audible burning

I discovered a little problem with audible and itunes the other week.

Basically, I like to listen to audio books while I'm walking.  I found music difficult to walk to as the tempo mismatch was disruptive.  The best audio books to listen to are autobiographies and non-fiction, as they tend to be in the form of little stories and you don't have a big plot to follow.

Anyway, I use audible, which is run by amazon.  The prices are really good (you get a book a month for your subscription, which is only about £7 and they're constantly running special offers.  Also, it operates entirely through download, which is nice and convenient.

When I first started using it I did have some issues.  Firstly, they have their own proprietary format, so most programs can't use it.  secondly, the manager software that allows you to play the files is horribly flaky.  It actually looks really naff - like a "my first application" thing you'd put together when learning C++ - and has poor functionality and constantly crashed.

But also, although they allow you to burn a copy of the audio book to CD, you can only do so via itunes.  I hate itunes with a passion, so this is horrible, but also you can only burn a copy of the book once.  SO if it goes wrong, you can't simply retry it.

I do understand this, as they need to be careful with pirating, etc, but there should be a simpler mechanism for redoing it if it fucks up.

Fucks up like it did a while ago.

What I tend to do is take advantage of the offers and buy a chunk of audio books at one time.  I also stack these up with my cheap subscription book and then burn and rip them all at once (you burn them as a standard audio CD, so you can then rip them to your heart's content!) and I did that last weekend (which, given how much other stuff I was doing, I'm not sure).

Anyway, I burned the CDs in one go on Saturday and then went to rip them all on Sunday.. and discovered some of them were totally silent.  Initially I thought maybe I'd turned the volume down, but no, it turned out there was nothing but 80 minutes of silence on each CD.

After some quick investigating I discovered that this is a know problem with itunes 10.5 and audible "format 4" files and the "solution" was to use another format (format 3, which is slightly poorer quality). Initially I was worried because of the issue of only being able to burn them once, but I guess that applies to each format, or maybe they've lifted it temporarily while they fix the problem.

It was actually on the audible site I found out about the issue, but they've not actually announced it, so I Wonder how many people have been affected?

What was also weird about it was that it was random - some of the books all of the CDs had burned fine, some none of them had burned at all and others it was just one or two of the CDs.

All very weird and obviously it cost me money in the sense that blank CDs aren't free and I wasted quite a bit of time, but now I know for future reference at least.

shelves of doom

I mentioned last week I would take some pics of my shelves, so I thought I'd present those today.

There are actually two shelves.

First is the one on the right.

A: Ink Cartridges
B: Some of my important documents.
C: Stack of important (and non-important, to be frank) documents that I haven't sorted out yet (though I'll need to go through them soon as I need to find something).  Plus this is where I keep my TV listing and all my remote controls.
D: These are basically piles of anime where I've bought and imported the original Japanese anime version (and I wonder why I'm skint).  I'm also in the process of collecting the western versions and my hope is that this combo will sell quite well on e-bay.  I'm somewhat afraid that actually they won't sell at all well, so I'm also kinda ignoring them.

E: This shelf is where I keep all the unscanned Japanese anime magazines.  As you can see, it's a fair pile, but it's a lot smaller than it was.  There used to be so many that they lived on the shelf below, which is much taller.
F: These are my PC games.  The ones in the front row are those I haven't really played much yet, if at all, and the ones in the back are ones I have played and want to hold on too or want to play a bit more, but feel I should really do something about those unplayed ones first.
G: And this is the core stack of anime.  As you can see it's quite a deep shelf and you have to remember that these are stacked in two piles, one in front of the other.  That's a lot of unwatched stuff.  It's also the stuff I've prioritised to watch "first" which obviously means I have a couple of other stacks of stuff I want to watch "after" :/.

H: This stack (again, double depth) is the real life TV series (or at least non-anime and non-film) all unwatched (well, I'll have watch the majority of the actual shows when they were broadcast, but I've not watched the DVDs).
I: This stack is "films".  Again, double depth and featuring a mix of live action, foreign and anime.
J: This is my cheater stack, where I've stacked up all those series I'm in the middle of.  It's yet another way of excluding stuff from the to watch pile because I like to marathon things.
K: These cake boxes contain all of the audio books that I've already listened to.  I like to listen to audio books while I walk.  as you can see I walk quite a bit.
L: This is the main chunk of box files containing important documents.
M: My digital radio which wakes me up in the morning.  I got it as a present from my Dad and was worried I might not be able to get a signal, but actually it's great.  My digital telly is problematic, but I think it's because the aerial is pointing at the London region antennae, rather than the Meridian, which is a lot closer.  Also we've still not switched over to full digital service in either region, so signal strength is lower than it could be anyway.
N: These stacks are original Japanese manga that I'm disassembling in order that I can scan the big spreads and dramatic images.  It's really a hang over from when I used to make wallpapers and I used to find new/different/original content by doing this.  Now they're just stuck in the huge scanning backlog (they're sell for a pittance on e-bay, so this way they at least get put to some use before being chucked away)
O: My right speaker, perfectly positioned so I get great stereo effect when watching DVDs or Blu-Ray... except of course I stuck a bunch of stuff in front of it :/.


Second is the one on the left.

