Rubenerd

As you can tell by the archive, I’ve been podcasting (terrible stuff) for a while. I’ve also got a significant archive of other recoded audio (events, snippets, audio journals) that may one day find themselves in a podcast, or other audio production. For this irreplacable audio, I trust FLAC.

FLAC is a free, lossless encoder that expands out to the original, uncompressed audio. This contrasts with AAC, MP3 or OGG Vorbis that compresses by irreversably removing information. It’s the same as PNG versus JPG, or Carl’s Jr versus Burger King (though now I’m a veg, it’s a moot point).

(I’ve gone on record saying FLAC is a waste of time for anime fansubbers. Considering you’re pairing it with video you’ve compressed the crap out of, I see no point using lossless audio that’s audibly indistinguisable to 320kbps lossy AAC).

A shortcoming of FLAC (depending on your view) is its limited commercial support. My beloved MPV can play it, but any audio imported into iTunes et.al. won’t work. For that, we’ve had Apple Lossless, thought that’s encumbered by royalties and closed source software.

Or at least, so I thought. According to the official Apple Lossless Audio Codec site, the format has been Apache licenced and royalty free since 2011. This is great news.

The main draw for FLAC seems to be its CRC information, which allows archived files to report data corruption. ALAC depends on the due dilligence of the file system and OS to copy files correctly; though if you’re serious about archiving you’re using ZFS anyway.

ALAC and FLAC performance compared

I use avconv and/or FFmpeg (depending on the whims of package managers) for most of my post-production work, so was intruiged to discover I could encode and decode ALAC files with it this whole time!

To test, I let avconv encode a 10 minute WAV file with ALAC and FLAC. ALAC’s native file extension is the ambiguous m4a container, so I added alac.

$ avconv -i electroboom.wav -c:a alac electroboom.alac.m4a
$ avconv -i electroboom.wav -c:a flac electroboom.flac

The size difference was negligable. The original WAV and a 128Kbps MP3 are included for reference:

$ ls -lh .
==>  42M Apr 26 11:44 electroboom.alac.m4a
==> 106M Apr 26 11:42 electroboom.wav
==>  41M Apr 26 11:44 electroboom.flac
==> 9.6M Feb  2 00:33 electroboom.mp3

So it seems compatibility in some environments is the main draw for ALAC. If you already have a FLAC library, there’s probably not much to be gained converting. As I’m an “Apple fanboi” (or however the trolls are spelling it thesedays), I’ll likely switch to ALAC just for convenience.

The Overnightscape Central is a fun weekly podcast hosted by the illustrious PQ Ribber. Hosts and listeners of The Overnightscape Underground participate in a topic each week, and you’re welcome to join.

01:41:37 – New Theme Music from Jimbo!! Chad Bowers, Rubenerd, Frank Edward Nora, and Shambles Constant join PQ for a well-rounded and fascinating look at News!!

You can view this episode on the Underground, listen to it here, and subscribe with this feed in your podcast client.

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29:26 – Recording on a new phone, sci-fi, custom plates, retro computer fandom, upgrade cycle fatigue, listener feedback (Jimbo), Mascot Woolies, chirping birds, farewell One Coffee Bean, food in NYC and Sydney, bagels, cheesecake, Instagram, Southerner stereotypes, and pronouncing food locations.

Recorded in Sydney, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Released April 2016 on The Overnightscape Underground, an Internet talk radio channel focusing on a freeform monologue style, with diverse and fascinating hosts.

Subscribe with iTunes, Pocket Casts, Overcast or add this feed to your podcast client.

I was in primary school when Office 95 came out. Even then it was a big deal, because it came bundled with its much-touted autocorrect and squiggly-red-line highlighting of misspelled words. No more hitting up the Spelling feature and scrolling endlessly through a long document to find and correct mistakes.

In the intervening years though, I feel I’ve become lazy. I basically stopped learning how to spell, because I knew anything could be corrected on the fly. In particular, there were a few dozen words that I chronically misspell, no matter how many times autocorrect fixed them. It was basically a learned habit.

So I decided to try and experiment. Rather than using Vim’s :set spell to tab through and correct mistakes, I relegated it to just highlighting problem words. It was then up to me to go to the word, and refactor it until it was spelled right. No looking up the word.

The results blew me a away. Within a week, I could spell dozens of extra words I was always looking up, from aforementioned to Massachusetts.

Give it a go yourself, you might be surprised.

People keep sending me rar files like its 1999. 7zip is free, open source, and has higher compression ratios: please use it!

So I tried installing on Debian Jessie:

$ sudo apt-get install unrar
==> Reading package lists... Done
==> Building dependency tree
==> Reading state information... Done
==> Package unrar is not available, but is referred to by another package.
==> This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
==> is only available from another source
==> E: Package 'unrar' has no installation candidate

This had always worked before, weird. One thing you can never accuse open source people of is consistency. Fortunately:

$ sudo apt-get install unrar-free

I have it on good authority this will soon be replaced by a nine word systemd command, as part of their archived framework.

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01:19:10 – Join Ruben on an audible excursion through the Sydney CBD late one evening.

Recorded in Sydney, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Released April 2016 on The Overnightscape Underground, an Internet talk radio channel focusing on a freeform monologue style, with diverse and fascinating hosts.

Subscribe with iTunes, Pocket Casts, Overcast or add this feed to your podcast client.

The Overnightscape Central is a fun weekly podcast hosted by the illustrious PQ Ribber. Hosts and listeners of The Overnightscape Underground participate in a topic each week, and you’re welcome to join.

