Segfault write-up

I finally got around to documenting some info about my homemade balancing scooter. See here.

Watching LDS General Conference on the Nintendo Wii (and other devices)

This weekend is one of the biannual General Conferences of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the LDS or Mormon Church). It's a chance for us to hear timely counsel from the inspired leaders of our Church, including men we believe to be God's prophets.

We have an Nintendo Wii hooked up to our TV, so I wanted to find a way to watch General Conference through it. The Church's website has a streaming video player, as well as a link to a low-resolution mms stream. I have WiiMC installed on our Wii, and the low-res stream works in it, but has a bit of lag and is low-res (not that it matters that much when you're just listening to people talk). After some poking, though, I found the source of the video in the streaming player. The current stream (Saturday morning session, October 2011) is at http://bcldshd-f.akamaihd.net/satameng_1_400@43919?videoId=1190841497001. I'll update this today and tomorrow if it changes.

I expect that this url will work with other devices, e.g. XBMC on the Xbox, the PS3, and possibly various set-top boxes.

Update: Someone emailed me to ask how to actually use these urls with WiiMC. Here' s the answer.
Guess I kind of left out the most important part, huh? Sorry about that. Assuming you installed WiiMC onto your Wii's SD card, just pop out the card and put it in your computer. Open the file apps/wiimc/onlinemedia.xml in a text editor. Put in a line like

<link name="Saturday AM" addr="http://stream2.lds.org/stream/satam/eng/ios.m3u8" />

where the addr field is the url.

Update: I was having problems with WiiMC, so I switched to Mplayer CE. Open menu.conf and put the line

<e name="LDS General Conference" ok="loadfile mms://a1119.l12520051118.c125200.g.lm.akamaistream.net/D/1119/125200/v0001/reflector:51118"/>

after

<cmdlist name="userdef" title="User-defined" ptr="<>" >
<e name="../" ok="menu cancel"/>

Update: Saturday afternoon (October 2011) - http://bcldshd-f.akamaihd.net/satpmeng_1_400@43919?videoId=1190861917001

Update (29 Mar 2012): I've noticed that this post has had a lot of traffic over the past few days. I'll get new stream urls up ASAP on Saturday.
Update: Saturday morning (March/April 2012) - mms://a1119.l12520051118.c125200.g.lm.akamaistream.net/D/1119/125200/v0001/reflector:51118
It looks like this will work for the whole weekend, but I'll update here if there are any changes.

Update: October 2012 - It looks like the media link is now posted on the Church website.  Go to http://www.lds.org/general-conference/live/languages?lang=eng and copy the link for Windows Media in your language of choice.   

Indic script convertor

I found this a while back and it has taken me a while to find it again the few times I've wanted to use it, so I'm going to post about it here. It's an online tool that converts between a number of Indic scripts, including Thai and Khmer.

http://www.virtualvinodh.com/aksharamukha

Map of LDS Missions

I couldn't find a good map of the missions of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (also known as the LDS or Mormon Church), so I made one. A .kmz file (for use in Google Earth, etc.) is here, and you can view it in Google Maps here. The data was generated from an unofficial list on the LDS Mission Network website. The markers are in the city for which the mission is named, not at the location of the mission office.

Stuff white people like

Just in case you haven't seen this already, I thought I'd share. Michelle and I watched it four times yesterday, and the kiddo thought it was awesome.

Free Hugh Nibley (and other authors) ebooks

Update (20 Feb 2014): It looks like the Maxwell Institute changed their website and the script no longer works.  It's fixable, but I don't know when I'll get around to it. 

I posted about this elsewhere a little while ago, so apologies if this is old news for some of you. I recently discovered that the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, formerly the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies or FARMS, has made the text of many or all of the books they publish available online. This includes the Collected Works of Hugh Nibley.
I've been wanting the read Nibley's books for some time. Now that they were available electronically (and for free), I wanted to be able to read these texts within FBReader, the ebook reader that I have on my Nokia N800. I put the first one into a epub-formatted ebook by hand, but then, seeing as there are many more of these books that I am interested in reading, I decided to write a Python script, GetBook.py, to generate ebooks directly from the website. Given the book ID encoded in the book's URL, it grabs the book title, author, chapters, and text, and formats it into a epub ebook. It works quite well, although I am aware of at least one small bug that I haven't fixed yet. The script and instructions for using it are posted on my website. Let me know if you need any help with it or have any suggestions for making it better.

NB: I've had a number of requests for me to send the epubs to people. I don't know whether or not it's legal for me to distribute the generated epubs, so I'm not sending them to people at this point.

Bread Bowls!

I made potato soup and bread bowls for dinner tonight. Here's how they turned out:



I'd been planning to make the soup since we have a surplus of potatoes that are on the verge of going bad, and I'd been thinking of making some bread, so I thought I'd try making bread bowls. They turned out a bit smaller than I was expecting/hoping, and the inside was a bit denser than I expected. I'm thinking I let the dough rise too long before punching it down and forming the individual . . . loaves(?). If any bread-making experts are reading this, feel free to tell me what I might have done wrong.
We decided that potato soup probably isn't the optimal filler for bread bowls--it ends up being too starchy and the bread doesn't really absorb the soup (which I suppose could be a good thing, depending on your point of view). I decided that the line between creamy mashed potatoes and potato soup is very thin. I also decided that someday I should make bread bowls in the shape of potatoes, slice them open rather than cut the tops off, and fill them with potato soup, maybe with some sour cream on top.