After seeing:

http://lifehacker.com/5376442/crack-a-master-combination-padlock-redux

which has a link to a graphic art representation of how to pick a master padlock:

http://www.markedwardcampos.com/index.php?/design/master-lock/

a coworker and I set about to figure out the pattern in the tables that help you reduce the possible combinations from 64,000 to only 100 (to open the lock without knowing the combination).

Seeing the pattern, I wrote a quick piece of shoddy php to generate the combinations needed based on the number you divine from the mechanical part of the process.

<?

$num = $argv[1];
$mod = $num % 4;
$secondRow[] = $mod % 2;
if($mod > 1)
	$secondRow[] = $mod;
$secondRow[] = $primer = 6 + $mod;
$i = $mod;
while($i < 40)
{
	$firstRow[] = $i;
	$i += 4;
}
$i = $primer + 4;
while($i < 40)
{
	$secondRow[] = $i;
	$i += 4;
}
echo "\nStart with the first number of the top row, in combination with the first
number of the second row\nThen use the same number of the top row with second
number of the bottom row\nThis way you reduce the possibilities from 64,000 to
only 100\n";

foreach($firstRow as $row){
	echo $row . "\t";
}
echo "\n|\\\t/|\\\t/|\\...\n";
foreach ($secondRow as $row){
	echo $row . "\t";
}
echo "\n\nLast number is: {$num}\n\n";
?>

Sloppy but accurate.

Cheers

Using a one-two combo, you can get your quick rips of mp3s (in good quality).

Step 1)  www.goear.com

The site http://www.goear.com/ will search out nearly any song (I tried with the obscure, but awesome, Canadian band The Rural Alberta Advantage here: http://www.goear.com/search.php?q=the+rural+alberta+advantage).  This search will find a song and then offer you a web-player and play the song.  The next step is to copy the link from the listening page, and paste it into step 2.

Step 2) dowint.net

Paste the audio listen link into http://dowint.net/ (take a second to copy the song name, so you can replace the random text that the filename has by default) and save that bad larry to your computer using the right-click -> save link feature of your browser.

Note that dowint.net can also rip media from youtube.com, dailymotion.com and metacafe.com, but goear.com seems to have the best quality audio, so far.  Side-note: if you listen to the song first, before placing the link in downint.net, it grabs it from your local cache, so you can grab the mp3 almostinstantly.

Happy Ripping

Here are two decent web services that you can use to rip the audio out of any Youtube video, and save it as an .mp3

Vixy.net

I found the first one, Vixy [ http://vixy.net/ ], over a year ago.  Generally it helped me when I wanted to grab a rare, b-side or unpublished song.  It seems these days it’s easier to find live than recorded work on Youtube, but this tool works like a charm.  They offer a Mac and Windows client to do the same from your own computer, but I always found the expiration dates annoying, and tend to prefer the web interface these days.  On the plus side, you can also rip the video if you want, in various formats.  Our second link is audio only.

Listentoyoutube.com

My girlfriend turned me on to this site: http://www.listentoyoutube.com/ which rips the audio at blazing speeds, and downloads nearly instantly.  I’d be curious to find out what they are doing so differently from Vixy to speed up the service.  If you just want a quick .mp3 of a song (or any video for that matter) you saw on Youtube, input the url at this site, and it will be done nearly instantly.

(By the way, I’m trying my 3rd post using WordPress post-by-email, it seems they don’t let my free account auto-include images by attaching them to the emails)

The first post did not show the image correctly, where I had inserted the image into the email, here I will try with the image as an attachment.

Let’s test email posting…

Classic Video (Afro Ninja):

Cool Picture (Subway in Buenos Aires):

In July of last year, I wrote a long winded and frustration-born post about my struggles with Firefox, which had seen a recent upgrade to version 3.  I thought it only fair to report that Firefox 3 has been working well for me on both of my XP machines (still no new hardware or motivation to try Vista or the beta for Win 7) and my development Linux box (and the linux install I had on my laptop for about 6 months).

Chrome came into the view a while back, and after beating down suspicions that it was little more than a Google services platform, and taking a lot of slack for extension lack, it has really shown itself a worthy competitor in the browser arena.

The lack of extensions is the main issue for me, or at least I thought it was.  Over time, and now with Chrome v.2, which offers a stable build with full screen, I’ve realized that while some extensions are irreplaceable, if a browser is good enough at it’s core, you don’t really need to extend it.  There will always be special needs for customization, and Firefox is the itinerant work horse here. It will always have a warm spot in my heart for taking on the big blue ‘e’ (IE) and holding it’s own there.  But Chrome is just hitting the spot these days, at least on my Windows builds.

In other tech related notes, I’m testing an Ubuntu 8.10 server install on some old cobbled together hardware to fool around and… serve stuff here at home.  After I muck about a bit more, I’ll post up on it.

