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October 31, 2007
We Have a Date
After interviewing four movers, getting four bids, and discussing each with the respective vendor, we've got a winner. Neighbors Moving and Storage will be loading us out on November 15th, and delivering us on November 16th.
Dawnise made progress on her sewing room yesterday - to the tune of a dozen 3 cu. ft. boxes of fabric (each weighing in at 70-ish lbs). This weekend it's going to be finishing my office, attacking the bedroom, and possibly the garage.
Posted by dberger at 6:22 AM
October 28, 2007
Linux+MTP: Missed it By That Much
After all the mucking with tags I've done, I figured it was time to re-sync my jukebox (a 40GB Zen Touch). I read that Amarok had improved MTP support of late, so I gave it a whirl.
Aside from being incredibly slow (part of that problem is that the linux mtp library is slow, and part of the problem is that MTP is just a broken protocol), it fails to sync files with UTF-8 characters in them over MTP. I'm not the first to notice it, but it doesn't seem to have a solution.
So a hundred-odd files (I'm surprised it's that few) from my collection failed to sync - unfortunately that includes entire artists like, say, Tiësto, and albums like Dire Straits - Communiqué. Suckage.
Guess I"ll continue syncing via Winamp on my work machine.
UPDATE: seems the bug has been fixed in the development versions of Amarok. So I pulled down the source RPMs from Fedora, installed the development dependencies (a yum one liner), tweaked the spec to include the patch, and rebuilt with the fix. Open-source is good.
Posted by dberger at 9:18 PM
October 27, 2007
Twelve Angry Men
I watched Twelve Angry Men this evening, a classic that I think I'll always associate with High School, for a number of reasons.
Continue reading "Twelve Angry Men"
Posted by dberger at 10:32 PM
October 26, 2007
Reliable Storage: Just In Time?
Over the last couple weeks, my primary machine has been acting flaky - I'll come in in the morning to check my mail before leaving for work, and the machine won't wake up, and won't let me ssh in.
Yesterday I got a lead, and it's not great...
Continue reading "Reliable Storage: Just In Time?"
Posted by dberger at 11:50 AM
October 25, 2007
High Fidelity
Finished High Fidelity on the boat this morning, and I must say, I very much liked it.
It might even make my top five debut novel list, were I to compile such a thing.
Continue reading "High Fidelity"
Posted by dberger at 8:50 AM | Comments (3)
October 23, 2007
Computer Guy
Last weekend, when I was picking up some stuff for Dawnise at Costco, I snagged a copy of High Fidelity. I've been reading it on the ferry the last few mornings, and it got me jonesing for some John Cusack. Not marginal Cusack, like The Ice Harvest, but good Cusack.
Like, say Grosse Pointe Blank.
Continue reading "Computer Guy"
Posted by dberger at 9:40 PM
October 22, 2007
Motivation
I stopped by the new house today after work to pick up the mail and generally check in on the place.
I left my office at 5:30, figuring since Dawnise was out of town, I might as well see how bad a rush-hour commute would be...
I was pulling into my driveway at 5:50.
I came home and packed.
Posted by dberger at 9:12 PM
October 20, 2007
Blade Runner: The Final Cut
Opens in Seattle at the Cinerama Friday the 26th.
w00t!
Dawnise gets back Sunday morning - I see brunch and a movie coming.
(Titus - I still say they're gonna take away your geek card for not liking this film...)
Posted by dberger at 8:07 PM | Comments (2)
You Said How Much?
Since we started thinking about moving, I keep saying "we have too much stuff." I've now got two moving estimates that cement that notion in my head.
Continue reading "You Said How Much?"
Posted by dberger at 11:55 AM | Comments (1)
October 19, 2007
Shameless Promotion
I don't normally blatantly hype work, but this was just too damn funny (though not really work-safe).
And if you liked that, you should listen to some of his previous reviews.
Posted by dberger at 11:08 PM
Bachelorhood, and New Toys
A short while ago, I dropped Dawnise off for the 5:30 sailing to Seattle. From there she's on to Seatac and catching a flight for her annual pilgrimage to Halloween Haunt with Vince. Since we didn't know if or when we might be moving, we didn't unplan or reschedule the trip - so she'll be gone 'till next weekend.
Over the next week, I'll be working, packing, and occasionally sleeping and eating.
But for the moment, I'm playing with my new ReadyNAS that arrived the other day (insofar as one can "play" with a 5"x8" shiny box with a couple hard disks in it).
Continue reading "Bachelorhood, and New Toys"
Posted by dberger at 6:32 PM
Artist Formerly Known As, The
Well, I decided that I can't really deal with having all the artists that begin with "The" sorted under "T", so a few minutes with find, sed, and metaflac got me this:
$ IFS='
'; for file in `find . -type f -name \*.flac -print`; do
ARTIST=`metaflac --show-tag=ARTIST $file | sed s/ARTIST=//g`;
ARTISTN=`echo $ARTIST | sed '/^The/s/^The \(.*\)/\1, The/'`;
if [ "$ARTIST" \!= "$ARTISTN" ]; then
echo fixing $file \($ARTIST -\> $ARTISTN\) ;
metaflac --remove-tag=ARTIST --set-tag="ARTIST=$ARTISTN" $file;
fi;
done
It's chugging through my flac collection now, which is housed on my spiffy new ReadyNAS (which I'll post about shortly.)
