June 2011 – VIRTUALDISTORTION

June 21, 2011

Aromatherapy

Do you believe in it? I sure do.

At night I love to smell crushed lavender buds. It instantly relaxes me. Perhaps I have sort of trained myself to clam down and sleep once I smell that scent. FOOD is a common favorite too.

Other than that I make and burn a lot of charcoal incense cones. I make small batches about once a month so they are very fresh and ready to ship! I have these scents in stock at this time: Blackberry Sage, Patchouli, Indian Sandalwood, Delicious, Tibetian Amber, Sandalwood.

6 Blackberry and Sage / 6 Indian Sandalwood – Incense Cones

12 Patchouli Incense Cones

The cones burn very well in/on my copper burners:
Abstract Handmade Copper Incense Cone Burner
Rose Leaf Handmade Copper Incense Cone Burner
and of course you can custom order one of these… It is a handmade copper ROSE incense cone burner. The inside lifts out and the cone is lit and set in side and then you replace the inside bud and watch the scented smoke billow out into your environment. It looks cool while in use or while it’s just sitting around.

Copper Rose Incense Cone Burner by Virtualdistortion on Etsy

I think I’ll go light a blackberry sage cone right now. (;

June 17, 2011

Spring in Full Swing

I walk around barefoot a lot.
I’ve been on some pretty amazing bike rides.
Had a nice garden salad and raw asparagus.
Art Season! Time to get some feedback.
Mosquitoes!

June 9, 2011

Swimming Raft

Handmade stencils for “ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US”.. used for spray painting on to our own swimming raft. Woot! Finally!

June 8, 2011

Successfully Convert .aa3 to .mp3 (in Ubuntu)

A friend had some audio files on a flash drive in .aa3 format, which is a Sony “ATRAC Audio File”. He wanted them to play in his Sony car stereo and it says on there that it’s supposed to play the format but it really doesn’t. So he wanted them in a more universal format in order to listen to them in the car. I run Ubuntu Linux and said “I can do it!” since he was having a lot of trouble figuring out a program that would do it in Windows.

After a bit of internet scouring on the topic and trying a few different converters I found a combo of programs that worked for me.

1. Open up your Ubunutu software center. Search for “soundconverter” and install it. Next, search for “XCFA” (X Convert File Audio) and install it.

2. Run XCFA. Import the .aa3 files (or any other format you want to convert) into the program. I selected and dragged my files into the main window. It then analyzes the files and lists them with what options you have for conversion. I selected all of them under the WAV category, chose my destination folder and then click on “apply the changes” and waited for them to convert. You are done with XCFA.

3. Run Sound Converter. Import the .wav files you just created. I selected and dragged my files into the main window. Go up to Edit >Preferences and change the output format to whatever format you want — .mp3 in my case. Hit convert and wait for the magic to happen.

That’s how you can easily convert .aa3 sony file format files to .mp3.
Leave a comment if this was helpful!