Articles by Mark Beattie

This is my blog. I like coffee, rock climbing, Linux and simple complexity. Mostly I started this blog to talk about bicycles and journal my efforts to run a sub 4′:45″ mile. That never happened. I moved to New York; I worked in lighting on films. Coffee, bicycles and running remained but I’ve added Linux to the mix as well as Z. She likes bicycles too. Things are good.

One Stop Ripping All Your FLAC Audio Needs

September 13, 2009 in Audio Server, Backups, Computer, DIY, Mark, Music by Mark Beattie | No comments

Thought I’d throw out a quick post while I was doing some searching for “best practices” in FLAC image extraction of audio CD’s for backup purposes. Basically follow this guy’s instructions:

http://hiphopiscoolagain.com/jiggafellz-step-by-step-guide-to-secure-cd-ripping-with-exact-audio-copy/

In EAC you’ll click the “Actions > Extract Image + Cue Sheet > Compressed” function using your basic FLAC settings. Also be sure to enable Accurate Rip and do the automatic detection on all the drive settings. Save a .log file. There should be three files upon final output: the FLAC image, the CUE sheet, and the .LOG. That’s it. Simple is as simple does. If you feel like embedding the CUE sheet in the FLAC you can use Foobar2000 to do such, know however that it’s non-standard as far as burning back out. Apparently it’s always handy to have a separate CUE sheet. Good to know.

UPDATE: So, two things I realized. One: XLD (X Lossless Decoder) for OS X does pretty much the same thing as EAC. However, if you’re still hell bent on using EAC and XP (couldn’t get EAC to go under Darwine) it’s important to know that it won’t easily embed cuesheets (.cue sheets) automatically as XLD does. Embedded cuesheets do make life a little easier as your playback software can look at either the .cue or the .flac file and see all the tracks from the single disc rip.

To embed a .cue using Foobar2000 right click on the .flac image file select “Utils > Edit cuesheet” a window will pop up, check “Embed cuesheet” and then “Load .cue file” from your extraction directory, click “OK” to save. Bingo bango. XLD can do this automatically. I really cannot say which is better per data integrity, YMMV. Obviously if you’re running Windows EAC is a “reference” standard.

Album art is another grey area as either the %Album Name%.jpg or simply “cover.jpg” can be used inside the album folder. Also, what about album dates? Certainly, we can agree that the album’s original release date is the important date here in metadata, and per genre conventions I tend to trust MusicBrainz. For a good read I really liked Daniel Stout’s article about simplifying down to 25 main “top level” genres and tagging comments/notes metadata with sub-genres. The moral here is you should read up as much as you can. Either EAC or XLD will do fine with rips to backup your audio CDs. Cover art and sub-genre notes I’m going to have to keep exploring.

Exact Audio Copy

Darwine you are a fine Wine.

September 10, 2009 in Apple, Computer, Leopard, Linux, Mac, Shimergo, Technology by Mark Beattie | No comments

For whatever reason I’d never played around with application compatibility layer software like Wine under OS X. Parallels and VMware are quite overkill for most people’s purposes. Usually the user may need to run one application in the guest OS and setting up an entire VM and giving 10GB or whatever over to that system, not to mention memory resources, is overkill. Certainly for developers being able to load/change machine states with VMs and sandbox their development, it makes sense, but for most end-users it’s crazy.

I haven’t checked all the applications I’d like to use, the ones I found myself booting to XP the most were A/V stuff like Foobar2000, MediaMonkey, EAC, etc. But the good news is that under Leopard Darwine v1.21.1 runs Foobar2000 just fine, a fine Wine if you will (hah). So that’s exciting. Codeweavers sells something similar called CrossOver but Darwine is free and I figured since I already had X11 installed it was worth a shot. Pretty cool stuff.

Darwine

Gaggia little Gaggia, the light of my life.

September 1, 2009 in Coffee, DIY, Mark by Mark Beattie | No comments

Found a used Gaggia Classic on newyork.craigslist.org. Took the train up to Greenwich, paid the the cash to the pusher man in the back of his SUV and took home a “marginally used” single pump/single boiler w/3 way solenoid valve home espresso machine. The Rancilio Silvia currently goes new for about $600 or more, the Gaggia Classic is usually just under $500. I paid less than half of that so I feel good about it. Now the grinding, that’s another story. My vintage PeDe hand grinder goes pretty fine, but it’s still a bit coarse for the Gaggia. I had Ellen at Sweet Leaf grind me some Hairbender with their Mazzer profi grinder and it’s perhaps too fine; I’ll try less tamp. This morning it has tended towards a bit sour extraction though blonding doesn’t seem to be happening as quickly and I’m getting the full 30 seconds if not more, which makes me think it’s too fine. With the Larry’s espresso I was using and the PeDe I was getting 15 seconds max but it was much sweeter, though likely much less extracted, so it’s a fine line.

