The Curious Case of the Box Fan

(April 30, 2011)

I bought an ESATA box to replace the crappy Synology RAID thing. It’s a very simple external enclosure with no brains whatsoever, so I can just string four ESATA cables out of the computer in the cupboard to the enclosure, and run standard Linux soft raid. I installed four 5900RPM Seagate Green disks into the … Continue reading The Curious Case of the Box Fan

Funny Looking Chocolate Not Actually Amusing

(April 26, 2011)

Look!  Exciting! As a rule of thumb, chocolate that looks all fancified often isn’t very good.  (There are a number of exceptions to this rule.) But this one looked too intriguing for me to pass up.  As you can see, it’s blueberries and lingonberries suspended in white chocolate.  I was wondering how they did that. … Continue reading Funny Looking Chocolate Not Actually Amusing

More Input Devices

(April 24, 2011)

Targus Wireless Presenter and Emacs Volume Control Finding wireless input devices (for controlling the stereo) that are 1) not too ugly and2) works reliably and3) has a range over a few meters isn’t trivial.  I’ve experimented with a few thingamabobs, and one device I’m pretty satisfied with is the Targus …  er…  I can’t find … Continue reading More Input Devices

Live TV!

(April 23, 2011)

Still can’t get my camera to focus on the TV I haven’t really missed having live TV for a decade, but it would be practical if guests wanted to watch the news or something.  So it just occurred to me that doing live TV would be trivial with the current infrastructure. I have an Emacs … Continue reading Live TV!

Digital Audio Extraction from Emacs

(April 21, 2011)

Triple Threat SATA Multilane Connector So my CD ripping situation is that I put a CD into the CD reading thing there (more about that in a thrilling later blog article), hit a key in Emacs, slap a CD cover onto the scanner, hit another key in Emacs to say that the format is (usually … Continue reading Digital Audio Extraction from Emacs

Useful Consumer Review

(April 19, 2011)

I got a new phone today.  The Nokia E7.  And look!  It’s perfect!  It runs Gnus under ssh! Look how pretty Gnus is on the phone! (The only thing that would have been perfecter would be if it actually ran Emacs on the phone itself, but I guess that’ll have to wait until somebody produces … Continue reading Useful Consumer Review

Scanning Record Sleeves

(April 19, 2011)

A CD Rippin’ Cupboard with an A3 Scanner In the continuing story of bits and pieces related to my music playing Emacs@Home installation, here’s the sleeve scanning function.  It’s basically just a tiny data base of common CD/LP/tape sleeve sizes. There’s a lot of sizes, unfortunately. But what I really wanted to have was something … Continue reading Scanning Record Sleeves

Editing Sound Files in Emacs

(April 17, 2011)

Emacs PCM Editing I buy quite a lot of vinyl still.  And the hipsterish hipsters have started releasing things on tape, since vinyl is obviously too mainstream.  (I’m wondering when 78s will be making a comeback.)  So to listen to this music I need to sample it and then convert it to flac. That’s trivial … Continue reading Editing Sound Files in Emacs

Greylisting Considered Annoying

(April 16, 2011)

Nobody likes spam.  So to avoid spam they either inflict pain on others, like with challenge/response systems that send endless challenges to me since “I” have sent them spam (From headers are so hard to fake? (I know this guy who automatically responds to all challenge/response systems (evil, but understandable))), or they use “greylisting”, which … Continue reading Greylisting Considered Annoying

My Favourite Shop

(April 16, 2011)

I buy tons of music, and most of it I buy from Norman Records. One of the many things I like about them is how some of their reviews are both concrete and abstract at the same time.

Emacs Can Haz Brainz?

(April 15, 2011)

Adam mentioned MusicBrainz in the comments of the last article.  I took that as a challenge, of course. I only implemented the query bits, though.  I’m selfish. (Oh, OK, the only reason I didn’t do the submission part, too, is that I can’t make up my mind whether cddb.el and musicbrainz.el should share the same … Continue reading Emacs Can Haz Brainz?

