Instagram filter used: Lo-fi
Photo taken at: Hampton Inn & Suites Halifax Dartmouth
Author: scruss
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still rather more proud of this code than I should be
Years ago, I wrote this tiny subroutine in PostScript:
/box { % draw a box given lower left and upper right corner coordinates  2 copy moveto  3 index exch lineto  3 -1 roll 2 index lineto  exch lineto  closepath } defAll it does is define a rectangular path given by four numbers. So to draw a box from (0,0) to (100,50), you’d say
0 0 100 50 box stroke
This code still pleases me because:
- it accepts arguments in a sensible order
- it uses no local variables, relying purely on the stack
- no spare values have to be popped from the stack at any time.
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Faxing it in from …
(image ganked from The Coast)
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Yeah, we’re like that …
Instagram filter used: Amaro
Photo taken at: Hampton Inn & Suites Halifax Dartmouth
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A bit too much Randy Bachman
Richard “Friendly Rich” Marsella noted that CBC Radio’s Vinyl Tap with Randy Bachman features a lot of music by … Randy Bachman. If you’ve got your own radio show “to play [your] favourite songs and tell stories from [your] life on the road and in the studio“, you might want to be a bunch heavier on your influences than your own actual work. It doesn’t seem that way with Randy Bachman, though.
In the 49 unique editions of Vinyl Tap broadcast in the last year, 27 of them feature his own music and/or performances. So in addition to his CBC pay for the show, he’s getting royalties, too. Rich puts it a little better, if a lot more invective filled:
Bring back quality broadcasting from people behind the scenes who are hard-working and informed…not merely has-been rock stars with egos larger than Winnipeg.
Given that Mr. Bachman constantly plays his own music on this show, receives royalties for the theme song, and might also be receiving ACTRA payments for incessantly wanking on his guitar between songs, CBC should consider whether or not this is a conflict of interest, as a public broadcaster.
Richard’s started a petition: Let’s petition to remove Randy’s Vinyl Tap from the CBC: No more BTO on the CBC! I’ve signed it, and I hope you’ll consider signing it too.
I ran some stats on the show’s playlists (thanks, CBC!), and Richard sure has a point. Here’s a list of all the shows from the last year, showing just the first Bachman-item on the show:
Broadcast Song Performer Album/Concert Randy Bachman credit 2011/03/04 Takin’ Care Of Business Bachman-Turner Overdrive Best Of Bachman-Turner Overdrive Live Composer 2011/03/05 2011/03/12 2011/03/19 2011/03/26 When Friends Fall Out Guess Who American Woman Composer 2011/04/02 2011/04/09 Undun Kurt Elling Nightmoves Composer 2011/04/16 2011/04/23 We Gotta Change Playlist For The Planet Composer 2011/04/30 Repo Man Repo Man Composer 2011/05/07 I’m Happy Just To Dance With You Bachman Cummings Jukebox Guitar 2011/05/14 Who Do You Love Bachman Cummings Jukebox Guitar 2011/05/21 2011/05/29 2011/06/04 Laughing Guess Who: Anthology Composer 2011/06/11 2011/06/18 2011/06/25 Undun Kurt Elling Nightmoves Composer 2011/07/01 Raise A Little Hell Trooper Hot Shots Producer 2011/07/09 Takin Care Of Business Randy’s Vinyl Tap – Guitarology 101 Composer 2011/07/16 Blue Collar Bachman-Turner Overdrive Anthology Producer 2011/07/23 2011/07/30 2011/08/06 2011/08/13 2011/08/20 2011/09/10 2011/09/17 2011/09/24 2011/10/01 Closing Time Closing Time Composer 2011/10/08 Lenny’s Warmup And Improvisation Of Autumn Leaves Lenny Breau Cabin Fever Producer 2011/10/15 Suite Theam Composer, Performer 2011/10/22 No Time Guess Who American Woman Composer 2011/11/05 2011/11/12 Undun Kurt Elling Nightmoves Composer 2011/11/19 Shotgun Rider Bachman-Turner Overdrive Freeways Producer 2011/11/26 Blue Sky Day Lindsay Ell Consider This Composer 2011/12/03 Day Off Michael Carey Composer 2011/12/10 2011/12/17 Geh Zoag Ma Doch Die Ding Spider Murphy Gang Geh Zoag Ma Doch Die Ding Composer 2011/12/23 Takin’ Care Of Christmas Takin’ Care Of Christmas Composer 2011/12/30 You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet Bachman-Turner Overdrive Anthology Composer 2012/01/14 2012/01/21 Any Road Randy Bachman Any Road Composer 2012/01/28 2012/02/11 Walk Bachman Cummings Jukebox Guitar 2012/02/18 Who Do You Love Bachman Cummings Jukebox Guitar 2012/02/25 2012/03/03 Of course, when anyone mentions BTO, I can’t help but think of
… which is a whole heaping helping of morissettian irony unto itself. The whole Smashie and Nicey thing was supposedly a factor in Matthew Bannister’s decision to fire the ageing and irrelevant DJs from BBC Radio 1 in the 1990s. I wouldn’t dream of making any inference from that …
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yay! a completed SSTV QSO!
