the BSD box
.. on Linux
Subtitles on the Netgear EVA8000
Nov 19th
I’ve posted before regarding the lack of support of DTS for the EVA80000, however the solution there is a quick codec change from DTS to AC3 and is pretty straight forward. Recently I wanted to watch a HD movie in MKV format that had subtitles, using mkvinfo on the file revealed that there was a video stream, an audio stream and the subtitles for this movie. Pressing Menu on the EVA8000 whilst the film was on allowed me to turn subtitles on, however this setting appeared broke as it never works.
I read numerous posts regarding playing movies with 2 audio streams and then subtitles in the MKV then subtitles would then work, which sounded like nonsense to me (and turned out to be nonsense as well). It’s a pretty easy fix with two solutions dependent on your situation:
1. Download the subs again from http://subscene.com/, these should be placed in the same directory and share the same name as the mkv you want to watch. You’ll find the EVA8000 finds and uses these subs.
2.Use mkvextract to extract the subs from the mkv file ‘mkvextract tracks “movie.mkv” 3:subs.sub‘ this subs.sub file will need renaming to the same as the mkv with the .sub extension as before.
Converting DTS audio to AC3 (.mkv file container) on OS X
Sep 11th
I have a lot of .mkv files that contain the audio as a DTS stream, which usually means that it can’t be read by my particular brand of media player (Netgear EVA8000). The DTS audio stream requires a paid for license to decode and/or special equipment to deal with the codec. However the AC3 codec which is another Dolby Digital codec has a free library implementation meaning that there are no licensing issues with using this codec, hence it being used with my media player. This obviously resulted in trawling the internet to find some solution to carrying out this conversion, which led me to this windows only solution:
– VID2EVA http://www.vid2eva.com/
This can be used on a mac by downloading virtualbox / vmware fusion / parallels and creating an XP machine and installing it in there and it will work fine.
However the issue that I personally have is that, the amount of extra CPU cycles needed for a virtualization layer sitting between the heavy amount of re-encoding of a data stream just bugs me. After a bit more research I found a script called mkvdts2ac3 that replaces the GUI of VID2EVA and with the right third party binaries will allow you to complete the re-encoding. A look into what would be required to build these third party binaries led me to a few other guides telling you to install xcode, download various tools, compile this, install that… It took quite a bit of messing around however I’ve gotten all of the Intel binaries sorted and the script and packaged them for convenience
– Please find the archive (tar.gz) here
–Installation instructions
Once extracted their will be a bin and a lib directory. As root move everything from the bin to /usr/local/bin directory, and move everything from the lib directory to /usr/local/lib directory.
–Usage
Open Terminal.app and execute mkvdts2ac3 as normal.
Facebook / Twitter
Jul 28th
Every revision that is made of Facebooks UI, usually results in some crazy uprising of it’s user base. This will then formulate into a group being created, something along the lines of ‘Abandon Facebook’, ‘If 1,000,000,000,000 people join they will put facebook back to the way it was’ etc…
The last change was to put emphasis on what people are doing, by making status updates the primary focus. This change made facebook pretty comparable to twitter in that you’re presented with snippets of what people are doing and what they’re up to. This cause an outcry and people instantly facebook-twittered that if they wanted to use twitter they would do etc…
The good thing about twitter is that it’s made up of people that I actually want to listen to, whereas I joined the trend of adding people on facebook that I went to school with or may have been in the same room at some point in my life. Every time I log into facebook these days i’ve got pages and pages of illegible drivel to ignore whilst trying to discern if there is anything worth reading.
So given that they all complained about the changes, they seem to have embraced this ‘micro blogging’ methodology without realizing. Shame I have to continually ignore it all the time.
Diluting the brand
Jun 30th
I was once lucky enough to see a battered escort driving past in Sheffield on a couple of occasions sporting the M badge, which amusing as it is to me usually makes nick quite annoyed. Still the common practice of sticking random performance badges on cars reached a new peak today:
A Renault Twingo ‘carrera’ !
From Sheffield to Germany
May 12th
All my worldly possessions were packed up and placed in a Ford Transit van over Saturday and Sunday. It’s quite eye opening to see your entire life and all the possessions that you feel you ‘need’ in order to function from day to day life all crammed into the back of a van. The contents of a two bedroom flat all packed into numerous boxes, wrapped in bubble wrap and stacking in the van was an upsetting sight. Not as upsetting as walking around the empty flat, especially given all of the craziness the last two years there have provided. 
