Monthly Archives: April 2010

Movie madness

Posted on April 19, 2010 by Jim

Outside of YouTube, MP4 is probably the most popular video file format available online.  MP4 videos exist inside a container format that’s also widely referred to as “the MP4 container format.”  Honestly, I’m not sure what the correct name for … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, Internet | Comments Off

Rules of bicycle commuting

Posted on April 12, 2010 by Jim

I’ve done a fair bit of bicycle commuting over the last 10 or 12 years, and have developed a few rules that by now are strongly ingrained. I don’t think about them often: they’re just part of how I ride. … Continue reading →

Posted in Cycling | 1 Comment

Bike happenings

Posted on April 7, 2010 by Jim

For various reasons, I haven’t been very active on the bicycle the last three years.  When I finished my birthday ride back in 2006, my bike computer read 15,795 miles.  That’s cumulative mileage since I got the computer in 1999, … Continue reading →

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Command line XML processing

Posted on April 7, 2010 by Jim

Today I got a big XML file full of yummy audio and video links that my Web crawler will just love to slurp up.  Not thinking, I wrote a quick grep command to extract some of the links and send … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Comments Off

GNU tools for Windows

Posted on April 2, 2010 by Jim

I got annoyed with Windows today.  I had this HTML file that contained a bunch of links to RSS files I wanted to download and examine.  The task before me was to extract the URLs, remove duplicates, and then download.  It’s … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, Programming | 2 Comments

Bad laptop USB ports

Posted on April 2, 2010 by Jim

My USB mouse on the laptop stopped working the other night.  I replaced the mouse with a known-working one and even it didn’t work on the laptop.  I wasn’t prepared to debug the thing at the time, so I continued … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers | 4 Comments