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