So yeah, at this point I have some cleaning to do: back flush the porta filter basket and 3-way valve, and do a full descale of the system. So far it doesn’t look like it was too heavily used though when I pulled the screen off the group head there was a pretty serious buildup of coffee soot/sludge so I’ll likely need to do a bit of cleaning around the group.

Gaggia Classic Espresso Machine

I did find a few terrific videos concerning grinding and cleaning I’ll link to here, from Seattle Coffee Gear and their blog here, The Brown Bean:

Temperature surfing your single boiler home machine

Pulling with a bottomless portafilter to better your shot

Descaling and cleaning

Dialing in your grind settings

V1 Octalink? 105 or Dura Ace, you choose!

August 17, 2009 in Bikes, Mark, New York, Training by Mark Beattie | No comments

I found this awesome quote in rec.bicycles.tech while looking for setup tips on the old Dura-Ace 7700 Bottom Bracket:

The Octalink crank attachment, its feet of clay, has no preload
between the facets of the square spline and therefore frets (tiny
motion] elastically, even if it has no actual backlash in torque.
Aluminum parts against steel are a classic of this syndrome because
the softer aluminum frets on the steel, and instead of developing
rouge as steel-on-steel does, it makes (hard) aluminum oxide whose
repeated fracture often makes a sharp click.

I haven’t heard your BB, but I have heard such clicks. This may be
your problem and the reason why Shimano gave up on Octalink. Elastic
backlash (absence of press fit) is a phenomenon that escapes
recognition in various mechanical devices and gets passed over in
time, even when the reason is not recognized.

Jobst Brandt
So there you have it from JB himself – Octalinks may develop clicking due to their design. We’ll see. I’m not sure if the weight savings and extra $30 are worth it for the DA BB-7700 vs the BB-5500 but I’m partial to designs that allow rebuild and proper setup/adjustment, so I think I just might go for it paired with a Sugino Cospea compact crankset. In my heart of hearts I want a triple with that 12-21 cassette I’m running, something like a 28-38-48 perhaps. The current 34/44 setup is fine considering I don’t often find myself needing much bigger of a gear than 28+ mph but on downhills it is lacking. The other issue being crossover gears where I often find myself running 34 x 12-13-14 and realize I need something slightly bigger.

Sugino Cospea Cranks

Gunks’ V4 – early bike rides & Bing!

July 14, 2009 in Bikes, Climbing, Computer, Mark, New York, Shimergo by Mark Beattie | No comments

Ryan and I went to the East Trapps yesterday to Boxcar and Andrew’s Boulder problem. I mananged to send the normal Andrew’s V4 problem by late in the afternoon. No luck on the Black Rock V5, and the V3 Baby Hole almost went, but we wanted to save a little skin and tendon strength for Andrew. The heel hook to toe catch seems to be crucial, there are some more challenging variations on it, including the roof, so I look forward to going back to it.

Went for a bike ride in Central Park at 06:30 with some co-workers. Seems crazy, but I feel good. Zoe informed me that Bing! is not finding my page yet, and I know there are quite a few optimizations I can make to get more hits of out of this thing. Wordpress has gone to 2.8.1 so I probably should upgrade which might help. That’s about all I got. Lots of Gimme! fresh roasted Platinum Blonde blend these days, should’ve brought a samovar with me to the Gunks yesterday, I think it would’ve helped assist more sends.

6mo! a ‘lil Sturm & Drang & your Yama Mama

July 6, 2009 in Mark by Mark Beattie | No comments

The fake wedding last weekend at Shi Restuarant on the LIC waterfront aka our ‘Six Month Jubilee‘ went beautifully. We really enjoyed having all of our friends and family in one place and the entire weekend went smoothly with only a few afternoon showers. We send our thanks and love to all those who were in attendance and to those who could not.

