this girl drives a tank

stealing music

One of the problems I have with the GUI version of Emacs is the fonts, basically, they suck. Big Time. This has now changed of course as the Emacs cvs development version (Emacs22) has a branch known as emacs-unicode. On Debian this is now relatively easy to set up.

cd ~/src
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/cvsroot/emacs co
-d emacs-unicode -r emacs-unicode-2 -P emacs 
cd emacs-unicode
./configure --enable-font-backend --with-xft --with-freetype --with-gtk
(you might need to apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev)
make
make install

Then run with emacs-23.0.0 --enable-font-backend -fn "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono-10", emacs finally looks pretty, readable and much much better than previous GUI versions.


There is one small drawback however and that is I cannot seem to get W3m, EMMS or TODO mode working which is a bit of a drag as the reason I wanted these nice fonts is for reading manuals and web pages, I am hoping though that this branch will get merged with the emacs22 tree and everything will then work, as they say, out of the box!.

This week a friend of mine dropped of four boxes of CD's. Totalling roughly 1200 CD's in all. I am now undertaking the tedious task of ripping them to mp3's. It's taking some time but he assures me he is in no rush and all he wants in return is for me to provide him with a hardrive containing a copy of all his music. The cool thing is, he has a very thorough collection. Every Bowie album ever released for example, Every Who album ever released... Every Stones album...every Beatles album.....Every Oasis, Charlatans, Pixies,...you get the drift. He managed this by working in a record store.

So, I figure at 256kbits/sec, joint stereo, variable bit-rate (something I didn't know about until someone shamed me into reading up on it) it will consume quite a bit of disk space, 130GB roughly, add to this my already 90+-GB collection and yet another friend who has his collection on a Mac (120GB) and is also wanting to merge all three collections, it looks like I will need to find some serious hard drive space quite soon.

Nevertheless, its very exciting to look through all these boxes of music!