Random Thoughts

Meh. Amazon.

I was reading yet another story about how Amazon working conditions totally suck, so I thought it was about time to ditch Amazon. And I’m someone who orders stuff from Amazon like every other day.

But the question remains, as ever: Why do all non-Amazon web shops suck? Badly?

For books I’ve now used bookstore.co.uk for a week. Amusingly enough, the name of the site doesn’t resolve. You have to put www in front. And the search engine is so slow that it’s not even funny. (I just can’t understand how you make a book search engine slow. The number of books in the world fits into the RAM of the cheapest phone you can buy, these days.) But I’ve managed to order a few books from them nevertheless.

Play.com used to be a bigger company that sold DVDs, but these days it’s a portal. Which is nice. I can imagine the DVDs being packed by nice grannies in Wales. And it has a nice search engine. The sign-on thing is kinda odd. When registering, you have to give a “description” for your credit card and your address. I tried using “Wat?” as a description, but it wouldn’t accept that until I deleted the question mark.

Now I just need to find a DVD and book supplier in the US, and I should be set.

Free range DVDs and books!

IT”S SPREADING!!1!

As all y’all remember clearly, some kinda weird white fungus attacked a pretty big aloe and killified it totally.

But look! This plant was totally OK just a couple weeks ago:

It’s spread! To a different room! But it’s still only attacking aloes.

And, eww. It’s leaving this grey residue on the sill:

I think I probably should throw away all aloes I have…

And scrub down.

Best Albums of 2013

According to Emacs, these are the albums I bought this year and listened the most to:

	Pet Shop Boys	Electric
	Adult.	The Way Things Fall
	The Knife	Shaking The Habitual
	Dead Can Dance	Anastasis In Concert
	Scout Niblett	It’s Up To Emma
	Gretchen Phillips	Do you ever wish for more?
	Grouper	The Man Who Died in His Boat
	Machine Drum	Gunshotta Ave.
	Team Dresch	Hand Grenade
	0	Soñando
	Actress	Paint, Straw and Bubbles
	Chrome Hoof	Chrome Black Gold
	Dean Blunt	The Narcissist II
	Mark Kozelek & Jimmy Lavalle	Perils from the Sea
	Seaworthy + Taylor Deupree	Wood, Winter, Hollow
	Swedish Azz	Erik Carlsson & All Stars Volum 1

So therefore they must be best.

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!