Yay! KA4UPI in Dublin, GA heard me, and replied.
Thanks to KE5RS‘s Live SSTV page, I can see what I was sending – or at least, how it was received in Leander, TX by KE5RS:
This was sent in response to this:
Here’s what I send:
compared to what was heard in Texas:
Choosing images to send is difficult. The number of cheesecake images is a bit distressing. For good, free images, I use Wikimedia Commons; the one I’ve used for my CQ call is File:Burrowing owl smile.jpg.
SSTV is a fun little mode. I was saddened to hear that its creator, Copthorne Macdonald VY2CM, passed away late last year.
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SSTV is go (sorta)
Luc gave a really good introductory talk about SSTV last night at the radio club. I’d had no luck at all running qsstv on this Ubuntu box, so I thought I’d try MMSSTV under Wine … and it worked!
I picked this image up from N5HIC on 14.230 MHz. Sure, I need to fix the sync, so my images aren’t slanted.I also don’t seem to be able to transmit, since it fails with a “Can’t open sound card (3)” error.But it’s a start! -
My kind of RPG
Progress Quest is my kind of game. -
Generational loss in MP3 re-encoding
Okay, name this tune:
madplay / lame – 1000 iterations
(You’ll have to scroll about half way in before anything starts)
Didn’t get it? Try this:
madplay 24-bit / lame – 1000 iterations
(Again, you’ll have to scroll about half way in before anything starts)
Missed that one? Okay then, how about:
(no need to scroll here.)
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, it’s a clip from Adele‘s Someone Like You. Sure, you can’t make out the words too well in the last one, but at least they don’t sound like some dire paen to Cthulhu, like the first two do.
All of the above samples are the same source file re-encoded 1000 times. I’d heard that there was some loss to encoding MP3s, but thought that if you kept about the same bitrate, there wouldn’t be too much loss. I wanted to test out my theory, so I took:
- LAME — a quality mp3 encoder (that can also decode to WAV)
- madplay — a decent mp3 decoder that uses fixed point for speed
- a shell script (see below) that encodes an MP3 1000 times, feeding the output of the last run as the input of the next.
- a sample clip; in this case, ganked from Amazon.com: 21: Adele: Music using Audio Hijack Pro.
The original sample looks pretty clean; it’s not the highest quality, but it’s clear:
The first thing that strikes about the multiply-reencoded file is that it’s much longer:
This is because LAME adds padding to the beginning and end of each song. All this padding adds up over 1000 runs.
I’d used madplay extensively before, so I knew it worked reliably. First, I tried it using an intermediate sample size of 16 bits (same as the source) and no dithering. Just after 100 runs, Ms Adkins’ plaintive voice becomes hard to understand:
madplay / lame – 100 iterationsI’d turned dithering off in the first test, as I thought it would overcome the signal. As the signal was pretty much gone, I didn’t think I had much to lose, so I tried it at madplay’s full capability of 24 bit internal processing. Again, 100 runs was where things started to go really sideways:
madplay 24-bit / lame – 100 iterationsLAME can also decode MP3s, and remarkably, the lyrics remained discernable after 1000 interations (so go and see the third sample up top). Sure, it sounds scratchy, but the piano sounds like a piano and not like some underwater harp. LAME is clearly able to recognize its own input, and decode it accordingly. madplay, on the other hand, just treats an MP3 as a generic MP3, hence the over-compression and extra silences.
So really, if you’re going to re-encode music, it matters more what you use to decode your MP3s. If you can use the same tool for both, all the better.
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All Day Long In Bliss
Call me a twee-hugger, but I love Trixie’s Big Red Motorbike. They sound like a brother and sister making up silly sweet songs and recording them on a shoebox tape recorder — which is (pretty much) what they were. Siblings Mark and Melanie Litten, along with some occasional help on backing vocals and saxophone, caught the ear of John Peel, and for a while they were the soundtrack of everyone’s anorak life.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHNIMCx3R14
Mark recently scraped together everything of TBRM and so Lobby Lud Records lives again on Bandcamp. There’s not much else out there, except the John Peel Session. This is good.
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rebooting the handwriting
My handwriting is atrocious. It’s scrawly, uneven, with malformed letters (r never recovered from Miss MacFarlane’s ligatures, t usually left unstroked) meandering up and down the line. It’s got blotchy, affected borrowings, too: tailed and stroked 1s and 7s in the European style, and a d that was least seen in a partial differential: ð›¿. In short, a style all my own, wanted by none.
I’d prefer to have my handwriting legible to others, and even by me. I don’t want my notebooks to look like a spider’s hauled its bedraggled carapace out of the inkwell onto the page. Unfortunately, cursive is right out to learn. I can’t read it, in any style. In fact, I find the German Sütterlin to be as logical to learn, as I can’t read that either, but at least it looks badass.The style I’m trying is pre-cursive. Yes, it’s meant as a transition from printing to cursive, but I like its simple clean italic lines. I imagine I’ll join it up a deal more when I’m writing quickly. The hardest part for me is sticking to the line and stopping my writing wandering off up the page.
We’ll see how this goes …
(and thanks to I want to write right! | Ask MetaFilter for the suggestions.)
