.
Installed all codecs from http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/all-20041107.tar.bz2
Replicated /usr/lib/win32 between blowie4 / porta-pc / tower.
See also http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/install.html
Sun, 21 Nov 2004http://www.linuxstb.org/dvbstream/index.shtml
dvbstream can broadcast (multicast) either a (subset of a) DVB
transport stream or a DVB program stream over a LAN using the rtp
protocol.
Other programs mentioned: dumprtp, rtpfeed, ts2es, pesdump
http://www.blogmaverick.com/entry/7673569691391003
Concept: Your PVR collects programs off the air or via the Net, and lets you watch what you want, on your own schedule.
Andrew Grumet has an RSS-powered personal TV network. You can put shows into his network here: http://www.grumet.net/ptv/add . He also has an aggregator that automatically tells his Tivo what to record. Tivo could probably do this themselves rather easily, but they always seem to be wary of offending Big Media.
http://objective.mine.nu/archive/2004/10/18.aspx
http://webjay.org/
http://secrets.scripting.com/whatIsPodcasting
http://www.medcosm.com/pictureframe.html
Cookbook for creating an electronic picture frame out of an old laptop.
Uses DSL (DamnSmallLinux) and Java to run the slideshow.
Fri, 05 Nov 2004http://tovid.sourceforge.net/
tovid is a suite of utilities designed to make VCD, SVCD, and DVD authoring a little less painful. tovid can create MPEG output from arbitrary video formats; other components in the suite can help you identify video files, generate graphical menus for DVD, and write the XML for authoring DVDs. Video files converted with tovid can subsequently be burned to a CD or DVD, using software that can create the appropriate file structure for VCD or SVCD such as k3b or dvdauthor.
http://tovid.sourceforge.net/documentation.html
tovid / idvid / makemenu / makexml
http://bittorrent.com
http://in.tech.yahoo.com/041103/137/2ho4i.html
Sites like Slovenia-based Suprnova (http://www.suprnova.org) offer up thousands of different torrents without storing the shows themselves.
Suprnova is a treasure trove of movies, television shows, and pirated games and software. Funded by advertising, it is run by a teen-age programmer who goes only by the name Sloncek, who did not respond to an e-mailed interview request.
Meanwhile, BitTorrent is rapidly emerging as the preferred means of distributing large amounts of legitimate content such as versions of the free computer operating system Linux, and these benign uses may give it some legal protection.
Among the best legitimate sites for movies and music:
-- Legal Torrents (http://www.legaltorrents.com/), which includes a wide selection of electronic music. It also has the Wired Magazine Creative Commons CD, which has songs from artists like the Beastie Boys who agreed to release some of their songs under a more permissive copyright that allows free distribution and remixing.
-- Torrentocracy (http://torrentocracy.com/torrents/) has videos of the U.S. presidential debates and other political materials.
-- File Soup (http://www.filesoup.com) offers open-source software and freeware, music from artists whose labels don't belong to the Recording Industry Association of America trade group, and programs from public television stations like PBS or the BBC.
-- Etree (http://bt.etree.org) is for devotees of "trade-friendly" bands like Phish and the Dead, who encourage fans to share live recordings, usually in the form of large files that have been minimally compressed to maintain sound quality.
Wed, 06 Oct 2004
Vsound - a Virtual Audio Loopback Cable
http://www.xenoclast.org/vsound/
This program allows you to record the output of any standard OSS program (one that uses /dev/dsp for sound) without having to modify or recompile the program.
One use of vsound is to help convert real audio files to some other format. Since the real audio format is proprietary, and all we have is a player, we can use the vsound to create a wave file like so:
vsound -f output.wav realplay input.rm
http://kplayer.sourceforge.net/
KPlayer is a KDE media player based on MPlayer. With KPlayer you can
easily play a wide variety of video and audio files and streams using
a rich and friendly interface that follows KDE standards.
Includes collection of Micro-HOWTOs for things like use of KIOSlave's.
Wed, 29 Sep 2004Often it is handy to capture a network media stream for listening/watching later.
Mplayer has -dumpaudio / -dumpvideo / -dumpstream and -dumpfile <filename> options
mplayer -dumpstream -dumpfile thu2300.ra rtsp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk/radio4/comedy/thu2300.ra
mplayer -dumpstream -dumpfile h2g3_episode1.rm rtsp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/h2g3_episode1.rm
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/
The last three books of the ‘trilogy in five parts’, Life, The Universe And Everything; So Long And Thanks For All The Fish and Mostly Harmless, have been dramatised as two new series (none of them were previously produced for radio).
Broadcast Tuesday 21 September ... Tuesday 26 October 2004
Each episode is available for replay or download for 7 days following the Thursday evening repeat.
Fri, 10 Sep 2004
tv_grab_dvb
http://www.darkskiez.co.uk/index.php?page=tv_grab_dvb
A Linux program to dump DVB EPG info in xmltv format..
i.e. Extract the TV Guide from the digital TV broadcasts.
Tune into a multiplex with whatever you like, dvbtune, mplayer, mythtv and run:
tv_grab_dvb [-t timeout] > whatson.xml
mp3Rip
http://www.linux.kaybee.org:81/tabs/mp3rip/
This is a Perl script that will rip audio CDs into well-organized
directories of mp3s. Minimal user interaction.
also AutoScrapbook, ImageBackup, Misterhouse Whole-House Audio and Speech ...
MakeMovingMenus
http://jensge.org/video/mmm/index.html
MakeMovingMenus (aka mmm) is a tool to generate a thumbnail menu
background for DVD authoring for chapters of one file or multiple clips.
To prevent misunderstandings: mmm is not a DVD menu authoring tool! It is a simple helper script to create fancy backgrounds for menus created with dvdauthor, spumux etc.
Wed, 08 Sep 2004
Varsha
http://varsha.sourceforge.net/
Varsha is a GUI based DVD authoring tool for Linux. You can make DVDs
from your mpeg files as well as digital still pictures (Slideshow DVD).
You can even combine slideshows with regular video and make them
accessible through menus. Using Varsha, you can also create simple
menus on plain background as well as moving video background.
Varsha is written in Java.
Uses dvdauthor
http://dvdauthor.sourceforge.net/
to create the DVD data stream.
Uses DVD Slideshow for Linux
http://dvd-slideshow.sourceforge.net/
Can create slideshows from igame galleries, or script images/audio/effects.