Convert audio from WMV files to MP3

A while back some radio station website or somewhere had a video in WMV of KT Tunstall performing Black Horse and the Cherry Tree and I wanted the music for a plane ride today.

Usually I'd use vsound, I've been able do save the audio track of a video in realplayer, but for some reason it wasn't working for gxine.

Anthony Barker's blog had the concise steps needed to use mplayer to grab the sound.


mplayer -dumpfile outfile.dat -dumpstream some-video.wmv

mplayer -vo null -vc null -ao pcm -ao pcm:file=audio.wav outfile.dat

lame audio.wav audio.mp3

rm outfile.dat


Go Carol Shea-Porter!

http://www.cmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070221/REPOSITORY/702210315/1028/OPINION02

The war of words between GOP Chairman Fergus Cullen and Rep. Carol Shea-Porter continues.

Last week, Cullen criticized Shea-Porter's recent speech on the House floor, saying it undermined U.S. troops. Shea-Porter called on Cullen to retract his statement.

Yesterday, Cullen declined to do so. "If she's going to be against this war, she should have the courage of her convictions and vote to end funding," Cullen said.

He described last week's House debate on a resolution expressing congressional disapproval of President Bush's troop surge in Iraq as "shameful."

Shea-Porter hit back: "If Fergus Cullen has the courage of his convictions, he should go enlist, because they're having trouble meeting their quota. He's young, he's single and he's healthy. If he needs to know where the recruiters are, call me."

Although she opposes the war, Shea-Porter said, she's "working in a bipartisan manner to protect the troops and keep them funded with everything they need."

Boston Classic Meet

Trevor placed 4th in the all around at yesterday's Boston Classic Boys' Level 5 gymnastics meet.

Here are some LoFi videos of his Rings, High Bar and Floor routines.

* Rings:

* HBar:

* Floor:

Building F-Spot from source on Ubuntu

The instructions How to Build F-Spot from HEAD are mostly correct for Ubuntu/Edgy and Ubuntu/Feisty, but leave out a number of packages that need to be installed before autogen.sh is run.

Be sure to also install the following packages:

sudo apt-get install mono-devel \
libglib2.0-dev libmono-dev libmono-system-runtime2.0-cil \
libexif-dev libgnomeui-dev liblcms1-dev libgphoto2-2-dev \
libusb-dev

And instead of make install, use make -k install since it will attempt to run scrollkeeper which attempts to update /var/lib/scrollkeeper/scrollkeeper_docs.

The offending line is: scrollkeeper-update -p /var/lib/scrollkeeper -o /home/marc/unstable/f-spot/share/omf/f-spot