If I ever hear the expression apples to apples comparison, I am likely to explode. What probably started as a humorous twist on comparing apples to oranges has become a prop to every middle manager. It has definitely jumped the shark.
Category: computers suck
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when clichés attack
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lion theft on the boulevard
Somebody stole our lions! We had two — admittedly rather scabby — concrete lions outside our house, and this morning they were gone.It’s not the fact that they were anything to write home about, but they were our lions. We kinda liked them there. Now they are gone, how will people find our house?
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And I Wished I Could Ride A Horse
This is the view from the back of Molly, a huge gentle Belgian mare. We had an hour’s trail ride today with work. Then we ate too much at a barbecue. -
The Wit and Wisdom of Paul Hart, part 37(b)
I mentioned to Paul that I wasn’t sure what this icon was, as I don’t remember installing it. “It must be pirate software!”, replied Paul. -
e-mail contact
Since someone gave me a Gmail invitation, I’ve decided to use it as my website feedback address. You’ll find the address on the sidebar (if you’re reading from the main page), or it’s the inevitable scruss at gmail dot com.
I may not check this very often, but I will do so at least weekly. The Gmail user interface is pretty good; some clever use of JavaScript there.
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iRiver standard cable, yeah!
I may eventually stop raving about the iRiver H120, but not any time soon.
One of the only annoyances I have with the H120 is that I’m nearly always leaving the USB2.0 cable for it at home. I was running an errand in a nearby computer store, and found that they had a USB2.0 to digital camera cable. It looked similar enough, so I bought it.
And it works just fine. Maybe I’m too used to old and weird proprietary cables from the past.
Anyway, if you want a spare/replacement cable for your H120, you want a “USB2.0 A to Mini USB2.0 5 pin” cable.
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Say no to Bonsai tomorrow, okay?
Please don’t vote for Stephen “Bonsai” Harper tomorrow. I don’t think we need a very small version of a Bush for PM.
Mind you, I could still be all riled up about seeing Fahrenheit 9/11 last night. Or as it’s called in Canada, Celsius -1715/99, since we’re metric.
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An improvement, wouldn’t you say?
Of course, really savvy windfarm management software would have real clickable turbines on the desktop that would show you the state of the whole windfarm … -
It’s gettin’ so you can’t say thank you no more
It’s my birthday today; call me Jean-Baptiste (a fête worse than death) …
Anyway, I wanted to thank my folks for sending me a card and a gift certificate, so I sent this message:
Subject: thank you!
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2004 06:53
To: Mum & DadI got the Amazon certificate and the card — thank you so much!
Best Wishes,
StewartWhat did I get a few minutes later?
Action: failed
Status: 5.1.1
Remote-MTA: dns; mail-in.freeserve.com
Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 550 Error: Message content rejectedThat’s right; I triggered a virus filter. So all because of bugs in an expensive operating system that I don’t use, I can’t say thanks to my parents.
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Happiness is not …
… coming home to find someone’s run up several thousands of dollars of unauthorized transactions on your credit card.
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linux allofmp3 downloader
I use — and quite like — AllofMP3.com. While it’s good that they don’t require special software to download the songs, clicking and saving each link on a page is a pain.
If you save the download page basket.html, you’ll be able to run the following one-liner to get all the files from it:
tr ' ' '
Update: Well, as you can see, the above code is all munged, but it’s moot since allofmp3 is basically dead and gone. If the service still works, one of the wget tricks in the comments will work as expected.
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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.
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iRiver H120
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.
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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.
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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.
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total sympathy failure
Oh, boo hoo — the CBC is moaning about petrol hitting 90¢/litre. It’s 81.9p/litre in the UK; that’s $2.002. So until we see a toonie a litre at the pumps in the GTA, cut the whining, please — I have MP3s that need listening to.
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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.
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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.
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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.
