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(image nicked from Canadian Family magazine)
Category: goatee-stroking musing, or something
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A not-very-good golf joke
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What if you build it, and they leave?
City Hall is currently tearing itself apart over transit. You’d think that in a city with a downtown that’s pretty much gridlocked for three hours of the day, the answer to the transit question would be “More please everywhere”, but in this precious city, it’s less than that.
We have a mayor who is obsessed with subways because he thinks they’re fast and will keep the automobiles running. Unfortunately, Toronto is a big sprawly city with less than infinite cash, so we’re not going to get subways everywhere. Our last venture into subway building — the Sheppard line — has been a bit rubbish, running a stubby distance to nowhere in particular, and being quiet enough that you can always get a seat.
Though I live in Toronto, I’m originally from Glasgow. Glasgow has a subway; in fact, it’s one of the world’s oldest. It was opened in 1896, when Glasgow was at the height of its “Second City” fame. Glasgow made the ships and trains that maintained the empire, and trained the engineers of the world. We were pretty hot shit at the time, and we had a bunch of workers we needed to get around every day from the shipyards and offices of the city. Lots of people moving in to work. Ergo, subway!
Just one problem: cities change, subways don’t. Even though shipbuilding was never a hugely lucrative industry (according to my grandfather, who worked at John Brown’s, they never cleared more than 7% even at the best times), Glasgow and environs would probably have never thought that its industries would change and contract the way they did.
So what’s the subway that Glasgow’s been left with?
- The industry has gone, so has most of the ridership. There’s an awkward mix of residential stations and, well, nothing stations. I mean, West St? C’mon!
- Both of the major rail hubs that the subway serves — Buchanan St and St Enoch — are long gone. I just remember the shell of St Enoch station used as a car park in the very early 1970s, but no trains.
- Given that Scots were a bit squat in the 19th century, the subway’s not built for 21st century people. I could never stand up in the trains.
- Ridership is frankly pants; indeed, even Toronto’s Sheppard line carries more people every day than the Glasgow subway. Riders are pretty much now park ‘n ride office drones, students (bored [on the way to uni], drunk [doing the subcrawl; a pint at the pub nearest ever station] or daredevil [the subway challenge]) or huns.
Glasgow used to have quite an extensive tram network. Of course, you wouldn’t know now, ‘cos it’s all been ripped up, but you can do that with street-level transit. Subways you’re stuck with.
Cities and cultures never know when they’re at their height. Glasgow had it going on when it built its subway, yet I’m sure the city planners never thought that the city would change the way it did. At least Glasgow made stuff that everyone needed; Toronto, what do you do that keeps you anchored here?
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“There is somewhere an abandoned house”
There is somewhere an abandoned house
With cracked walls and sagging roof
In its yard the grass unmown
Unswept dust the door unmovedGuarded by a dog
A small forgotten man
With unshaven beard and unkempt hair
Paces back and forth like a madman
Lost face hope abandonedLooking for his dog
— Eqrem Basha, “Introduction to the meaning of solitudeâ€
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kind of defeats the purpose
The highlighted text says “Staedtler Textsurfer Gel highlighter”, but you can’t read it because the highlighter made the ink fade.
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shrunky dunk
I didn’t know they still made SHRINKY DINKS. Indeed, I didn’t know they were ever really a thing outside something you got free in Nabisco cereal boxes in the 1970s. Or something you did with Hula Hoops packets, then stuck a safety pin on the back so you could wear it as a smashing badge.
To be appropriately retro, I printed this with a dot-matrix printer.
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Generational loss in MP3 re-encoding
Okay, name this tune:
madplay / lame – 1000 iterations
(You’ll have to scroll about half way in before anything starts)
Didn’t get it? Try this:
madplay 24-bit / lame – 1000 iterations
(Again, you’ll have to scroll about half way in before anything starts)
Missed that one? Okay then, how about:
(no need to scroll here.)
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, it’s a clip from Adele‘s Someone Like You. Sure, you can’t make out the words too well in the last one, but at least they don’t sound like some dire paen to Cthulhu, like the first two do.
All of the above samples are the same source file re-encoded 1000 times. I’d heard that there was some loss to encoding MP3s, but thought that if you kept about the same bitrate, there wouldn’t be too much loss. I wanted to test out my theory, so I took:
- LAME — a quality mp3 encoder (that can also decode to WAV)
- madplay — a decent mp3 decoder that uses fixed point for speed
- a shell script (see below) that encodes an MP3 1000 times, feeding the output of the last run as the input of the next.
- a sample clip; in this case, ganked from Amazon.com: 21: Adele: Music using Audio Hijack Pro.
The original sample looks pretty clean; it’s not the highest quality, but it’s clear:
The first thing that strikes about the multiply-reencoded file is that it’s much longer:
This is because LAME adds padding to the beginning and end of each song. All this padding adds up over 1000 runs.
I’d used madplay extensively before, so I knew it worked reliably. First, I tried it using an intermediate sample size of 16 bits (same as the source) and no dithering. Just after 100 runs, Ms Adkins’ plaintive voice becomes hard to understand:
madplay / lame – 100 iterationsI’d turned dithering off in the first test, as I thought it would overcome the signal. As the signal was pretty much gone, I didn’t think I had much to lose, so I tried it at madplay’s full capability of 24 bit internal processing. Again, 100 runs was where things started to go really sideways:
madplay 24-bit / lame – 100 iterationsLAME can also decode MP3s, and remarkably, the lyrics remained discernable after 1000 interations (so go and see the third sample up top). Sure, it sounds scratchy, but the piano sounds like a piano and not like some underwater harp. LAME is clearly able to recognize its own input, and decode it accordingly. madplay, on the other hand, just treats an MP3 as a generic MP3, hence the over-compression and extra silences.
