lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

A quote by Steve Jobs

When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth.

The crap dished out on the Indian tv is mind numbingly bad. The actors in those serials go through the complete spectrum of human emotions in 30 minutes (even less than 30 minutes, if you factor in the ads). The really disheartening part about the whole thing is that there is no conspiracy.

If you have not seen Futurama the Movie: Bender's Big Score yet, do it as soon as you can get your hands on the dvd.

Since my constant companion, the video ipod, cannot play Speex format, I needed to convert a bunch of files .spx files to mp3 format.

This shell script should do the work for you (it will work for files with spaces in them)

sudo find ./ -name '*.spx' | while read FILE; do ogg123 -d wav -f - "$FILE" | lame - "$FILE.mp3" ; done

The -d wav -f - argument to ogg123 make it(ogg123) use the WAV driver and output the result to the stdout (given by -f -). The stdout from ogg123 is passed to lame, which converts the wav to mp3. Caveat: The id3 info in the spx file is lost and you have to add that to the mp3 files manually.

One interesting thing I came to know in this was how to loop over files with spaces in them. This is done by piping the result of find to the while read part. More details of this is here

Phew!

Link to the AP story

Do you regularly troll through YouTube looking for episodes of your favorite TV shows or to find scenes from a movie you are planning to go to or to find recordings from a conference you could not attend?

In that case, you might find my youtube search - sort by video playtime Yahoo! pipe useful. The pipe has been run 1813 times and it already has 12 clones.

I made the pipe to find myself episodes of Dilbert. Here are some other useful searches

• some nirvana videos
• very relevant dilbert videos - click on any of the videos and then move to 'related videos' from there on
• clips from The Office, one of my favorite shows. Gory details about the show
• clips from Coffee with Karan, one of the favorite shows of my SO
• OSCON videos

## Geek notes

The base url of the pipe is <http://pipes.yahoo.com/lunatech/ytsbyduration>. Add your query string with '?q=string' to the base url. For example, <http://pipes.yahoo.com/lunatech/ytsbyduration?q=Yahoo>.

Let me know if you found this useful. Happy Tubing!