I found a Mac OS X hint yesterday mentioning how VideoLAN CLient (VLC) can save streaming videos into a file. Since today I wanted to record a radio show off the Internet, I gave it a shot for an audio stream too.

Here’s what I got:

If you want to save a Quicktime (AAC/MP4) audio stream (maybe others, too? Leave a comment if you know!) to a file, start VLC from the command line (terminal window) like this:


/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC –rtsp-tcp \
rtsp://example.com/path/to/stream \
–sout ‘#standard{access=file,mux=mp4,url=/Users/\
Shared/VLCoutput.mp4}’


(obviously, you needn’t break it up into several lines of code, you can just leave out the line breaks as well as the backslashes: We will use that format in a jiffy).

Now, if you want to schedule the whole thing, a cron job will do the job. The tool at would be certainly more correct (since you don’t want to schedule it as a recurrent task), but the at daemon is disabled on OS X by default.

So, do a crontab -e and put in two lines like this (yes, put the whole VLC stuff into one line as mentioned above):

0 15 12 5 * /Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --rtsp-tcp rtsp://example.com/path/to/stream --sout '#standard{access=file,mux=mp4,url=/Users/Shared/VLCoutput.mp4}'
30 15 12 5 * killall -QUIT VLC

The first line starts VLC as mentioned above. 0 15 12 5 means: Start at 3 p.m. (= 0 15), on May 12 (= 12 5). The asterisks in each of the lines just mean that you don’t care about the weekday.
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That kind of impressed me today when I saw this Washington Post article on digg.com:

A Washington Post poll shows that the majority (63%) of Americans are ok with the cyber and wiretapping efforts of the NSA. Almost the same percentage, even a little more, are ok if their personal calls were collected by the NSA. Americans are apparently willing to sacrifice privacy for security.

That disturbs me a little bit. Are these people concerned about privacy so little? Are basic civil rights not an issue, as long as gas is cheap? It seems to be a socially inherent problem in the U.S.: Society (in the majority of cases) here seems to be highly judgemental, insisting on personal freedom far more than I have ever seen before but at the same time not leaving their hands off issues that are just not their business, i.e. somebody else’s private concerns.
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September 2005:

• ich: “Eine Pizza… bitte.”
• Bedienung, sofort: “Oh, aus welchem Teil Deutschlands kommen Sie?”

Mai 2006:

• ich: “Eine Pizza… bitte.”
• Bedienung, fünf Minuten später: “Oh, hm, könnte ich Ihnen eine Frage stellen, vielleicht?… Haben Sie einen Akzent?”

Ein bisschen stolz macht es mich ja schon, dass sich das ganz-sicher-deutsch-Stigma zu einem vielleicht-Akzent gewandelt hat

Too bad my NSLU2 apparently does not have a battery inside…:

# ntpdate time.oregonstate.edu
Looking for host time.oregonstate.edu and service ntp
host found : time.oregonstate.edu
8 May 21:08:00 ntpdate[4084]: step time server 128.193.10.15
offset 1145070824.207699 sec


Recently, I have to do a lot of point plots for one of my classes, i.e. taking huge amounts of two-dimensional data points, having them “drawn” and printing out the resulting image.

Usually, for this job, I used Maple, mostly because this is my computer algebra system of choice since I used it in my advanced math course in high school. It is just so much better in tedious arithmetic than I am ;). Writing a little script, I read in the provided data file by the teacher and returned an expression that I could directly copy and paste into Maple. The resulting graphs look somehow like this:

However yesterday, I managed to break Maple. I read in two lists of a few hundred data points each and wanted to plot them together with a function in one plot. So far so bad: In spite of the correct syntax, I got some evaluation errors and an empty plot. Great.

So I tried gnuplot, the apparent “industry standard” for all sorts of scientific data and function plots (unless, of course, you spend a sh*load of money on Matlab ;)). And, within minutes, thanks to the numerous howtos on the Internet I was able to make much more beautiful (and working) plot such as this one:

And I finally understand why so many people are using it: It is just the right tool for the job.

One tutorial I want to point out in particular are the not so frequently asked questions that helped me a lot to get the trivial, not-so-trivial-after-all tasks done to get a little more sleep and spend a little less time on homework.

To keep track of my numerous bookmarks on the Internet, I use the popular bookmarking service del.icio.us, along with a handy Firefox extension.

Well, when you accidentally hit the “tag” button on a newly opened tab in Firefox, this is what happens:

You are bookmarking the unbelievably useful website about:blank.

Due to the ginormous amount of information stored on that web page, I decided to keep the bookmark as a valuable resource for my daily Internet research (after all, it is the “home” page in my web browser and thus the first page I ever see when opening Firefox). … And so did 2362 other people who were as stupidsmart as me to bookmark about:blank

Update: … and counting…: There are already 2374 people besides me, now