The journey took over 17 hours, 2 of which were set in the VIP section of a ferry. We were delayed with accidents on the M25, road works on various roads and horrific weather through Belgium reducing visibility to only a few car lengths. Still at 10:30 the next day we finally arrived outside the new flat in Germany and proceeded to carry my worldly goods up four flights of steps (what you want after no sleep for 27+ hours). Everything is in the flat now, many boxes to go through
Journey from Sheffield to Germany
Couple of images from Germany
Apr 22nd
Thought i’d throw a couple of images from Germany taken from my iPhone on the internet. Pay particular attention to the image of Kim and Nick looking incredibly confused at the ticket machine in the train station. Also the photo of the toilet might look a bit odd, but look closer, there is a little football net and ball to keep you busy whilst on the toilet. 
Irritating
Apr 5th
I was recently reading an article on wired.com, which I must say irritated me greatly. Basically it was an article saying how the latest round of zillionaires in silicon valley have decided the newest and coolest craze over there is to drink tea. Obviously being british I was onto my first cup of tea 0.5 seconds after emerging into this world. However, they’re not going to be drinking your average ‘normal’ teas nope and don’t get me wrong i’ve tried these teas. I’m sure some zen master from the mountains of china loves his crazy brew, personally I find it like drinking swamp water. So after reading the article for a min, I decided to find out what this guy (who looked far too young to be a zillionaire) had done to net him his millions.
Turns out that he holds a world record for tango dancing …. can’t imagine that netted him millions. He also wrote a book …. this is my source of irritation.
His book ‘four hour work week‘ is apparently the book ‘du jour’, found in the book cases of all megalomaniac CEOs next to all the other bullshit and no doubt a copy of mein kampf. In this book we’re told that to be more successful we need to keep away from email/texting, instant messaging etc… as they complicate life etc…
Turns out that he built pre-release hype by posting on blogs and messaging people, what a hypocrite …. obviously can’t complicate life that much. Plus the premise of the book is ridiculous, less distractions means people will work more efficiently. I’m thinking of bringing some books out myself:
A guide to winning for Olympic sprinters - “Run faster”
How to to lose weight - “Stop eating fatty food”
Those millions are going to start rolling in any time soon, but in the mean time I think I’ll open a tea bag shop in silicon valley.
Wired article can be found here
Easy proxy configure for on the move with your mac :)
Apr 2nd
This script is a little one i’ve just thrown together to make it easy to move around and reconnect to proxies. Could be made a lot better but for basic needs it will suffice 
#!/bin/bash
# Assuming Use of Airport, change SSH_HOST and SSH_PORT and needed
NETWORK_SERVICE="Airport"
SSH_HOST="hostname"
SSH_PORT=22
PROXY_PORT=8080
echo "Checking IP of Airport to ensure network connectivity"
sudo networksetup -getinfo $NETWORK_SERVICE | grep "IP address" | grep -v v6
sudo networksetup -getairportnetwork
echo "Configuring Proxy … "
sudo networksetup -setsocksfirewallproxy $NETWORK_SERVICE 127.0.0.1 $PROXY_PORT off
echo "Connecting to SSH host. (Press Ctrl+c to exit)"
ssh -q -D $PROXY_PORT -C -N -x $SSH_HOST -p $SSH_PORT
echo " "
echo "Returning settings to default"
sudo networksetup -setsocksfirewallproxystate $NETWORK_SERVICE off
echo "exiting…."
VMware Fusion Context menus (open with..)
Mar 13th
VMware Fusion is a brilliant application allowing seemless use of numerous operating systems. However they’ve added a feature (enabled by default) that I would regard as more of an annoyance than a ‘feature’.
The default setting is to have OS X open menus polluted with the possability of opening documents with applications inside virtual machines. If I right click on a jpeg file for example, I get mspaint.exe, preview.exe, runasdll.exe etc… Should I accidentally click on any of these the XP VM will boot up, however more amusingly it looks as though it wont start the application (i.e. mspaint.exe).
To remove these context menu additions i’ve read numerous things about emptying LaunchService caches etc.. Turns out there is a correct way to do it.
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