Life

I have been an avid listener to the Linux Voice podcasts since they began, and before that I listened to the same guys when they did the TuxRadar podcasts for the Linux Format magazine. Sadly though it would appear that the Linux Voice podcasts have ended^[1] as there hasn't been a new one since November last year. Previously, the podcasts were produced once every two weeks.

I decided recently to dig out some of my old cassette tape music albums. Most of them are pre-recorded tapes of albums purchased in the 1980s, but there are also many home recordings of vinyl LPs . I wanted to make digital copies of the albums and include them in my collection, which I carry with me on my mobile 'phone. I had a quaint notion that with a bit of work the music on the tapes could be of acceptable quality. Boy, was I wrong.

For a few weeks now my laptop has, on an intermittent basis, been playing a two second musical alert. Is my CPU burning so hot it is about to imitate a China Syndrome? Is my fan spinning so fast that it resmbles a pulsar? Could it be my battery is about to explode? Maybe it is just an incoming email matching a particular pattern. The thing is I have no idea what the alert is for as there is no accompanying visual confirmation. I certainly don't remember manually setting any alerts. It is driving me nuts!

In the "old days" I used a really nice GNOME GUI app called Grip for ripping CDs. The interface was so nice that I would invariably use it for playing CDs too. I decided recently to make copies of my CDs for use on my tablet and mobile 'phone. However, I was dismayed to find that my old standby no longer existed in Debian. Unfortunately, the last stable release of Grip was in 2005. Around 2010, due to bugs, it was dropped by Debian.

There is a very similar GUI app, for ripping anyway, called Asunder but it doesn't seem to allow sorting rips into Artist/Album/Track hierarchy instead opting for Artist-Album/Track. So, for example, this would give Queen-A-Day-At-The-Races/ and Queen-A-Night-At-The-Opera/ as the top level directories rather than just Queen. I'm fussy, I like things just so. The hundreds of CDs in my collection with sometimes multiple albums per artist would give me too many top level directories.

A while ago I wrote about a great little Digital Media Primer from Xiph.org. Well, the follow up video took a little while longer to appear than I anticipated or as is ironically stated on the website 'Continuing the "firehose" tradition of maximum information density'. Regardless, the second video is well worth watching as it is both educational and presented in a entertaining manner.