Welcome to Big Turtle Country

We stopped in Madoc on Highway 7 last night for refreshments, and there in the Tim Hortons car park was a huge turtle. With its snake-like neck, thick bowed legs and saurian tail, it looked like an animated gothic footstool.

Just a little down the road, there was another similarly-szied beastie. I wonder if they were calling to one another? Maybe the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.

freecache doesn’t

You might have heard about freecache, a method of cooperatively cacheing web content so it doesn’t eat your bandwidth. I thought this would be just the thing for the MP3s of a show by The Decemberists, ‘cos I’ve only got 5GB/month.

Imagine my dismay when I get a note from my service provider saying that I’ve used 90% of my allocation in a couple of days. The freecache proxy doesn’t do a thing, just redirects back to the original links. Bah.

I’ve had to take the files down for now. Maybe they’ll be back later.

iRiver H120

h120.jpg

I’ve had the iRiver H120 for a few weeks now, and I think I’ve used enough of the functions to give it a fair appraisal. I bought it because it would make a good portable hard disk, which coincidentally would play MP3s on my long commute.

The device is basically a Toshiba 20GB mini hard drive with a direct USB2.0 connection to its FAT32 filesystem. It also supports USB1.1, which means that the H120 will interface (albeit slowly) to most machines you’d meet today.

This is how my Linux boxes identify the H120 on power up:

scsi3 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
  Vendor: TOSHIBA   Model: MK2004GAL         Rev: JC10
  Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Attached scsi disk sdb at scsi3, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
SCSI device sdb: 39063024 512-byte hdwr sectors (20000 MB)
 /dev/scsi/host3/bus0/target0/lun0: p1

It’s easy enough to figure out a mount point from this information.

I don’t think I have USB2.0 support quite figured out on my machine, as I find transfers to and from the H120 to be rather slow. Sometimes I find that large transfers time out, causing the device to remount read-only. A pain, but it does ensure that the filesystem doesn’t corrupt itself.

I couldn’t be happier with the sound quality. With all my MP3s encoded with LAME‘s standard preset, and using Sennheiser headphones, it sounds great. The H120 will play other file formats (Ogg, WMA and WAV), but I’m primarily interested in MP3s. Never quite got the Ogg thing, despite its open source credentials.

A lot of people complain about the H120’s lack of gapless playback between MP3s. Sometimes this bugs me a little, other times I don’t notice it. iRiver claim to be working on it, and it’s easy to upgrade the firmware when they do.

There are also options to use M3U playlists (which are absurdly easy to generate using the find, tr and sed commands — I must show you someday), and also an ‘iRiverDB’ database. I found the latter worse than useless; it increased startup time by over a minute, and seemed to get its genre recognition spectacularly wrong. At least it’s optional on the H120. I usually just play directories of files arranged by artist and album.

The H120 has a useful set of IO ports. In addition to its headphone and (proprietary) remote socket, there’s digital in and out, plus analogue line in and out, and external microphone input too. There’s also a built-in mike for voice recording. The digital in, when coupled to a CD player with digital out, allows you to rip even the most broken copy-controlled CD.

Last night I recorded The Decemberists at Lee’s Palace with the H120, and it came out quite well. I have a Sony ECM909A stereo microphone, which works better than it should for live taping. I recorded to 44.1kHz 16-bit stereo WAV (it can also do a variety of MP3 bitrates), and it’s nice to see the results sitting as files directly in the filesystem. There’s an (arbitrary?) limit of 74 minutes on WAV recordings, after which the H120 will go into record pause mode, and will start recording again on pressing a key.

My biggest complaint about recording with the iRiver is that there is no level meter, and no way of changing record level in mid-recording. I had to be very conservative with my record levels to make sure that last night’s recording didn’t clip, so I have a good — but quiet, though fixable with normalize — recording of the show. I took the iRiver community website‘s advice and recorded without the remote attached, and consequently got a noise-free record.

I also find the iRiver’s controls to be a little confusing, especially when you get to recording. I was forever accidentally knocking it into FM radio mode before the show started. For day to day playing, however, it works perfectly.

I’ve also found the remote to be a bit flimsy. Before I knew how careful I needed to be with it, one self-destructed in a subway turnstile. The main unit itself seems to be quite solid.

I’m very happy with my H120. It holds a decent part of my CD collection, it’s a handy portable hard drive, and it records with at least the same quality as my MD recorder. It may not have the caché of the iPod, but it also doesn’t have the “please mug me” white cables of the Apple box.

Addendum, June 14: The USB timing out problem has gone away now that I have compiled in USB2.0 support into my kernel; and transfers are extremely fast. This problem doesn’t seem to happen with my USB1.1 Thinkpad which, while slow, works perfectly with the H120.

cheesepiphany

The age I am, I thought I was a one cheese sort of a guy. Give me a good mature cheddar — none of your vac-packed rubbish, but something with a bit of history to it, like from Alex Farm Products — and I was in cheese heaven.

Or so I thought. I occasionally like a piece of blue cheese on a steak, so I asked them at Alex's on the Danforth what they’d recommend. They came up with Fourme D’ambert. As Alex say, Its flavour is assertive piquant with a mellow buttery finish.. I’m already looking forward to it on oatcakes for lunch.

