Entries Tagged 'general' ↓

Day 2 of vacation is a success. I got a lot of important sitting around done AND I beat a level in Incredible Hulk for the xbox. Pantloads of fun were had by all. (me).

I also got around to checking through my bookmarks putting the important stuff in delicious and deleting the rest. When digging through those bookmarks I ran into the Internet Archive for music. It’s done in a collaboration with etree and they have some solid bands in there that allow taping. I thought I might point out some good shows they have available. Today’s selection is a Spoon concert. You may know them from their song ‘I turn my camera on’. I like them a lot. As far as an indie band goes they are solid musicians and their work sounds as good live as it does on their albums. This concert is recorded very well, sounds like it might even be right off the board. Anyway, here are the details:

July 15th, 2003

Band/Artist: Spoon
Date: July 15th, 2003
Venue: The Fillmore
Location: San Francisco, CA
You can get the shn files (shorten) here Unfortuantely the shn format is pretty much completely unfriendly for iPod toting hipsters like buzzco. So I took the time to convert them to mp3’s and even tag them. You can get the fruits of my labor here If you want to check them out try this track .

The conversion from shn files to mp3s is kinda crummy, this is how I did it.

First install shntool from universe
Next you need the actual shorten binary for shntool to use, you can find it here . I put the binary in /usr/bin.
Lame to convert from wav to mp3
Finally cowbell to tag it.

Ok, shnconv * on the downloaded tracks gives you mp3’s. Next a little find magic with lame converts them to mp3’s.
find . -name \*.wav -exec lame -b 256 -h -m s {} \;
Finally I imported the tracks to Muine and used cowbell (an awesome app) to tag it and rename the files. If anyone has a better way to do it let me know.

This week is the start of my vacation, I don’t have any big plans. I’m going to see Deathcab in NYC on weds with Mike, Marie, and Lisa. Thursday I plan on going up to Burlington to hang out with Tristram. Other than that I’m just hoping to get through a bunch of crap I’ve been meaning to do around the house and hopefully finish up my mambo component for the ZN website.

Along the lines of finishing up crap around the house I’m cleaning out my room and I plan on putting a ton of shit of ebay and just clearing out the pile of
stuff that’s just sat in my closet for the past year. In said closet I found an old tapestery that I got in college and haven’t seemed to find a place for since I started in the real world. Rather than just toss it I decided to use it to cover my old office chair which was looking pretty foul after having it for five or six years.

It was pretty easy to do I basically took it apart and cut a couple sections to size of the seat and back and then stapled it on. It took like a half hour and I was pretty happy with the results.

I got a new laptop last week after selling my 12 Powerbook. I was looking for something that would be easy to take with me but mostly for living room use. It needed built in WIFI and good battery life.
After trolling ebay for a while I honed in on the general class of machine and finally picked the Fujitsu P2021. (Planet COSI folk: I believe Oleg also has one). It’s a sublaptop i guess. It has a cramped keyboard and a small screen. It’s based on a 933Mhz crusoe which performs like a 1.2 Celron or so. If has built in WIFI, excellent battery life, and runs standard i686 ubuntu.
Anyway, I installed Kubuntu and I’ve been playing with it. It’s been a long time since I checked out anything but what’s going on with the latest gnome, so it’s interesting to see what else is going on there.

This is a test post from monkey journal. Every 6 months or so I set up xml-rpc posting just in case I want to use monkey journal or my phone. Then I don’t post remotely and it breaks. So yeah. The cycle continues.

So figgy smacked my python script down. He sent me this IM yesterday:
`find /path/to/whatever -name ‘.DS_Store’ -exec rm -f {} \;`
I say fuck him and his noise.

In other news I’m wearing the most comfortable pair of socks ever. I got them at old navy on sale. $3.00 for a pack of 3. THAT’S .50 A SOCK. So get on that.

So Donny’s in town and Tim came up but we never ended up finding Donny, Figgy, and dowem. Which is weak. We still made a good run of it and drinking our share.
I relisted my mac on ebay today. It already sold on ebay once but it turned out the guy that won used someone elses paypal account. Good thing I didn’t ship it. You can see there new auction here . Since I’m transfering all my files over to my Linux Desktop I had a small problem. OS X leaves .DS_Store files everywhere. I wrote a python script to clean them out.
#!/usr/bin/env python
import os, os.path

fsbranch = ‘/home/matthew/Desktop/Media/Music/’
lines = []

def findFiles(arg,dir,files):
a = os.path.abspath(dir)
if files:
files.sort()
for file in files:
fullpath = ‘%s/%s’ % (dir, file)
if os.path.isfile(fullpath):
if file == ‘.DS_Store’:
lines.append(fullpath)
os.unlink(fullpath)

file = open(’/home/matthew/kill_results.txt’, ‘w’)
for line in lines:
file.write(line+’\n’)
file.close()

os.path.walk(fsbranch, findFiles, ”)

Sometimes I think posting infrequently and promising to post more often is the lamest thing a person with a blog can do. In other news, I haven’t been posting much and plan to step it up a bit. I even have a new half finished design up. Woo!

So everyones favorite donny chevettey is coming it pootown later this week. that should be a good time. I don’t think I’ve seen donny throw up yet…
To cap off my rambling I went hiking thursday, it was a good time, Overlook Mt. in woodstock, ny. (no woodstock did not happen there (irony folks) but it is full of hippies.) It was a 2.5 mile hike up an old road so it wasn’t exactly a tromp in the woods but the top was totally worth it. There was an old timey hotel that burned down in the 20’s to explore and a firetower looking out over the hudson valley. I was told on a clear day you can see all the way to Albany. That could be a lie though, it was hazy so there was no proof. In anycase totally worth it.

So I got home from the 4th weekend at my parents to see this note on my door from one of my roommates.

Dudes,
There was some hardcode thunder/lightning storms friday night that shut the power off a couple of times, so that’s why your computers are off and the appliacnces are all confused.
….
Also good luck finding a square inch of your stuff my nutsack DIDN’T touch while you were gone.

Hugs + Kisses
Jeff
P.S. - Dinner’s in the fridge. Be in bed by 9.

Finally spent the time and got all the sites working properally. For those that care I have zetanu.net up and running mambo. Still working all the admin details out. At the moment I’ve hacked together a basic gallery component. Although mamboforge.net has plenty of entries under gallery none of them seem to work… so look for developments on that.
In other news here are three cool DIY projects in a very specific order

Homemade brick oven
Homemade Solar Power Generator (Homemade is relative..)
Finally, Homemade Rootbeer.

Bonus points to anyone who gets the title context without google.

Hey mike, I bottled a case of beer and two growlers. So thanks for nothing.