Running as Root

I was talking about ring tones with some people at work yesterday. It reminded me that I had wanted to get better ring tones for my wife's phone. I don't need them since mine is on vibrate most of the time. In particular, I wanted the "They Meet" theme from Ms. Pacman. A lot of games have surprisingly good sound tracks, so it'd be cool to be able to do the whole thing myself. There are pretty good instructions on converting WAVs to QCPs on the SprintUsers forums which should work well for any phone that supports QCP ringers.

Now the only problem is that while MIDI songs that could be used as ring tones are pretty easy to find, crop, and transfer, I didn't have a MIDI file for the Ms. Pacman theme (plus, why would simply transferring a MIDI file to my phone be cool?). It turns out that the latest version of Mame32 (an arcade emulator) supports dumping the sound from the game to a WAV file. I loaded up Ms. Pacman and played to level 3 capturing the desired sound.

After that, I just loaded the WAV into my favorite audio editing program (the forums recommend WavePad although I have not personally tried it). I boosted the volume and then saved the file out to a lower quality mono WAV file. I then used the command line utility provided by Qualcomm called PureVoice to convert the WAV to QCP. Finally, I sent the file to my phone using the Phone Uploader web site that has worked well for me in the past. The uploader was originally intended for Sprint phones, but should work with quite a few other providers.

I'm happy with the end result. It seems like a good set of steps for converting any audio file to a QCP ring tone. I'd recommend trying it out if you're interested. It beats the hell out of renting a ring tone for $2.50 for 90 days.

Although I've known for some time that the Sprint picture mail functionality was crippled to near uselessness, I didn't quite realize the full extent of the problem until today. I have a simple need. I'd like to email a picture taken with my crappy little VGA (640×480) picture phone to Flickr with the subject line and body intact. I emphasize the subject/body thing because Flickr will use these as the photo name and description respectively. Well, there's the first problem. Sprint doesn't exactly email the picture to the address you specify as expected. The recipient gets an email with the subject "A Picture Share!" and a bunch of quasi Sprint-spam in the body along with a low resolution version of your picture (250×250 with white space–probably really 250×187.5). In addition, you cannot send the picture with a subject/body–just an impotent little "message." That message gets stuck in the body of the email in a nice non-standard way.

Although there used to be a utility over at hoho.com to rotate the images and extract the higher resolution version from the site, it seems it no longer works. Sprint has a habit of not only not exposing any sort of API, but of routinely changing the way their stuff works. I know this from experience in trying to maintain auction monitoring programs to send text messages to my Sprint phone through their crippled SMS web site. I digress. Well, surely if you just view the image on the site you're taken to from the email, you'll get the "high" resolution photo? Not so much. That version gets a border added to it and achieves the whopping resolution of 296×224. Still a far cry from the 640×480 my phone is capable of. How do you get the full resolution? You click the download link on the page your taken to after receiving the email. This will download a zip file (because JPGs are sooooooo compressible) containing your picture (with a "jpeg" extension). Simply unzip it and enjoy the full, eye-popping joy of it all.

Now, why the hell can't Sprint keep their propaganda to themselves and either send the real picture as an attachment or at the very least publish an API that would allow people to write tools to do the same? I'm sure there's some fucked up reason it makes good business sense to frustrate your customers with retarded functionality while spamming their contacts with crap about your services (which your own fucking customers don't even like). Here's to good business. Ass.

I know no one I know watches the show, but as I had mentioned previously, the reality show "The Ultimate Fighter" is a godsend to mixed martial arts fans.

The first season's finale was shown live on SpikeTV on April 9th, 2005. It featured three televised fights. Two of the fights are between four of the participants of the show (in different weight classes) vying for a contract in the UFC. The other fight was between Ken Shamrock and Rich Franklin.

I mention the finale here mainly because it contains one of the best MMA slug-fests I have ever seen. If you are even mildly curious / interested, I recommend hunting down a rebroadcast of the event and taping/TiVoing it (too much filler to watch it live). The middle fight between Forrest Griffin and Stephan Bonnar is really the main one worth watching (non-MMA people will more than likely be severely bored with the first and third fights). The second fight, however, may be the best in UFC history. In addition, after the fight both competitors acted with nothing but class, showing a great deal of respect to their opponent.

