This is the ringtone for Derek Flint’s direct line to the President in the 1966 movie, Our Man Flint, which was a sort of parody of the James Bond movies of the time. The ringtone would also be later used as the sound of the electronic handcuffs in Hudson Hawk.
Category: ramblings
Objective-C on Twitter
I run the @objectivec account on twitter, aggregating many RSS feeds of developers and other Mac/iOS/Cocoa/Objective-C development blogs. That’s it. Just wanted to note that. If you want to be added or removed (or have suggestions for same), get in touch.
Receipts, Neat and Otherwise, on Mountain Lion
I have an old Neat Receipts scanner Scanalizer. I also have a Mac. Unfortunately, it seems that Neat Receipts may abandoning the Mac market with the release of their Neat 5 software, as it still only works on Windows (so far), and the Mac Neat 4 software still doesn’t work correctly on Mountain Lion. (This…
3D Snowflake
With some of the holiday cards I send out this year, I included a plastic snowflake ornament that I printed on my 3D printer. Granted, a relatively flat ornament is not the best design to show off what a 3D printer can do, but it is one that fits inside a holiday card envelope and…
Podcast URL Schemes on iOS
I’m updating an app to make it easier to subscribe to a podcast in your listener app of choice, and am trying to see which URL schemes work with which apps. So far, I have: podcast:// — opens in Instacast 2.x — podcast://www.aalgar.com/the-sarcastic-voyage-podcast.xml pcast:// — opens in Apple Podcasts, [or Instacast 1.x on iOS 5.x…
A Puzzle
In the course of transferring film (24, or for our purposes, 23.976fps) to NTSC (29.97fps or 59.94 interlaced fields per second), we get what’s referred to as 3:2 Pulldown. What happens is that we get three fields from one frame of the film, two fields from the next, and repeat this forever. So, for frames…
Ripping Blu-ray to iTunes on Mac
This is a little thing, but as it took me a while to hit on the best combination for my needs, I thought it might be useful to others. Of course, make sure that ripping the movies that you own on Blu-ray for your own personal use is actually legal in your jurisdiction.
That assumed, you’re going to need a Blu-ray drive. No Mac currently ships with one (Steve Jobs’ “bag of hurt” statement continues to hold sway), so you’ll have to add it yourself. I have an internal drive that I put in the second optical bay of my Mac Pro, but if you have a more compact system, my understanding is that there are external drives that will work just as well (though I don’t have personal experience with those).
I use MakeMKV to rip the Blu-ray movie to a Matroska Video File. Just pop the disc in the drive and once it loads, click the “Open Blu-ray Disc” button.
It will scan the disc for all of the available tracks, and present them to you. The first thing I usually do it right-click on one of the checkboxes and choose “Unselect all”, since usually I only want one or two tracks, at most. You can usually guess which track is the main movie by it being the largest file size (here, 31.5 GB) with a decent number of chapters.