October 25, 2008

Is Buxfer sharing with Google

Christian Decker wrote this in the early evening:
Today I logged in to Buxfer to see my latest expenses and how my budgets where doing and guess what: Google Adsense somehow knew that I’m a regular Icetea drinker: (click for larger image) Now the natural question is: does Buxfer share its users information with Google AdSense? According to the privacy information it is not:

Ads appearing on buxfer.com may be delivered to users by our advertising partners, who may set cookies. These cookies allow the ad server to recognize your computer each time they send you an online advertisement to compile information about you or others who use your computer. This information allows ad networks to, among other things, deliver targeted advertisements that they believe will be of most interest to you. This Privacy Policy covers the use of cookies by Buxfer and does not cover the use of cookies by any advertisers.

So how does Google get my information? I’m not saying that Google is bad, in fact I love their AdSense service, but it’s a bit scary isnt it?

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October 24, 2008

Converting Youtube Videos to MP3

Christian Decker wrote this at around evening time:

I recently lost all of my music collection due to a harddisk crash on my fileserver, which means that I have to start collecting all over again, and believe me, some rare songs are pretty hard to find.

On the other hand I often find a nice song on Youtube and decide that I have to keep it. And after a bit of looking around I found the handy youtube-dl script which automatically parses the pages content and downloads the video file, much like keepvid.com does, but all from the shell.

After we have the video file all we have to do is dump the audio and convert it to a format we like (most likely MP3 or OGG). Until today I used mplayer and mencoder to dump and encode the audio, but I stumbled across this article on howtoforge.org that uses ffmpeg, and is more flexible and avoids me one intermediate step :-)

So now I have a really simple script that fetches the video and converts it, which looks like this: 
#!/bin/bash
# Just additional setting to use high quality video
YOUTUBE_OPTS="-b"

# Please make sure youtube-dl is in your path
youtube-dl $YOUTUBE_OPTS -o temp.flv "$1"

ffmpeg -i temp.flv -ab 128000 -ar 44100 "$2"

Please make sure, as stated above that youtube-dl is in your path. Usage is pretty darn simple:

ripyoutube <youtube-url> <mp3-name>

Don’t forget to enclode the URL and filename into doublequotes

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