The whole event had to be a dream come true for the owners of the UFC. With such a great showing in its first live (non pay per view) broadcast, I think the UFC's marketability will go nowhere but up.

I just read on Boing Boing about a Flickr group that contains pictures of laptops that have their wallpaper set to a picture of what is behind the screen (there's also a Flickr group). My explanation sucks, but you should take a look, it's pretty cool. I have to wonder what this would look like if you strapped a camera (probably some super wide angle camera) to the back of your laptop display and tried to accomplish this automatically…

Divakar recently posted that when he was in the emergency room he was asked to rate the pain he was feeling. He went with a 4 or 5. With that rating, he did not receive immediate attention. I would have commented on his blog, but sadly comments are turned off. My wife's uncle has been in the medical field approximately 15 years as a paramedic. One of the pieces of information I've picked up from listening to his many anecdotes is that when asked to rate pain on a scale of 1 to 10, people in pain that requires immediate attention always seem to say their pain rates an 11. So much so, that that is the answer they're looking for. Therefore, if you're ever asked this question, and you want to be seen / get drugs immediately, you should always say, "My pain is an 11."

I'm definitely loving the whole podcast thing. There is a wealth of good stuff (and some not so good stuff) available out there. When listening to a file on the iPod, if the file is an audio book (an AAC file with an m4b extension) the iPod will allow you to accelerate the file. That's definitely a handy feature. Unfortunately, you can't control how much faster you're listening to the file. I want to be able to control the amount of the time compression as well as have the pitch adjusted to compensate (not that I don't like hearing Alvin and the Chipmunks talk about IT issues). Also, if you want to use something other than an iPod, you'd probably have to do what I'm about to do as well.

Thanks to Coté I'm using iPodder to grab all of my podcasts and dump them in a directory that iTunes will pick up so I can just synch my iPod in the morning and get all that delicious content. Well, iPodder will let you run a script after downloading each file. That seemed like a good opportunity to add a script to automatically accelerate each podcast to my liking. It would also allow me to convert any MP3s to AACs if I wanted (since people tell me you can bookmark audiobooks).

I did very little research and found that SoX would allow me to speed up a WAV file and correct the pitch. It has a command line interface, thank the gods, and even a Windows binary available. I found binaries for FAAD and FAAC to decode and encode AAC files over at RareWares. I also decided to use madplay (the Windows command line for MAD) and lame to decode / encode MP3s respectively. So the plan is to take an encoded audio file, convert it to WAV, optionally accelerate it, and encode it (possibly to a new format). I'd write a script (probably a batch file since I'm on Windows) and have iPodder call it after each download. I grabbed each of the aforementioned tools and dumped them all in a directory under c:\speedster (oh, aren't I funny) and wrote speed.bat to be called from iPodder.

It took way too much effort to do this using a batch file. Batch files suck. They're a non-programmer's idea of a scripting language. It seems to be necessary to jump through all kinds of hoops to get the functionality you need. There are also terrible compatibility issues between different versions of Windows. That being said, I still wrote my glue script as a batch file. It was a learning process. I learned that batch files suck. The script should work on Windows 2000 and above as long as you have shell extensions enabled (the default) I believe.

Anyway, the resulting script can be found here. For the time being, I'm testing it in iPodder using the command c:\speedster\speed.bat .8 "%f" .m4b -short which take an audio file that is either MP3 or AAC, time compresses / pitch adjusts to 80% (seems like a reasonable value) of the original length then encodes it to audiobook format (m4b) and dumps the file back out as the original file name plus "-short" appended to the end. If all goes well I'll change that line to c:\speedster\speed.bat .8 "%f" .m4b remove -short which will do all of the above plus remove the original (only in cases where the original file differs from the output file.

If anyone wants to do the same, knock yourself out. If you have trouble getting my file to work or find corrections, by all means email me or post a comment. Unfortunately, Mac and Linux people are on their own. I'm sure Linux people won't have any problems (since their OS doesn't "just work" either) and will probably happily point out an easier way to accomplish what I've done.

I realize converting from lossy to lossless to lossy is going to amount in a lot of quality loss, but hey, as Matt Ray pointed out to me (and I think I agree), "It's just voice anyway." If you want to use this to listen to your music files even faster, you probably need help. I'm sure the batch file could work a lot better, probably doesn't handle all of the possible errors, and isn't really that well thought out / designed. Up yours, too.

