Finished Business

Y'know those things you've been meaning to do for some time, but just haven't got around to? Well I have more than a few things on that lengthy list. :P But what really frustrates me is having things on that list that just shouldn't be there. Well I got rid of two of those little gnats recently. (Hmmm... for some reason "recently" looks really weird. I feel like its spelled wrong, but know its not.)

A few weeks back I tried to rip some audio from a couple of DVDs packed in as extras for some albums I bought. I searched around and found some pretty helpful tutorials for doing this on the Mac, but I failed miserably. :( You're golden if you can extract AC3 files from those DVDs, but I was only able to get PCM files from mine. They were horrible. I was sure I'd never get much use out of the programs I downloaded to get the job done. But I recently bought the 2-disc edition of Quentin Tarantino's "Death Proof" (2007) on DVD and fortune smiled upon me. ;) Soon after I watched "Grindhouse" on opening day in the theatre I was hooked by the track that played during the end credits: April March's "Chick Habit". I bought the track on iTunes as soon as I could. I was happy. In a blissful ignorance. Until I watched "Death Proof" again on DVD. Then I learned that the track I'd been listening to was incomplete. It was missing a critical segment sung in French. Well guess what I set out to do? :P Needless to say, I now have the "complete" version of "Chick Habit" sitting in my iTunes library. :D It sounds so pristine. I'm happy. ;) I'm so glad I was able to salvage that DVD extraction/conversion workflow... 'cause it works like a charm for true DVDs.

If you're on the Mac and interested and doing the same thing that I did, check out that link I provided above (I found post #14 by darelon to be the most helpful. :D ) and download these programs: 0SEx and mAC3dec. Happy ripping! Enjoy. ;)

This next little to-do has been long overdue. I don't know why it is, but my poor little iMac G5 doesn't do very well with Flash content. My iMac is really old school, still working with the PPC architecture, and the processor goes insane when it runs into a piece of Flash it doesn't like. Those fans start spinning and I start fuming. >:O I can't stand it! But it's not a problem with all Flash content, mainly embedded third-party supported ads. Grrr! Well my brother's been using the Flashblock extension for FireFox for what seems like centuries and I love it! I just never installed it. :P I don't know why. Chalk it up to extreme laziness. Anyway, I was ranting about system resource-hogging Flash ads recently and a friend of mine suggested that I run Flashbock. I already knew about it, and knew I should... but something about that night finally pushed me toward the installation. :P I'd like you to all know that I'm now a proud user of Flashblock and it's made a world of difference in my life. I'm happy yet again! :D (Doesn't take much, does it? :P )

DS333, happy. :D