Nozell, rhymes with Oh Hell

Today some of the kids have a 5 hour fencing competition and I wanted to get caught up listening to some podcasts. The problem is the cheap little RCA Lyra 1080B has a couple problems with listening to long mp3s. When you pause playback for more than a few minutes, the device turns off, but on restart it resets to the beginning of the mp3. Also there is no way forward ahead within an mp3.

So looked around google for a way to split mp3s into smaller chunks and found
mp3splt.

This is how I load up the mp3 player with podcasts now:

Copy those ‘casts I want to a tmp directory and then:

mp3splt -f -a -t 5.0 *.mp3

Which splits all the mp3s in the current directory into 5 minute chunks.

Then copy those chunks to the player mounted on /mnt:


find . -name "*00.mp3" -printf 'cp -v "%p" /mnt n' | sh


Off to the competition!

[update: Griffin got 3rd and Trevor 6th in novice Epee 12 and under while
Spencer came in 4th for 13 and older]

I listened to Dave Winer’s Coffee Notes for 24-Oct-2004 podcast on the way home tonight and felt compelled to reply to him with an audio reply email about Richard Scoble/Scooble’s voice mail. Here is how I created it.

* Get the Festival Speech Synthesis package for your Debian GNU/Linux box


$ sudo apt-get install festival

[...bunch of status about installing a festival and dependancies removed...]
$


* Create a snappy reply. I like emacs. This is exactly what hi-dave.txt looks like:

Hi Dave!

This is Marc No-zell and I just listened to your Coffee Talk with
Richard Scoble. It sounds like Microsoft’s voice mail system is using
a descendant of the DECK-talk system that was created by DECK in the
1980s.

I’m creating this audio reply using the Festival Speech Synthesis
System on my Deb-ian GNU Linux laptop. Neener, neener, neener!

Well, thanks for the Coffee Notes!

Now I did do a little cheating here. Festival follows strict pronunciation rules and sometimes gets words wrong. For example my surname would be said as ‘nozzel’, so I spell it how I want it to sound. The same is true for DECtalk and DEC, which sounds like ‘dec-tork’ and ‘december’ (trying to be a little too clever ;-)

* Convert from text to wave format:


$ text2wave hi-dave.txt -o hi-dave.wav


* Convert from wav to mp3 format


$ lame hi-dave.wav hi-dave.mp3


* Listen to the result:


$ xmms hi-dave.mp3


Griffin was the sole director, producer, photographer and set designer for this mini-movie.

All I did was knock down the resolution for the web version (the original is 20M, this is only 2M)
and run the magic command to convert it to an animated GIF image (convert -delay 20 *.jpg output.gif).

[Check it out!](http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/griffin-stop-motion-snake-video-small-format.gif)

Send kudos to Griffin by sending email to his first name @ his last name dot com

This evening Griffin and I made some stop-motion videos using some clay figures he made and my HP camera.

[Take a look](http://www.nozell.com/blog/data/griffin-video-02.avi)

This is how we did it:

* Set the HP 318 Camera to the lowest resolution, turn off flash
* Screw in the little tripod I got years ago for one of the first webcams
* Have plenty of light
* Take about 90+ photos
* dump onto my Linux/Debian laptop (gphoto2 –get-all-files)
* Convert to an animated gif ( convert -delay 10 IM*.jpg out.gif) with a 10/100 second delay. Realize it is a huge 20M file
* Convert to AVI ( mencoder “mf://IM*.jpg” -mf type=jpg:fps=7 -ovc lavc -o output.avi) which gives a much smaller (~1M) file.

Repeat until the batteries need to be recharged.

Yesterday I needed to fix the MBR of a ProLiant (Red Hat Enterprise
Linux 2.1) by reinstalling grub and grub-install just won’t work.
grub-install assumes that the boot device is in the form /dev/hda or
/dev/sda and since most ProLiant use a SmartArray RAID controller its
boot device is typically /dev/cciss/c0d0.

So, in order to recover this is what I did:

* In /etc/grub.conf (a link to /boot/grub/grub.conf) uncomment the
line that looks like this:

     boot=/dev/cciss/c0d0
     

* Make sure /boot/grub/device.map is setup right and looks like this:

        (fd0)     /dev/fd0
        (hd0)     /dev/cciss/c0d0
     

* Run grub like this:

   /sbin/grub --batch --device-map=/boot/grub/device.map
        --config-file=/boot/grub/grub.conf --no-floppy
   grub> root (hd0,0)
   grub> setup (hd0)
   grub> quit
  

Hope that helps!

First connect to the demo system and start a href="http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/">vncserver running
there. If you are already logged in, simply vncserver. Or be
fancy and do this from your desktop: ssh your@demo.labsystem.net
vncserver

Now setup an encrypted port redirection using ssh from my desktop to
the demo system. VNC uses po
rt 5901 for desktop :1, port 5902 for
desktop :2, etc.

$ ssh -f -C \
        -L 5901:127.0.0.1:5901 \
        -l marc demo.labsystem.net sleep 7200

Now run a vncviewer on the local machine. Be sure to use the command
switches below which give better performance.

$ vncviewer -compresslevel 9 -encodings "tight copyrect" localhost:1

Now have your field person also create a ssh port tunnel (of course
they need an account on the demo system as well) and also run
vncviewer. Now both of you can control the keyboard and mouse for the
system. The performance can be surprisingly good if you have a least
T1 speeds. Across a slower DSL, it is usable, but you feel the delay.

I stumbled across this while messing with debian’s apt-cache search. kio_fish is a KDE extension that provides a way to browse a remote directory usingssh. There is no need to setup an FTP or web server on the remote system as long as you have an account there. Just point konqueror to fish://user@home.system.com.

BTW, depending on your KDE installation, you may need to also install liblcms

Take a look.