We Saw a Chicken …

Author: scruss

  • 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.

  • so, why would anyone buy a Mac now?

  • I spy …

    Why is there so much writing about a US $700 billion plan, and almost nothing about a $634 billion one?

  • 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 tar on 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.)

  • 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.

  • I did say these words – just not in that order

    Windfarms can spend as little as 5% of their …

    • … ads from the axis of evil …
    • … songs (Thunderbird) performed backwards. On Earth My Nina, which is named after the protest has been knocking about the mystique around Jesse James, who comes across more like the Fontana designed by Giovanni Mardersteig for William Collins’ private use in 1936. A sample of it goes back to the local roads department thanking them for it. Shortly afterward, it stopped cooperating, and the main brake was inactive. At least you can still keep up.
    • … rounded font by making the standard corporate print colour a pale imitation of the bus …

    – ah, I love MarkovFilter.

  • memo to self

    Yes, I really have opted out from the MAKE e-mail list. If I get any more e-mail, O’Reilly — formerly publishers of useful Unix books with animals on them — are just a bunch of filthy spammers.

  • iTunes ate my iPod!

    Kind of what my iPod now does, until the battery runs out
    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.

  • dual monitor + virtuawin = 13,312,000 virtual pixels of awesome

    VirtuaWin adds joy to my desktop: using my 1280×800 laptop with a Dell 1920×1200 flat panel with four workspaces, I’ve got over 13 million pixels at my command. I have the laptop screen dedicated to my Vestas Online Busines SCADA session, so by making the SCADA window sticky, it’s always visible as I move from workspace to workspace on my big screen.

    Shame the underlying OS blows pickled pineapple, though.

  • announcing the automatic podcast

    Every day, the automatic podcast presents a random selection from my music collection. And I mean random: cartoon incidental music, snatches of folk songs, instrument tuition, and ancient scratchy 78s nestle up against my favourite indie hits. And it’s all introduced by a synthesized compère. I have no idea what’s going to be in it each day, and no records are kept of what was offered yesterday. It’s meant to be a daily snapshot, not an ongoing record.

    There are still a few bugs to get out of the RSS feed, but generally I’m happy with how it works. There is some listener discretion required, as I can’t vet what goes into each day’s presentation.

    Update, 30 Sep 2008: think I’ve fixed the RSS problems.

  • The Hinzman Family gets to stay

    U.S. deserter wins stay of deportation.

  • speaks to my condition


    — from pictures for sad children.

  • what are Mandolin Brothers smoking?

    This from their website, and many more similarly strange blurbs lurk there too:

    VINTAGE NEWS – OPEN BACK FIVE-STRING BANJOS
    THE FEAGLE – OLD TIMEY ICON – FISHIE FROM THE PAST
    A visitor to our Website (www.mandoweb.com) writes: “What is that critter engraved on the headstock of some A. C. Fairbanks and Vega banjos — the guy with an eagle’s head and the body of a snailfish? I thought it was a griffon (or gryphon) but the dictionary says that’s an eagle-lion crossbreed. – Bob Stepno, University of North Carolina. Bob wondered if this should be called a “Seagle” instead, for sea creature & eagle, but felt it sounded too much like “seagull”. We replied: It’s a “feagle” for fishie-eagle. We know this because we have obtained a bit of Albert Conant Fairbanks’ DNA (from when he had scraped himself on a bracket nut) and cloned him and have already set him up (a crude system but he remains upright and it works) in an old frame factory building in Boston, staffed with people who come to work every day in Victorian clothing. We tell him “The fire never happened. You still own the company.” Clones’ll believe anything. In his day feagles were prevalent. There were millions of ’em. They could swim and/or fly. They could eat plankton or small woodland animals. Unfortunately, in those days feagles were themselves eaten by banjo players and driven extinct. They tasted like soft-shell crab (this was in the days before soft-shell crab was eaten, because tartar sauce hadn’t been invented yet). Anybody with more information on feagles is welcome to send in (or email) what they know. For instance, we know that feagles wore tiny plaid sports jackets yet A. C. Fairbanks chose to depict them naked. What was he thinking?

  • does this mean we’re normally allowed to set fire to people’s clothes?

    BBC NEWS | UK | Scotland | Tayside and Central | Teenager given clothes fire Asbo
    “The Asbo bans the teenager from attempting to set fire to people’s clothes …”

  • Kross Bluetooth Hands Free Cell Phone Car Kit with FM Transmitter .

    Kross Bluetooth Hands Free Cell Phone Car Kit with FM Transmitter – is this thing too cheap to be any use? I think its part number is BHK-204. I’ve found nothing about it on the web.

  • bic for better banjo bowlines

    If you use Nylgut strings, you’ll likely be tying a lot of bowlines. My first attempts at this were very poor.

    I’ve found that if you slip a pen (preferably one with an integrated cap and clip, like a Bic) through the main loop of the knot, you can get some consistency in your knots – no more random clutter around your tailpiece. The pen clip can be slipped over the loop so that the string supports the pen so you can have both hands free.

    (Incidentally, Jeff Menzies sells Aquila Nylgut strings – he’s the only dealer in Canada.)

  • maybe a bit too nerdy


    MidpSSH on my Blackberry talking to a screen session on my home server running a bittorrent client (and no, this doesn’t mean that I was torrenting over a mobile network).