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1126

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / GUI for PixelBeat's DVD-VR splitter application

« Last post by Edvard on October 15, 2012, 01:33 AM »

My son picked up an inexpensive Mini-DVD recording video camera, and liked the DVD-VR format for it's flexibility, but didn't like that it couldn't be used directly in a video editor.  After some searching, I came across this:
DVD-VR ripper for Linux
http://www.pixelbeat...org/programs/dvd-vr/

dvd-vr is a utility to identify and optionally copy recordings from a DVD-VR format disc, which can be created by devices like DVD recorders and camcorders

Basically, it can rip the VR-format file into individual .vob files, which can then be imported into most video editing programs not written by Microsoft  , but it needs to be compiled in Cygwin to run on Windows, and then it's a command-line program.
My son being a fan of the Windows 7 that came on his laptop, I dusted off my XP partition, brushed up on my Autohotkey skills and came up with dvdvrGUI.



[ Invalid Attachment ]

Instructions I wrote for installing Cygwin, compiling and running dvd-vr and dvdvrGUI can be found here:
http://comments.pixe...d-vr/#comment-302522

Still working on a version for Linux, possibly written with Yad 

1127

Living Room / Re: 3D Printing Under Attack

« Last post by Edvard on October 14, 2012, 09:16 PM »

 

1128

Living Room / Re: 3D Printing Under Attack

« Last post by Edvard on October 14, 2012, 01:02 AM »

Time to start printing handguns.

Oh, wait...

1129

Living Room / Re: How Many Planets Are There?

« Last post by Edvard on October 14, 2012, 12:40 AM »

10.
I vote Pluto and the planet behind the sun.
 

1130

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by Edvard on September 24, 2012, 01:10 AM »

1131

Living Room / Re: Cascading grammar trolls

« Last post by Edvard on September 24, 2012, 12:59 AM »

Dude, literally!   

1132

General Software Discussion / Re: yet another file manager thread...

« Last post by Edvard on September 24, 2012, 12:29 AM »

Xplorer2 all the way.  I loved it and still install it on every Windows computer I am entrusted with when file management is a part of my job.  Tree on the side and two panes with full line selection turned off and a decent set of bookmarks and dancing through the file system is a breeze.

If only there were a comparable one for Linux, I'd be ecstatically pleased.  There are lots of Explorer clones (list or tree on the side and one pane), a few with two panes and no tree, but none with a tree and two panes. If I ever get free time to actually learn some programming (tried at least a hundred times...) my first project will be an Xplorer2 clone for Linux.

P.S. Tried running Xplorer2 on Wine, a bit disappointing as some of the functions didn't work correctly (big surprise), so no go that route.

1133

Living Room / Re: Acoustic Levitation

« Last post by Edvard on September 19, 2012, 05:32 PM »

I've seen acoustic levitation before, in those old Moody Science films when Dr. Irwin Moon did it with a Hartmann whistle, a parabolic reflector and pieces of cork.  He'd place the cork pieces in the nodes  of the standing waves made by the reflector.  Looks like that's what is going on in the first video, albeit a bit more modern.  Nice find Ren!

1134

Living Room / Re: Cascading grammar trolls

« Last post by Edvard on September 18, 2012, 10:15 AM »

Priceless.

(see attachment in previous post)

from Tmonews

-daddydave (September 17, 2012, 05:14 PM)

Lol is an acronym, not a word, so it should be LOL.
 

1135

General Software Discussion / Re: What exactly is a "Windows idle time", anyone?

« Last post by Edvard on September 18, 2012, 10:07 AM »

Coffee?
http://www.howtogeek...-downloads-complete/

Run it, point it at the network adapter that data is flowing through, and give it a minimum data threshold before it shuts off and allows the computer to sleep or hibernate on its own.

1136

Living Room / Re: What's the name of your car?

« Last post by Edvard on September 17, 2012, 01:39 AM »

Jerry.  A blue mid-80's Ford Escort hatchback that eventually blew a water pump.  Got me and my girlfriend (now wife) from art school and back to our respective homes for almost a year.

