More Than Technical

Archive for March, 2011

This is a short tale about last minute information salvage, and why you should always stay optimistic about your failed hard drive.

This of course, doesn't cover up case of hard drive that is making funny noises… Read the rest of this entry »

I'm a fan of Last.fm online radio, and I have a habit of marking every good song that I hear as a "loved track". Over the years I got quite a list, and so I decided to turn it into my jogging playlist. But for that, I need all the songs downloaded to my computer so I can put them on my mobile. While Last.fm does link to Amazon for downloading all the loved songs for pay, I'm going to walk the fine moral line here and suggest how you can download every song from existing free YouTube videos.
If it really bothers you, think of it as if I created a YouTube playlist and now I'm using my data plan to stream the songs off YT itself..
Moral issues resolved, we can move on to the scripting.

Update (4/27/12): youtube-dl.py has moved: https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/, and also added a very neat --extract-audio option so you can get the songs in audio right away (it basically does a conversion in a second step).
Read the rest of this entry »

I found a nice little trick to ease the work with the very noisy depth image the Kinect is giving out. The image is filled with these "blank" values that basically note where the data is unreadable. The secret is to use inpainting to cover these areas and get a cleaner image. And as always, no need to dig deep - OpenCV has it all included.
Read the rest of this entry »

My adventures of getting frame animation on the Android 2.1 continue, and take a turn for the worse. Will I come up victorious in the end? Not sure...

Read the rest of this entry »