Dear Santa, thank you for the dolls and pencils and the fish. It's Easter now, so I hope I didn't wake you but... honest, it is an emergency. There's a crack in my wall. Aunt Sharon says it's just an ordinary crack, but I know its not cause at night there's voices so... please please can you send someone to fix it? Or a policeman, or...
Back in a moment.
Thank you Santa.

Tuesday, October 25

Anime

Aha, He Cried

VirtualDub doesn't automatically insert keyframes if you do a direct stream copy. That's why sometimes I can't get a clip to start at exactly the right frame - but it works if I use a different episode of the series. It's latching on to the nearest keyframe, and some encoders are very sparing with them.

Choose fast recompress from the menu, though, and you're all set.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:42 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Monday, October 24

World

All That's Missing Is A Church Door

44 Reasons Why the Chomskians Are Mistaken. It's talking about Chomsky's infamously bogus lingustics, not about his infamously bogus politics. (Although the same problem - a cargo-cult approach to understanding the world - underlies both.)

(via Amritas)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:56 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Sunday, October 23

Anime

Anime Clip Torrent

I have put up a torrent of my collection of anime clips - opening and closing credits of various shows - here. The tracker page is here if you're interested. The total size is 1,830MB, so it might take a while to download.

Currently there's just the one torrent containing all the clips; creating and seeding dozens of torrents is too much trouble unless there's a lot of interest in this.

Let me know if you have problems downloading (other than speed; it will be slow to start with until I get another seed running), or with playing any of the files.

Oh yeah, this includes the opening and closing credits of Kamichu! in "glorious fake HDTV". Fake it may be, but it is significantly better than the standard 640x360 files.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:52 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Wednesday, October 19

Geek

OMG LOL

The Daily WTF. It's sort of a funny version of comp.risks:
The Dexia Bank ATM machines are expiriencing a curious problem. The machines stop functioning when someone enters the number 7, making it impossible for people with a 7 in their pin (personal identification number) code to perform a cash withdrawal.

The problem has been occuring for a month. To prevent people from running out of cash, they are able to perform cash withdrawals inside. "We are expiriencing a problem with the software", a Dexia spokesman admitted last wednesday in the daily journal Het Laatste Nieuws, "the problems should be solved within three weeks."

I think I know the programmer.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:13 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Anime

Chu Chu Chu!

I have for some time now been struggling to extract a video clip of the closing credits of Kamichu!, which is one of the best shows to come out of Japan this year. I do this all the time, and have amassed quite a collection - which is currently off-line until I can make it into a torrent, because it was using up more than 20GB of bandwidth a day.*

Anyway, for this work I use the simple but very functional VirtualDub. VirtualDub lets me say "start here" and "stop there" and snip out a minute and a half of video without the time-consuming (and quality-destroying) re-encoding. It just grabs what's there, bit-for-bit (and creates new keyframes as necessary).

But VirtualDub is designed for AVIs with fixed bit-rate MP3 soundtracks. Kamichu! has been released so-far as an HDTV** Matroska file with AAC audio. Standard VirtualDub won't have a bar of it. VirtualDubMod, which has been patched to handle Matroska files, crashes violently on Kamichu!

I'm not that easy to stop, however. I used MKVextract to split the Matroska file into an XVID-encoded video-only AVI and a separate AAC audio file. Then I used All Converter to turn the AAC file into a raw WAV. Then I fired up VirtualDub again, and told it to load the video from the AVI and the audio from the WAV, and re-interleave them into a new AVI file and snip out this bit (the opening credits) and that bit (the closing credits) for me.

Which it did. And lo, the opening credits were very good. But the closing credits were teh suck, because the audio was hugely, and I mean hugely out of sync with the video, and the main reason that the closing credits of Kamichu! are cute is that they are in sync with the music. As you will see when I put them up for you to download. Via Bittorrent.

This caused a certain amount of puzzlement as it slowly dawned on me that not only were the audio and video out of sync, but that the problem became worse over time. Close examination indicated that even if they were in sync at the start of the clip, they were out by fifteen or twenty seconds at the end, which is a hell of a lot.

This, it turns out, is because the closing credits run at 30 frames per second, while the rest of the show runs at 24 fps. Why anyone would wish to do that I have no idea, but that is indeed what they have done. In the original video file it works just fine, but when I clip out the closing credits, it falls apart. But if I take that clip and tell it hey, you run at 30 fps... It works!