1137

General Software Discussion / Re: What went wrong with Linux on the Desktop

« Last post by Edvard on September 17, 2012, 01:34 AM »

Agree as well.  
There were several packages in Ubuntu I found that never worked for me EVER, and there was always a few forum threads here and there that folks would complain on and eventually someone would stop in and just say flat that the package was broken because of some dependency thing that couldn't be resolved, but the package was there anyway.
Jokosher comes to mind, due to some shenanigans with the gstreamer-gnonlin library (this persisted for 3 versions before I gave up...) as well as a few media players that would consistently break each other depending on whether they used mpg123 or mpg321  

BTW- I compile lots of stuff nowadays, but usually software packages, not libraries, and always stuff that's just not in the repos yet.  I use the repo to install the -dev header packages for the needed library and life's a peach.

1138

Living Room / Re: Community Documentation done right - Slackware's new 'doc' project.

« Last post by Edvard on September 17, 2012, 01:18 AM »

FWIW I sometimes think the need to occasionally resolve software dependencies on your own has the hidden advantage of discouraging too much willy-nilly installation of software.

Trust me, I feel you there, and although I must admit I have my fair share of cruft from useful things I installed and forgot about 3 days later, things that aren't immediately useful or promising usually get the curb in less than 10 minutes.

I have not-too-fond memories of trying to install Sodipodi (FFS... SODIPODI!!) and taking 2.5 hours running it from terminal, seeing what it complained was missing, searching the internet for what package libonedamnthingafteranother-0.1.95-i386.0.so came in, installing it, running Sodipodi from terminal to see if it complained... ad nauseum.
Then I had the brilliant idea to try and install a game for my son...
Tuxkart, I believe it was (FFS... TUXKART!!).  Never again.

I totally understand the rationale and logic behind keeping things as non-automagic as possible, but I must admit I just don't have the time.  When the solution to a successful compile of an interesting source-only thingamajig is a simple 'apt-get install libwatchamacallit-dev' away, I can't imagine ever going back.

1139

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by Edvard on September 17, 2012, 12:59 AM »

1140

Living Room / Re: Tram-mļöi  hhâsmařpţuktôx

« Last post by Edvard on September 17, 2012, 12:54 AM »

Something Delany used to good effect in his brilliant sci-fi novel Babel-17, which inspired similar treatments of language in other novels.

The first time I really "got" the idea of artificial languages was the first time I read Watership Down.
Richard Adams' casual dropping of Lapine throughout the text struck me as little more than quaint until the climactic battle where Hazel confronts General Woundwort and utters the untranslated line "Silflay hraka u embleer rah!"
At that moment, I fell off my chair in absolute giddiness because it was not only appropriate for that moment in the story, but I suddenly realized I understood what it meant without being aware that I had learned the language.  Ah, THERE was a eureka moment if ever there was one.

1141

Living Room / Re: Shit Apple Fanatics Say

« Last post by Edvard on September 14, 2012, 08:32 PM »

No, but it did come with double mins for life, no extra card to buy.  Net10 is where I first saw a Huawei phone.  Their android phones require the 50.00/month plan, which made me think of it in the first place:
http://www.net10.com...?model=UCMTST_009539
Unfortunately, no Net10 android phones are available in my area, which I cannot understand at all.

1142

Living Room / Re: Shit Apple Fanatics Say

« Last post by Edvard on September 14, 2012, 06:08 PM »

I seriously considered getting the biggest device I could fit in my pocket, and didn't really care if it could make calls or not! So there! In fact my last phone was an iPod Touch, which can't make calls.

In fact, I wonder if smartphones will eventually find a way to take "phone" out of the name, since making calls is probably a tiny fraction of what people use them for nowadays.

(I fibbed a little. Actually I am still using a dumbphone for that for the moment -  LG900 which has a qwerty (which in a dumbphone is probably a good thing because people were always saying "send me a text", and I liked it at first but don't recommend it because I've had 2 and same issues with both: the charging port goes bad, and the camera locks up when you try to take pictures to the SD card. )

My wife is the same as you, though. I just bought her a pretty decent quad-band flip phone recently, and the process of buying it made me realize that "dumb" phones are still evolving and getting better.

-daddydave (September 14, 2012, 05:28 PM)

I got a LG500G prepaid through Tracfone, and it suits me just fine, though I've lately considered buying a cheap Huawei android phone and just using it through WiFi... kinda like a tiny tablet computer.

