A downy woodpecker, doing its thing.
Blog
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Avoiding Copy-Protected CD suckage with an iRiver H120
- Hook your iRiver H120 to the optical output from a CD player
- Start recording on the H120, and play the CD
- Stop recording at the end of the CD
- Transfer the very large MP3 file across to your Linux box
- Use mp3splt to split the tracks from a freedb track list
- Result! 😉
Now I can listen to Fountains of Wayne Welcome Interstate Managers without hassle.
Oh, and if anyone says that an H120 recorder doesn’t have legitimate use, please see my field recordings.
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big, real big
RePower have installed the world’s largest wind turbine, the 5MW RePower 5M. With blades 126m in diameter on a 100-120m tower, this isn’t for the home scale wind enthusiast.Their site’s incredibly slow just now, as it has just been discovered by SlashDot …
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Uncle in The Oldie
My favourite elephant got a good writeup in The Oldie, a magazine I’m not quite old enough to read. The PDF of the full May 2004 issue is currently online if you wish to read it. -
it’s not cheap being green
I got some spam^H^H^H^Htargeted marketing e-mail from thegreenwebhost.ca. Their prices seem deeply off; they charge C$109.95 (about US$83) for 7.5 gig monthly transfer, 2 gig storage and 100 e-mail addresses.
By comparison, I pay 1and1 US$10/month for 50 GB monthly transfer volume, 2,000 MB web space and 500 POP3 accounts.
While I’d consider paying a premium of perhaps up to 50% for green consumer items, there’s no way I’m paying more than 8× the price.
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two blue herons
standing in a field at the edge of Burlington; standing close enough to be together, but obliquely apart, like a couple who have said all they ever will.
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not *that* Gold Disk, I hope
I see that a company called Gold Disk Canada Inc is being sued again over spamming. I do hope it’s not a remnant of the the old Amiga software company of the same name. The Gold Disk I remember used to write neato DTP and publishing tools in Mississauga
I used to think Mississauga must’ve been quite the place, back when I used to compute away in my suburban Scottish bedroom. I guess Cumbernauld (the Scottish new-town equivalent) might sound exotic to denizens of the Land o’ Hazel.
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Russia ratifies!
Russia Ratifies Kyoto! So that leaves those other backward countries out in the cold.
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half a turbine: wee deid speug
We found a dead sparrow (= speug, in Scots, pr. sp-yug) outside the front window when we took the recycling out. It had hit the window. Sorry, little dude.
So that’s me used six months of the avian mortality of the ExPlace wind turbine.
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big bogging box
Every day, I walk past some fields in Burlington. They’re alive with the ringing of crickets, the autumn crops are coming on nicely, and Canada geese pad around warily. Idyllic, no?
Today I discover that this is slated to become a Wal-Mart. Yuk! Can there be anything more hideous than a Wal-Mart? Always Low Wages … Always! should be their motto. Catherine’s hometown square has been destroyed by a gargantuan Mal-Wart just outside the city limits. These stores are ugly, and they smell.
I don’t often find myself agreeing with a Toronto Sun columnist, but Marianne Meed Ward wrote:
What’s right and fair is a living wage. Until Wal-Mart (and other discount retailers, restaurants and businesses) provide it, it’s not ethical to shop there.
in her June 27th column, titled Lining up for poverty.
So, please, Burlington Ontario doesn’t need another Wal-Mart. It needs green spaces.
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using MIME::Lite from ActiveState Perl on Windows
Wouldn’t you know it, but Windows just has to do things its own way. I’ve just started writing periodic system monitoring programs for our met station network, and needed to send e-mail. Under Unix, it was a simple matter of using MIME::Lite, and calling:
$msg->send();But Windows doesn’t do sendmail, so you have to talk to the SMTP server directly:
$msg->send_by_smtp('your.SMTP.server.here');That seems to work.
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co-transiteers annoyance
Two new annoying fellow travellers on the GO train yesterday:
- The Clipper: she took about 10 minutes to get her nails just right … clip, clip, tick, clip … am I the only one who finds that kinda gross? I felt like making kapweeng! kapweeng! ricochet noises to go with it
- The Thumper: Take a Stompin’ Tom Connors record. Remove the vocals and instrumental accompaniment. Slow it down 200 times. That’s what this youth was doing with his right foot: thump … thump … … thump … … … thump … thump. He kept checking around to see if he was getting a rise out of anyone.
Being the consummate commuter of course, I abided by the first law of transit annoyances: Sit there and do nothing, for cowardice is a virtue.
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the joy of spam!
Hooray! I got my first bit of comment spam on this blog. This means two things:
- my blog is being found on search engines.
- WordPress is being used by enough people to make blog spamming worthwhile.
Of course, I’m not going to let any through, but it’s a wee piece of serendipity while I’m waiting for the furnace repair person to come.
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my monitor crashed!
I use a Samsung SyncMaster 171s, and it has this weird quirk every now and again. It decides to fade to white with chilling slowness. I used to think it was Windows 2000 crashing, but the system’s okay if I hit the ‘Auto Calibrate’ button on the monitor.
Maybe it needs exorcism.
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Poorly Hacked Perl
I have to admit, I’m gaining more than a sneaking admiration for PHP, the web application language that WordPress and Gallery are written in. It does remind me of an even more hacked-together version of Perl, but if it works well, well …
I looked for books, but they seemed to be out of date or very expensive, or both. So I’m sticking with the online PHP Manual.
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