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Yearly Archives: 2011
T-mobil
Richard Harvey – A New Way of Seeing
A New Way of Seeing was created by Richard Harvey for ICL for the launch of a new series of computers in 1979. Since it was only released to ICL dealers and their clients, it’s not widely known. This is a shame, as it’s a delicious slice of electro-prog.
So here it is: A New Way of Seeing – Richard Harvey (mp3).
Quality’s not great, ‘cos the audio’s ganked from this YouTube video. Seeing as ICL is long gone, this is probably the best we’ll have to live with.
pdf qsl cards for all!
I’m right chuffed that people have started sending me PDF QSL cards in return. Here are just a few samples:
(Okay, so Federico’s was a JPEG; near enough …)
Thanks to all who sent them.
mildly impressed by shazam (and soundhound)
I’m a late adopter of Shazam, which is a semi-magic music recognition service. I just gave it a ten song shuffle from my collection.
Shazam matched:
- LLL — Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter
- Puppet Master — Marissa Nadler
- He Woke Me Up Again — Sufjan Stevens
- At The Bottom Of Everything — Bright Eyes
- Derelict — Beck
Shazam found no match for:
- Religious Songs — Withered Hand
- Caney Fork River — Old Man Luedecke
- Appetite — Mount Eerie
- Setting Forth — Flashman
Shazam was completely wrong about:
- Reuben — Rafe Stefanini, which it thought was Sure The One You Need — Ron Wood.
So: 50% hit rate, 50% miss — and one false positive. Adequate.
Karl recommended I try SoundHound. It matched:
- LLL — Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter
- He Woke Me Up Again — Sufjan Stevens
- Religious Songs — Withered Hand
- Caney Fork River — Old Man Luedecke
- At The Bottom Of Everything — Bright Eyes
- Derelict — Beck
Soundhound didn’t match:
- Puppet Master — Marissa Nadler
- Reuben — Rafe Stefanini
- Appetite — Mount Eerie
- Setting Forth — Flashman
So it knew about Withered Hand and Old Man Luedecke, but didn’t know about Marissa. About the same; maybe slightly better.
MetaFilter 2012-1 Music Swap
It’s music swap time on MetaFilter. Here’s what I chose:
- Mobius Smurf — Nichol Robertson
- Unyoked Oxen Turn — Alasdair Roberts
- Is She Fiona — The Gerbils
- The Sloth — Flanders and Swann
- Morphine — Clifton Hicks
- Please Be Kind (demo) — Colleen and Paul
- Running on Fumes — King Creosote & Jon Hopkins
- Alcoholic Blues — Sheesham and Lotus
- Four Horses — Ken Reaume
- Hypernuit — Bertrand Belin
- Ran So Hard The Sun Went Down — Otis Taylor
- Freeing Song by Reindeer — The Music Tapes
- Wrapped In Grey — XTC
- Tengo La Voz — Bostich
- Singing to the Earth (to thank Her for You) — Apollo Sunshine
- Flop Eared Mule — Holy Modal Rounders
- The Speed of Things — Robyn Hitchcock
- Olivia — BGM
- Yawns — Frightened Rabbit
- No Cigarettes — Withered Hand
- Ficelles — Ingrid St-Pierre
It’s here on Spotify: MeFi Swap 2012-1.
and now only two
more ttc kalimba at Pape station
kalimba at Pape, 15 Dec 2011, 18:16
I think his name is Achilla Orru, and I’ve heard him twice before.
Colorado
One’s a meal
I’d been to Conway’s Red Top before, about a decade ago. It was just as good as I remember it.
End of Movember
Thanks to my donors, my stonkingly ill-advised facial hair raised over $1000 for men’s health and prostate cancer research at Movember.
before
after
Man, it feels strange to shave again. Especially on my chin, which hasn’t seen sunlight since around 2003.
New toy …
A Bumper Sticker for the late Mr. V
last past th’ epost
I’ve had a full billing cycle go through epost now, and would like to note that:
- EFT direct payment — the kind I had to send through a void cheque — isn’t actually supported by any of the companies I use. It might be my bank being useless, but it’s a waste of time for me. I still have to faff with online banking for payments.
- The “Record a Payment” feature appears to be designed for inline PDF viewing. It took me ages to find it on the bill page, since my PDF bills appear in Preview.
My second favourite utility, Bell Canada (the first being all the others), seems to want me to use their online One Bill service rather than epost. Bell Canada posts their bills on their internal system first, then on epost a few days later.
2011 Award for worst-directed charity mail …
… goes to the Canadian War Museum. I’m just an average white poppy wearing guy, so I replied thus:
On MetaFilter, as I suspected all along …
I ♥ 10m
And this is why I do ham radio:
Worked a pileup on UA0FO, Sergey on Sakhalin. Yeah, those islands just north of Japan … y’know, the whole part of the world my antenna doesn’t even point near.
(picture from Philip Gladstone’s entirely awesome PSKReporter)
Ooh, XLD niftiness!
XLD‘s “Import Tags From a Text” is teh nifty for importing new or small-distribution CD (like Glass Flesh) metadata. Just paste in the track listing, define the format, and hit Apply. Done!
Yours truly, ‰te>a…t
I like epost. I’d like it even more if they hurried up and processed my direct payment ability — which required a form and a void cheque mailed to an address in Toronto — but it’s a pretty good service. I get my bills, viewable and payable online, on the day of issue. No paper. This is good.
This is good because every single filing container I buy eventually ends up full of (paid) bills and financial administrivia. Less paper = less messy Stewart = happy Stewart. Some messes, like my electronics table, could be classed as glorious, however, and therefore joyous in their creation and use. Not all tidiness is good.
So I got my first Visa bill by e-post. Yay! Reviewed it, paid it. No hassle. But since this a PDF facsimile of my bill, something mighty odd has happened to my address:
It’s a perfect substitution cypher of my name and address. I’ve been out of the prepress industry for long enough not to immediately recognize it as a font encoding error. I’m confused why it might have A, T, E & N, but no M. Odd indeed.
Chirp, the universal HT programmer
CHIRP is rather good. It replaces all the horrid proprietary HT programming software with one cross-platform, cross-radio solution. It allowed me to program my new Kenwood from data from my Wouxun. It uses transparent file formats, and can import from everything. It’s great!
Update: Whoa! It can now program my FT-857D! I just uploaded all the repeaters within 50km, and there’s a bunch going on on a few of them.