East of the Sun, West of the Moon

Perhaps this week will bring me sanity? Last week the kids were home for 2 out of the 5 days and one of the remaining 3 days was used up by errands and other fun. Work-wise one day was mostly taken up by a failed harddisk in one of the servers, which might normally not take much time but this is a server in a place where the nearest person was about 1 hour away. I’m 2 timezones away, so couldn’t do much more than be irritated and communicate between two of the parties involved.

The week before that we’d just decided to put the boys in the afterschool program to give me back some more sane work-hours in the afternoon, which is typically the time I get up to speed work-wise, but then they had no school on that Friday, so that attempt had a bit of a false start.

The reason for our decision to make these changes is that M is now working a fulltime schedule at her work, while taking over (temporarily) for someone who quit her job. She did this with two weeks notice, which was enough to teach M what needs to be done on a daily basis, but there are probably some gaps in her knowledge still. Fun.

So she got busier, which made things just a little too crazy for me, so we decided to give in and use the option to let them stay 2 hours longer at school, supervised, after which M can pick them up after work, giving me longer stretches of work before & after lunch.

*crosses fingers*

Three words that I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to pronounce properly or in a way that seems distinguishable:

1. Colour
2. Collar
3. Caller

Then again, I’d like to see/hear you speak Dutch without an accent…

It looks like Fridays and Saturdays are bad days for blogging for me.

Had the same kind(s) of pizza again and was fine this time, so now the only suspect left (until I figure out another one) is the chewing gum. Yay! Not that I was particularly impressed with this brand/type of pizza, but nothing stood out in the ingredient list as being something I wouldn’t come across in other kinds of food.

On the plus side, my fondness of chewing gum had subsided about a decade ago anyway and I’d never had this particular brand or kind before so I won’t miss much.

When you add your own quick search in Firefox, be sure not to leave any trailing spaces in the ‘keyword’ property. If you do leave one, Firefox will not recognise your keyword and instead complain about the URL being invalid!

On the one hand there’s the Samba (SMB) mount of recorded (from TV) episodes. On the other hand there’s the NFS mount of same. Let’s copy a nice 1 hour DivX file (over 800MB in size)…

The copy over the Samba mount had only done 25% in the time it took me to eat lunch with M, which I would guestimate at having taken 45 minutes. The copy over the NFS mount took 2.5 minutes total. Zikes!

No guessing what I’ll be using to (re)view the recorded episodes, eh? Sheesh.

Just in case anyone reading this didn’t know it yet.

Every day I record an audio-stream of a Dutch radio-show. Using mplayer I record it as a WAV(E) file and then convert it for convenience and diskspace reasons into the Ogg Vorbis format.

I used to semi-regularly listen to them with a homebrew Perl script that allowed me to mark the new ones as heard or keep, but as this didn’t combine very nicely with the audio player I used for all my music, this didn’t work out very well and while the automated recording was still happening every day, I had not heard a recording in weeks, maybe months.

Recently I’ve started to listen to podcasts. Initially manually, but after switching to the Mac Mini I’ve gone and installed the iPodder software which drops the downloaded audio files into iTunes playlists, making it fairly easy to keep track of them, listen to them, and then go back to the usual dose of music.

Tonight I decided to create an RSS feed for the captured and converted files and make that available on a website that’s available on our intranet at home and that way seamlessly combine it with all the other podcasts.

Great fun and it feels a bit like I’m making my own custom radio-station this way. I wonder what this will look like a year from now.

Finishing this entry half a day later, I’ve sadly decided to start encoding the stuff into MP3 instead, as the iTunes plugin is less than ideal (it works, but I’ve seen my share of colourful spinning discs, so to speak) and for the 1 hour long audio files it just hangs at the end of them, never finishing, let alone marking it as read or upping the play count. Either way an amusing combination of software packages tied together to make things Just Work ™!

I’m sure this is documented, but for my own sake I’m going to put this here:

For fast-switching to actually do that pretty animation with the desktops on two sides of a cube, it helps if both accounts are set up to use the same monitor refresh rate. Doh.

Browsing around looking for documentation on a key-combination I ran into a page with some Mac Tips, supposedly undocumented, but who knows. The handiest one I find that in Terminal you can command + doubleclick at the beginning of a URL (needs to start with http, it says, but it also appears to work for https, not for ftp though), and it’ll open it in whatever is the default browser. In my case that’s Firefox which has been set up to open a new tab for such events.

Handy!