So, I took a look at my most recent posts, and it seems I was writing more for the sake of writing, than for writing something interesting.  I mean, I wrote about a light bulb.  That’s gotta be a near bottom for web journal topics.  Here’s to another bout of effort…

Jack Black, Mos Def, and Danny Glover drive Be Kind Rewind (IMDB link opens in new window) through its fantastical and often times nearly horrible plot with all the finesse of a surgeon using a hammer as a scalpel. Fortunately, that is just what the story calls for.

Be Kind Rewind Movie Art

The entire film plays as an advertisement for DIY film making. A call back to early Lucas, or early childhood. The lo-fi special effects solutions leave you mouth agape from the sheer creativity of it all. Clearly Jack Black is not actually falling off of a sky scraper, but who would have thought to put him on his back, spinning on a lazy Suzanne, over a tiny town kids room play rug to achieve the effect.

The basic plot revolves around a desperate attempt to save a local VHS only rental store, about to be reclaimed by a city beautification project. When every video in the store gets erased from a “strange magnetic field” (it’s ok to call Jack Black strange, right?), the two shop keepers, Jack Black and Mos Def, resort to re-filming each of the video titles, one by one, to the growing amusement and interest of their neighborhood.

The bubbling, at times playful, at times insane energy of this movie left me laughing uproariously throughout nearly the entire film, although in the end, what I appreciated the most was how it left me with an urge to create.  It was a nostalgic throwback to watching the A-Team or, much earlier, the Muppet Babies.

One thing I particularly enjoyed was how the movie, for the first time, painted the beloved VHS camera and cassette of my youth as an underground “true art” tool.  When I was younger, I got my hands on an old 8mm and love the idea that DVD’s ugly uncle (VHS) could hold that sort of cachet for new generations of old media-culture junkies.

In eBay speak: “Recomend Seller A+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++”

I finally tried out one of these energy saving bulbs at home. Despite the higher entry cost (about four times the price tag of a standard incandescent bulb) and the uncertainty regarding the quality of the light, I picked out a 20w, “Cold Light” bulb and put it in the home office.

My first impressions are very favorable. The cold light is apt for the office space, and the 20w light is actually much brighter than the old bulb I had been using (the box informs me that 20w is equivalent to a 100w incandescent, in terms of light production). Additionally, the packaging indicates that this bulb will last 6,000 hours, roughly equal to six standard incandescents, and will save me 80% in energy and associated costs.

The only (minor) downside was a little wait in time-to-full-light. It’s not so important, and maybe easier for the eyes anyways.

Next I’ll try a “Warm Light” bulb in the living room. I’m anxious to see if these lights can live up to their marketing claim of 6x the normal life span.

I was hoping to write up a nice glowing review of Firefox 3. I’ve tried the betas, the final and now the first update. The problem is, the browser won’t let me play with it long enough to test it’s new features.

When searching for fixes to the problem I’m having, I find a crew of other malcontents slowly raising their hands on forums (Mozilla’s own, as well as others), admitting, despite their best wishes, that the browser has bottomed out for them too.

The specific problem I am having relates to the browser hanging and running up it’s memory use. If I give it a higher priority (working with the Windows task manager process list) sometimes it will resolve, but the fix is always temporary. I get between one and five minutes of FF3 free wheeling fun and then bam, frozen. It has topped out at 200k, even with no page loaded while in safe mode.

Helpful posters at the mozilla forums suggested some possible solutions (opens in new window) which did not help my case. Also, Mozilla offers tips at their Firefox Hangs (opens in new window) page on how to address a freezing browser, but again no help for me.

I spent the first part of the day switching back to FF3, after changing my anti-virus, uninstalling a slew of possibly conflicting programs, and going commando on all traces of previous FF installs (folders, registry settings, old happy memories). Of course, the initial 5 to 10 minutes of my first run of each fresh install of FF3 are beautiful, filling me with soon-to-be bitter hope. After admitting that I was still not ready for Firefox3 on this machine, I uninstalled it and reinstalled the latest 2 release (2.0.0.16) and was back to no problems.

With the day nearly over, the news that 3.0.1 was available trickled into my RSS catcher and I went out, once again, on the hunt. Needless to say, the experience was not improved by the mysteriously summarized “Fixed several stability issues” (See http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.0.1/releasenotes/).

In summary, after a day of juggling between Firefox 2 and Firefox 3, I’m throwing in the towel and sticking with 2 until I hear about some major stability fixes. I still can’t take myself out of the search for solution. For all I know, some little proggie I use is gumming up the works, but Mozilla, this is for you: Address these issues!

Incidentally, a frozen Firefox browser still beats a working one of Internet Explorer. Sheesh, who does Microsoft hire to come up with product names, anyways: “Internet Explorer.”  Woo hoo, where’s my captain’s hat?

Download links:

Firefox 3.0.1: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
Firefox 2.0.0.16: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-older.html