P: The other speaker
Q: The overspill pile.  It's mainly anime, but there's plenty of normal TV stuff in there too.  My intention is to watch this stuff after the other stuff... yeah, because I'm ever going to get through all that other stuff :/.
R: My unread books.

 S: VHS Tapes - burn the heretic!  They're old anime VHS tapes that I felt guilty about chucking away without rewatching at least once.
T: Supposed to be my unread manga pile, but they actually spill down on to the shelf below.  I've actually not being doing so bad recently with keeping on top of reading manga.
U: This is ostensibly my western comics to read pile, but it also has a bunch of CD old/empty jewel case I intended to use as spare parts to replace broken ones, but have never gotten around to.
V: These are the CDs I'm hanging on to for now.  There's two stacking crates into eh kitchen of CDs I either want to e-bay (god, the effort required) or sell on one of those "sell your DVD sites" (bound to be a rip off).
W: These fans were headed out to the garage.  Well, until this current heat wave so now they're sort of back in use.
X: I'm rapidly running out of letter, so, from left to right we've got: The DVDs I plan to take to watch on my upcoming holiday; CD cake boxes containing fansubs (I'm supposed to be sorting through them but got distracted half way); my Blu-Rays (I promised myself I wouldn't let it grow :() and a box of software.
Y: These spindles are the blank ones with DVDs and (out of picture) CDs for burning stuff on too.  Oh, and some pants.

So there you go.  The perfect shopping list for burglars.  Well, burglar nerds.  Which is very different to nerd burglars.

start of moto gp season

This weekend sees the start of the MotoGP season.

I'm rather in two minds about whether to follow the MotoGP season this year. The problem I've got is that it's going to add quite a few more hours of stuff to watch this year and I'm not sure I want to expend that time.

I've sorta been hoping that this summer would represent a bit of a "turning point" in terms of my unwatched DVD pile. I was hoping that I would roll on my new found desire to get stuff done that I've been putting to good use for the scanning into watching these DVDs.

I have actually been trying to watch some DVD stuff in the evenings and I've been doing okay, but my hope was that when it gets round to summer and interesting telly stuff dries up, I'll be able to use that time to make some sort of impression on it.

This hope is further boosted by the whole crunchyroll thing. Now that I've been tackling most of the new anime via the legal and paid for route of crunchyroll, I'm hoping that has a huge knock-on effect in terms of the DVDs or buy. Or rather, it will massively reduce the number of anime DVDs I buy (indeed, it may eradicate them altogether).

Of course, this will help me financially too - not only will I be able to sell stuff I've watched on e-bay, but crunchyroll only costs about £60 an entire year, and I can easily spend that every month on DVDs.

To this end, I've already been getting into quite a brutal mindset for the telly I watch at the moment. Once a week I like to set up all the stuff I want to watch on pre-record. This then allows me to take a look at the list and see how much of it there is and what stuff there is. If it's too much or there's some things on there I perhaps didn't like enough to keep them going, then I'll delete them.

Comedies in particular have tended to got the chop. I'm not sure if I'm becoming less tolerant, or I used to be overly-tolerant, but I've even found myself dropping things without completing the first episode.

So I think I'll suck it and see with the MotoGP season - give it maybe a couple of races and if it proves too much of a time burden or isn't that interesting, then I'll probably drop it.

edging ever closer

The weekend revealed another step closer to my weight loss goal for the year.

And it was a much more impressive change than last week, as I'd lost 4 pounds. I now need to loose about 11 pounds before the end of the year and if I can have a few weeks where I achieve weight loss like this last weekend I may well reach my goal before Christmas.

I'm not planning on doing that - the goal is still the end of the year, so if I don't get there before Chrimbo I won't be too disappointed. Still, it'd be nice to no longer be morbidly obese before Christmas... and eating and drinking too much and putting some of it back on again :/.

I think I've mentioned this before, but one of the things I've been doing to help me exercise is listen to audiobooks. I'm pretty sure I did mention it, as, in order to get the audiobooks I joined Amazon's audible site and discovered the books have a horrible DRM that it's a pain to get around (you have to burn them to CD via iPlayer (yuck) and then rip them from CD, which takes ages).

The reason I started listening to the books was because I'd been trying to listen to songs and not really enjoying it.

See, I know when people run they tend to put playlists together and listen to them, and I think that might work because you can choose songs all of a roughly similar tempo. You can then run too that tempo. But I have several problems - firstly I don't really like listening to random songs, as I prefer to listen to complete albums and secondly, the faff of putting together a playlist just seems like too much hassle.

But also, and most importantly, I found it difficult to match the tempos. Obviously, when you're listening to an album (well, an album of proper music, not some dance tracks where all the tempos are the same) you're going to get varying tempos, but also when you walk in real life, rather than run on a treadmill your pace varies all over the shop.

You might have to walk uphill for a bit, then downhill, or you might be on a nicely tarmaced pavement before then walking down some pot-holed track. So you can't really maintain the same pace of walking, so I found listening to music slightly unhelpful.

With an audiobook it doesn't matter - people don't talk at a fixed tempo. Also, you can actively listen to what they're saying and obviously enjoy it. And as a bonus it's a good way of reading and therefore doing something "productive" while I do something "unproductive" (the quotes are because yes, I appreciate that technically, doing exercise is a different sort of productive, but in my mind it's dead or wasted time, which, when you analyse it, is probably a big part of how I ended up the way I am).