LookIt

How to rip sound from a DVD on Windows using freeware

I am amazed and appalled that none of the answers I got from Google on this worked with the DVD I had. Codecs and formats are still beyond standardization, I guess. Fortunately, Doom9 came to the rescue. The short answer is to rip the raw sound from the DVD as a WAV file, edit it, and save it as an MP3. It takes two freeware programs.

• Get eac3to, a command-line Windows tool.
• Find the VOB file on the DVD that has the sound you want, and copy it to your hard drive.
• Open a command window in Windows, and give the command
  eac3to.exe source-from-dvd.vob dest-temp.wav
• Get Audacity, a wonderful freeware sound editor.
• Edit the dest-temp.wav file, selecting just the bit you want. Export that bit as a new MP3 file. Audacity has a zillion other tools you can work with to clean up the sound.

I tried three other methods, and they all failed, but I'm fairly sure this will work with other DVDs that I have. I have heard that BeSweet can be used instead of eac3to, but haven't tried it.

(Edited the original article to remove the need for VLC, which makes the process much faster.)

Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, with Pete Seeger thrown in for fun

In the mid 1960's, Pete Seeger put together a wonderful TV show called Rainbow Quest. Some of the shows can be found on Nexflix, others (probably illegally) on YouTube. If you like old-style black blues, some of the best from the 40's through the 60's came from Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. They appeared on one episode of Rainbow Quest, and completely wailed on one of their faves, Rock Island Line. Pete plays a bit on the song, but mostly turns it over to the masters.

Delectable new music: the Carolina Chocolate Drops

If you like old skool roots and blues and what to try something new, by all means check out the Carolina Chocolate Drops. This recent show is a great sampling of their live style: fun, complex, and historical, all at once.

Terrapin Station, live

The fad in the past few years for bands that have been around for a decade or more is to perform an entire album live. The Grateful Dead never did this (thankfully), but people have fixed that problem by putting together mixes from shows that match the album. Here is one for Terrapin Station that is made up of performances just before the album was released. It's surprisingly sweet, although later performances of the title song went out further.

If you don't want to sign up for Lossless Legs and start torrenting (or that link dies), drop me a line and give me your postal info and I'll email you a CD made directly from the torrent.

On Facebook statuses and their visibility

Many Facebook users don't understand how status changes are seen by their "friends". In conversations with my non-geek friends, I somewhat consistently hear that they think all their friends see their status changes. Those of us who know a bit more about web apps and social networking know that this is not the case: your friends only see your status change if Facebook-the-corporation wants them to.

As an experiment, I changed my status last Sunday to "is conducting an experiment. Please send me an email (to any of my addresses) when you see this Facebook status. Results to be reported later." Of my 272 "friends", 11 responded to my proper.com (personal) address, 3 to my vpnc.org (current business) address, and 1 responded to my Gmail (mixed) address. Only 1 responded in Facebook email. Everyone who responded did so within 24 hours. I kept that status for the whole week, only changing it Saturday morning.

For me, some interesting results of the experiment were:

• It seems likely that Facebook only showed my status change for about a day, and only to a small number of my "friends".
• A few people thought that responding to the status message itself constituted email.
• The people responding were widely distributed among actual friends, business contacts, and barely-known people with whom I have become "friends".
• Probably no one looked at my Facebook profile during the week.
• Facebook users don't think much about Facebook email, or they don't consider it one of "my addresses".
• No one uses my imc.org address any more, even though it was my primary business email address for many years.

It's clear that Facebook's rampant popularity will definitely change the way people think of online communication.

Avatar 3D

Surprisingly good. Almost no gratuitous use of 3D for shock value. Lots of "war is bad and ecology is good" messages, but too many splosions. The 3D definitely added to the value of this movie in ways that I suspect will not be true of the slew of Disney 3D movies that were previewed. There were a number of kids in the theater; this movie is not at all appropriate for kids, for all three of swearing, war gore, and [spoiler elided].

God confuses

But that can be explained.

Free Wifi in airplanes: somewhat fail

I post this as I am flying on Virgin America. The part about "blogging while flying" is cute, maybe even useful. What is not all that useful at the moment is the wireless connection. It is slow almost (but not completely) to the point of distraction. The slowness, I believe, is not due to the inherent slowness of the uplink/downlink, but instead because Google is running a promotion with Virgin to give everyone free Wifi during the holidays. I was on another full Virgin flight earlier this year, and I didn't really mind paying the $10ish for the connection, and it was much faster than this one.

I hope Google and Virgin America (and their wireless provider, Aircell) are getting some good data on what happens when you get as many people as possible using wireless on the flight at the same time. It should help them in determining a good price that will cause enough people not to use it to make it useful to those of us who are. From looking around the plane, I believe about 50 folks are using the service at the moment (out of 122 very full seats on the flight). It would be interesting to see what cutting that down to 25 would do to the bandwidth.

Wondering about FreeBSD?

Here's a great comparison between FreeBSD and Linux. It is obviously slanted towards FreeBSD, but it covers well the main advantages for FreeBSD. I have been a FreeBSD partisan for a long time, although I have been forced to use Linux more in the past few years. All my outward-facing servers run FreeBSD, and I made that decision years ago based on the same features listed in the comparison.

The comparison, however, misses the main advantage of some of the Linux distros, namely that they have many more users and so lazyweb support is better. But that's true for only maybe two or three distros (most notably Ubuntu), and even then you still have to deal with the "it's OK if it only kinda works" mentality in the Linux world that is much less prevalent in the FreeBSD world. If you're running a host with a mix of server software, you will find that the package system on FreeBSD is much, much easier to deal with than on most of the Linux distros, even though the Linux world has more help available.

The article above comes from my FreeBSD hosting service, RootBSD, who have been rock-solid for me. They have low prices, good service, and they know FreeBSD much better than any of the other host operators I looked into. My main server is colocated at a different ISP, but I would heartily recommend RootBSD to anyone who wants a virtual server running FreeBSD.

All security tools must be about preventing hacking

This is just sad. This article's lede says "The National Institute of Standards and Technology released on Friday a revised draft to security metrics used by federal agencies to test how well their computer systems fight off hacking attempts." The article is about a new draft of FIPS 140, which talks about how to test whether or not software or hardware conforms to US requirements for cryptography. It has nothing to do with "hacking attempts". "Hacking" has now subsumed all security discussions, unfortunately.

(FWIW, I do not link to FIPS 140 above because it is actually a set of many documents. People who only go here will definitely not understand all they need to know about the testing.)