08 Nov 2004
Speaking more regarding my MP3 player/voice recorder/toy in general.
Update: The software listed here doesn’t appear to be working for newer hardware. There is updated software available in a more recent post, here.
I’ve been wondering if it’s possible to do a direct digital transfer of voice recordings made on my little MP3 player thing. Turns out it is. This applies not only to my Pavo PM-505, but also to BenQ’s Joybee range (obviously only those capable of voice recording), and any other player which saves files with an .act extension. The utility I’ve found also handles .rcd and .rec files, however I’m uncertain as to what players save files with these extensions by default… I know I could set mine up to save with different extensions if I fiddled with configuration files, but I haven’t, as I see no point in this.
As you may have imagined, I’ve come across some software which is capable of converting these formats into something rather less obscure, namely WAV or MP3 file formats. The software, named “Sound Convert Tool 2.0″, is available freely for Windows systems from a Geocities website, at http://www.geocities.com/sound_converter/. In the interests of longevity, and given the ability of Geocities to come and go faster than Cities and Thrones and Powers according to Rudyard Kipling, I’ve mirrored the application here. (418.4 KB ZIP archive)
If you’re the rights holder to this application, and would prefer this utility wasn’t hosted here, I’d request you contact me and I’ll take it down. There is a notable absence of any and all attribution on the Geocities page, so not only did I have no-one to contact, I also don’t even know for sure that the Geocities page was the original place this software was published. Dubious ground, and if you know any better, please, get in touch to clear things up.
The readme is fairly self explanatory, and it converted a recording slightly over an hour long (one hour and three minutes twenty-five seconds, to be exact) to MP3 format (which involves converting to WAV, then encoding an MP3) in probably around five minutes… I wasn’t clocking it, though. Tis nifty.
Other manufacturers who may have branded this equipment: JP’s, JNC, Acer, BenQ, Pavo, iRiver, EFX, .BXCUTE, Digital, DX, Speed, Datum and probably others. Yes, that was blatant Search Engine suckery, but there’s a distinct lack of clear information out there regarding this conversion, and these MP3 recorder type things are popping up everywhere. If your player/recorder isn’t there, and records ACT, REC or RCD files, let me know and I’ll add it to the list.
07 Nov 2004
Ooh yeah. I’ve just checked out my hours at the place I’m working next week. 9:30 am ’til 4:30pm. Josh is happy. To make things better, I live a mere 15-20 minute walk from there, so guess who’s going to be sleeping in this week?! ME!
P.S. If you’re a post-HSC unemployed bum, no need to brag about your lack of… anything ;)
06 Nov 2004
I’ve been racking up a few too many 404‘s of late, which I think is due to hits on my robots.txt file falling flat on their face (ooh, alliteration!) — this means that search engines are looking for this page, and getting errors happening. Reduce your 404‘s today, and let search engines use their time (and your bandwidth) more efficiently!
robots.txt is the first file requested by a search engine (or any other robot) as it begins to spider a website. You can use this file to (theoretically) allow or disallow all search engines, or specific search engines, access to certain pages of your website. Each spider should have its own unique identifier, or user-agent string, which can be used to apply specific rules to it in a robots.txt file.
Personally, that’s of little relevance to me: blanket rules seem to work quite nicely. robots.txt files should be placed in the root of your web site directory — so, in the case of this website, the appropriate place to locate it is http://www.joahua.com/robots.txt.
With WordPress, the blogging software in use here, there are some files which spiders have absolutely no need or reason to access — this should not only result in bandwidth reductions, but also in (possible) security improvements.
My robots.txt file, as of around 4:30pm today, looks like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /blog/wp-comments-post.php
Disallow: /blog/wp-login.php
Disallow: /blog/wp-register.php
The contents of it are fairly self-explanatory, I think, but basically this stops search engines from looking in my cgi-bin directory, and from hitting the comment posting page, or trying to login to my administration area for WordPress.
Whether a bad hit on robots.txt from a search engine counts as a 404 error with Awstats, I’m uncertain: at any rate, the number of logged 404‘s (speaking of raw Apache statistics) should decrease now that there’s actually a file there.
More information can be had at http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/active.html
06 Nov 2004
I’ve acquired a new scanner today, namely, an Elux U-3620P flatbed. A quick web search reveals illiterate teenagers swearing about a lack of drivers for Windows XP (at least, I hope these people aren’t considered literate and mature in… well… any society on the planet), and a whole lot of not-much information about the actual capabilities/performance of the scanner.
Elux apparently went out of business (cause undetermined) a few years ago, so they don’t have a useful website full of specifications which I can check, either. The whinging would suggest that these scanners are slow and deliver poor image quality, but I’m not compelled to believe them without seeing this thing working first. Which, incidentally, can’t happen just yet, because the only cable I have which’d connect it nicely happens to be packed away in a box taped shut.
Speaking of cables, though, I find it most curious that this device does not have a visible DC power inlet! I’ve been told to “look harder” by various people… but, at this stage, I seriously can’t see it at all! If it weren’t all single piece construction, I’d take it apart to prove it… that said, it is single piece constructed, and I’d rather wait until I had a cable to prove or disprove my point rather than break it trying to discover before-hand.
This is all based on the premise that there is some form of Linux driver support for the damn thing… if not, I’d presume there are Windows 9x drivers out there, somewhere, but I’d really rather not. One of the reasons I suspect it (the scanner) was performing slowly for aforementioned illiterates, is that they were running on a system with a parallel port which made everything grind to a halt when used. This isn’t a problem on my main desktop, but on some of the 9x boxes, it certainly would be!
I’ll see if I can hunt down a spare parallel cable some time this week, and then give it a whirl with XSane (or *shudder* Twain). Worst case scenario, I’m sure there’s something crazy I can do with the lights inside a scanner… we shall see.
05 Nov 2004
Don’t see the movie “Hero”, unless you enjoy constant martial arts fighting with rather poor chroma key work, disjointedly linked to a vague suggestion of plot, which consists of the retelling of three alternate versions of a story leading to an event which does not happen.
The hero is riddled with arrows as a traitor, and given a hero’s burial. There, a spoiler. Now you don’t need to see it, do you?