rip audio bit from dvd

So obviously a Linux thing. Use mplayer's mencoder and audacity to export the portions you want.

mencoder dvd://4 -chapter 1-1 -ovc frameno -oac mp3lame -lameopts cbr:br=192 -o pp1.avi

this rips just the audio from title 4 of chapter 1 to pp1.avi

then

mplayer -dumpaudio pp1.avi -dumpfile pp1.mp3

to get it to mp3

and then use audacity to extract the bits you want to separate file.

then bluetooth "sendfile" it to your phone and "Peppa pig" is now my ringtone.

Unison and file synchronisation

This seems to be working very nicely between various machines on the network.  I am mainly running it from the MacBook Air to the Linux box.  I might configure it to work with the NSLU2 in the loft but there is not so much room up there at the moment.  Also I need to re-establish the off-site back up some time.  

This is a very well written guide for Unison if you want to read any further.  

Rotating Video

If you need to rotate video then I found that this command will rotate 90 degrees right.

mencoder -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg -vf rotate=1 -oac pcm input.mov -o output.avi

Sometimes we record movies rotated.

This came from here

Delete everything listed in the output of find

I find this very useful. It deletes all of the files output from the find command. Be careful to check your find expression is correct first!

find -name .banshee-dap*.mp3 -exec rm -f "{}" \;

Download mpeg4 from Youtube so you can get it to an ipod thing

I found http://keepvid.com/ which allows you to download Youtube videos locally. So you can then sync them with an ipod using iTunes (other portable video players are also available!). So I now have the Lego Eddie Izzard Darth Vader stuff to watch any time I like!

New MacBook Air

So now I have an Apple, The first Apple since I was 15. 25 years ago I had an Apple ][ Europlus - well it was really my mother's as she worked at Apple in Slough (UK) for a while.

The main reason for getting one is that I currently do not have a laptop and I need one. It was an apple since I would like to start using my Ipod touch. In order to do this you really do need iTunes and there are driver issues running iTunes for windows as a guest VM. I tried both VM Ware workstation and Innotek Virtualbox. Both have the same issue which was rumoured to be an issue with the USB kernel support in Linux, or possibly Apple encrypting the USB traffic.

I am really impressed with Apple integration of OS and Apps but I still think you can do more with Compiz than Aqua. So far I have:

1. Loaded Open Office for Aqua. It seems to be fine. I have not really used in anger yet but there is no need to buy anything.
2. Bought (goodness knows when I last needed to buy any software) to install VMWare Fusion. It seems to get better reviews than Parallels.
3. Installed Ubuntu Hard Heron 32 bit in a VM. So my Mac can now do all the normal "dicking about" that I do normally. . I have become so familiar with OpenSuse that I might go back after a little playing about.
4. Currently writing a script to bulk (and incrementally) convert all my ogg and flac music to mp3 so I can load it on my ipod.

Still to do:

• iSync with my Nokia 6300
• Config Time machine to work to a network drive (smb share)
• Investigate options for mail/calendar for multiple machines and multiple users. Scalix running locally with Spamassassin might be the way forward.

SAMBA Swat

Just had to sort out a niggling issue on a SLES 10 box at dad's work. I have given up for the time being trying to sort out Samba acting as a primary domain controller (PDC) for the Network there. So I have enabled SWAT and found this very useful post which went into the detail. It doesn't look like the default xinted config file for swat is particularly helpful. Added the blue lines to it.

service swat
{

  port            = 901
  socket_type     = stream
  protocol        = tcp
  wait            = no
  user            = root
  server          = /usr/sbin/swat
  log_on_failure  += USERID
  disable         = no
  only_from       = localhost

}

I always expected that YAST on SLES would be able to do all of the necessary configuration. Not yet. One day it will but the whole setup is rather clunky. If you read this article you can see how fiddly it is.

It's not a lot to ask!

I have never understood what all of the directory permissions and ownership need to be on the physical disk. I am sure that 777 is overkill.

Is it this or is it that ringtone

So I wanted to have Is it this or is it that as a ringtone on my new Nokia 6300. So I found a wmv and downloaded the link. I guess mp3 would be the right format so I had to:

1. Strip the audio out of the the file.
   
2. Convert some sort of windows format to mp3.
3. Bluetooth it onto my new phone.
4. Select it as a new ringtone for my profile.

"Easy peasy Japenesea." Ella would say. It was, sort of.

From this forum thread on Ubuntu it is very easy from the command line.

ffmpeg -i video.wmv audio.wav

(Does anyone know how to go the {{{ }}} wiki thing)

Then from this post it reminded that LAME does the mp3 conversion. I should have remembered that one.

lame -V0 -h -b 160 --vbr-new input.wav output.mp3

At this point if you might be wondering what all of this means if you have never used Linux.  If you do know then I am using OpenSUSE 10.3 on a dual core 939 AMD Athlon

Linux 2.6.22.17-0.1-default #1 SMP 2008/02/10 20:01:04 UTC x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Then the tricky bit came. For some reason I could not just drag and drop the mp3 into the phone when I opened it up by typing in the Nautilus address bar:

obex:///

But it would drop it onto my old Nokia 6230i phone. So I did that and then bluetoothed the file from one phone to the other phone. Mission accomplished but I may need to sort out why Nautilus thinks there is no space on my new phone.

Starter for 10

I have a million and one little projects on the go just now. Many of these seem to involve technology and dicking around in my study, as Hils refers to it as. In my projects I always seem to solve issues and never really write them up at all so I thought I could start this blog to document things that I find out so I can find them again easily and others may stumble across them and may find them useful.

So what are the projects then? Well of course there isn't a list, it changes on a day by day basis. Is it this or is it that? Well that's the question and the first task this morning.