So really, if you’re going to re-encode music, it matters more what you use to decode your MP3s. If you can use the same tool for both, all the better.
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rebooting the handwriting
My handwriting is atrocious. It’s scrawly, uneven, with malformed letters (r never recovered from Miss MacFarlane’s ligatures, t usually left unstroked) meandering up and down the line. It’s got blotchy, affected borrowings, too: tailed and stroked 1s and 7s in the European style, and a d that was least seen in a partial differential: ð›¿. In short, a style all my own, wanted by none.
I’d prefer to have my handwriting legible to others, and even by me. I don’t want my notebooks to look like a spider’s hauled its bedraggled carapace out of the inkwell onto the page. Unfortunately, cursive is right out to learn. I can’t read it, in any style. In fact, I find the German Sütterlin to be as logical to learn, as I can’t read that either, but at least it looks badass.The style I’m trying is pre-cursive. Yes, it’s meant as a transition from printing to cursive, but I like its simple clean italic lines. I imagine I’ll join it up a deal more when I’m writing quickly. The hardest part for me is sticking to the line and stopping my writing wandering off up the page.
We’ll see how this goes …
(and thanks to I want to write right! | Ask MetaFilter for the suggestions.)
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best fail whale
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fun trick noisemaker
I just built my first Atari Punk Console, a simple LM556-based noisemaker beloved of the circuit-bending crowd (and pretty much avoided by everyone else). Jimmie P Rodgers sells a nice board (or kit), and I bought a few boards a while back, and only just built one up now.
The board’s a nicely finished little thing:
… and yes, it really only needs three resistors, three capacitors, and the 556, plus the control pots, power, speaker and all-important on/off button. The APC sounds a little like a drunken, flatulent bee banging around in a lager can, so you really want to be able to turn this thing off.
Jimmie designed this to fit in an Altoids tin, but Catherine had discarded a LUSH Massage Bar Tin which looked just about the right size. The tin is made of butter-soft aluminium, so it’s easy to start holes in it with the awl on my Dutch Army knife. It’s bigger than an Altoids tin, so you don’t have to fight to get things in. Lastly, the LUSH tin is nicely curved, and fits in your hands well.
Wit the lid closed, it looks like this:
And the sound? Well …
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One’s a meal
I’d been to Conway’s Red Top before, about a decade ago. It was just as good as I remember it.
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End of Movember
Thanks to my donors, my stonkingly ill-advised facial hair raised over $1000 for men’s health and prostate cancer research at Movember.
before 
after Man, it feels strange to shave again. Especially on my chin, which hasn’t seen sunlight since around 2003.
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last past th’ epost
I’ve had a full billing cycle go through epost now, and would like to note that:
- EFT direct payment — the kind I had to send through a void cheque — isn’t actually supported by any of the companies I use. It might be my bank being useless, but it’s a waste of time for me. I still have to faff with online banking for payments.
- The “Record a Payment” feature appears to be designed for inline PDF viewing. It took me ages to find it on the bill page, since my PDF bills appear in Preview.
My second favourite utility, Bell Canada (the first being all the others), seems to want me to use their online One Bill service rather than epost. Bell Canada posts their bills on their internal system first, then on epost a few days later.
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It’s Ill-Advised Facial Hair Month!
It begins with a shave …
Yes, I’ve signed up for Movember. Sponsor me, or I’ll grow a Holiday Neckbeard … -
No work of art …
but it is my first working lead-free, SMT soldered circuit. I have two SoftRock Ensemble RXTX radios to build, and I thought it would be better to melt a $10 trainer kit than a $100 radio. It works as expected, though I wouldn’t describe the red/green LED’s insane flickering to be “an attractive and functional SMD dual color LED flasherâ€.Flux is your friend here. I tried Chaney’s recommended method of supergluing components on the board, but that didn’t work. What ended up best was applying flux to all the pads, supplying the thinnest layer of solder possible, refluxing the pads, then flowing on the components. A steady hand, a magnifier, tiny (½mm) solder, good tweezers and a pointy soldering iron helps. Some kind of fume extraction is good, too, as Pb-free flux is a tad acrid.
I don’t miss eutectic leaded solder. Sure, it’s easy to use, and it’s got a kind of magical quality that it’s below the melting point of either lead or tin. But Sn-Ag solder is toxic enough, and I don’t need to dump more lead in the world.
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not your dad’s multimeter
I’d been surviving on a series of sub-$50 multimeters for years. They’d give an approximation of a reading,then fail miserably in a variety of stupid ways. The last one, a rip-off of an Extech, decided to show me how its wires were connected to the probes. “Barely” is a fair description.
So I thought I’d buy a decent meter. One that had heft and gravitas, like the Avo 8 that my dad used to bring home from work. The Avo — seemingly constructed from bakelite, glass and lead — didn’t just take readings, it told you The Truth on its mirrored scale.
So I bought an Agilent. Reliable company, all the right features, beeps politely only when required; a very, very sensible meter. Then I found these in the package:
Dude, what?! Skins on a meter? Meters aren’t toys. Meters are sensible things used by sensible people. We don’t want our work distracted by thoughts of Space!, America!, Sports!, or Some Kind of Bug Thing Eww Squish It Squish It! If you were able to get “skins” for the Avo 8, they would be about Wisden, sheds, and the TSR2.Despite the sticky nonsense, it’s a good meter. I also managed to catch a Handheld Digital Multimeter Cash Back Offer, so it’s cheaper than competing Flukes and Extechs.
