turn on | tune in | strung out

Command Line Ninja

I used to have a page dedicated to these CLI modifications, but at some I must have deleted the page. Thanks to the waybackmachine.org, I was able to get the content back!

showlevel (alias l=’showlevel’)

  1. #!/bin/perl -w
  2.  
  3. my $pwd=`pwd`;
  4.  
  5. my @parts = split("/", $pwd);
  6. my $level = (scalar(@parts)-1);
  7. # Want to show which directory we are going to
  8. $level–;
  9.  
  10. print $pwd;
  11.  
  12. my $last_index = 0;
  13. my $index = 0;
  14.  
  15. while( $index != -1 && $level >= 1)
  16. {
  17.    $index = index($pwd, "/", $index);
  18.    my $space = "";
  19.  
  20.    my $double_digit_level = 0;
  21.    # Needs to be 8 because we print the spacer first
  22.    if( $level > 8 )
  23.    {
  24.       $double_digit_level = 1;
  25.    }
  26.  
  27.    for( $i=0; $i < ($index$last_index)-1; $i++)
  28.    {
  29.       if($double_digit_level)
  30.       {
  31.          # When we print the double digit level, we need to
  32.          # leave off on "spacer"
  33.          $double_digit_level = 0;
  34.       }
  35.       else
  36.       {
  37.          $space.=".";
  38.       }
  39.   }
  40.  
  41.    if($index != -1)
  42.    {
  43.       print $space.$level;
  44.       $last_index = $index;
  45.       $index++;
  46.       $level–;
  47.    }
  48. }
  49.  
  50. print "\n";

~/.profile or ~/.bashrc

  1. function k
  2. {
  3.    level=$1
  4.    cdback=""
  5.    for i in `seq 1 $level`
  6.    do
  7.       cdback=$cdback"../"
  8.    done
  9.  
  10.    cd $cdback
  11. }

New Domain

Looking around, you may be thinking: “Something’s different… What’s changed?”

I’ve moved this blog to it’s own domain: www.totiso.com which I guess soldifies the name. I played around with longer variations, but turnontunein just looked funny. This way has a more phonetic ring to it.

I’ve placed a redirect at blog.mcstudios.net so all links should continue unbroken (fingers crossed at least).

I’m trying to juggle a large number of projects and I’m unfortunately trying to chew them all at once. Hopefully some will bear fruit in the next few weeks. January has flown by and I really need to get on top of things.

King’s Quest VI OST

Kings Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow

King’s Quest VI was one of my first “obsession” games. I first played it at Matt’s house who had x386 with enough memory to run it. I can’t remember what sound card he had (either a SoundBlaster 16 or Pro Audio Spectrum), but it was something with emulated Roland MT-32 MIDI and even then, the music of this game was absolutely awesome.

Decades past… Quest Studios released both MIDI and digital versions of the music from many of the popular Sierra games. I wanted to put my new Roland JV-1080 through it’s paces, and since Quest Studios only had a Fantom XR rendition, I thought I would construct my own. Definitely check out Quest Studios for other sounds tracks from classic Sierra games!

Opening & Introduction

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Seagull Theme

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Isle of the Crown

The Beach

The Beach & Village

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The Castle

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Lord Abdul Alhazred

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Overture For a New World

Back in the day (before such modern things as compressed digital audio and mp3s), MIDI was king. For me, it was initially driven by the soundtracks of Sierra’s adventure games like Kings Quest 6 and Quest for Glory 3 and 4. It expanded into hobbyist music editors (think early, early versions of Cakewalk), and eventually I purchased a Roland JV-35 keyboard for the sole reason of improving the sound of my MIDI files (and this was before SB AWE Soundfont technology). The first “awe inspiring” composition we found on the fledgling Internet was this piece called “Overture For a New World”. I still don’t know who composed it, but it definitely formed a very lasting memory.

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This clip was recorded using my JV-1080 module (which really has some kick ass sounds for it’s time). These are pure GM patches… I have the Orchestral expansion board, but I haven’t optimized the piece for it yet.

I hope you enjoy, and if anyone could possibly identify the composer, I’d love to know (and to see if he or she did any others!)

Business Hours

HTML 5 Video Prep

So what caused me to be up till 2 in the morning? Struggling with video encoding, conversion and HTML5 fickleness. Essentially, this is not a process for mere mortals. While video in general is complicated enough, most will and should rely on a site like youtube to share their videos (at least basic creators). However due to certain, ummm… how shall we say, “ambitious” music labels, music video remixes get flagged and punted immediately. It will be nice if we can get a universally supported video codec (stay tuned for Google I/O) as it will greatly streamline this process (or should in theory).

I learned recently that Handbrake has let it’s ogg/theora capability go stale and will not bring it back. Additionally, my video editor of choice, kdenlive doesn’t generate web optimized mp4 files (where the index is at the beginning of the file). Thus, after rendering I struggled a bit to find a combination of programs that would generate the necessary ogv and mp4 videos to support the html5 video browser ecosystem. Here’s what I came up with… Modify to suit your needs.

HandBrakeCLI

HandBrakeCLI -i input.mp4 -o output.mp4 --encoder x264 --vb 2000 --ab 128 --width x --height y --crop 0:0:0:0 --optimize

ffmpeg2theora

ffmpeg2theora -V 2000 input.mp4 #generates input.ogv

It also doesn’t help that ubuntu has decided it can’t ship an ffmpeg with aac support (which means I have to modify kdenlive’s profile.xml to use libmp3lame instead).

A Wolfi Photobomb

DSC_1323