This Is Faux

I’ve got a few minutes before I have to be in my LEGL class, so I decided to sit here in Sanford Hall and write a long overdue post on the TiF blog. I buy my Sprite, open up my laptop, and wait for that sweet, free, on-campus wireless to fill up my AirPort bars. Much to my dismay, only the tiny little period at the bottom of the arc is filled, and that’s when I remembered that the wireless signal in Sanford Hall is lacking to say the least.

I figured I would at least get decent wireless sitting in a designated sitting area, so I decided to do a little “snooping.” With so many wireless access points on campus, my computer doesn’t always seem to automatically choose the best one, so I have to do a little work myself. I use a program called KisMAC for all of my scanning. It has a lot of features, but really the only one I use is scan and then join the network with the best average strength.

KisMAC before any scanning

Open up KisMAC and you’ll see an empty box ready to be filled with potential wireless connections. Click start scan and let it do it’s thing. It will immediately start sniffing around for all of the available wireless connections, secured or not.

KisMAC filled

After scanning you should get a nice little assortment of connections to choose from. Because all of these are nice and available to me as a student, I want to click “Average Strength” to sort them based on the strongest signal. I then just “Connect to Network” and voila! I’m using the best possible wireless connection available to me.

So, recently I’ve gotten very attached to a certain TV show. So attached in fact, that I decided I wanted to keep it on my external harddrive. That way, when my roommate and I part ways for the summer, which is merely 2 finals away (I should be studying), I can still watch Ryan and Marissa play their love games over and over again…I mean, watch episodes of Man Vs. Wild over and over again…

As I sat down to start ripping, I realized that I had never ripped anything other than a full length movie before. How exactly am I supposed to rip the DVD into individual files of the episodes instead of one file with them all? So, I played around with HandBrake for a while and figured I would write a very simple tutorial up for anyone else that was interested.

First, of course, you want to click Source and select the VIDEO_TS folder of the DVD. Once that’s open, you’ll find that the DVD is split up into the various titles. The longest one is the title you choose when you select “Play All.” In the case of a TV series, that’s not the one you want.

As you can see in the screenshot, we want the four titles that are 43 minutes long. Looks like I mislabeled the series though, that’s supposed to say The Sopranos. Once you’ve selected the title you want, give it a name. I go with the SHOW_SXEY file names, with X being the season number and Y being the episode number. Once you have the name selected, click “Add to Queue” and continue on to the next title. Do this for all the episodes on the cd.

When you get done, your Queue should look very similar to mine. Set your video settings to your personal preferences, click “Start Queue,” and enjoy!