So as I mentioned in the previous post, I had a bit of a geek out this afternoon. I had all kinds of things I wanted to get done this weekend, but it had been a rough week, and Friday was extremely rough (note to self: an ulcer and a migraine are a bad combination). And so I decided that I both needed and deserved a day off.
In the morning I finished watching Don (yes, I fell asleep before it ended last night. Cut me a break, Bollywood movies are 3 hours long!) I spent the afternoon fooling around with my computer, figuring out how to do things I've wanted to do for a long time.
First was to get a new ringtone into my phone. Which ought to be easy, but because Verizon are bastards, they don't let you add any sound as a ringtone. They make you buy the ringtones from them. Which is stupid and annoying, but I would have put up with it if they had had the ringtone I want (the sound of the emergency phone in Our Man Flint).
But Verizon doesn't offer the Flint phone as a ringtone, so I had to find one and figure out how to get into my phone. It was complicated and confusing when I last tried a few years ago, but now it couldn't be easier. Well, it could be easier if Verizon provided instructions in the manual, but as hacks go, it's as easy as it gets.
First of all, it turns out my phone has Bluetooth. I had no idea. And my new computer also has Bluetooth, so hey! No need to buy a data cable. Next, I installed a program called Bitpim. It couldn't auto-detect my phone, but it was easy enough to tell it how to find the phone.
Once it was connected to the phone, all I had to do was grab an audio file of the Flint phone -- found a .wav file somewhere online -- and use Bitpim to convert the file to .mp3 and send it to the phone. That's it! I don't think this program existed last time I tried to do this. It made things so easy. While I was at it, I uploaded a couple of photos I had been using as wallpaper but had accidently deleted a while ago. Now my phone is all set up just the way I want it.
Next I went to work on the Don DVD. The music is so awesome, I really wanted to extract some audio files. And I also wanted to grab a few screen caps of those awesome costumes. The latter turned out to be the easiest. Apple has disabled screen capture for the DVD player, because they are toadies to the movie industry, but I found a free screen capture utility that lets you capture the contents of any window. Problem solved!
Getting the audio clips wasn't hard either, once I found a program called Audio Hijack Pro. Maybe this is old hat to everyone else, but I thought it was the coolest thing. It lets you record audio from any program, or you can record everything coming through the speakers. So you can record the system sound effects, or record from several programs simultaneously, if for some reason you needed to do that. The same people make an audio editing program I used to trim the clips. There's probably a way to do that on one or another of the programs that come with the Mac, but I wasn't sure which, or how, and so it was easier to download a program made for that purpose.
With the tools in hand I captured a bunch of great music clips from Don, and added a couple of the best to yesterday's post on the movie. (Speaking of which, if you like incredible music and you haven't already, go back to the previous post, scroll down and listen to the clips. It's worth it, I promise.)
It would also be great to learn how to capture video clips from a DVD. Does anyone know how to do that on a Mac? I found instructions online, but they seemed overly complicated. Maybe there's an easier way to do it on the PC? I keep forgetting that with the dual core, I have a PC in the house now.
I did eventually do something physical in late afternoon: split some firewood. The wood is a couple of years old and split pretty easily. I wanted to have a nice roaring fire tonight, but Thirteen has been restless all day and finally settled down on her bed, which is right in front of the fireplace. I don't want to disturb her now that she's finally sleeping.
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