We Saw a Chicken …

Month: June 2004

  • The DSCN0001 Project

    dscn0001_project01.jpg
    Digicams produce sequentially-numbered picture files. Every camera has taken a first picture, and quite frequently these pictures and their original file names make it onto the web.

    Inspired by a conversation with James Dignan and Ken Weingold, the above is a collage of nine images originally named ‘dscn0001.jpg’ by the owners’ cameras. These thumbnails were found on Google Images, and have been scaled and tiled in a pseudo-random selection.

    I don’t who these people are, or what the images are from. The selection and arrangement is arbitrary. The only thing that they have in common are the file names. Somehow, despite their differences, they are strangely related.

  • e-mail contact

    Since someone gave me a Gmail invitation, I’ve decided to use it as my website feedback address. You’ll find the address on the sidebar (if you’re reading from the main page), or it’s the inevitable scruss at gmail dot com.

    I may not check this very often, but I will do so at least weekly. The Gmail user interface is pretty good; some clever use of JavaScript there.

  • Two differences

    There are two differences about me today. I’m sure you can tell what they are straight away:

    1) I’m now a part of the OMC Gas Grill family. All my life there was a gas grill family I didn’t know I had. We’re just like any other family, except that we don’t know each other, and all we do is barbecue things.

    2) I’m now the proud owner of a Faber Castell 57/87 Rietz slide rule. Watch me multiply with uncanny ease!

  • iRiver standard cable, yeah!

    I may eventually stop raving about the iRiver H120, but not any time soon.

    One of the only annoyances I have with the H120 is that I’m nearly always leaving the USB2.0 cable for it at home. I was running an errand in a nearby computer store, and found that they had a USB2.0 to digital camera cable. It looked similar enough, so I bought it.

    And it works just fine. Maybe I’m too used to old and weird proprietary cables from the past.

    Anyway, if you want a spare/replacement cable for your H120, you want a “USB2.0 A to Mini USB2.0 5 pin” cable.

  • Say no to Bonsai tomorrow, okay?

    Please don’t vote for Stephen “Bonsai” Harper tomorrow. I don’t think we need a very small version of a Bush for PM.

    Mind you, I could still be all riled up about seeing Fahrenheit 9/11 last night. Or as it’s called in Canada, Celsius -1715/99, since we’re metric.

  • I think I’ve got my thunder, thank you

    Ah, a Scarborough dinner: mutton koththu roti and a bottle of Thums Up Indian cola. The soft drink tastes exactly like the colas I used to remember in Scotland, especially Barrie’s Old Time Cola. It’s slightly more spiced than that plain old brand from Atlanta.

    Thums Up’s rather improbably tagline is: “Thums Up, I Want My Thunder.” After that much spicy food and soft drink, well …

  • An improvement, wouldn’t you say?

    a parody of the MS background, improved for wind energy types
    Of course, really savvy windfarm management software would have real clickable turbines on the desktop that would show you the state of the whole windfarm …

  • The Mayor McCa Experience

    Since I had no success/interest when I tried to torrent this show on sharingthegroove, I give you: Mayor McCa Live at Lee’s Palace, 18 June 2004.

    1. I’m So Poor. Buy My CD
    2. That’s A Wrap
    3. Hey Man, You Gotta Nice Job
    4. I Got A Haircut
    5. Funky Fresh Beets
    6. I Can’t Pay The Rent
    7. You Better Watch Out

  • It’s gettin’ so you can’t say thank you no more

    It’s my birthday today; call me Jean-Baptiste (a fête worse than death) …

    Anyway, I wanted to thank my folks for sending me a card and a gift certificate, so I sent this message:

    Subject: thank you!
    Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2004 06:53
    To: Mum & Dad

    I got the Amazon certificate and the card — thank you so much!

    Best Wishes,
    Stewart

    What did I get a few minutes later?

    Action: failed
    Status: 5.1.1
    Remote-MTA: dns; mail-in.freeserve.com
    Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 550 Error: Message content rejected

    That’s right; I triggered a virus filter. So all because of bugs in an expensive operating system that I don’t use, I can’t say thanks to my parents.