In a different kind of cheesey news, my Sympatico DSL modem is on its last legs. They’re sending me a new one, but this one’s currently pegged at some ridiculously low speed so I can even connect at all. The tech at the (third stage) support centre says they’re really pushing for VoIP, with expected rollout in two years. That would be nice.

My letter to The Guardian

Re: An ill wind?, article by John Vidal.

Date: Wed, 02 Jun 2004 22:05:44 -0400
To: weekly.letters@…
Subject: An Ill Wind to Dr Bellamy’s Wallet

Further to John Vidal’s article on wind energy in the UK, I am astounded by David Bellamy’s gall in denouncing wind energy. He must think we have extremely short memories indeed.

Back in the early 1990s, when I was a neophyte windsmith, I remember seeing a CEGB-sponsored film about wind energy. It was narrated by Dr B., and he was effusing about how wind turbines would be a familiar part of the future landscape, about how beneficial they are, and all the good things that mindful wind energy development will bring.

One wonders what caused the good doctor’s volte-face against green electricity. It would be a shame if such a familiar public face would say anything that it were paid to say. One wonders if David Bellamy now has a backer with an agenda different from that of the old CEGB?

Stewart C. Russell

ebay.ca “page not responding” with mozilla

ebay.ca seems to have great difficulty generating pages for Mozilla. I can have ebay.ca open on both Mozilla and Internet Explorer, and feed them the same URL. Internet Explorer loads it fine; Mozilla comes up with Page Not Responding.

This appears to be entirely repeatable, certainly on my Windows box. Try it for yourself; here’s a sample URL for camera tripods.

busy busy weekend

logscale.png
This weekend was so busy, I’ll need the whole week to recover …

Friday night was baseball. We saw the Bluejays beat the Texas Rangers.

Saturday was speaking about wind energy at the Ontario Association of Physics Teachers annual conference. There were some great talks, including one by Jim Hunt called “Can Physics Experiments be Inexpensive and Accurate?“.

Sunday daytime was attacking the garden. Being away in Missouri last weekend meant that it got a bit overgrown. Sunday evening was going to hear Shahid Ali Khan with Mast Mast Qawwal Party. Who would have thought that Sufi devotional music could be so much fun?

I also finally got the Beta Band‘s newest CD, Heroes To Zeros. Annoyingly, it’s copy controlled (read: deliberately broken for your lack of listening pleasure). Why, then, did I pay the Canadian levy on my MP3 player to exercise my right to make a personal copy for my MP3 player? Thankfully, the “copy control” is extremely poor, resulting in a slightly slower rip. EMI Canada sucks, but you knew that.

If you are wondering why there’s a strange logarithmic scale at the top of the page, it’s because I found my old Make your own slide rule source code. Until I get round to posting instructions on how to multiply, divide and estimate square roots with it, print out the PDF that’s linked from the image, cut along the line, and enjoy having two pieces of paper to play with.

Putting the rant back into intolerant

What’s with Canada’s eminently sensible newspaper The Globe and Mail carrying ads for far-right Colorado-based Focus on the Family? Are we getting so tolerant that we tolerate intolerance?

The words far-right Colorado-based, aren’t mine, by the way. They’re from an article by the Globe‘s Leah McLaren where Focus on the Family … claim homosexuality is both preventable and treatable.

Some of my best friends are from Colorado, and in a perfect world I’d hope that FOTF would take massive umbrage at Leah‘s article, and withdraw their ads from my paper. As is, I wish I had a subscription to the Globe, so I could cancel it in disgust.

How to make Windows suck 10000 fewer times

In the same spirit of Marvin’s comment about Arthur Dent’s brain (It amazes me how you manage to live in anything that small.), it amazes me that anyone can actually get work done on a Windows box without having virtual workspaces …

But I found DESKWIN, which does all I need; four virtual desktops, with hotkeys between them. Not much else. Perfect. Well, okay, Windows has still got about seven orders of magnitude of improvement to go before it’s even mildly usable, but it’s a start.

too many cables

The iRiver remote unit decided to self destruct last night, so it was a rather hurried trip off to G-WIZ to get it replaced. I’m also having a bit of a problem with cable management — my Sennheiser headphones have a 3.5m cable, and there’s probably another good metre or so of cable on the iRiver remote. So I’m wandering around looking as if I’m lugging a protable recording studio, even though the player itself is quite svelte.

raw, raw!

I’ve just ‘hacked’ my Nikon Coolpix 2500 to run in raw mode, using cpixraw (on a Windows machine, alas). I can read the files with Dave Coffin’s dcraw. So far, it seems I’m getting a bit more extra detail than from the original JPEG files.

The only real disadvantage I can see is that for every picture I take, a regular JPEG and a raw file is created. The raw file is confusingly called *.jpg. I think I can live with this.

iRiver, youRiver, hesheitRivers

I just bought an iRiver H120 portable hard disk/audio player/recorder. It seems to work quite well with Linux, so far. Even at over 9MB/s, it’s taking a while to transfer my music collection.

I bought it from the terribly-named G-Wiz store in Scarborough Town Centre. I think it might’ve been a store return — there was some truly execrable music on it (Eminem and Kylie Minogue … bleah!), and the packaging was slightly open. Hmm.