Update

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I think I'll drop madplay and try out the decoding built into lame–I didn't realize lame would also handle the decoding (duh). I also need to find a way to copy/edit the ID3 tags on the output file; right now there aren't any tags on the output file. If I find something, I'll probably hardcode the genre on the output file to "Speech" for easier organizing of these podcasts. If I drop the requirement to copy the existing tags, I could just do the genre tag using FAAC's or lame's built-in tagging capabilities.

My new 60 GB iPod photo arrived on Wednesday. As cruel fate would have it, the accessories that I ordered arrived on Monday and Tuesday–the Griffin iTalk (which everyone I know likes despite the mediocre reviews on Amazon) and the Macally FM Transmitter and Charger. And, of course, it was delivered while I was at work so I couldn't fondle it. All I could do was call the wife and have over the phone iPod sex: "What's the iPod wearing? Is it a baaaaad iPod?!?" I finally got my grubby little mits on it that evening.

Not much to report on it that most people haven't already heard / read about. I would say iTunes is a nice program for managing all of your MP3s, the setup and transfer of the iPod is painless, and transferring photos is equally easy. The screen is bright and crisp. The slideshow functionality is pretty handy as is the AV cable. I was quite happy to get the pre-March packaging as this means I got the AV cable, dock, and whatever else that is now not included since the March "price drop." I am anxiously awaiting the promised attachment from Apple that'll allow me to transfer pictures directly from my camera. I'm also mostly hoping it'll work with my current camera, otherwise I'll just have to go buy a new camera as well. The only other pain is that I don't have a USB 2.0 computer. The downside is that transfers are pretty slow. The upside is that now, of course, I must buy a new computer–there's no other solution.

Coté pointed me to iPodder to grab the podcasts I've been dreaming about (they're most of the reason for the iPod purchase) and to IT Conversations to feed my hungry content monster.

I also began long process of ripping every CD I own. After some research I finally decided on using Exact Audio Copy to rip WAV files directly to my harddrive and then batch encoding overnight using lameb at 192 average bit rate because this that's what I thought would fit me best after reading the Radified Guide to Ripping CD audio & MP3 encoding. If you're curious, my lameb batch file runs this option:

perl c:\lameb\lameb.pl -i rms -fs "~a/~c/~n ~t" -D -o "--abr 192 -h" -d c:\lameb\encoded c:\lameb\wav\*.wav.

Overall, I'd say it has been a very satisfying purchase. As is the norm with the wife and me, I should definitely get my money's worth out of it. And that, as they say, is that.

I finally pulled the trigger on my mp3 solution. I'm getting a 60gig iPod photo. I ordered it from Buy.com today and it should be here sometime in the future. With my luck it'll take forever. But when it gets here–POW!! I'll have a fun new toy that everyone seems to rave about. Hopefully with the number of photos the wife and I take it'll be a heavily used device.

Most people are aware that you can play real arcade games on your home computer using MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) and any legally purchased ROM files you may own. Which you bought. With money. Well, many people have decided that it would be enjoyable to have a super arcade machine in their own home. One that has all of the correct, arcade-style controls and thousands of games made possible from the legally purchased ROMs that they own and purchased for money–legally. You can see quite a few of these stunning works just by searching around on Google's image search.

I'm not sure what is appealing about being able to have an oversized arcade cabinet in my house providing true take up the whole corner of the room realistic 1980s to 1990s hot arcade action to me while I stand (or maybe sit on a stool). Yeah. It's silly.

Except that I want to build one. There's even a book that'll hold my hand through the entire process. Then I saw the pre-fab Spincade. It comes in at around $6,000 (including shipping and an overinflated sense of power). Of course I would never buy it, unless of course I suddenly started crapping money. But, man, is it sweet:

If anyone is a fan of mixed martial arts (UFC, PrideFC, etc) then I highly recommend watching the new reality series the Ultimate Fighter. They take 16 wannabes and give them the chance to train with Chuck Liddell and Randy Couture.

The "challenge" portion of the show is pretty much worthless reality show competitions, but most episodes involve a fight between two members of opposing teams. The nice thing is that if the fight doesn't go the distance, the winner gets $5000. That seems to liven up the action a little bit. Also, the loser is off the show. No voting, no bullshit popularity contests. You fight, you lose, you're off. As an MMA fan, it is definitely some entertaining stuff.