  • Getting (Not Very) Political

    Canada goes to the polls soon. For the last month, the papers have been filled with the minutiae of the candidates and their policies. As a Canadian Without A Vote™, I feel strangely detached from this. Having an opinion on the candidates would be like me judging a beauty contest for slugs.

    But people keep asking for my opinion, so here it is: Anyone but Harper. Stephen Harper reminds me a lot of George W. Bush, minus the intelligence and charisma of the southern leader. I’ve seen sharper hockey pucks than Harper, who always seems to be photographed with that glaikit (see extended entry for definition) open-mouthed expression on his face.

    Martin looks like he’s got terrible halitosis, and is permanently worried that we’re on the verge of finding him out for some nefarious act. Layton’s a bit full-on for a successful leader. And that green party guy just looks uncomfortable in a suit.

    None of the parties have innovative sustainable agendas, so I can’t recommend any of them. But if Harper wins in June, all those friends of ours in the US who want to inhabit our basement should Bush win in November might as well stay home.
    (more…)

  • The Multi-Talented Mayor

    mcca_colour.jpg
    One-man band singing sensation. Tapdancer. Comic book artist. Sometime mayoral candidate in Hamilton Donut Rock City. Is there no end to the talents of Mayor McCa? Why is he unknown outside Ontario?

    I was on the guest list for his show at Lee’s Palace on Friday. CA was on first, so there wasn’t much of a crowd. This is the first time I’ve seen him in his one-man band persona. Much fun was had.

    I recorded the show with the Mayor’s permission. I had the files online, but took them off when I ran out of space. Let me know if you want to hear them.

  • Happiness is not …

    … coming home to find someone’s run up several thousands of dollars of unauthorized transactions on your credit card.

  • linux allofmp3 downloader

    I use — and quite like — AllofMP3.com. While it’s good that they don’t require special software to download the songs, clicking and saving each link on a page is a pain.

    If you save the download page basket.html, you’ll be able to run the following one-liner to get all the files from it:

      tr ' ' '

    Update: Well, as you can see, the above code is all munged, but it’s moot since allofmp3 is basically dead and gone. If the service still works, one of the wget tricks in the comments will work as expected.

  • Welcome to Big Turtle Country

    We stopped in Madoc on Highway 7 last night for refreshments, and there in the Tim Hortons car park was a huge turtle. With its snake-like neck, thick bowed legs and saurian tail, it looked like an animated gothic footstool.

    Just a little down the road, there was another similarly-szied beastie. I wonder if they were calling to one another? Maybe the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.

  • and the groundhog shall lie down with the cat

    groundhog_cat.jpg
    A sign of peace, or something, at the Parliament Hill Cat Sanctuary in Ottawa. We went up with Paul and Caroline. We stayed at the Auberge des Artes again. We ate too much. It was good.

  • freecache doesn’t

    You might have heard about freecache, a method of cooperatively cacheing web content so it doesn’t eat your bandwidth. I thought this would be just the thing for the MP3s of a show by The Decemberists, ‘cos I’ve only got 5GB/month.

    Imagine my dismay when I get a note from my service provider saying that I’ve used 90% of my allocation in a couple of days. The freecache proxy doesn’t do a thing, just redirects back to the original links. Bah.

    I’ve had to take the files down for now. Maybe they’ll be back later.

  • No, it’s not “Your Brain On Drugs”

    oddblob.png
    Suggestions, please, as to what you think the above image is.

  • “The Quest For The Rest”–The Polyphonic Spree

    www.questfortherest.com

    Together We’re Heavy

    This flash game is by the same guy who did Samorost.

    (look, The Polyphonic Spree asked me to do this, so who are you to complain? Sure beats their original suggestion of forwarding the link by e-mail. )

  • iRiver H120

    h120.jpg

    I’ve had the iRiver H120 for a few weeks now, and I think I’ve used enough of the functions to give it a fair appraisal. I bought it because it would make a good portable hard disk, which coincidentally would play MP3s on my long commute.

