Week of 21st July, 2014

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Monday, 21st July

New fortnight starts today - a 10 shift, which, as usual, is mainly concerned with short-form material and own productions. Of which there weren't many.

The ingest area, where I work, is still the coolest part of the building - which isn't saying much. It's still too warm, just cooler than everywhere else.

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Tuesday, 22nd July

More of the same. Although, the services manager has announced, by e-mail to "everyone@", that a temporary chiller will be installed on Thursday. Can't be too soon...

One of my colleagues has a Win 8 laptop. by HP, that has suffered a nasty infection of one of the Web search toolbar add-ons. It's one of the most invasive, obnoxious and tenacious of the breed, and she's finally had enough. I have the machine for a complete reinstall from the restore partition. There's no significant user data on it, so the way is clear.

I've never done this on a Win 8 machine, and there's no COA sticker on it, so where do I get the install key? Judicious research on the web suggests that said key is embedded in the UEFI BIOS, although BIOS is not really the correct term anymore. Anyway, the Win 8 installer detects this key at install time. In fact, it's  allegedly so tenacious about it that you can't install any other version of any flavour of Window$ without reverting to "legacy boot mode". Which, incidentally, is what inspiration's vendor did to put Win 7 on him. And I still wish I could turn off PXE booting when an ethernet cable is plugged in.

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Wednesday, 23rd July

It's a bit cooler today, which is good, because I have to get the rail tickets for Yeovilton today - or tomorrow, but I need to get them before Saturday. And, as is her wont, Jane gave me a shopping list... a short one, which I could fill before having lunch.

When I got home, I decided that setting up torrentpi was the next item on my agenda, since all the necessary cables are now to hand. So, run a CAT 5 cable from the stairwell switch into the front room - which is off-limits to minded kids. And since this is the summer holiday, minded kids there are - all day.

Then I plugged up torrentpi, stinker, and the TP-Link ethernet switch, using the TP-Link's own power brick. I could then see that torrentpi had picked up an IP address in my guest scope - 192.168.x.128/26 - which allowed me to ssh in and run raspi-config. ntpd is installed, so time will be correct - it's within 20 ms of UTC  now, and this will only get better with time. I also had a brainstorm, and added gpsd, which I don't need, since torrentpi will not have a GPS receiver connected to him.

Now for the first of torrentpi's raisons d'etre - get-iplayer - which is a programmatic way of getting material off the BBC's iPlayer site. Alex Eames has a good description of how to install it, here, although that is an amended version of a previous post, and has much extraneous material in it.

Summarising, type the following lines at a Raspbian commnd prompt (it is assumed that you are running a recent version of Raspbian Wheezy)

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install get-iplayer ffmpeg atomicparsley libmp3-info-perl

This will result in a conventional apt-get style install of the indicated packages -

get-iplayer is what this is all about, ffmpeg is a general-purpose command-line tool that is used to reformat and re-encode media files, and atomicparsley is another command-line tool that will add the MPEG-4 equivalent of ID3 tags to the file.

Not mentioned is the fact that get-iplayer is a monstrous perl script, and thus has an absolute dependence on perl. This dependence is satisfied by the fact that Raspbian includes perl.

Alex seems to say that you can invoke get-iplayer from your home directory, with the usual syntax: ./get_iplayer. That didn't work for me - there's no get-iplayer directory under /home. I had to invoke it from where the installer left it, with:

/usr/bin/get_iplayer

which showed me a rapidly scrolling list of over 1,000 TV programmes. Not really what I wanted (the BBC Proms Radio 3 PasB files) but saying:

/usr/bin/get_iplayer proms

showed me the single video file, for the opening night, with it's ID number (126) which I could download by saying:

/usr/bin/get_iplayer --get 126

and 1.8GB, and some little time, later, it's done.

Reading the voluminous text that scrolls up the screen as all this happens, led me to a documentation site, which has a complete description of how to drive get_iplayer, thus allowing me to invoke it with the correct options to download all currently extant PasB audio files. And Auntie has been kind enough to break out the interval talks - each concert exists as files for each part, and another file for the interval talk.

