brian hefele's untidy space

Having decided that I'm better off downloading lossless files from Bandcamp &c., and preferring to save a bit of space by sourcing FLAC files, I finally did something that I should have done a long time ago. The annoying issue for me has always been the extra work necessary in preserving metadata when using a 'flac -d -c input.flac | lame - output.mp3' process. My solution, which works well for me and is being made available here for others, is a simple shell script - flac2mp3.

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I haven't been here very much lately. It's immeasurably hard to describe how hard it is doing nothing, having nothing to do. It's depressing and the depression makes it even harder to do simple, little things, like maintaining my little slice of the internet. Hopefully I'll be able to force myself back into it soon.

Until then, I think I owe it to two of the terminal emulators I previously discussed here to talk about a couple of updates. First, a while ago, iTerm was forked into iTerm 2. One of the promises was improvements to iTerm's positively abysmal speeds (and the devs' refusal to acknowledge such). The first release of iTerm 2 that I tested somehow managed to perform worse than iTerm. But more recent releases are much improved, and while it's still not the top performing terminal emulator on the Mac, it does hold its own against the competition. Plus, interesting new features are being added, making it far more worthy of download than the old iTerm was. Now all they need is to hire an actual artist to un-ugly their icon (hint… hint…)

In my previous roundup, I regarded ZOC very highly, despite some stability issues I was having. Fortunately this must have just been a glitch, as I have since updated and have yet to make it crash (knock on wood!). Interestingly enough, ZOC doesn't seem to have a modern system of update checking in place. Rather, after a given amount of time, it pops up a box saying 'hey, check out our website, there's gotta be a newer version by now!' which, admittedly, was true (actually by the time the box popped up, I was two points behind, so, can't complain I guess). So, ZOC, also better than I originally wrote.