    The device is basically a Toshiba 20GB mini hard drive with a direct USB2.0 connection to its FAT32 filesystem. It also supports USB1.1, which means that the H120 will interface (albeit slowly) to most machines you’d meet today.

    This is how my Linux boxes identify the H120 on power up:

    scsi3 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
  Vendor: TOSHIBA   Model: MK2004GAL         Rev: JC10
  Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Attached scsi disk sdb at scsi3, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
SCSI device sdb: 39063024 512-byte hdwr sectors (20000 MB)
 /dev/scsi/host3/bus0/target0/lun0: p1

    It’s easy enough to figure out a mount point from this information.

    I don’t think I have USB2.0 support quite figured out on my machine, as I find transfers to and from the H120 to be rather slow. Sometimes I find that large transfers time out, causing the device to remount read-only. A pain, but it does ensure that the filesystem doesn’t corrupt itself.

    I couldn’t be happier with the sound quality. With all my MP3s encoded with LAME‘s standard preset, and using Sennheiser headphones, it sounds great. The H120 will play other file formats (Ogg, WMA and WAV), but I’m primarily interested in MP3s. Never quite got the Ogg thing, despite its open source credentials.

    A lot of people complain about the H120’s lack of gapless playback between MP3s. Sometimes this bugs me a little, other times I don’t notice it. iRiver claim to be working on it, and it’s easy to upgrade the firmware when they do.

    There are also options to use M3U playlists (which are absurdly easy to generate using the find, tr and sed commands — I must show you someday), and also an ‘iRiverDB’ database. I found the latter worse than useless; it increased startup time by over a minute, and seemed to get its genre recognition spectacularly wrong. At least it’s optional on the H120. I usually just play directories of files arranged by artist and album.

    The H120 has a useful set of IO ports. In addition to its headphone and (proprietary) remote socket, there’s digital in and out, plus analogue line in and out, and external microphone input too. There’s also a built-in mike for voice recording. The digital in, when coupled to a CD player with digital out, allows you to rip even the most broken copy-controlled CD.

    Last night I recorded The Decemberists at Lee’s Palace with the H120, and it came out quite well. I have a Sony ECM909A stereo microphone, which works better than it should for live taping. I recorded to 44.1kHz 16-bit stereo WAV (it can also do a variety of MP3 bitrates), and it’s nice to see the results sitting as files directly in the filesystem. There’s an (arbitrary?) limit of 74 minutes on WAV recordings, after which the H120 will go into record pause mode, and will start recording again on pressing a key.

    My biggest complaint about recording with the iRiver is that there is no level meter, and no way of changing record level in mid-recording. I had to be very conservative with my record levels to make sure that last night’s recording didn’t clip, so I have a good — but quiet, though fixable with normalize — recording of the show. I took the iRiver community website‘s advice and recorded without the remote attached, and consequently got a noise-free record.

    I also find the iRiver’s controls to be a little confusing, especially when you get to recording. I was forever accidentally knocking it into FM radio mode before the show started. For day to day playing, however, it works perfectly.

    I’ve also found the remote to be a bit flimsy. Before I knew how careful I needed to be with it, one self-destructed in a subway turnstile. The main unit itself seems to be quite solid.

    I’m very happy with my H120. It holds a decent part of my CD collection, it’s a handy portable hard drive, and it records with at least the same quality as my MD recorder. It may not have the caché of the iPod, but it also doesn’t have the “please mug me” white cables of the Apple box.

    Addendum, June 14: The USB timing out problem has gone away now that I have compiled in USB2.0 support into my kernel; and transfers are extremely fast. This problem doesn’t seem to happen with my USB1.1 Thinkpad which, while slow, works perfectly with the H120.

  • A Happy Sight

    6/6/04 10:45 – The Don Valley Parkway as seen from the subway – car free, & filled with cyclists.