That got me something in excess of 5GB of files - the audios are .aac encoded at 320kb/sec. VLC will play them, and Audacity is claimed to import them.

So it works...which is a result.

But the attempt to power the TP-Link switch off the EasyAcc 5-port USB power supply didn't  Via its own power brick, it's fine. I suspect the power brick emits a few tenths of a volt more. So the eBay-supplied USB A to 5.5/2.1mm barrel conector pigtail is no use, which means the Raspi cluster will need 2 power sockets, not one. I can live with that.

And I need to do fewer font effects - aolpress has crashed at least 10 times while editing this post, with a complaint about "font nesting levels".

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Thursday, 24th July

Lots of work with get-iplayer. Successfully.

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Friday, 25th July

Our 33rd Wedding Anniversary

And also Jane's birthday. I'll draw a veil over how many birthdays she's had - a gentleman never asks... Not that I'm much of a gentleman.

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Saturday, 26th July

RNAS Yeovilton Air Day

This was a good day out. The weather forecast was good, and was entirely accurate - although I suspect that they underestimated the temperatures.

So, roll out of bed at 04:30, needing to depart by 06:00 to get to Waterloo station by 07:10, to catch the train to Exeter St. Davids, that just happens to stop at Yeovil Junction.

At 09:40 - 2 minutes late - we arrive. And there's no shuttle bus to Yeovilton, half-an-hour away. Eventually, the bus arrives, at 10:10, but it's only a single decker, so not big enough to collect all the people who were waiting by this time. I almost got on. Then we discovered, next bus at 11:00! Ungood. This was a Buses of Somerset bus and driver.

About 10 minutes later, a First Bus arrives. He's going to the bus station in Yeovil town, where there will be another Buses of Somerset bus to take us further. No charge by the First bus driver. Yay!

Sure enough, at the bus station, there's the Yeovilton shuttle. So we all pile on, springing UKP5 a head for the return trip.

Eventually, we arrive at RNAS Yeovilton, just before the festivities start at 11:00. UKP25 to get in, plus UKP6 for the souvenir programme. And it's already baking hot. I had the Dunsfold rucksack, with my umbrella strapped to it (and a more redundant item would have been difficult to imagine) plus a litre water bottle clipped to my belt. That bottle is either US mil-surplus, or a close facsimile thereof, and it fixes to your belt with metal ALICE clips. I now know why the military fora contain many fulminations about ALICE clips - they dig in. The more modern MOLLE straps seem to be better.

Then the show started, and a good show it was, lubricated by a pint or 3 of beer. The Red Arrows weren't in attendance - they had 2 shows up North - but the Vulcan and the BBMF all displayed in due time, together with a number of other aircraft. The Eurofighter Typhoon paid a flying visit - a quick blast down the runway, before disappearing to another venue - waking everyone up in the process.

Eventually, after the Commando demonstration that always ends the display at Yeovilton, we all made our departure. I was lucky enough to get onto the last-but-one bus back to Yeovil, so all was well there, but I suspect there were people left stranded. And the taxi fare is UKP19, one way! Also ungood. Buses of Somerset seem to make no more than a token effort to provide a service in support of the Air Day.

So I retraced my steps to home, getting back at about 23:00 - a long day, but a good one, despite the snafu over buses.

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Sunday, 27th July

And then it's back to work - not that there's much to do. Most of the jobs were cleared yesterday. I just had 3, all HD. And there was time to complete them, upload to the media management system as HD, spot check and approve them, wait for the transcode to SD to complete (we now use a quicker, lower quality transcoder setting, since HD material airs in HD on capable channels, and normally doesn't channel hop to SD-only channels) and check the transcodes before leaving. The SD transcode is a necessary step, since the lo-res copies for subtitling and transmission timing are made from the SD version. I am advised that the new site will be all-HD internally, with real-time downscaling at TX time for those channels that only air SD. So it is said... Once it all gets built. The move date keeps sliding later and later.

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