Useful Consumer Review

I buy quite a few DVDs, and I'm even able to play some of them under Linux, even though I've paid for them. 

(DRM is all about keeping people who pay for your stuff from watching your stuff.  Pirates find away around that stuff anyway.)

But I'm going away on a holiday next month, and I thought I'd try watching movies on the flight instead of reading books and listening to music, as I've done until now.  (The idea being that combining watching movies and getting drunk at the same time will make the flight better, and drunkenness and books don't combine as easily.)

So I started looking into how to rip DVDs to disk.  While preserving subtitles and alternative audio tracks.  This turns out to be black magic.  Ripping just the main title with mplayer or vlc is easy enough, but you don't get the rest of the stuff.  And I like the subtitles, especially on mumbly movies.  I don't like having to jack up the volume just to catch what people are saying.

So the interwebs recommended MakeMKV.  It's fantastic!  You just insert the DVD (or the BluRay!!!) into the player, and it just works!  You click "yes" two times and it rips the disc perfectly!  Under Linux!  Debian!

It's not free software, but it has a 60 day evaluation period.  I found the UX so wonderful that I bought a license after ripping a couple of disks.

I give this lots of thumbs up.  It even installs without problem on Debian Stale!

This means that my flight might, perhaps, be as drunken as I hope it would be.

Thank you, MakeMKV people!

I Heart Japan

I ordered an album by Tujiko Noriko and Nobukazu Takemura (two of my favourite artists) the other week and forgot all about it. 

Today I got this in the mail:

What's that purple thing?

It's a bird!!!

This is already my favourite album, and I haven't even heard it yet.

My New Concert Review Blog

Instead of just posting pictures and footage from random concerts, I thought I'd try to do a review instead.

So it's the Rune Grammofon label night.

First off was a band that was called....

Something.  It was kinda prog rock jazzish.  They were quite good.

Then Maja Ratkje:

It was fantastic, as usual.  Although she didn't do the really noisy bits this time. 

And then Bushman's Revenge:

Oops.  The camera stopped recording after 30 minutes because of reasons.  Here's the last six minutes:

I've seen them a few times before, and I think this was their best performance.  They were a bit too "rock" earlier. 

Rock.  Eww.

This reviewing thing is so easy!

My New Horticulturalist Blog

Well, I had to replace the aloe that the fungus ate.

I think that's an aloe, another aloe, and a sansevieria.  I have no idea what the grassy swampy thing in the back is.

So you can lead a horticulturalist to water...

My New Fashion Designer Blog

I like making t-shirts (i.e., having professionals screenprint them), but it would be fun making some one-offs, too.  And learning how to do screen printing is kinda a project.

Then somebody linked to Inkodye, and it seemed almost perfect.  The process is simple: You apply the ink to the t-shirt and mask off the bits you don't want to have ink on.  Then you put the shirt in the sun for 20 minutes, and wash off the unexposed ink.

I got the supplies yesterday, and, of course, I didn't have any transparencies to print anything on today.  And there's apparently no sun here for the next week, so I used gaffa tape instead of using a transparency.  And I used a black t-shirt.  All the instructions use a white fabric, but I want to see what it looks like on a black t-shirt.

A Roll-On Thingie

That means that the design is perhaps, er, a bit simplistic.  But it's only a trial run! Er.  It kinda looks like a Norwegian flag from that angle.  But it's not.

The ink smells a bit of ammonia, but it's not too bad.

Hanging out on the balcony, developing.  Gaffa saves everything.

Ok, it's not that sunny.  Better leave it out for 40 minutes.

Time passes.

Hm.  The ink isn't looking any bluer on the black shirt.  Perhaps I should test on a white shirt?

Even simpler design.

Gaffa it up on the balcony.

The ants are my friends.  They're blowing in the wind.

Hm...  not looking all that blue on the white t-shirt, either.

The snacks I'm eating are tasty kinda fishy.

So that's the result on the black shirt.  A kinda dirty splotch.

Oh.  Perhaps I should have read the ninth FAQ:

"Because it is a dye, it does not coat the fabrics like a paint would. It actually become part of the fiber, and therefore will not add color to a black or dark-colored material."

But  the white shirt looks nice. A very deep, rich blue.

Oh, well.  I'll just have to learn how to do screen printing.

rbl.maps.vix.com finally gone awol?

According to this, vix.com shut down the service in 2007.  Now vix.com redirects to domainnamesales, which I assume aren't nice people.

The reason I noticed is this:

I tried to submit something to freedb.org, and it bounced because of maps.vix.com.  So perhaps somebody ... not very nice ... finally decided to start answering in the affirmative to all requests?

In which case: Nicely played, scammers.  This is probably going to drive a lot of traffic to your site while people are trying to figure out what's going on.

Epic Unboxing

I got chocolates from Demarquette today. He makes the best chocolate in the world, probably.

And just look at this packaging.

Nom, nom, nom.