For the longest time it was only available for Mac OS in its full featured form. The Windows version was sort of neutered and the Linux version is GUI-less. Now the Windows version is the same as the Mac OS version. Give it a try, its FREE! Free as in beer, as well as speech.

REMEMBER! THIS DOES NOT DECRYPT COMMERCIAL DVDS! YOU WILL STILL NEED A PROGRAM LIKE ANYDVD, DVD43 or DVD DECRYPTOR TO RIP THE DVD TO DISC!

http://handbrake.fr/

In the beginning (for me) there was WordPerfect. Not the bloated GUI, WYSIWYG program that you see these days. No, real WordPerfect. WordPerfect for DOS. What you got was what you needed: a blue screen and a blinking white cursor. That’s it. No icons or menus (they were hidden behind a hot key), just sheer unadulterated text. You could get some writing done. The old PCs didn’t multi-task. They didn’t play music. If you wanted it to type, that was all it was going to do. It was simple and clean.

As time went on GUIs replaced the blinking cursor and the work space tried hard to mimic actual paper and typesetting. The problem with this (though I didn’t know it at the time) is that choosing fonts and designing layout is not writing. It’s typesetting. Writers write. You write and you write and you write. When the writing is done, you edit. You edit and proofread and rewrite and edit some more. First, second, third, forth drafts; it goes on as long as it takes. When all this is done, if you need to print it to paper or a paper like distribution (like a PDF or website) then you worry about typesetting and justification. That’s when the bolding and italics matter. And the writer (in most professional settings) doesn’t even do it!

I thought that Word for Windows would make my writing better because of all of it’s bells and whistles. It had an assistant and a spell checker (okay, spell checkers are nice). You could see what your novel would look like while you were typing it! And you know what? It did nothing to make me a better writer.

Eventually I got tired of pirating Word and switched to OpenOffice because I knew that I didn’t need half the features of Word. I needed a word processor for resumes and what the hell, maybe I could get some writing done.

Many a resume got written, but not so much fiction. Then I started dabbling in Linux and I found myself using Nano, a command line text editor that did little more than open, save, search and replace. I found myself enjoying writing in such a simple environment. Under Windows I started writing in Notepad. Then EditPlus. Now a days I use gedit in Linux and notepad in Windows, but that may change.

Enter Dark Room. Dark Room is a Windows clone of an OS X program called WriteRoom. Basically the theme of these programs is a full screen text editor like my old lover WordPerfect for DOS. It replaces your desktop with a black screen and a green cursor (of course you can change the colors to whatever you want). Ctrl-S saves and Ctrl-Q quits. ESC will shrink it down to a window and you can use the mouse, but the hot keys are where it’s at.

Give it a shot, free yourself of buttons and icons.

EDIT: There’s also a similar app in Linux called PyRoom. I love it on Ubuntu!

So what to do? I figured instead of doing nerve surgery with a chainsaw (complete reinstall of both OSes), I’ve decided to do it the proper way and do some partition shuffling.

At the moment I have Ubuntu installed with 4 partitions (“/boot”, “/”, “/home” and “swap”). “/” was about 40GB and realistically you don’t need much more than 10GB for Linux and Linux software. That would free up 30 GB without sacrificing precious “/home” space and 30GB is fine for Windows with a few games and Ableton Live.

Here was my theoretical process:

1. Use Gparted to resize partitions
2. Use Gparted to create new partition.
3. Install Winblows.
4. Yell FUCK! WHERE IS GRUB?!?
5. Boot Knoppix or Ubuntu or Gparted livecd.
6. Run some sort of grub command to take back the bootloader.
7. ???
8. Profit.

All my research said this is fine. And to my knowledge (combined with other people’s opinions) it actually is.

LATER: Well I get an “A” for effort, but a “F” for poor planning. I started the process last night at 7pm (it is 4pm the following day) and I’m still on step one. Apparently resizing a 40GB partition down to 10GBs is a trivial 20 minute affair while MOVING a 110GB partition is a fucking ORDEAL. I set up the “/” to be 10GB and noticed that there was now a 30GB block of unpartitioned space between it and the 110GB “/home” partition. So my interior OCD voice says “Hey! Let’s move that “/home” partition next to the “/” partition and make the whole Linux side of the disk nice and tidy! Well, it will be nice and tidy…some 24+ hours later. Damn!

Mental note: when partitioning a new install, plan for the unexpected. Either that or murder the OCD voice.

Since I dived head first into WINE, I’ve become pretty adept at setting up apps. I’ve had a few resounding successes, namely MP3Tag and dBpoweramp (THE BEST audio converter) and a few total failures, Indigo Prophecy, iTunes and Ableton Live. Luckily, those are pretty much all the Windows apps I give a shit about. As WINE gets better these things should improve.

EDIT: B00, It doesn’t run very well. It starts and logs in, but the frame rate is far too slow and the objects aren’t drawn correctly. Oh well.

When Pigs Fly: The Death of Oink, the Birth of Dissent, and a Brief History of Record Industry Suicide.

“I thought there were plenty of new ways to sell music that would be fair to all parties involved. But I no longer believe that, because the squabbling, backwards, greedy, ownership-obsessed major labels will never let it happen, and that’s more clear to me now than ever. So maybe music has to be free. Maybe taking the money out of music is the only way to get money back into it. Maybe it’s time to abandon the notion of the rock star – of music as a route to fame and fortune. The best music was always made by people who weren’t in it for the money, anyway. Maybe smart, talented musicians will find ways to make a good living with or without CD sales.”

This leads me to another project idea: lossless video. Are there any good lossless video codecs? I did a bit of googling and found MSU, CorePNG, HuffYUV and a fork of HuffYUV called “Lagarith”. I realize a DVD is lossy to begin with (compared to HD), but I thought perhaps there is a way to achieve 30-50% size reduction for archiving purposes. This would yield a perfect DVD when decompressed, but would be more practical for hard drive storage. Any suggestions?

My research leads me to believe that this is not really possible, but surely I’m not the only one that wants this.