2010 Aug 17, 3:05
I've just got a new media center PC connected directly to my television with lots of HD space and so I'm ripping a bunch of my DVDs to the PC so I don't have to fuss with the physical media. I'm
ripping with DVD Rip, viewing the results in Windows 7's Windows Media Center after turning on the WMC DVD Library, and using a powershell script I wrote to copy over cover art and metadata.
My powershell script follows. To use it you must do the following:
- Run Windows Media Center with the DVD in the drive and view the disc's metadata info.
- Rip each DVD to its own subdirectory of a common directory.
- The name of the subdirectory to which the DVD is ripped must have the same name as the DVD name in the metadata. An exception to this are characters that aren't allowed in Windows paths (e.g.
<, >, ?, *, etc)
- Run the script and pass the path to the common directory containing the DVD rips as the first parameter.
Running WMC and viewing the DVD's metadata forces WMC to copy the metadata off the Internet and cache it locally. After playing with Fiddler and reading this
blog post on WMC metadata I made the following script that copies metadata and cover art from the WMC cache to the corresponding
DVD rip directory.
Download copydvdinfo.ps1
powershell wmc technical tv dvd windows-media-center 2010 Jul 8, 9:00
I previously described my desire to
hook my Outlook calendar up to my
Google calendar. I just found out that I can do this and the reverse as both support publishing calendars to the Internet. The following are how I set this up under Outlook 2010 and Google
Calendar:
In Outlook, I go to the calendar view, right click on my calendar and select "Share Publish to Office.com". At this point I can change the permissions to allow anonymous Internet access, and under
Detail change between 'Full details' (full calendar), 'Limited details' (subject lines & availability only), 'Availability only'. Availability only is almost just what I want -- I'd also like
to include location but availability only is good enough. After hitting OK here I get a 'Do you want to send an invitation...' dialog box. I hit 'Yes' and I can copy the webcals:// URL out of the
email window that opens up. Next, to add it to my Google calendar, I open
http://www.google.com/calendar/, and under 'Other calendars', I select 'Add
Add by URL', paste in that webcals:// URL but change the 'webcals' at the start to 'https'.
In Google Calendar, I can click on my calendar name under 'My calendars', select 'Calendar settings', and on the new page, look under 'Calendar Address', click the ICAL icon, and copy the URL in
the new dialog. Now back in Outlook I go to the Calendar view, right click on 'My Calendars', and select 'Add Calendar From Internet...'. In the new dialog that pops up I paste in the URL from
Google Calendar.
In this fashion I can share public calendar data between my personal and work calendars.
2010 Apr 16, 1:08Analysis of a potentially time travelling individual captured in a 40s photo "Reopening of the South Fork Bridge after flood in Nov. 1940".
humor history photo photography time-travel via:boingboing 2010 Apr 11, 2:34
Sarah and I are just back from a successful wedding planning trip to California. We now have cake, food, officiant, makeup, and some other things. Planning weddings is tough. It was also, of
course, a pleasure to see my parents who made home made pasta -- yum!
wedding parents family weekend 2010 Mar 9, 10:43Documentary 'The Achievers' follows Lebowski Fest is going in my Netflix queue...
the-big-lebowski movie review documentary the-achievers 2010 Feb 26, 5:00
sequelguy posted a photo:
Jen's going away surprise for me was to add to my Diversity Inc cover artwork with my own photoshopped cover. Note the attention to detail in the headlines.
me photoshop office diversity microsoft billgates 2010 Jan 21, 12:53"Of course the word "Amateur" comes from the French word "to love". Good enough reason for me to participate. And you?"
internet culture net-culture web social blog 2010 Jan 11, 2:24Heat map of rental popularity of particular movies from NetFlix in various cities.
visualization movie netflix map nytimes flash information 2009 Dec 23, 10:02"These designs are reproductions of Eiffel's original designs included in his book "The 300 Meter Tower", Lemercier publications, Paris 1900."
design architecture blueprints france eiffel eiffel-tower retro visualization illustration 2009 Dec 2, 3:00"These are tough questions, but the horrific problems of the "Victorian Internet" suggest that government overreach isn't the only thing to fear. In 1876, laissez-faire "freedom for all" meant (in
practice) the freedom for Henry Nash Smith to read your telegrams if he didn't like who you supported for President. It meant freedom for Associated Press to block criticism of Western Union, and
even to put potential critics and competitors out of business. And it meant freedom for a scoundrel to hijack the system at his leisure."
