alfa.org.uk

If you ever have to deal with PDF files, you’ll know that Adobe Reader is slow and bloated, and has horrific startup times. This can be fixed, thanks to these easy instructions:

1. Navigate to where you installed Reader (C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 6.0\Reader for me)
2. Rename the plug_ins directory to something else (perhaps plug_ins_old)
3. Create a new plug_ins directory
4. Copy the files EWH32.api, printme.api, and Search.api from your plug_ins_old directory into the new plug_ins directory
5. Test on a PDF file

I found that Reader now starts in one second rather than fifteen. Of course, by not loading all the plugins you won’t have access to some of the advanced features (like file encryption, web services, automatic updates), but really, who uses those anyway??

Fantastic. A Linux distribution designed for Christians. My personal highlights from the feature list:

• Special hack of emacs “M-x doctor” mode, “M-x pastor”
• Optionally disable logins on Sunday, the day of rest
• Login screen has full text to Lord’s Prayer
• bash(1) is default. The “Bourne-Again” shell is already the default; but we like the shell, and we love the name :)

Last year, I bought the latest Radiohead album, Hail To The Thief. Last week, I decided I wanted to be able to listen to it on my laptop whilst at work.

Personally, I would classify being able to do that as “fair use”.

However, EMI in their infinite wisdom have “copy-protected” the disc. Of course, by “copy-protected” I really mean “corrupted”. Some digging on Google revealed that the corruption mechanism used by EMI is known as “Copy Control” and is produced by a company called Macrovision. More digging revealed that this is apparently one of the more difficult protections to crack (i.e. it can’t be foiled by “holding down Shift when inserting the CD”, or “applying some judicious felt-tip pen to the disc”). Basically, if you have one of these discs, it’s pretty much a lottery as to whether or not you can rip it, depending on your CD drive.

I have three CD drives - one in my laptop (which steadfastly ignored the disc) and two in my desktop. Of the two in my desktop one is an old 48x CD-ROM drive which made worrying noises when I inserted the disc, and the other is a Ricoh DVD-CDRW combo drive.

I was lucky. Using CDex I was able to extract every track except the first one to WAV using my RICOH drive. I then subsequently encoded the WAVs to MP3 using LAME.

The only problem was the first track. For some reason ripping it was never perfect, with varying amounts of jitter error on each attempt. My only guess is that EMI corrupted the first track more than the others to deter determined CD drives from reading the disc. Bastards.

The best rip I got doesn’t have the first 3 seconds and has a few pops at the end, but I guess it’s better than nothing.

So, EMI, screw you. It took a few hours, but I now have an almost perfect rip of the CD I bought with my own money.

If anyone else has experience defeating Macrovision protection on EMI discs I’d like to hear it. I can’t believe this corruption scheme is unbeatable…

I’ve recently started using Spambouncer to filter the increasing amount of junk I get emailed to me. Trouble is, most of the time I’m forced to use Windows (work build environment etc).

My solution has been to use Cygwin, the UNIX environment for Windows. There are Cygwin packages of Mutt, Procmail, and Fetchmail. The only problem is I couldn’t find any documentation about running Spambouncer under Cygwin.

Spambouncer is a set of Procmail rules which filter mail for you (and optionally send complaints emails about spam to abuse@ email addresses). There are problems under Cygwin though, because Spambouncer uses the nslookup utility to query domains. Cygwin doesn’t supply a version of nslookup though, and Spambouncer doesn’t work properly with the version supplied with Windows.

Luckily there are specially-compiled versions of nslookup (and other utilities such as “host” and “dig”) available at the BIND for Cygwin page. You’ll then have to make sure that your Spambouncer setup (in sb.rc) points at the correct version of nslookup (not the Windows one which is probably already in your path). I found the line:

{ NSLOOKUP="/opt/bind/bin/nslookup" }

did the job for me.

Hopefully that will help someone else stem the flow of junk…