Author: scruss
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maybe I shouldn’t play with HDR …
Cultus Wind Farm, Fall HDR -
discordion
I’m really regretting downloading The Blue Bell Polka (hey, it’s Flop Eared Mule, revisited!), ‘cos now emusic is recommending:
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pgmrnoise – a more random (or less repeatable) pgmnoise
Update: If you have a recent NetPBM, this is fixed.
I’d previously alluded that netpbm’s pgmnoise wasn’t as random as it could be if you called it several times in quick succession. Nerdy discussion after the break, but here’s a (perhaps slightly linux-centric) alternative:#!/bin/sh # pgmrnoise - a more random pgmnoise; limited to 8-bit images # created by scruss on Sun Oct 12 19:36:37 EDT 2008 echo P5 echo $1 $2 echo 255 dd if=/dev/urandom bs=$1 count=$2 2> /dev/null
I just pasted the shell text in there; you’ll need to save it as a file. It works the same way as pgmnoise:
pgmrnoise width height > noise.pgm
It is limited as written to 8 bit-per-pixel output, but is a fairly trivial edit to make it 16 or more bits.
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advice: just buy a can of kidney beans
Okay, so now the house smells of damp, the stove top is covered with evil red liquid, and the pan is coated with something that looks like it came from the insides of a duck. This is why canned red kidney beans are a good idea, and why almost no-one cooks their own.
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car scraping time
First frost last night in Tillsonburg.
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giving up roasting for now
I’m giving up roasting coffee – too much smoke, too many smoke detectors. That, and the fuss, the mess, the occasionally imperfect roasts. It’s been fun, but it’s time to move on.
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I spy …
Why is there so much writing about a US $700 billion plan, and almost nothing about a $634 billion one?
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half-assed, but endearing
So I bought the Kross Bluetooth Hands Free Cell Phone Car Kit with FM Transmitter. It has its good points, but it has some quirks and serious shortcomings.Here’s what’s good:
- It’s cheap (< $40)
- It provides in-car Bluetooth speakerphone
- It plays MP3s from SD card, USB stick, or an line level source.
Here’s what’s not so good:
- Playback quality is limited to finding an open FM frequency, which is hard in the GTA
- The transmitter is not very powerful, so nearby vehicles can swamp your signal (or, if you want to call it a feature, it’s a “random positional mashup”)
- The phone mic is a tiny port on the unit, so sometimes the caller can’t hear you too well
- You need to have your radio on to answer your phone
- The USB port doesn’t provide enough charging current for a phone or GPS
- The remote isn’t very good
- Voice dialling doesn’t seem to work with my Blackberry
- The MP3 playback function usually remembers where you were when you start the car, but sometimes forgets, and needs the card ejected and reinserted
- It doesn’t know about ID3 tags
- Weirdest of all, it plays back files in the strict order they were written to the directory – not ordered by file name. It seems that, under Microsoft operating systems, files are copied in name order, but under Unix, they are (winging it here) copied by inode. Using
taron a Mac or Linux is the way to go, as it writes in name order.
The Kross S-150 Manual (scanned PDF) is pretty terse, and has been of limited use to me. For all its faults, it’s kind of useful, but if I had a USB-capable stereo, I wouldn’t need this.
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moothie
Had my first harmonica lesson with Al Lerman last night. He’s a really good teacher, and he had us all doing simple 12-bar blues in the first half hour. The improvisation will come later.
On the way there I discovered The ACME Burger Company. I think that will be my pre-class meal of choice.
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demented tiles for demented people
I’d totally put these up on my walls, but I may end up climbing them:
I made them by taking 32×32 pixel tiles of random grey noise, Atkinson dithering them (using pamditherbw) then vectorizing them using potrace. If you click on the tiles, you can download/view the PDF source of each.
(pgmnoise, the source of the grey noise, relies heavily on the system time as its seed. Before I introduced a delay between image generation, several images appeared almost identical.)
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cleaning up your FireFly Media Server database
mp3 tagging is a minefield. Like all metadata, one has to balance obsession with detail against ease of acquisition.
Some Firefly clients are pickier than other about tagging. Regrettably, some of the music I get from emusic has bad characters in the tags, which throws the players right off. Finding the problem files is the majority of the problem – here’s a method that at least helps:
wget -O- http://host:port/rsp/db/1 | perl -pwe 's,<(?![/\?]),\n<,g;' > firefly.xml
xmllint --noout firefly.xml
You’ll likely get a few lines like:
firefly.xml:463415: parser error : PCDATA invalid Char value 65535
<title>�Singing in the Bathtub</title>
In this case, the song title tag has some junk characters in it that you’ll need to fix. After cleaning up the tags and rebuilding the database, try this process again to see if you’ve caught all the errors. -
y’know, just in case you were interested …
FactoryDirect.ca has rockboxable Sandisk Sansa E250‘s for under $50 – including 4GB of microSD cards.
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iTunes ate my iPod!
Kind of what my iPod now does, until the battery runs out I have, well had, a 2GB second-gen iPod Nano. Now I have a very slim brick.
When I upgraded to iTunes 8, it offered an update for my iPod. I let it do its thing, then resync’ed it. I noticed that the iPod rebooted after the sync — no big deal — but then kept rebooting (back and forth …) forever.
I tried resetting it; nope, it would just start doing its thing again.
I tried putting it into disk mode, then restoring it; nope, back and forth, back and forth …
In desperation, I tried restoring it on a PC, which needed to reformat the iPod. Partial success; it sync’ed music from the PC, but since my working music library is on my iBook, I had to restore and resync, and guess what? back and forth, back and forth …
I’d heard that the problem could be caused by empty podcast folders, so I cleared out and rebuilt my library, put the iPod into disk mode and restored it on a PC, resync’ed on the iBook and … back and forth, back and forth …
As a last try I’m going to fsck it under Linux. I might be stuck using yamipod, which is probably a bonus, as all I use iTunes for is as an iPod conduit. I really miss having a Rockbox-capable player, as it just worked the way I expected.
UPDATE: yeah, that last one did it. Shame about yamipod’s UI.