net-neutrality internet government politics communication telegraph technical 2009 Nov 23, 2:20"The Atlas of True Names reveals the etymological roots, or original meanings, of the familiar terms on today's maps of the World, Europe, the British Isles and the United States. For instance, where
you would normally expect to see the Sahara indicated, the Atlas gives you "The Tawny One", derived from Arab. es-sahra “the fawn coloured ,desert”."
humor reference map etymology translation atlas geography 2009 Nov 23, 1:21"Je vous propose aujourd’hui de découvrir le travail de StarType, un ex typographe qui a connu le temps du plomb et travaillé dans de nombreuses imprimeries pour évoluer et devenir graphiste par la
suite."
typography advertising font french design history 2009 Oct 13, 5:08Paper investigating chicken soup as a "remedy for symptomatic upper respiratory tract infections." Under methods is the recipe they used: "Traditional chicken soup was prepared according to a family
recipe, which will be referred to as “Grandma’s soup” (C. Fleischer; personal communication; 1970). This recipe is as follows..."
soup humor science medicine chicken paper 2009 Sep 25, 5:32Smithsonian sponsors a free museum day with free admission to museums across the US tomorrow (2009-09-26)
free magazine museum 2009 Sep 25, 5:18"The closest the organization comes to stating its actual intent is in the wording of the print ad they’re running. Hmm. On the open medium of the Internet the organization hides its purpose, but in
the controlled medium of print, they come close to stating it. How unexpected!"
net-neutrality network-neutrality network internet broadband isp cable humor 2009 Sep 25, 2:19
Irritatingly out of line with what their commercials say, in my area Comcast, under the covers of the national
broadcast digital switch, is sneaking in their own switch to digital, moving channels above 30 to their own digital format. Previously, I had Windows 7 Media Center running on a PC with a Hauppauge PVR500 which can decode two television signals at once setup to record shows I like. The XBox 360 works
great as a Media Center client letting me easily watch the recorded shows over my home network on my normal TV.
Unfortunately with Comcast's change, now one needs a cable box or a Comcast digital to analog converter in order to view their signal, but Comcast is offering up to two free converters for those
who'd like them. The second of my two free converters I hooked up to the Media Center PC and I got the IR Blaster that came with my Hauppauge out of the garage. I plugged in the USB IR Blaster to
my PC, connected one of the IR transmitters to the 1st port on the IR Blaster, and sat the IR transmitter next to the converter's IR receiver. I went through the Media Center TV setup again and
happily it was able to figure out how to correctly change the channel on the converter. So I can record now, however:
- I can only record one thing at a time now
- Changing the channel is slow taking many seconds (no flipping through channels for me)
- The Hauppauge card can't know if the channel change worked. So if it tries to change to HBO (I get it for free with one of the Comcast packages) which is encrypted and the converted won't show,
the channel doesn't change but the PC doesn't know it and ends up recording some other channel.
To fix (3) I need to manually go through and remove channels I don't have from the Media Center. To fix (1) I may be able to get a second IR transmitter, a third digital converter, hook it up to
one of the other inputs on my Hauppauge, and go back through the Media Center TV setup. There's no fix for (2) but that's not so bad. All in all, its just generally frustrating that they're breaking
my setup with no obvious benefit.
digital tv hauppauge mce cable windows media center comcast 2009 Aug 26, 2:30"Being fair is not enough. In fact, sometimes what's fair is wrong precisely because it's fair. Oooh! A seeming paradox! One of the top three rhetorical forms for essays!"
technical internet david-weinberger net-neutrality web fair 2009 Jul 7, 6:02More on converting between different date/time formats and the effective range of the formats.
datetime time date programming c++ c technical 2009 Jun 29, 4:19
I've looked at my web server logs previously to see if anyone had used my Web Frotz Interpreter and until recently didn't realize that awstats (the web server log report generator) was truncating the query from my URL, so I couldn't tell that anyone was actually using
it. But after grepping the logs manually I've pulled out the URLs of visitor's text adventure sessions. If you'll recall, my Web Frotz Interpreter stores the game state in the
URL so its easy to see user's game states in the web server logs.
I've put some of the links up on the Web Frotz Interpreter page. Some of the interesting ones:
server-logs technical zork frotz pants interactive-fiction uri if
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