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Monthly Archives: February 2009
ah
I appear to have deeply borked the autotagging of my old blog entries
too many instruments
I just counted, and found out that my instrument collection has 115 strings. I think I should thin the herd.
how does he do that?
Someone asked how the automatic podcast works. It’s a bit complex, and they probably will be sorry they asked.
I have all my music saved as MP3s on a server running Firefly Media Server. It stores all its information about tracks in a SQLite database, so I can very easily grab a random selection of tracks.
Since I know the name of the track and the artist from the Firefly database, I have a selection of script lines that I can feed to flite, a very simple speech synthesizer. Each of these spoken lines is stored as as wav file, and then each candidate MP3 is converted to wav, and the whole mess is joined together using SoX. SoX also created the nifty (well, I think so) intro and outro sweeps.
The huge wav file of the whole show is converted to MP3 using LAME and uploaded to my webhost with scp. All of this process is done by one Perl script – it also creates the web page, the RSS feed, and even logs the tracks on Last.fm.
Couldn’t be simpler.
Nobody Waved Good-bye by Don Owen, – NFB
NFB is featuring the well known long-neck banjo-strumming ne’er-do-well drama Nobody Waved Good-bye this week.
hot off the press: Green Energy and Green Economy Act 2009
Ken Reaume gives away his early discography
Ken is no longer performing under his given name, and has decided to give away his early recordings, Hope in Another Place and Ken Reaume. They’re good.
sometimes you just have to …
frag
I really don’t know how a Windows system disk can get this fragmented:
That’s $34,600 per parking space …
out on my bike
-
- my awesome bike
-
- where the cheesewagons sleep
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- a lovely day in the hydro corridor
rather a new wearer of clothes
So my quest for the Sensible Bicycle is over; I found it. Or rather, it found me, for bicycles have lives of their own.
Curbside Cycle had a sale. They also had, for reasons known only to the manufacturer, been sent just one of their top-of-the-line Batavus Crescendo Deluxe city bikes. I took it for a test ride in the ice and slush of the Annex. It did everything just right.
Here’s how it measures up to the checklist I wrote about in 2004:
- Fully enclosed chain — yup. Batavus have a really clever clip-together sectional polymer chainguard.
- Full mudguards — for sure.
- Hub gears — 8 speed hub gears, no less.
- Dynamo lights — a front dynamo hub, no less. Slight marks off for a battery rear light, but it does make the wiring simple.
- Proper carriers — a really nice alloy one, with built in pump and elastic strap.
- Anything but rim brakes — roller brakes, in the hubs. I was initially sceptical of their gentle action, but they can stop you to almost the limit of adhesion of the tyres, so they do work well.
The one thing it does have, but I didn’t think I’d need, is suspension. It irons out the uneven Scarborough spring roads rather well.
I love the manual; it’s written for sensible riding. Basically, most advice is given as Talk to your Batavus Dealer. The similarity to a modern car manual is striking; just you get on with riding the thing, it implies, and we’ll worry about fixing it. Tellingly, the English language section is the back; these bikes are much too sensible to waste on those silly Anglos.
I’ve barely walked the length of myself in the last few months, so in even short distances my legs let me know about it. It’s freezy out, but dry and bright – I must go out on my bike again.
(the title’s from that early eco-geek, and it’s the other half of the widely-misquoted:
I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit?
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden
For me, it’s perfect; not merely do I not require new or special clothes to ride it, but I have become a new wearer of clothes by it.)
If you need to find me, you know where I’ll be …
the glowing-eyed teddy bear of DOOM!!!!!!!!!
Actually, I disturbed a raccoon.
the revving gasmeter of walmer road
acme of acmes
Acme Burger‘s second location at Bloor near Bathurst is just as awesome as the Queensway one.
How to select broken URLS from e-mail
(without resorting to TinyURL.com, xrl.us or is.gd when posting …)
Some mail clients wrap URLs in a way that breaks their ability to be clicked on. Trying to explain a method to fix this is tiresome, so here’s an animation that explains it:
Basically, it helps to select the URL from the end to the start. Once you’ve got all the text, copy it, and paste it into your browser’s location bar.
timed screen grabs (with mouse pointer) on OS X
The following shell script will, after a five second delay, save a screenshot every second for the next minute:
sleep 5
for f in $(jot 60)
do
screencapture -wC $(date +%Y%m%d%H%M%).png
sleep 1
echo $f
done
no zapf, dingbats aplenty
Well, yes, according to YourFonts.com. You write into a special template, scan it, upload it to their website, add your signature and bank details, and you get a TTF of what you wrote. Next time, I’ll be a bit more careful with baseline alignment.
I might mess with the alignment and kerning in FontForge, but otherwise I like it.
(via Cool Tools)