Friday 29 May 2009

Ever wanted to retrieve space on your shelves from all those old CD's? Try using Exact Audio Copy (EAC) to convert all your CD's to "flac" files (Lossless) then stream them to anywhere in the house with Logitech's Squeezebox family of products.
You can then store all those older CD's into your loft as hard backup for your copied files. I would highly suggest ensuring that your hard drive is mirrored though because ripping the CD's to hard drive takes ages and you really won't want to do that more than once....
If you also want MP3 versions of your music, I would highly recommend the "front end" for FLAC. It can convert FLAC to mp3 very easily.

Thursday 28 May 2009

Ubuntu 9.04 - Upgrading to OpenOffice 3.1


If you want to take advantage of OpenOffice 3.1 upgrades on your ubuntu 9.04 installation, then the instructions are here:

http://ubuntumanual.org/posts/175/upgrade-to-open-office-3-1-in-ubuntu-jaunty-intrepid-hardy

Strangely the "About OpenOffice" dialog still shows an OpenOffice.org 3.0 graphic but as you can see the actual version is correct

Origami rose

At last I have managed to create the amazingly complex version of the origami rose by Kawasaki Toshikazu. It took about five attempts.
Each rose takes 20 minutes to make and requires highly complex pre-folding. Now I just have to make 20 of them for my daughters wedding table decorations!