bLanark’s bLog

I mentioned Last.fm already. This morning, in a fit of idleness unsurpassed since, I decided to update the software that drives my Squeezebox. It’s moved on many versions, and one of the things that tempted me was a link to last.fm.

I am really impressed with it. I have been listening to “my” radio station for hours, and have only had to skip one track, and that’s one I would listen to (a bit dance/techno) but Mrs bL didn’t like. I’ve heard stacks of great tracks I don’t own (and some I do), some by new artists, but I’m impressed with myself that I can (say) recognize the Newsboys.

The squeezebox can report it’s usage (i.e. what I listen to from my own music collection) back to last.fm, and I’ve turned this on, but as soon as I start getting High School Musical, I’ll be turning this feature off and then I’ll be served stuff that I’ve vetted while at my PC.

Speaking of which, my laptop at work has a really, really naff soundcard. I sometimes switch from my mp3 player to the PC, and the quality is akin to listening to someone shouting down a tin can/string setup. I am tempted to by an external or PCMCIA one, but I’ll get a new laptop early next year. And I already have a pro-quality “audio interface” on my desk in my pretend music studio.

I just scanned some family pics in (yes, not digital!). One of them was too large for the scanner, which copes with A4 and letter and that’s about it. So, I had to scan the picture more than once, then join them.

Worse than that, the image was just slightly too big in both dimensions. Coupled with my plans to get the image square in the scanner, that meant I had to take four scans, each rotated a quarter turn.

I fixed my images up in the GIMP, trimming the white space and rotating appropriately. Then, I thought of the fun in fixing these images perfectly, so that my everything joined. I find it difficult working with big images at 1:1 resolution, often i want to see more than a 1000×1000 square onto the canvas. So I started to look for some free software.

So I did a quick google for an app that would join photos to make a panoramic shot - you know the kind of thing. The first one I chose (not the first in the search results, but a program from a producer that wasn’t subsisting on web advert revenue) was autostitch. It was totally fantastic. I used it on two images, and it joined them together perfectly. It did downgrade the resolution, but I was not worried about that as the whole idea of scanning them was to get them onto the desktop, so I exported all my pictures at 1024, 1200 and 1600 resolution (yeah, me wishing for a 2128×1600 monitor), and autostitch had given me an image about 1800 high, iirc, about half of my source images when stuck together.

So, autostich is totally free, and highly recommended.

From Lars:

Today is your last day as an self-determined human being, enjoy that day. From tomorrow on you’ll be regarded as a slave with no free will and without any right to do what you want. And as you might imagine wihtout a free will you won’t be able to change this situation ever again.

I might as well just give up everything, eh?

Actually, I’m kinda looking forward to the easylife of permiedom - no accountancy deadlines, no enforced 10% wage cuts, no insurances to buy, no uncertainty on the taxation situation, etc. Och yes! Bring it on!

They use skype at work, so I downloaded pidgin (remember, I don’t do mainstream) and configured.

One of the joys if IM is the spam messages. Now I’m wise to them, I can actually scare the people on the other end (when they are real people and not bots).

Last week I had another contact:


[16:06:00] - francesca - sexy nude woman xxx says: sorry
[16:06:50] bLanark says: me too! Why not visit my web site wwww.ugly_45_year_old_man.org ?
[16:06:51] - francesca - sexy nude woman xxx says: somebody wanna talk?
[16:07:17] bLanark says: no, I wanna do sign language and cryptic emoticons
[16:07:20] - francesca - sexy nude woman xxx says: Why don’t you come on http://www.SkypoSexy.com it is really cool and have more girl than ever
[16:07:43] bLanark says: no, I want emoticons - ;-%^ and that kinda thing. It really gets me going!
[16:07:45] - francesca - sexy nude woman xxx says: I have an idea why don’t you come on http://www.SkypoSexy.com like that i can seen you!!!
[16:08:09] bLanark says: I tried that, but my boss objected. Tell me what :-^ does for you.
[16:08:31] bLanark says: wow! you’re stunned into silence - that’s great


It was a long day, but very worthwhile.