On a completely different tack, thanks to CM for introducing me to the musical talents of Wolfgang Voigt through his ‘Studio 1′ work. The artist goes by many monikers: ‘Mike Ink’ & ‘Gas’ to name a couple but it’s the flavor of his 4/4 minimal deep beats that I’m enjoying and Zoe is hating. She prefers her beats with a bit less drum & bass, say a bit more melody and less like a Berliner discotheque.

Finally, the Yama Vacuum coffee pot continues to work well as I refine the proportions. I need to find some new freshly ground beans as my Gimme! ‘Picolo Mondo’ runs out. I’ve found that 3 cups of water, 4 heaping Tbls of medim-fine ground beans, and let the coffee sit in the top of the vacuum pot about 45 seconds before pulling off heat -so far- seems to work the best. Not too strong but gives a nice smooth clean flavor.

Okay, really last thing. The alt install of Ubuntu 8.04.2 LTS on the old PIII works fine with mt-daapd (Firefly) and .flac conversion but it appears smart playlists and certain .flac encodings cause it to completely kick out of iTunes. There is a newer forked version that I happened upon while surfing the internets: http://packages.qa.debian.org/m/mt-daapd.html and this is Julien Blache’s blog http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/06/12/217 which has the info about his rewrite of the fork. It sounds like he streamlined mt-daapd to the bare essentials and coded for only Linux; so long as it still works with iTunes I am happy. You can get it from his git here with the proper client: git://git.debian.org/~jblache/forked-daapd.git

A 2nd Photo set from Pre & Post Jubilee is now up on our Flickr as well. Thanks again to Mr. Ryan Webb for the beautiful photos.

WWDC no 802.11n in on the 3G S iPhone!? Drat!

July 2, 2009 in Apple, Backups, Coffee, Computer, Linux, Mac, MythTV, Technology by Mark Beattie | No comments

So, with the new iPhone 3.x OS you will not be purchasing an 802.11N enabled wireless chipset. Apparently the new 3G S model does support 4G HSDPA but not 5 GHz 802.11N wireless with the new lower powered Broadcom BCM4325. Apparently the 3G S model is a bit snappier. When is the 802.11n iPod Touch coming out? That’s what I’m waiting for. I saw that Garret had a very small LG phone that’s basically free from Verizon, if I could find that used/new and then go with a Touch remote… we’ll see how it goes…. Windows 7 RC is OK. It works, for what it’s worth.

I like Ubuntu 9.04 with MythTV…. I’m going to go back to that but probably do a dual boot leaving Win7 RC just in case…. Sadly, for Netflix playback due to Silverlight DRM a Windows XP/Vista/7 VM or even an OS X VM is necessary for Netflix streaming…. or buy a Roku box, unfortunately our TV doesn’t have 2 HDMI inputs… I’m surprised no one has been able to reverse engineer the Roku Box’s chipset and put the Silverlight DRM code out there…. Or even just have a “Roku Box VM”…. Why not, right? Seems possible, when you consider how almost all old video console games can now be played and fit on one flash drive.

I brewed with the Yama 5 Cup Vacuum brewer today. Thank you Conor and Leigh, awesome gift BTW; best of luck in your trip West. The coffee is very good, very clean, very smooth. I currently am grinding Gimme’ Coffee’s Picolo Mondo variety. Thank you Japanese vacuum brewing technology and to Chris for the awesome vintage German Peter Dienes grinder which does it job remarkably well for a hand grinder over twice as old as I am.

Yama Vaccuum Brewing by Digital Colony

My Vintage PeDe looks similar, all metal on top though

Hackable? Image from ehomeupgrade.com blog

blast you mt-daapd! blast you!

May 28, 2009 in Mark by Mark Beattie | No comments

So I thought that Firefly / mt-daapd was working under Jaunty 9.04 but I was wrong. It does in fact stream remote .mp3s but it doesn’t transcode the FLAC. Boo. Apparently it’s usual for things to break when they’re upgraded, but it worked fine on the old Dell PIII which makes me think that maybe I should go back to that. 9.04 may be required as a front-end (using VDPAU) but if I can get some 8.04.2 LTS stable love on the back-end and have all this other stuff working I’d definitely prefer that. Did you know that the AMD XP 2800+ had a 78W TDP? I sure didn’t. That’s a hot little puppy. This cheap Intel e5200 I bought is significantly faster and cooler than that guy, my only regret is that it doesn’t have VM/VT natively. Man. So sad, I thought I had it all going strong.

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