Ripping Audible audio books to MP3.
I started using Audible with their Get 2 Free audiobooks with 14-day trial period. offer. I usually listen to audio books on the subway or while running, and ... NO, I do not want to buy an IPod or some audible-capable device just to be able to listen to something that I have already paid for. I have been looking for a software on the Mac that does just that. (If you are on Windows however, ITurns FREE from DVDNextCopy is your ticket to DRM-free Audible content.) In my search over the past couple of weeks to convert aa to mp3, it looks like there are three options to do this:
- Burn the book to audio CDs and rip them to MP3s.
- Use Noteburner ($39.95)
- Record using a virtual audio cable
- SoundFlower
- Audio Recorder
- SoundSource
This is the virtual audio cable that allows you to pipe the output from ITunes into your recording software. Make sure to close all software that would beep / make noises (like your IM client) while recording. Since it is a virtual audio client, it will not record from the microphone. So, you don't need to worry about your snoring.
A free audio recording software that allows you to specify the recording duration (I set the audio book to record before going to sleep at night). One caveat: make sure to set it to write to disk once a minute - it's one of the options in the Preferences.
It gives you a small tray icon that helps you switch your audio input and output sources with a single click, and even adjust their volume settings. You can do without it, if you choose.
- Set the input and output devices to SoundFlower either using SoundSource or using your Sound preference pane.
- Start Audio recorder. Set the duration of the recording and ask it to save every minute in the preferences.
- Open ITunes, and start playing the audiobook.
- Hit record on AudioRecorder
- Make sure to revert the audio settings to mic and headphones once you are done recording.
ITunes allows you to burn your audio books to CD. The problem is that it is an audio CD - yes, I mean 80 minutes per CD. With an audio book like Blink that is almost 8 hours long, you would use up 6 CDs just to rip them back to MP3s. You could use CDRWs - but CDRWs have never worked for me (I admit I haven't used one in over 5 years).
The concept is pretty cool. They make a virtual CD that ITunes uses to burn your audiobook. While to ITunes it appears as a regular CD drive, the software actually stores the book as a bunch of MP3 files on your hard disk. But, I couldn't get it to install on my Leopard. After doing a restart, I got an error message that said something to the effect that it couldn't find the virtual CD driver. The windows version seems to get good reviews (of course, I do not know if it is just astroturfing). Also, $40 might be a bit too much. If it isn't, feel free to send Paypal donations to raam at cmu dot edu.
This is the digital equivalent of using line-out from your computer to line-in of some recording device in the analog world. I ended up using this less-than-ideal option. Other than for the installation, it is actually not too much of a hassle, and it's FREE 
. You would need the following software:
Once the installation is complete, the recording process is actually pretty simple -
Let me know if you find a simpler way. Here are the two offers I have found very useful:
Try Audible Now and Get 2 Free Audio Book Downloads with a 14 Day Trial. Choose from over 60,000 titles.
Limited Time Offer - Get Your First 3 Months at Audible for $7.49/month!
Copying contacts from old Samsung phone to iphone
My old Samsung SGH-D807 does not have an option to select all contacts (all 222 of them) and send them to my Mac. To make matters worse using the Iphone you cannot import contacts from a sim card. GSM Remote to the rescue if you have Mac OSX. Phew!
Twitter Client Popularity
I have been collecting data from Twitter (a white-listed machine) for research purposes. Here is the Twitter market share I found from my database (early January 2009) which is much different from what TechCrunch reported. They pulled numbers from TwitStat which might be bit biased.
Web 55.57%
TwitterFeed 11.32%
TwitterFox 4.32%
TweetDeck 3.90%
Twhirl 3.58%
Twitterrific 3.45%
Tween 3.14%
mobile web 3.00%
txt 2.38%
movatwitter 1.47%
P3:PeraPeraPrv 1.41%
Twit 1.23%
TwitterBerry 0.96%
TwitterFon 0.95%
FriendFeed 0.90%
Twinkle 0.65%
Perl Net::Twitter 0.63%
Tweetie 0.60%
Ping.fm 0.53%
Getting indices for a sorted array in Ruby
I keep reinventing the wheel
array = [0,4,3,2]
(0..array.length-1).sort_by{|e| array[e]}
returns indices of the sorted array
ShipTogether coverage on Planet Green
Brian Merchant of Planet Green from the Discovery network did an excellent plug for ShipTogether, which allows you to combine shipping with your Facebook friends on Amazon purchases. You should check it out. Thanks Brian!
MySQL gem on Mac Leopard 10.5
Opinionated Rails 2.2 decided to remove mysql gem.
sudo gem install mysql
throws
ERROR: Error installing mysql:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
*** extconf.rb failed ***
Could not create Makefile due to some reason, probably lack of
necessary libraries and/or headers. Check the mkmf.log file for more
details. You may need configuration options.Provided configuration options:
--with-opt-dir
--without-opt-dir ....
Just run the following command:
sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386" gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config
You need the arch i386 due to our dearest Ruby that comes with Xcode - Thank you Apple!
Downloading Albums from SmugMug (Mac/Win/Linux)
Here's a quick Adobe AIR application I put together to download your / friend's entire album from Smugmug. It's very rough (Ver 0.15) - just has the basic functionality built in. Installation instructions are below:
Installation Instructions
- Download and install Adobe AIR installer from here: http://get.adobe.com/air/ (if you don't have it installed already)
- Go to this page: http://rf-smugmug.appspot.com/latest/index.html
- Click on the Install Now button
- Click "Open" in the dialog that pops up. (This should install RapidFetcher in your Applications Directory)
===========================================
UPDATE [Version 0.26] (Jan 2, 2010)
1. Added support for downloading into separate directories per category/subcategory/album
2. Added better integration of progress.
3. Added support for Album specific passwords
4. Fixed filenames to reflect the names given while uploading.
===========================================
UPDATE [Version 0.21] (March 4, 2009)
- Fixed a bug that prevented images to be downloaded from Subcategories.
===========================================
UPDATE [Version 0.20] (Feb 19, 2009)
- Now allows Original downloads.
- Logout button added.
- Added Progress bar on downloads.
===========================================
TODO LIST:
Implement delay + message so that people wait till their album list is populated.- Allow users to browse albums by categories , subcategories, keywords
Retain the Category/Sub-Category of a Gallery (using Folders and Sub-Folders).
Dumping memcached to disk
Need to upgrade or restart your server and dump all the contents of memcached onto disk and reload later?
I came across this tool (mirrored here).
memcached-tool host:port dump > /tmp/keys
# upgrade cache
nc host:port < /tmp/keys
There is, however, one caveat:
It might not work for multi-GB memcache servers since it only dumps a part of the cache.
Getting matplotlib on Mac osx 10.5
This is the ultimate place you want to go to get your instructions:
http://ipython.scipy.org/moin/Py4Science/InstallationOSX
I was getting this stupid numpy version error, and following this instructions magically fixed it. Follow every single step to the dot, and you will be fine.
Hope it helps you!
Mechanize Timeout Errors
Just a quick note for my own reference. Looks like Timeout errors on Mechanize have to be handled separately from rest of the errors. So you will have
begin
page = agent.get(url)
rescue Timeout::Error
puts "Timed out!"
rescue
puts $!.to_s
end