The alarm went off early, but I was alread awake before that. The journey in was pants, but I was outside the event on time, coffee in hand. There were about 20 early-start volunteers, and we got to sort out the dressing rooms and “green room” for the bands. There is a maze of little rooms, stairs and corridors at the back of the Hammersmith Apollo (I still wanna call it the Odeon), and I carried tables and chairs up so each room was more hospitable. We were gonna try and move two enormous sofas from a VIP room behind the balcony, but there was no way they were gonna fit. To avoid rock and roll anger, all the cusions were sewn in and they weighed a ton. The dressing rooms were very basic, lucky to have seats in them, definitely Rock and Roll rather than Jonathon Ross.

During the course of the day I humped (carried), went out for lunch, went out for drinks, helped with ticket collection, ushered, sold CDs, DVDs and T-shirts, broke-down the displays, waited, sat around, made friends and overall got great joy!

Ticket collection was cool - they used iPod Touch machines, and all people needed was their confirmation number or name, and then you could check in one, a few, or all of a group. The boss lady could see stats and could say “we’re at 85% capacity now” which was pretty cool.

Musically, I managed to catch the DC*B soundcheck, before we discovered that we were not supposed to be in the theatre at that point. But they sounded awesome. I caught the end of Chris Tomiln, all of Matt Redman, and the first couple of songs of DC*B.

Afterwards, I was selling CDs, and lots of people wanted to know more about DC*B - more than anyone else.

We collected a huge pile of towels and socks for homeless, imagine a pile 80cm high, 2m wide and 4m long of soft, delightful towels, all neatly stacked. Now imagine jumping into them after a long, busy day -that;s what I wanted to do - but didn’t!

I got home at 12:30, after leaving at 6:40.

I’ve been listening to Internet Radio recently.

My past experience has mainly been with streamed stuff from the BBC - mainly Radio 4 and Radio 5 Live. I can grab these on my Squeezebox via the
AlienBBC Plugin (Did you know that the software behind the fantastic Squeezebox, SlimServer (OK, it’s called Sqeezecenter now) is free, open-source, and can be used with the (also free) SoftSqueeze on most desktops ~(it’s java), or without softSqueeze, using just software mp3 players such as Winamp?). (Whew! that was a parenthcal remark and a half.)

I regulary listen to my fave, CrossRhythms both at work and at home on the Squeezebox (it can tune in to web radio real easily without a plugin, it’s only the BBC that make things difficult.

I’d also listened to Virgin Radio, back when (a) they didn’t have FM “down south” and (b) there were not many internet radio stations, so one that played godo music was unusual. Plus, I’d often tried for the free US-University based stations that played non-RIAA artists. Basically, web radio in the US stations have to pay *a lot* to the RIAA when they broadcast a song, and by avoiding RIAA, their costs are much lower - typically airplay is free.

Anyway, I was chatting via IM to a friend who said “Internet radio is the way of the future!”, and he then pointed me at SomaFM. I immediately saw the Lush channel (”Sensuous and mellow vocals, mostly female, with an electronic influence.”) and, as I gushed expectantly that this looked fantastic, not suprisingly he said that was his favourite.

So, I spent a few days listening to the various channels on SomaFM, then went further afield. There are _too_many_ internet radio stations to mention, there are sites catalouging and ranking them, but with a commercial edge to everything webby, you can’t really trust them. The best way is word of mouth, so I recommend Lush, but also something I stumbled upon by luck this week - Last.fm.

Last.fm is a custom radio station - there’s no stream going to every listener, you all get your own choice of songs. And, you get some control over what you want to hear. The way it works is that you tune in to an “artists like X” and you get to choose who X is. So, if you like The Smiths, you can tune in to ‘artists like “The Smiths”‘. You can vote for tracks you like, you can skip tracks, and you can say “Never, i mean NEVER play me this song again!” You can see (and hear) what other peopel have been listening to, you can create a playlist, even just play the same song three times in a row.

Recommended.

You’ll all have had one of those moments when you wake, maybe not totally alert but aware that something is very wrong. Sometimes, it’s just a bad dream. Other times, it’s real.

Last week, I went to bed well before Mrs bLanark. Later, I was woken as she bounded in the bedroom door. I’d like to say I was instantly awake, reaching for the sword I always keep under my pillow, but I wasn’t. Instead, I groggily listened as she told me she could smell burning, see smoke, but couldn’t find the fire.

