Improved one-liner:
- mpg123 -s input.mp3 | faac -b 80 -P -X -w -o output.m4b -
The trouble with the above (works on the MacBook) is that you need the terminal, mpg123 and faac. These are all easy to get and install, especially if you are using macports or the fink. I’m using macports now since the fink seems sunk.
No special tools:
Import to AAC in iTunes.
SetFile type to m4b.
(You can either use SetFile (below) or just make a new file with the same contents as the old file, named m4b.) Window users have an easier time of this since there is no resource fork. Mac users may have to use the SetFile program (below) to get the file to be recognized as m4b (instead of m4a). If you don’t have SetFile, this should work too:
- Put the AAC file somewhere easy to find (like on your Desktop and call it foo.m4a)
- Start Terminal.app
- Type this into terminal.app:
- cd ~/Desktop
- cat foo.m4a > foo.m4b
Voila, You should have foo.m4b that iTunes will think is an audio book. (This Terminal.app hack is untested).
Original Procedure (which works with no extra software):
Starting with an MP3 file is somewhat painful. The overview would be something like:
- Create M4A file from MP3 that can be played in iTunes at the appropriate (reduced) bitrate.
- Convert the M4A file to an M4B file.
- Augment the M4B file with bookmarks or ‘chapters’.
UPDATE: I have found the right tools and have successfully done this without any intermediate CDs. The results are quite acceptable. Additionally, I’ve been able to use some small tools to digitize books on tape and get them into my iPod too.
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This is simply one of the most frightening examples of (mocking) what’s going on with the current Administration plans with respect to science. Textbook disclaimer stickers. The real problem here is that this will affect us far beyond 2008. This is going to pervert a whole generation of students and leave us really quite behind the times. (If you consider the times to be the late 1800s.) 
Update: Just to point out, at least one of these stickers (the upper-left evolution sticker) is REAL and was a disclaimer printed in textbooks in the Southern Jesusland US states in an approved and used high-school science textbook.
Sometimes you cannot help but laugh yourself stupid. It might be with a bunch of friends positing something about a bland celebrity or it might be reading someone elses description of a life-changing event. This story had me ROTFLMAO. Thanks PK.
draft-jennings-sipping-outbound-00
Abstract
SIP has many situations where a request can only be routed over an existing connection. This can arise in cases with firewall or network address translation (NAT) devices in the network path, over both UDP and TCP. TLS is also affected when the user agent (UA) does not have a certificate suitable for mutual TLS authentication. This draft addresses how user agents and proxies need to behave to work in these environments, and addresses keep-alive and DNS configuration issues required for high reliability connections in situations where the UA can form connections to the proxy but the reverse is not generally true.
This work is being discussed on the sipping@ietf.org mailing list.
Some days, you just need help beating on the network, or at least someone responsible for the network. In these cases, nothing quite beats (like) a CAT-5 o’ nine tails – Professional Version (of course).
Everybody’s favourite SIP stack (reSIProcate) now has (preliminary) support for Datagram TLS (DLTS) [paper, draft]. What a coup! Big thanks to Nagendra for his contribution of time, labour and understanding. Nagendra is one of the authors of the IETF internet draft that outlines the DTLS protocol, co-authored with Eric Rescorla, of OpenSSL general fame.
Update: Ekr points out that he’s not really directly involved with OpenSSL, oops.
Sitting around with some good friends we managed to have one of those really serious “I think someone is going to pass-out” laughs. Turns out it was a long and twisted journey starting with an evil step-sister and ending with a confession that Larry King Changed My Life. No, I’m not allowed to explain it, but there’s a funny link about it at RottenBrains — ok it’s only funny if you were there, so perhaps I will explain it some day.
So at the recent IETF meeting in Washington, D.C. this week I was sitting around with some fine friends and thought I’d modify a vCard in my friend’s Nokia 6600 phone.
I diligently tap CTO into the Title field and the predictive text entry (T9) shows:
BUM
Thanks! I guess T9 works better than we’re letting on.
Election 2004 Results
Robert J. Vanderbei
Vanderbei’s maps and data are well done and very interesting. Well worth reading if you haven’t seen this already. It paints a very fair picture of things, not at all the impression you get looking at the maps usually run in the mainstream media.
For completeness’ sake, the old switch page is still online. There are a few less useful tips there that I am not likely to migrate and a few tips that I haven’t had time to migrate yet.
