I used the PMD620 this evening to transfer 30+ year old cassettes that Catherine‘s father had made of the (then) children. Sound came out pretty clear, especially since these have been living in the wild with no case to protect them.
Author: scruss
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wish I had a canon …
It’s probably as well that the most basic digicam that CHDK runs on is just too expensive to be an impulse buy, else I’d be doing all the weird and wonderful things you can hack your Canon digicam to do.
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most annoying thing ever
I have an HP Photosmart C5180 scanner/printer thingy. It works fairly well, except when the drivers are being stupid under Windows. But it has one flaw so appalling that the first time it happened, I almost trashed the printer in a blind rage (yeah, I have some anger issues).
The power supply brick has a three-prong connector; pretty much the same as the “kettle lead” you get on PCs. But this thing, whether through vibration, heating and cooling, or just plain evil, slowly works itself loose. So you go to turn the printer on one day, and … nothing. You check the cables; all are plugged in. Check the wall socket; it’s (zap! ow!) live. After tearing some hair out, you troubleshoot every cable – all looks well until you notice that the plug is just a little farther out of the power supply than it might go. Snug it in a couple of millimetres, and a working printer is you.
This happens every few months. Even when I know it’s likely to happen, it still jars me. Wouldn’t have happened in Bill & Dave’s day.
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The one that got away
The one that got away – Scotland on Sunday on Ivor Cutler.
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2U
You know that if you play How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb backwards, you hear Bono giving complete and easy to follow instructions on how to build one?
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is this the same report?
A recent BBC news story from Scotland leads with:
Wind farms could hit tourist jobs
Wind farms could cost Scotland’s tourism industry millions of pounds and hundreds of jobs, a report has warned.
But the findings of the report are much milder:
This research has shown that even using a worst case scenario the impact of current applications would be very small …
… Our overall conclusion is that the effects are so small that, provided planning and marketing are carried out effectively, there is no reason why the two are incompatible.
So it looks, as usual, as if the BBC is trying to make wind turbines look far worse than they really are.
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All that’s left of Bishop’s Block
Two windows are pretty much all that’s left standing at Bishop’s Block, which was one of the oldest buildings in Toronto. It would seem that the façade is being kept for the new Shangri-la bourge hut, but the way the workers have been wrecking old bricks, it would be a surprise if much of the outer wall can be rebuilt.
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glitch out
I really don’t think that my ipod was supposed to do that. But then, it was playing Columbus Fruge’s Saut Crapaud at the time, which is enough to make anyone shift a few pixels to the side:
Saut crapaud
ta queue va brûler
Prends courage
a’va repousser -
anklemeat
I’m beginning to regret wearing my Docs today. Breaking in a pair of Docs is a multiweek process for me, involving blisters, anklemeat and sticking plaster.
I bought these particular Docs years ago. I bought a pair of Blundstones at the same time. Since they didn’t need any breaking in, the Docs were consigned to the shed. I found them a few months ago while searching for a derailleur tool, and finally cleaned them up last night.
At the moment, my ankles are merely a bit raw. In a couple of days, you could boil my socks for soup …
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hiding from The Weed Man
their 1-800 number calls about 5 times a night with no message. I call ’em right back (hey, it’s their dime) and just let the phone sit for 5-10 minutes. In between the Your call is important to uss, there’s the occasional “Hello? … Hello?”. I’m yet to formulate an evil plan (scream? giggle maniacally? play banjo? all three?), but I see a Weed Man truck prowling the neighbourhood. I think they’re on to me …
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words to live by
A weird imagination is most useful to gain full advantage of all the features.
— screen(1) manual.
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like a virtual workspace manager for the shell
How did I manage to go for so long without knowing about screen? screen allows you to create several connection sessions to a terminal, switch between them, detach from them, then reconnect from anywhere. I’d previously had to to set up long-running remote jobs as background jobs, relying on nohup and various methods to prevent terminal output. But no more!
This page taught me all I know about screen: screen: Keep Your Processes Running Despite A Dropped Connection
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the making of a long neck banjo
The making of a long neck banjo: Hugh Hunter sent me some pictures of the work in progress.
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no banjo tonite
Dang! The roads were too snowy for us to get to Guelph to hear Old Man Luedecke.
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barcodes of miscellaneous things found on my desk
021205009544 043100455349 051122172625 073999738360 093074013021 5099680001525 9780176224509
You can tell I found my cuecat, can’t you?
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guess my music competition
So I could listen to semi-disposable CDRs in the car (and with that phrase, my green cred has vanished) I wrote a program that converts directories of mp3s to WAV files and TOC files for cdrdao. It works rather well.
In order to get sensible file names, the program truncates album names down to eight letters. I will send $5 canadian by paypal to the first person to guess correctly the album and artist of the following four names:
dancetun darlingc hepooscl maggotbr
Answers in the comments only, please. They’re all official releases, before you accuse me of getting you to guess my mix CDs.
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puts the moronic in oxymoronic
i think that any commentary would be such a cheap shot that i’m refraining entirely …
