Apr 30 2011

Early birthday present

As much as I don’t want to think about it, my birthday is a week from today. I got a great early birthday present though. A few months back, I was blown away by the sound quality of the Bose AE2 headphones. I’ve wanted to get a really nice pair of headphones (given the amount of music I listen to in the office), but hadn’t ever found the right pair. The AE2s fit around the ear (Around Ear 2), and they are absolutely incredible! They work wonderfully for the myriad types of music I enjoy each day, from the pure beauty of Libera, to the new-age sounds of Enya, to the opposite extremes of Anberlin and even the loud crunch of As I Lay Dying.

More information about the AE2s can be found on the Bose website. Now that I have these outstanding headphones, I will be able to write an even better review of the new Libera mini-album Song of Life that came in the mail a couple days ago (can’t believe it only took four days from Tokyo). I will likely write the review tomorrow.

What an incredible birthday present! I can’t express how much I appreciate such a thoughtful gift.

Apr 29 2011

Ripping woes

Well it hasn’t exactly been the most fun of days in the world of troubleshooting. I bought a bunch of used CDs recently, and decided that I needed to rip them to my new machine. I started on the process, but then three of the new discs didn’t rip. They just sat there. I put the discs in an older computer, and they ripped just fine. I then decided to try them again on the new machine. They ripped incredibly slowly, but they worked. However, they skipped all over the place, but the rips on the old machine didn’t. I concluded that I have a bad optical drive.

However, I just noticed something. My new machine has version 2.1 of Asunder, and my former machine has 2.0. I tried downgrading to 2.0 on my new machine, and the CDs ripped just fine with no noticeable skips. There was one minor one that I don’t think I heard on the older machine, but that could have been due to a multitude of other factors.

After these trials, I believe that the issue may stem from this line in the changelog:

3 Jan 2011 – 2.1
================
…
– No longer passing -Y and -Z options to cdparanoia, for better quality rips. This was reported to freeze on badly scratched disks, but perhaps the cause was different.

I will likely file a bug with the developer of the application regarding this situation.

Apr 28 2011

Epson Perfection V30 scanner inside a VM

I had forgotten about my scanner that I bought a while back for scanning old family photos. Since scanner support in Linux (via the SANE backend) is not all that great, and considering I often wanted to manipulate the photos in Photoshop, I rarely even hooked it up to my main computer. Now that I use VirtualBox for a Windows XP VM, and use Photoshop inside of that environment, I thought it might be worth a shot to attempt installing the scanner inside the VM. The scanner was surprisingly easy to set up under VirtualBox 4.0.6. I simply hooked it up to the host machine, started the VM, went to Devices –> USB Devices –> Epson V30/V300 [0100], and checked it in order to enable USB passthrough. The scanner was readily recognised. For this particular scanner model, I had to install three separate drivers in order to allow for all of the scanning functions (TWAIN import in Photoshop [standard scanning], direct scanning from the buttons on the scanner itself [the event manager driver], and the copy utility).

I like it when things “just work.” 🙂