Editing freedb/cddb entries

(April 15, 2011)

The new album New Album from the folk band Boris When ripping large quantities of CDs, you really have to have an efficient way to query and edit CDDB entries.  So here’s an Emacs library for doing that. It includes a bunch of convenience functions for fixing up other people’s bad entries, and you also … Continue reading Editing freedb/cddb entries

Musical Beats & Pieces

(April 14, 2011)

The music player The last hoard of Emacs-related code I’ve written over the years is part of my Emacs-based music player.  It started off (in 1997) as a way to rip my CDs and play mp3s (as well as swap out the mp3s to CD since I didn’t have enough disc space to store all … Continue reading Musical Beats & Pieces

Emacs Movie Browser

(April 12, 2011)

See Emacs. See Emacs play movie In the continuing story of Emacs@Home (don’t worry, I think there’s only one part left now), we’ve now come to the part where I watch TV.  I know, it’s something most people manage quite perfectly without resorting to Emacs, but why would you? Well, actually, I think that the … Continue reading Emacs Movie Browser

Sennheiser HDR 180

(April 11, 2011)

Headphones cradled on the charging cradle Most hardware seems to have been created in a “will this do?” mind set.  They have a bit of technology, and they have some economic restraints, and then they rush it to market.  It makes perfect sense, and I can’t envision that it’ll ever change, but it’s somewhat depressing. … Continue reading Sennheiser HDR 180

Hardcore Food

(April 11, 2011)

I was looking through my cookery books for meatball recipes, and this was one of them. It just seems too hardcore for me.  It starts with “half a kilo of meat from ox, calf, sheep, horse, moose, whale”.  And then you add blubber or lard or whatever “spekk” is.  And half a liter of milk. … Continue reading Hardcore Food

Quimby Upgrade

(April 10, 2011)

The old Quimby Quimby (the machine doing everything at *.gnus.org) has been unstable lately.  (It’s died mysteriously two times.)  So instead of investigating what’s going on, I just installed Debian Squeeze on a new machine and rsynced over all the pertinent parts.  The old Debian installation was too stale, anyway, and 32-bit, so it was … Continue reading Quimby Upgrade

Alarm Clock

(April 10, 2011)

The alarm clock before I started writing this article Most alarm clocks have somewhat awkward interfaces, which may be why so many people have switched to using their mobile phones instead.  Most mophos have alarm clocks that are easy to use — just open the clock app, choose a menu item and type in the … Continue reading Alarm Clock

Adding Commands to mplayer

(April 7, 2011)

The computer I use to watch DVDs (and other stuff) with has three sound outputs: via HDMI to the TV, via the built-in analogue sound port to my wireless headphones, and via a USB sound card to external stereo speakers.  Which one I use depends on what I’m watching and what time of day it … Continue reading Adding Commands to mplayer

An Emacs-based PVR

(April 5, 2011)

In the continuing story of me trying to push a few of the odds and ends of the code I’ve written for my own use, we’ve now come to the Emacs-based PVR. As usual, it may not actually be very useful code for, like, normal human beans, but why not push it out there?  Perhaps … Continue reading An Emacs-based PVR

Synology DS409 RAID is Crap

(April 3, 2011)

Do you see that thing over there?  The Synology Disk Station DS409?  It’s crap. It’s not the usual hardware RAID problems that make it so crappy.  Yes, it’s slow.  Painfully slow.  Yes, it has a weird Linux kernel that, somehow, manages to do put all NFS clients into df: `/mirror’: Permission denied if you change … Continue reading Synology DS409 RAID is Crap

Running an RSS to NNTP Gateway

(April 2, 2011)

If I knew that doing an RSS to NNTP gateway was so easy, I would have done it years ago. I was just waiting for somebody else to pick up this obviously useful idea, but apparently nobody else wanted to. In comparison to doing the Gwene gateway, the (almost) ten-year-old Gmane mail-to-news project is pretty … Continue reading Running an RSS to NNTP Gateway

Tellstick Redux

(April 1, 2011)

I was whinging a lot about the terrible Tellstick range in my last post on the issue.  Deservedly so.  It’s terrible!  However, the Telldus people have released a new version of the device: The revolutionary new invention is the antenna!  Who would ever have thought that an antenna would give greater range?  Kids these days. … Continue reading Tellstick Redux