Archive for June, 2011

nugget of wisdom

Thursday, June 30th, 2011

embed the fonts in pdfs from disobedient matlab outputs!

ps2pdf -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress old.pdf embedded.pdf

from:
http://www.mit.edu/~kimo/blog/matlab_figures.html

innards

Wednesday, June 29th, 2011

fooding for 5 people with sneaky meatballs! took about 40mins

blodgett recommends nom with pasta and cheeeeeeeeeeeeeese

food items:
bit of oil for frying
12 sausages
1 large onion
small pile of herbs
3 large tomatoes
1 can tomatoes
2 knorr stock cubes or 3-4 oxo cubes
optionally 1 tablespoon of sugar (but not heaped)
chilli sauce to taste

process:
1. chop onion, heat oil, fry hot till soft and browning, turn heat down
2. add herbs
3. squeeze meatball-sized lumps out of sausage skins into pan, making them a bit more round. wet hands helps greatly here, else, meat paste will stick to you
4. fire hup, fry till cooked, optionally drain out some fat
4a. now would be a good time to put pasta on eh
5. chop and add tomatoes and canned tomatoes, fry a bit to make mushy
6. add stock cubes (and chilli) and bubble for 10-15 mins, stir sometimes
7. if necessary, thin with hot water, add sugar if sauce is too tangy

EDIT: blodgett forgot to say some black pepper is good as well at the herb stage. om nom nom second dinner

the dvd, it plays!

Friday, June 24th, 2011

blodgett was having an irritating problem, could not watch dvds: preamble-y things would play, but xine etc. couldn’t access anything from title menu onwards. it would say

the source can’t be read. maybe you don’t have enough rights for this, or source doesn’t contain data

all libdvd* stuff up to date, but it would say

libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_1.VOB at 0x00004436
libdvdread: Error cracking CSS key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_1.VOB (0x00004436)!!

after some searching, blodgett discovered this sometimes happens with region problem. setting regions in xine settings not help at all, so blodgett install package regionset. it said

regionset version 0.1 — reads/sets region code on DVD drives
Current Region Code settings:
RPC Phase: II
type: NONE
vendor resets available: 4
user controlled changes resets available: 5
drive plays discs from region(s):, mask=0xFF

after changing region to ‘2’, it says:

regionset version 0.1 — reads/sets region code on DVD drives
Current Region Code settings:
RPC Phase: II
type: SET
vendor resets available: 4
user controlled changes resets available: 4
drive plays discs from region(s): 2, mask=0xFD

important parts: ‘type’ line now say “SET”, and last line now list region 2 instead of empty list of no regions! also number of available resets gone down, but this ok.

blodgett had to delete /home/blodgett/.dvdcss directory to remove old broken dvd informations.
and then plays! all mended.

ha ha rocks

Sunday, June 5th, 2011

musical piiiiieee

Friday, June 3rd, 2011

amongst many reasons to love blue danube waltz, it opus 314 of strauss