10 News video on a Mac (and VMIX on TV!)
My company, VMIX was recently on the local San Diego ABC affiliate, 10 News. I was actually in a few of the shots and when looking for the video, found that the 10news.com website's windows media video player didn't work on my Mac. So I created a quick hack to return the URL to the .asx file so I can play it with VLC.
Search for the story and pull up the video detail page. The URL should be something like this: http://www.10news.com/video/13299238/detail.html
Open up "Terminal" on your mac and paste this command, replacing the first URL with the URL of your video detail page:
curl http://www.10news.com/video/13299238/detail.html -s
| grep 200k
| awk -F"'" '{print "http://mfile.akamai.com/12922/wmv/vod.ibsys.com"$2}'
| sed 's/wmv$/asx/g'
The result should be something like this:
http://mfile.akamai.com/12922/wmv/vod.ibsys.com/2007/0511/13299238.200k.asx
Which you should be able to play in VLC. You can also include that URL in your blog to quote the story. Hit this link to see the video coverage and my geeky mug at the keyboard. Video clip courtesy of 10news.com.
Update: Url's changed to local video.
Removing the Stank from your Shoes
I was explaining this to a friend that suggested I blog it. I try to do it every 6 months with my shoes if they need or not.
- Put shoes in zip lock bag or a double layer of tied up plastic grocery bags
- Put in the freezer overnight (I do 2 days)
- If they still stink, pour baking soda inside the shoe and repeat
- Let them thaw out in the bag.
The reason this works: the bacteria inside your shoe that produce odor thrive in a warm moist environment. Freeze them and it will kill them out. The baking soda will absorb the smell, if it remains after the bacteria die.
UNIX shell commands for job notifications
Ever spawn off a big job and immediately realize it'd have been great to get a notification when it's done? If it still has hold of your terminal, you could blindly type the next command and hope it works. But if it's forked into the background, that won't even work. Here's how to do it:
Find the process ID of your job. In my case it was 22603:
$ ps auxw | grep batch_process
user 22603 0.0 0.1 8044 2076 pts/18 S+ 01:24 0:00 batch_process -bg
Great, now that we have it, use it like this below:
$ ( while ps 22603; do sleep 60 ; done ; date | mail
you@yourcompany.com -s "process done" ) &
Now I can log out and wait to get a mail on it.
The same thing works when waiting for a machine to come back up:
until ping -c 2 hostname.domain.com ; do sleep 10 ; done ; date | mail you@yourcompany.com -s "hostname back up"
Alter the number of seconds of sleep for higher resolution on the checks. The above will send 2 ping checks every 10 seconds. Close enough for rock and roll.
I learned something just now while double-checking my ping syntax:
"-a Audible ping." Yes, ping will bonk your shell on each packet
return. Whoah cool
Flash Games Rule Lately
I've been a Mac head since my first B&W Mac in the 80's. So my first windows PC was purchased exclusively to play Unreal Tournament. I was blown away by that game, I remember looking at the reflections and the multiplayer game play with my jaw on the floor. I really haven't played much in the way of games since then...
Until recently...the onslaught of thousands of half decent flash games that are fun and entertaining. No fancy graphics needed. In fact, most of them could have been played on an 8 bit system if properly written. The best one I've seen lately is here: http://ec2-1.playr.co.uk/onslaught/ Screenshot of the action below:
Fricking Lasers!
Tracy and I went to see Tool tonight. Pretty rockin show. The visuals were great, and they had some sweet laser action going. I do get the distinct feeling that I just got back from the airshow tho...I'm freakin deaf. The music was way too loud for my taste...next time I'll have to remember to bring my earplugs.
Isn't thinking that loud music is too loud a sign of getting older? ;)
mybrainhurts war is over...apparently
Apparently the mybrainhurts.net guy that e-mailed me a few years ago to
tell me how bad ass his site was going to be and how he was going to
somehow kick my ass on the internet has turned into this:
Other than the girl being pretty cute, I am very certain that he has lost whatever war he was trying to wage.
Meat slicer? Get serious.
Victory 1 for .com. Yea, um, take that.
Ham Radio
Check out what I've been up to lately. After 10 years, I finally upgraded my FCC Amateur Radio license to the next class, from Technician to General. I passed the exam 9 hours after the morse code requirement dropped. It was decently hard, but worth the studying. And I didn't have to learn morse code! Now I have HF abilities! The picture to the right is a shot of me running fldigi on my Linux box, decoding PSK31. It's a new digital mode that has the same properties as CW (morse code) in terms of penetrating thru the noise and bandwidth usage. A normal FM conversation would fill that waterfall but you can see 4 PSK conversations going with plenty of room. The 2 people talking are HAM's, one from Kansas, the other from Washington. Pretty neato to pick that conversation out of the air with just a wire antenna (dipole).
My Antenna has some SWR problems...that is the ratio of radiated vs reflected power is too high. I have done something wrong, not sure what yet. I will get it worked out and post more about it later. I can't wait to get on the air with PSK myself. I bet I can hit up my friends back east easily, especially if i bump the power up a bit.
Update: I figured out the SWR problems just now. While my dinner was rotating in the microwave, I went up on the roof, in the dark, untied and moved the antenna to another part of the roof. Apparently my proximity to some rooftop spinner vents let the RF take a spin too. I just made my first QSO on HF in PSK! 1500 miles!
my morse key pic
...I got a letter from Dave, who asked if he could put up one of my Flickr pics on his blog. Pretty cool article too!
FM 94.9 on Linux
Don't have a windows PC? Prefer Linux CLI? Easy solution! Add this to your .bashrc:
alias 94.9="mplayer http://wmc1.liquidcompass.cc/KBZT"
Now you can type '94.9' at the command prompt and the best radio station in San Diego will play.
KPBS on Linux
I started wondering if I could do the same thing I set up for 94.9 with SD's local PBS station, KPBS. Unbelievably, they also use Windows Media. WTF is wrong with the world? You'd think that PBS would give them MP3 streaming ability, not like they care about DRM (Public Broadcasting?) Anyway, here is the same command for KPBS:
alias kpbs="mplayer http://media01.kpbs.org/kpbs-fm"
Enjoy!