But you can't see it, because we have no bandwidth left.

* Between the anime fans and the bastard referrer spammers, the bandwidth well has run dry this month. I was planning to get another server to offload some of our stuff, but the hosting company seems to have run out as well.
** As it happens, it's really just up-converted anamorphic widescreen 704x480 video, not native 720p. It still looks pretty.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:47 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Tuesday, October 18

Geek

How Cute

There's a bug in the firmware of the Western Digital 200JB (also the 200BB, 180JB and 180BB) such that if you use them with a 3Ware 7000 or 8000 series RAID controller, after a certain amount of time (days or weeks) they will cause a spurious timeout and the controller will consider them to have failed.

Mirroring these drives merely gives you a longer window before they disappear.

Well, at least now I know why half a million files just disappeared.

There's a patch. A patch. For a hard disk. Oh, joy.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:24 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 96 words, total size 1 kb.

Monday, October 17

Life

Globalicious

So here I am, lying in bed, watching anime and eating Peanut Butter M&Ms.

Like Pocky, Peanut Butter M&Ms are not available in Australia. Twenty years ago, that would have meant that they were not available in Australia. Today it just means that you have to look around a bit.

Munch crunch.

Okay, it sounded revolting, but it seems to work. I think I still prefer the peanut ones, but these aren't bad.

Next up: Almond.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:55 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 78 words, total size 1 kb.

Art

Pixy Goes To The Movies

I went and saw Howl's Moving Castle today. That makes four movies I've seen (at the cinema) in the past month; more usually I'm likely to see one or two in a year.

It also makes four out of five of the current movies that I want to see -

Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-rabbit
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Serenity
Howl's Moving Castle
Corpse Bride
Only the last remains, because it doesn't open here until next week.

Howl's Moving Castle is a great (but flawed) movie by Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, My Neighbour Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service, Castle in the Sky, Porco Rosso...). Rotten Tomatoes gives it 84%, which as far as I can see is the worst rating they have given to any Miyazaki film.

I'm planning to put up a review of all five movies at some point, so for now I'll just note that if you enjoy animated films or fantasy stories at all, this is a must see while it's on the big screen. But as I noted (and unlike most of Miyazaki's previous work) there are a couple of rough edges.

I can't say for certain whether these crept in during translation (possible for one of the problems), are present in the original novel by Diana Wynne Jones (most of Miyazaki's films are from stories of his own creation), or are Miyazaki's fault. I'll be seeking out the book tomorrow, so I'll be able to clear that one up at least.

As to what the rough edges are... Well, wait for the review.

Ah. Okay. From one of the reviews on Amazon:

Diana Wynne Jones is much more subtle with her lessons in the book than Miyazaki is in the movie so don't expect the "war is bad" and "love is good" lessons to be thrown in your face. In fact, there isn't even a war in the book! That was something that was added in the jump from page to screen.
Yes, that was the worst of the rough edges. Sure, war is bad and love is good, but before now Miyazaki has been able to communicate this without, well, throwing it in your face. Now I must buy the book.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:45 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 379 words, total size 3 kb.

Life

Mmm, Chocolate

I have here a bag of mixed chocolate-coated coffee beans (dark, milk, and white chocolate), a bag of Peanut Butter M&Ms, and a bag of Almond M&Ms. The latter two are not available in Australia. Err, that is, they are available in Australia, but they cost more. Finest quality imported chocolate, these are.

I went to the movies today

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:42 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 63 words, total size 1 kb.

World

Message -> Mark -> As Junk

I've been trying to convince Thunderbird that the daily emails I received from the Washington Post are spam, but for some reason it's an uphill struggle. I don't know why Thunderbird refuses to block it, but this is why I want it to:
Sunni Turnout Is High In Vote on Iraqi Charter

Insurgents largely suspended attacks, granting Sunni Arab voters a chance to try to defeat the U.S.-backed charter and giving much of the country a rare day of peace that belied the deep fractures exposed by the vote.

Well sure, that's a piece of nice, straightforward, fact-driven reporting and not an abysmally biased opinion piece masquerading as news at all.

Fortunately we have blogs; in this instance The Belmont Club. At least Wretchard knows the difference between reporting and speculation.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:34 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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