Entries from September 2007 ↓

I wanted to get Album Art for all of my (newly ripped) songs on my MythTV box. 

Thierry has a nice perl script which finds album art on Amazon and automatically downloads it, but unfortunately for me the music plugin for MythTV has upgraded their database schema and the script no longer worked.  I am using the trunk SVN code, so it's a bit more up-to-date than the latest packaged release, but this means that scripts designed for the packaged versions may not work. (This specific script had a problem finding the correct directory to store the album art, so all the album art was stored in the root directory, overwriting itself with each album.)

Luckily, I know just enough SQL and Perl to be dangerous, so I whipped up a few changes to his code that fixed my problem (after exploring the new database format). The updated script is here if anybody needs it.

UPDATE: I also added features that allow you to run the script multiple times (if an albumart.jpg file already exists, it will skip that album) and improved the searching (if "album by artist" is not found, it will try searching by "album" name only).

Amazon Album Art Scraper Script

Copying a streaming video to a file using mencoder.

I wanted to watch Randy Pausch's last lecture on my home media PC as opposed to my laptop. It has MythTV, which can be used to watch any file on the hard disk. Unfortunately, you can't just download the a file, as his lecture is hosted by a streaming server. The specific URL is:

mms://wms.andrew.cmu.edu/001/pausch.wmv  

wget won't work, so I had to use mencoder to download the stream and copy it to a file on my hard disk. The command line I used was:

 mencoder mms://wms.andrew.cmu.edu/001/pausch.wmv -o randy.wmv -oac copy -ovc copy

(The -oac and -ovc are the output audio and video codec specfiers, and I have set it to just copy. If you would prefer the file be transcoded to a different format, you could specify a specific codec (xvid with ogg vorbis sound, for example) and mencoder would transcode the file (possibly losing some quality) at the same time.

PaperBackSwap.com is a service that I have used for the last several months and find extremely useful. They give you credits for sending a paperback to other members, and allow you to use your credits to request paperbacks. They also provide an easy to print mailing label and you can pay them to add delivery confirmation and/or postage to the labels.

When you first sign up, you get 3 free credits when you list 9 books with them as "avaliable" for other members to request, even before anybody requests the books! This allows you to request a few books before other members have requested yours.  I've personally traded at least fifty books using the website, and am very happy with it!

Unfortunately, as of  October 5th, 2007 they will change their policy and only give new members 2 free credits when they list 10 books on the site. So, if you are considering joining, you really should do it before October 5th!

Using directions from Felipe Alfaro Solana, I set up an encrypted home directory in Ubuntu 7.04. I only had one problem, that exhibited an error message as follows:

Command failed: Incompatible libdevmapper 1.02.08 (2006-07-17)(compat) and kernel driver

This was caused by the dm_mod module not being loaded. I fixed it for the session by issuing a  modprobe dm_mod command, and fixed it forever by adding dm_mod to my /etc/modules file.

Continue reading →

A list of the channels easily avaliable with a small amplified Radio Shack antenna from the Decatur Area:

• 2-1 -WSB-DT – ABC
• 2-2 (Blank, no signal)
• 5-1 WAGA – Fox HD
• 5-2 WAGA – Fox SD
• 11-1 WXIA-D NBC-HD
• 11-2 WXIA-D (NBC Weather, All the time!)
• 14-(1,2,3,4) – Ion subchannels.
• 17 – WTBS-HD – TBS
• 30-1 – PBS
• 36- WATL-D -MyATL
• 43-1 WUPA – CW
• 46-1 – WGCL-HD CBS