Tips

Little Angry Man in my Head

This is a continuation of the thoughts I had in my previous post on writing.

The little angry man in my head sat slumped over in his armchair. He looked asleep. I had to check if it was something more serious. The cigar had been out for a while. I neglected him for a year now – it’s possible he died of boredom. Or possibly from a lack of exercise. You have to walk your inner voice from time to time and I’ve been neglecting mine.

I called to him. No response. He looked more fragile than usual.

I shook him, but only a little, just enough to wake up the inner voice. No response.

I checked for a pulse. It was there, but barely. There’s still hope, I thought.

To keep him alive I started CPR, or as the other part of my brain calls it, „creating prose regularly“ with this short story being an example. Is it any good? I don’t know, this is a stop-gap measure, necessary to get things going. What he really needs is to be awake in moments of inspiration.

You can’t just take the first step and stop. You have to keep on walking, you have to be ready for the times along your journey when your mind runs wild.

Okay, he seems to be moving now, I think he is reaching for the cigar. Good, good.

Note to self: whatever you do, don’t let the little angry man die of boredom.

Combining .VOB files on MacOS with the cat command

Here’s a little little-known trick I learned recently about the cat command on MacOS.

The cat command joins (or more precisely, concatenates) files. Even though there is little documentation out there exactly how many file types the cat command supports, luckily for anyone working with DVD rips, VOB files are on that hard-to-find list.

The command joins the files end-to-end and like .txt, the .vob extension is concatenatable.

Here’s how you do it:

First open Terminal and cd into the directory with the VOB files.

Then run this command, replacing the placeholder file names I used here with the ones that interest you. The order of the files is the order they will be joined together: 

cat VTS_1.vob VTS_2.vob VTS_3.vob > VTS_all.vob

If there are many files, but they are numbered, you’re in luck, just run this instead where the * replaces the numbers:

cat VTS_*.vob > VTS_all.vob

The process takes a few seconds. Of course, if you are already using Handbrake, you can just combine and encode VOB files into format of your choice, but this takes much longer.