Blake on Stuff

I just have to blog this so I can help anybody else in this situation (including myself next time I need it).

I was trying to recover data from a friend’s computer with a sick hard drive. I couldn’t boot into Windows due to some poorly placed bad sectors so I booted using a very handy Linux rescue CD called Trinity Rescue Kit. This worked great. I got on my network, mounted the Windows drives, and ran the ‘fileserver -s’ command to auto-share the drives to Windows via SMB.

Everything is cruising along…

The Problem

I want to be able to easily copy specific folders and files (sometimes entire folder trees) across three different target (sick) drives to my local drive.

I don’t want to have to ctrl-select a hundred different folders or copy them one at a time and have to wait between copies. I want to be able to easily filter folders beforehand and copy them all at once. I am positive this is easier than I made it, but I embarrassingly banged my head for a couple of hours with these tools:

• XCOPY - You can exclude folders, but it’s painful, deprecated, and I want a GUI.
• robocopy - Powerful, kind of a pain to get in XP (comes standard in Vista), and has a basic GUI. It still is cumbersome if you want to do a one-time selective copy of a bunch of folders.
• XXCOPY - A super-XCOPY. Tons of options and just over-complex for one-time use. No GUI that I could find.
• Beyond Compare - This is a fantastic diff tool and is actually mentioned in a few places as a potential answer to this problem. You can exclude files through a relatively intuitive interface, but there is one big problem once you start the copy. Summed in in their documentation: If a folder is selected, its entire contents are copied, regardless of file filters or display filters in effect. So, no good for what I need.
• Various other shareware-type apps - It would just confuse things more to link to them here.
• Write my own - This was one of those problems where I thought about starting Visual Studio the entire time but I always thought I was going to find the solution any second. Luckily, I found something that kind of worked.

The Solution

I’ve used Backup4all before backup purposes but it didn’t occur to me to try it for one-time copies. I don’t think there is a free version, but it’s cheap and does its job very well (it at least has a free 30-day trial). The secret is to use “mirror” mode which means it just copies and doesn’t try to compress or anything.

The workflow is exactly what I wanted. At it’s simplest (it has a lot more options), you choose the folders in a treeview (this works for network or local locations):

Then add any global include or exclude filters:

Then select a destination:

Then hit the Backup button:

And the filtered list of files is copied! Such a simple problem to not be able to solve easier. Hopefully this post will help.

Please comment if you’ve found a better way to do this.

Tags: backup4all, copy, file, Linux, samba, trk, windows, XXCOPY

No, this isn’t a DDR post, but it’s close.

During my regular blast through Lifehacker posts a few weeks ago, this post called Burn 600 Calories a Day Typing (source) caught my eye. Long story short, Jonathan Fields built a fancy keyboard for his treadmill and he walks slowly all morning long. Very cool idea!

Then, I saw a comment in the Lifehacker post about somebody who rides his recumbent bike while playing XBox. That tripped a familiar synapse in my brain that makes me start buying things and waste time that I don’t have (watch this space for lots more like this one).

See, I have very low willpower when it comes to exercise. I’ve tried various different inspirational techniques, but none ever stick (as has everybody I assume). But… could playing XBox while exercising distract my mind so much that it forgets it is exercising (what I’m calling the Critical Distraction Point)? Through the first two weeks of this experiment, the answer is a solid Yes.

My Setup

If you are inspired enough to try this out, you’ll need a stationary recumbent bike. The reason is that with a recumbent bike only your legs move and your upper body is stable. I bought this one from Amazon for just over $200 (and free shipping since I have Prime). Here’s a mini-review, Good: It’s super quiet and perfect for my use. The LCD display is low (physically) so it doesn’t obstruct straight-ahead viewing. Bad: The LCD and programs are certainly not gym quality, but I don’t really plan to use those anyway. Here are some pics of my setup:

With a bit of side turning you can do a bit of laptop work. Hard to have a laptop in front of you without hitting your knees. BTW, that’s the multi-tasking Dave laptop stand from IKEA also mentioned on Lifehacker (source and IKEA link) (yes, I’m easily influenced).

As you can see, the LCD is not why you’d buy this. It does count time well though which is all I need.

Summary

If you’re looking for a great way to trick yourself into exercising (and who isn’t!) I highly recommend this method. Until I burn out on it in a few weeks of course.

Tags: exercise ikea dave lifehacker xbox

Want to listen to that 8 hour audio book in 6 hours and not lose any details in the process?

I love Windows Media Player’s ability to speed up or slow down audio and video in real-time via its awesome Play Speed setting. This is commonly referred to as time stretching or changing tempo. If you listen to a lot of podcasts and audio books or watch a lot of instructional videos (like I do) this can save hours and hours in the long run.

The problem is that I like to listen to podcasts or audio books in the car, and I don’t have a fancy PC available to speed audio up in real-time. My Sansa e250 with Rockbox does lots of cool things, but alas it can’t speed up audio without the dreaded chipmunk effect.

I looked for a way to easily (and cheaply) time stretch my audio files, but mostly found a bunch of headaches. There are painful ways to do it with Audacity (open, apply filter, convert, save, etc.) and other audio editors. I think there’s a way to do it through WinAmp. There are also programs made to specifically convert audio like dbPoweramp, but I didn’t have much luck with that (and it’s not free).

My Solution

Here’s the best solution I’ve found so far (and I looked long and hard). It’s easy to setup and has worked super fantastically so far:

foobar2000 + SoundTouch DSP plug-in

1. Download and install foobar2000.

2. Download foo_dsp_soundtouch.dll from wherever you can find it (I got mine from here). This thing was a pain to find. You might also need the vc8 runtime files. They are included in the .NET runtime so might as well download and install that. Copy foo_dsp_soundtouch.dll to your foobar2000 components folder.

3. Drop an audio file (or a bunch of audio files) into foobar2000 (or use File -> Open). I’ll use an episode of the excellent Hanselminutes podcast as an example.

4. Choose a Convert option from the right-click context menu and set your encoding options (the ones in these pics work well for me).

5. Click OK and watch it churn out your sped up mp3(s).

Tips and Thoughts

I’ve been using 25% speed-up on audio books and informational podcasts and 12.5% on entertainment-related podcasts like Dawn and Drew. At 25% it’s easily listenable but you can really tell it’s sped up. At 12.5% you can really only tell if you listen to the original along side it. Also, I feel like I concentrate and pick up more (kind of a “flow” thing) when it is sped up.

Being able to drag and drop a bunch of files, right click once, and watch all the converted mp3s pop out is an amazing efficiency over some of the other methods I found.

So, let me know if you’ve found alternate solutions or can improve on this one (I haven’t tweaked many of the settings). And if you want to start looking forward to that hour-long drive to work in the morning, buy a cheap mp3 player and check some of these podcasts out.

Tags: foobar2000, mp3, timestretch