the alpha newswire

So I have to admit that after watching some Kitchen 4B, I developed a bit of a crush on Jill Santopietro. Unfortunately, The Moment only has a single RSS feed for the entire blog, and this includes a bunch of content I’m not particularly interested in. But with some quick Hpricot magic, I quickly whipped up a script to use in NetNewsWire. (Also, much love for NetNewsWire enabling me to create subscriptions to scripts such as these.)

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'rubygems' # Since I"m too lazy to set the RUBYOPTS
                   # environment variable for NetNewsWire

require 'hpricot'
require 'open-uri'

doc = Hpricot.XML(open('http://themoment.blogs.nytimes.com/feed/atom/'))

(doc/:entry).reject {|entry| (entry/:author/:name).inner_text =~ /Jill Santopietro/ }.remove

puts doc.to_html

Edit: I’ve since replaced this script with a Yahoo Pipe, as this allows me to view this feed in both Google Reader and NetNewsWire.

Much thanks to these blog posts for revealing the secrets behind rotating video with mencoder. Specifically, I had taken video on my D90 which needed to be rotated into portrait.

mencoder -vf rotate=3,scale=405:720 -o middle.avi -oac copy -fafmttag 1 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg input.avi
mencoder -vf expand=960:720 -oac copy -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg middle.avi -o output.avi