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Various civic… uh…

Wouldn’t your life be better if you had audio CD’s of the full soundtrack to The Big Lebowski in your car? Of course it would!

These instructions assume Linux, mplayer and k3b and that you have the Universal edition of the disc. I don’t know the track count for the original Paramount disc.

Insert the disc.


for n in $(seq 1 22); do mplayer -vc null -ao pcm:fast:file=track${n}.wav -vo null dvd://1 -chapter ${n}-${n} ; done

However! For some weird reason, track12.wav will be in French if you do the above!

My solution was:

mplayer -vc null -ao pcm:fast:file=track12.wav -alang en -vo null dvd://1 -chapter 12-12

Since I already had the other ones ripped I just ripped the one track with the language set. You can probably just add -alang en to the first loop and you’ll be fine.

The .wav files will be at 48kHz which is above the RedBook standard of 44.1kHz, so you’ll have to resample them. There’s probably a way to do that while ripping, but I’m too lazy and let k3b do it for me. I’d also suggest you let k3b (or whatever) normalize the tracks because as ripped, they’re very quiet. I used “normalize-audio” before I saw that k3b could do it for me.

You really should do this. You’ll thank me.

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News You Can Lose

Nobody told me there was yet another digital display interface standard. HDMI is so last year I guess. It’s cool that it can do native fiber though!

The Wii has been hacked and someone ported mplayer to it so that it’ll play DVD’s now and do other cool home-brew stuff. Cool. See also.

They’re triple-dipping another Lebowski with a 10th anniversary … DVD(?!?!!). WTF? Why not Bluray? Oh and your site sucks. You’re welcome.

If you know me, you probably know that I LOVE me some Boris. Well Boris are good buddies with this band Sunn O))). One of the Sunn O))) dudes plays a Bean (like me) and I’d heard some of their stuff on Skreemr (beware the popups!) so I thought I’d pick up one of their records. Bzzt. Not so great. Some cool drone stuff, but too much demon-voice (as Ed calls it) for me.

My big project release is inching closer. Don’t forget to breathe!

A while ago I picked up an HP dv2845se (laptop). I’ve had an HP workstation (from the workstation, not desktop line) at work for years and love em. The laptop, however is a piece of crap. They keyboard loses strokes. The trackpad falls asleep randomly. The soundcard is a soundcard in only the most academic sense of the term. It’s completely useless for doing any kind of recording even with a fancy mic hooked to it. The video card over-heats all of the time. The wireless is a bit flakey and was somewhat of a pain to setup in Linux. It’s almost enough to make a guy buy a mac. Ha! I’m kidding of course.

I have to imagine someone makes a decent laptop. I wonder if I’ll be forced to buy a gaming laptop just to get something capable of doing real work.

I keep meaning to do my youtube savant documentaries post, but wonder if folks actually watch the vids I post especially when they’re long-ish. If you do, post a comment! These docs are great!

Audio-surf claims to make a video game from analyzing your music. Seems like a cool idea.

Thanks wordpress for losing a huge chunk of my post!

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This and That

I finally got Jose Gonzalez’ new album and it’s mostly great. I was lucky enough to find a couple of completely kickass videos of my two favorite songs on youtube. I embed them here for your pleasure.

Man, I wish I could have Jose come to my house for a personal show! I haven’t been playing as much lately, so my playing/learning The Nest tonight has my right-hand fingers quite sore. I need to get back into it.

I picked up I’m a Lebowski, You’re a Lebowski (the book from the LebowskiFest guys) recently and it’s really a funny and informative companion to the movie.

Another post, another cool TED talk. This time on the intelligence of crows. Who knew?

A tip: Just as seeing someone wearing a visor at a party (male or female) should be your cue to leave; reading or hearing the phrase “quiet desperation” should be your cue to stop reading/watching. Perhaps you never thought of that, but that’s what I’m here for. Sam Rowe: Lifecoach.