I think I actually did begin to move quickly rather quickly. I checked the kids, they seemed OK, but I could smell burning in the house - mainly the stairwell, hall and landing.

Downstairs, we could smell the smoke, but couldn’t pinpoint it. We shut off all non-essential electrical equipment, moved a bunch of paper from on top of the telly, cleaned behind the fridge, but the smell seemed to linger, and might still be getting stronger.

Several rooms seemed clear, so we shut those doors, turned off all the lights, and left downstairs for a few minutes. when we came back, we decided it was our study, where Louise had been working all evening. At this point, I wondered if a component on a PC board had failed, and, although the PC worked while running, it might fail to boot. MAybe an outgassing capacitor or something.

But I was uneasy. What if it wasn’t a PC, and we went to bed, never to waken up. I was about three minutes off phoning the fire brigade and starting with “I can’t find a fire, but I can smell smoke….”.

But Mrs bL was up to something. Standing on a wheely chair, in fact. We (OK, *I*) recently fitted a new (inexpensive but of fair quality) light fitting, with frosted glass lampshades like champagne flutes. Whenever the tiny halogen bulbs blows, it trips the whole lighting circuit. We’ve also recently had the dimmer switch in the front room blow, taking out the house, and resulting in a switch that would not switch. So, I was not happy when I saw what appeared to be brown staining on one of the lampshades - did we have an overheating problem? Were the whole house electrics up the spout? Overvoltage?

I got up on the chair (don’t try this at home, kids!), as Mrs bL was not best placed to see. A quick sniff confirmed the culprit was the suspicious lampshade. And a quick peek showed that it was not an electrical issue - a curious wasp had snuggled down, lost conciousness, and spent the last four hours being cooked next to a halogen lamp. It was like charcoal: only a light, black husk remained.

So, the house did not burn down, and I realised just how many things we leave plugged in (even if they are switched off).

And the smoke detectors did not trip - I guess wasp is a lighter kind of smoke that that from grilling meat, which always seems to set ‘em off.

Hmm, I’m a bit disconcerted by the adverts that I see in facebook - they really appear to be well targeted. I guess they are based upon the preferences of my friends, cos I never click on them.

I’m a bit more upset about the ones that are appearing on this site, though. “Marriage Problems?” “100% natural body products?” Do they have a spy somewhere?

What if every modern appliance starts misbehaving - DVDs glitch, cars fail to unlock, washing machines and dishwashers stop mid-program and restart, and PCs fail randomly?

It’s only a few years off, warns Bob Cringley. By removing lead from tin, we’ve changed the substance used to join electronics together for decades. We’re replacing the old solder with new stuff,that hasn’t had decades of testing, and so we are potentially lining ourselves up for a huge problem. The fact is that we *are* getting tin whiskers now, and so need to face the problem, not ignore it.

After reading his article, I dug up some interesting research myself.

Of course, Cringley was on the ball in 2004, when he first brought this up.

The whole solder thing is similar to removing lead from petrol, and replacing it with something else that may be les safe, but at least we haven’t proved it yet. (I was gonna make some comment about lead from petrol being detected in the brickwork of city buildings and then add “but who licks bricks?”, but without looking into it, there could be groups of people affected more directly by lead.

What’s worse with lead solder than with lead in petrol is that it’s only those who manufacture stuff that have to worry with the solder, and a big manufacturing plant can suck air away and scrub it in some way. But with petrol, it’s out in the environment.

Anyway, I was looking forward to an 80 gig solid-state mp3 player in 2010, that would last me a lifetime (yeah, right!). But maybe it’ll start resetting itself after only a few years. Time to buy a new on - whaddaya mean, that was what Apple wanted?

I’m not really one for watching TV, and I’ve just come across this rather excellent blog post about how much time is “wasted” (my words) by people watching mind-numbing drivel (my words again). hour after hour.

Imagine what good all that free time could do, if it was harnessed in the correct way! Imagine if instead of locking themselves up in their houses, everyone went out into their neighbourhoods, chatted with each other, even helped each other? Or would we just get more wars between bigger, better funded gangs? More marital infidelity, recession as the advertising and TV industries die, more pollution from people driving to other leisure activities?

Something to think about.