Producing lines like this:
fixing ./00 - holiday/christmas/alarm, the/the big 80s christmas/14 - happy christmas (war is over).flac (The Alarm -> Alarm, The)
fixing ./00 - holiday/christmas/beach boys, the/the ultimate christmas album, volume 4/02 - the man with all the toys.flac (The Beach Boys -> Beach Boys, The)
So far, so good.
Posted by dberger at 6:26 PM
Customer Service: Two Case Studies
I've spent this morning dealing with two unrelated customer service issues. First, trying to figure out why the map updater for our Garmin Nuvi claims it can't talk to the internet, and second arranging an RMA for the Ultra power supply in Dawnises desktop machine.
One of those conversations was a nightmare, and the other smooth as silk. Any guesses which was which?
Continue reading "Customer Service: Two Case Studies"
Posted by dberger at 9:32 AM | Comments (1)
October 16, 2007
Choosing a Moving Company
We knew going into this that we're past the point in our lives where we're willing and able to move our own stuff. We've gone from pine furniture to cherry, from having a lot of books, CDs and movies, to having a metric ton each of books, CDs, and movies.
Not to mention the pool table.
Or the fact that I have the lower back of a man twice my age.
So we're operating under the assumption that we'll pack it, and we'll pay someone to move it.
So now I have to find a mover.
Posted by dberger at 8:31 AM
Progress
In about six hours of work, Dawnise and I have packed the game collection - resulting in a wall of boxes nearly 6'x4', and the library - a line of boxes nearly 10'x6'.
We're gonna need more boxes...
Posted by dberger at 6:23 AM
October 14, 2007
Reliable Storage: Solution
I gave in and ordered the ReadyNAS this morning.
I realized that the deal I mentioned last time was about as good as it was going to get ($1 per usable GB), and if and when I add another 500G drive, the cost per GB drops to about $.80.
I also learned it runs linux (no surprise there) and there's a cross compiler toolchain available - so once I get it up and running, I'm going to see about hosting my music media server directly on the NAS.
It's first job is going to be to hold complete backups of every machine in the house prior to the move, and I'll hand carry it to the new place.
Posted by dberger at 10:55 AM
Holy Crap, We're Moving
Well, thanks to a bunch of effort from several key folks, the sale of our Bainbridge house and the purchase of our new digs in Newcastle successfully closed and recorded on Friday. The full story is long, sordid, and can't be told without plenty of alcohol, but we're no longer playing the "are we moving or are we not" game - and now we need to actually make the move happen.
Continue reading "Holy Crap, We're Moving"
Posted by dberger at 10:30 AM | Comments (1)
October 8, 2007
MusicBrainz - The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
Over the course of the weekend, I debugged the current "stable" release of Picard enough to get it mostly working. It seems to really suck at handling compilation albums, which I have more than a few of.
Out of the 700-ish albums (excluding holiday music, which are all compilations and hence I'm trying to avoid thinking about) I've got all but around 30 tagged.
Continue reading "MusicBrainz - The Good, The Bad, The Ugly"
Posted by dberger at 9:18 AM
Weekend in Review
We had a really good weekend despite the move still being unresolved (it's a long story, don't ask).
Continue reading "Weekend in Review"
Posted by dberger at 8:30 AM
October 6, 2007
MusicBrainz, Take 2
After debugging some of the Python that makes up Picard - the "official" MusicBrainz tagging application, I realized that the most likely cause of the issues I was having were valid looking MusicBrainz tags with bad data on some of my FLAC files, so with a little shell magic, I stripped all the offending tags and gave it another whirl.
It imported all 8500-odd files without complaint and has been chewing on them, trying to cluster them into albums for a few minutes now.
Seems promising...
Posted by dberger at 5:13 PM
Reliable Storage, Redux
The drive I use to hold all my music, and the one that's housing digital photos, are both approaching capacity. Since I run linux on my desktop, and have all my file systems on top of volume managment, I could solve this problem by adding drives and futzing with volume groups.
But it seems like it's finally time to bite the bullet and buy some sort of external (preferably networked) reliable storage.
Continue reading "Reliable Storage, Redux "
Posted by dberger at 9:54 AM | Comments (1)
October 4, 2007
Experimenting with MusicBrainz
I have a reasonably sized music collection, somewhere in the neighborhood of 650 CDs. I've ripped most of it to FLAC, and I transcode it to MP3 (using flac2mp3) to load onto my portable jukebox and stream it wirelessly through the house to two Rokus.
Continue reading "Experimenting with MusicBrainz"
Posted by dberger at 9:46 PM | Comments (1)
October 3, 2007
Over the Edge of the World
The other day at Costco I picked up a copy of Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe, and it became my reading on the ferry.
It was good, though at times a bit dryer than I'd have liked - the research was solid, the writing crisp, and the subject matter interesting, though not as fascinating as I'd have hoped. The author (or maybe it was an editing decision) was a bit inconsistent in terms of which side-stories he chose to explore, and there were more than a couple that I would have liked deeper exploration of.
Overall, though, a worthwhile read.
Posted by dberger at 5:09 PM
October 2, 2007
Dark Sky - Citizens on Patrol
Speaking of Dark Sky, here's an interesting looking project.
Posted by dberger at 9:55 PM