1143

Living Room / Re: Community Documentation done right - Slackware's new 'doc' project.

« Last post by Edvard on September 14, 2012, 05:58 PM »

I too, started out with Slackware and used to be a big fan, but figuring out dependencies manually just to run something that didn't come on the ISO didn't sit too well with me (or my lovely wife) after a while.
Tools like slapt-get and swaret offered a lot of promise, but that's about it.
The typical response of Slackware users to the subject of automatic dependency resolution may be sound on a technical level, but is hell when you just need the thing to go and don't have the time to put into it.
http://www.linuxforu...ution-slackware.html

That said, glad to see the Slack community pick up the ball on documentation.  Looking forward to some quality contributions from that crowd.

1144

Living Room / Re: Shit Apple Fanatics Say

« Last post by Edvard on September 14, 2012, 03:35 PM »

What I don't want is to have to think about how to extract information from the device (simple, concise, done) and that is what I get from the Windows Phone.

-Stoic Joker (September 14, 2012, 07:56 AM)

I've made my recent (philosophical) conversion public elsewhere, but I must give credit where it is due.

Microsoft really has a very good understanding of development and how to make things easier for developers.

And I must confess... I am LAZY as hell when it comes to development. If I can find a cheaper, easier, faster way, I will.

But every time I look into something that isn't Microsoft, I find nightmarish mazes of ways to get simple things done. One need only look at a text input in Windows Forms vs. GTK or whatever.

Microsoft just "gets it right" to make developers productive.

I've shied away from MS mobile platforms for the past few years, but I think I'll take a look again fairly soon.

I already do a lot of work on mobile platforms. Given how easy MS stuff is, it should be dirt easy to get a windows mobile app running. (I'll skip the cursing about other platforms.)

-Renegade (September 14, 2012, 10:18 AM)

* Edvard tosses Renegade a monkey wrench...

Microsoft annoys developers with Windows Phone 8 secrecy
 

1145

Living Room / Re: Perhaps About the Coolest Book EVER~! =D

« Last post by Edvard on September 13, 2012, 03:30 AM »

Of course not, because you see, he's line.

1146

Living Room / Re: My quick Cody cut and paste.

« Last post by Edvard on September 13, 2012, 03:24 AM »

Welcome to the site, DCuser!
Here's my take on your idea, shadows done by clone tool and gray paint in Gimp:

1147

Living Room / Re: Initials That Meant More Than They Realized

« Last post by Edvard on September 13, 2012, 03:00 AM »

http://theimho.org/
http://en.wikipedia....Tenant_Farmers_Union
http://www.kthxfm.com/
http://dl.acm.org/ci...ation.cfm?id=1159955

1148

Living Room / Re: Raspberry Pi's $35 Linux PC

« Last post by Edvard on September 12, 2012, 09:45 AM »

I'm waiting for the day they start ramping up production so I don't have to wait.
...
*badum-pish*
 

1149

Living Room / Re: What's the name of your car?

« Last post by Edvard on September 11, 2012, 04:10 PM »

I had a friend named Brad whose name was famous in our circle because inevitably when the conversation turned to cars, the phrase "Brad's Nova" would be invoked and initiate a round of knowing nods, low chuckling and quiet tsk-ing.  Brad's Nova was also affectionately known as The-car-that-would-not-die-even-when-we-finally-decided-to-kill-it.  Long story.  Great car.

1150

Living Room / Re: Windows system "aliases"?

« Last post by Edvard on September 11, 2012, 04:04 PM »

Shortcuts... seriously.
Make shortcuts with the full command of what you're trying to do, and place them in a folder that you add to %PATH% (putting them in c:\windows\system32 was kinda rude, IMO, albeit effective...).
I did it all the time, worked well as long as the options were there.  Fer example, to open firefox and have it open to Donationcoder.com:

[Select]

c:\path\to\firefox.exe "https://www.donationcoder.com"

http://kb.mozillazin...mmand_line_arguments

You'd have to look up how to do it on other browsers, and programs that don't accept parameters you want can be dealt with by using a script automation thing like AHK.