02:48:31 – A look at games with Shambles Constant, Chad Bowers, Clara Tse, Rubenerd, Doc Sleaze, and Frank Edward Nora!! Your host is PQ Ribber.

You can view this episode on the Underground, listen to it here, and subscribe with this feed in your podcast client.

I use and love Solarized Dark for my afternoon and evening work, but I find its equivalent Light theme and spelling lacking. I need bright colours in the morning to wake up, especially after a late night that may not have involved the aforementioned dark theme.

My requirements for light themes are:

1. Blue or white tints, not cream or yellow. I use light themes in the morning, and find blue and white visually fresh and stimulating.

2. A distinct, different colour for bold text. I first saw this used to great effect on NetBSD’s man pages, and use it everywhere now. I don’t think colours belong in a bashrc; set as bold and let your terminal emulator pick it based on your circumstances (am I in an SSH session, or limited to 16 colours, etc).

3. The name should be spelled correctly to fit my favourite colour spelling. For those who can’t pick it up, I’m being sarcastic. Mostly.

Nearly all the light themes I surveyed fit the first criteria, but not the second. I’d all but given up hope, until I found PencilLight by mattly.

In a word, it’s refreshing, right down to the choice of minty-green and the slightly-off white which I’m a fan of (as evidenced by my site resign). The blue is one of my favourite schades [sic], and the yellow has a clear and pleasing level of contrast.

If you’re going to spend most of your life looking at a shell, may as well make it as nice as it can be, and this is. He also managed to find a pair of words all English speakers can agree on their spelling, which is an added bonus.

I recorded lots of television in the mid to late 2000s. Most of it was advertising for my sister’s media course, but also lots of one off stuff.

Incidently, I blogged about the Elgato TV Tuner I used to do it, and it got my little blog here a mention on the company’s press page. Pretty cool, I thought.

Fast forward almost a decade later, and I found a ton of these old recordings on a backup drive. I didn’t have the heart to delete them, so I re-encoded them with avconv in as h264/aac to shave close to 90% of their space with no discernable difference in quality.

Running it through ffmpeg, I noticed something interesting. Each of these files had metadata, rught down to the original digital broadcast stations! Here was a file recorded from Channel 9:

Input #0, mpegts, from '000000000ed96070.mpg':
  Duration: 00:02:06.26, start: 14817.417544, bitrate: 6649 kb/s
  Program 1105 
    Metadata:
      service_name    : NINE Digital
      service_provider: Nine Network
    Stream #0.0[0x200]: Video: mpeg2video (Main), yuv420p, 720x576 [PAR 64:45 DAR 16:9], 15000 kb/s, 25 fps, 90k tbn, 50 tbc
    Stream #0.1[0x28a](eng): Audio: mp2, 48000 Hz, 2 channels, s16p, 256 kb/s
    Stream #0.2[0x240](eng): Subtitle: [6][0][0][0] / 0x0006
  Program 1112 
    Metadata:
      service_name    : NINE HD
      service_provider: Nine Network

And here’s one from Ten:

Input #0, mpegts, from '0000000010569747.mpg':
  Duration: 00:02:20.34, start: 16243.436922, bitrate: 6002 kb/s
  Program 1617 
    Metadata:
      service_name    : ONE HD
      service_provider: Ten Adelaide
  Program 1621 
    Metadata:
      service_name    : TEN Digital
      service_provider: Ten Adelaide
    Stream #0.0[0x200]: Video: mpeg2video (Main), yuv420p, 720x576 [PAR 64:45 DAR 16:9], 9000 kb/s, 25 fps, 90k tbn, 50 tbc
    Stream #0.1[0x28a](eng): Audio: mp2, 48000 Hz, 2 channels, s16p, 256 kb/s (clean effects)
    Stream #0.2[0x240](eng): Subtitle: [6][0][0][0] / 0x0006
  Program 1623 
    Metadata:
      service_name    : ONE HD
      service_provider: Ten Adelaide
  Program 1624 
    Metadata:
      service_name    : ONE Digital
      service_provider: Ten Adelaide

And another from 7:

Input #0, mpegts, from '0000000010627706.mpg':
  Duration: 00:02:02.60, start: 89862.635622, bitrate: 6851 kb/s
  Program 1360 
    Metadata:
      service_name    : 7 Digital
     service_provider: Seven Network
   Stream #0.0[0x501]: Video: mpeg2video (Main), yuv420p, 720x576 [PAR 64:45 DAR 16:9], 15000 kb/s, 25 fps, 90k tbn, 50 tbc
    Stream #0.1[0x502](eng): Audio: mp2, 48000 Hz, 2 channels, s16p, 256 kb/s
   Stream #0.2[0x504](eng): Subtitle: [6][0][0][0] / 0x0006
  Program 1361 
    Metadata:
      service_name    : 7 Digital 1
      service_provider: Seven Network
  Program 1362 
    Metadata:
      service_name    : 7 Digital 2
      service_provider: Seven Network
  Program 1363 
    Metadata:
      service_name    : 7 Digital 3
      service_provider: Seven Network
  Program 1364 
    Metadata:
      service_name    : 7 HD Digital
      service_provider: Network Seven

I wonder if those stations still exist, or with the same names, now?

The Overnightscape Central is a fun weekly podcast hosted by the illustrious PQ Ribber. Hosts and listeners of The Overnightscape Underground participate in a topic each week, and you’re welcome to join.

02:29:01 – Rubenerd, Doc Sleaze, Shambles, Chad Bowers, Mike Boody, and Frank Edward Nora!! PQ Ribber hosts!!

You can view this episode on the Underground, listen to it here, and subscribe with this feed in your podcast client.