BeigeJournal

I saw a link on Boing Boing to the new Bushisms DVD and thought it sounded likely to be pretty funny, so I ordered one. I’m underwhelmed.

It is a bit unfair to pick on people for occasionally misspeaking. As anyone who has lived in a dorm room, or worked in a lab or office, in which someone kept a ‘quote board’ with everything everyone there has said that didn’t come out right knows, we all sometimes have trouble getting the words out correctly. Bush does seem to be an especially prolific source of mangled syntax and garbled words. He grew up listening to his father, after all. So often we see him leaning against the lectern in that oddly casual way he has, struggling to get some sort of thought out. Fair or not, this could be entertaining, I thought.

The problem is they seem to have about fifteen minutes of material but apparently were told that they needed to make the DVD an hour long so that people would feel they were getting a good value. There is too much time spent talking about what George tried to say. Though TV is a lousy medium for comic strips, they tediously show a few Doonesbury strips anyway. The George W. Bush Singers set a few of his stranger statements to music, but they didn’t really write songs, they just sing the same mangled W. bits over and over. Tom Smith could do far better in five minutes. Honestly, “food on your family” was pretty funny the first time, but at times this seems like the Food On Your Family DVD. I don’t think it’s worth the time or money.

I saw on Dave Slusher’s blog a link to Charlie Stross’ web site, where I found his article about a tour of the Torness nuclear reactor complex. Since I’ve been so fortunate as to get a tour of a nuclear power plant myself I had to point to his article and thought I’d write a bit about my own tour.

I visited the Clinton Power Station in central Illinois, back then in roughly 1994 still owned by Illinois Power. I was taking a radiation protection course at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and since our professor also worked at the plant an the head radiation safety person he was able to arrange the tour for us. Even in those days this involved some sort of FBI background check on us beforehand.

The Clinton plant is a 950 MWe boiling water reactor located, naturally, near Clinton, Illinois. These plants are amazing things to see. Giant buildings, huge pipes, meters-thick reinforced concrete walls, and tremendous bundles of wires, tubes, lines, pipes, and cable running every which way.

We visited the top level in the containment building. One passes through an air lock to get into containment. The air lock doors at Clinton are cranked open and shut with big handwheels. It’s a fairly dull place considering that we were within 20 meters or so of a reactor operating at around 3 gigawatts thermal. Looking down around the edges the suppression pools where steam is dumped during certain sorts of emergencies can be seen. Apparently one would prefer to not be in there on the rare occasions when that happens. There’s a polar crane in the cylindrical containment building for use during refueling. Wrapped up in plastic was the powerful hydraulic device used to remove and re-attach the very large nuts that hold the pressure vessel lid on.

The turbines are hidden behind a wall in a BWR, since the steam is a bit radioactive even under normal conditions. We were able to see the tops of the turbines over the wall from an upper level at the other side of the turbine building. I’ve seen some large generators before, but the 950 megawatt unit basically took the form of a large building located inside the much larger building housing all the machinery that is outside the containment.

Rather than see the actual control room we toured the simulator, which is on-site. The simulator staff was eager to show off things that are basically incomprehensible to people who are not reactor operators. They’d press some buttons and proudly announce that this is what a design-basis accident would look like. What it looks like is every warning light in the control room, and there are an awe-inspiring number of warning lights, lights up. All at once. I imagine that operators have dreams that look like that.

One thing that was really quite interesting to actually see was the spent fuel pool. There’s not actually much to see, but the size is interesting. The pool there is sized to hold twenty years worth of spent fuel. Twenty years is a long time, yet the pool really isn’t very big, especially considering the giant scale of everything else there. Spent fuel is extremely hazardous but the quantity produced is remarkably small.

I’ve put up a web page with photos and audio from Milwaukee’s MacArthur Square, a park atop an underground parking garage that is not at all a peaceful place to be due to the huge ventilating fans that the park benches were thoughtfully placed near.

I’ve had an iRock 830 128 megabyte flash memory MP3 player for about two weeks now and I’m quite happy with it. My intent was to listen to IT Conversations and some audio blogs on it. I’ve found it very nice to be able to listen to those while away from the computer and I do also use it for music.

This unit has the dull-but-practical rectangular box form factor. It has a miniature USB connector and acts as a USB mass storage device. I have had no problems using it with Linux with both a 2.6 and 2.4 kernel. It uses a AA cell instead of the more commonly used AAA size, which gives it a slight bulge on the battery side and also very long battery life. I’ve been using 2.2 amp-hour “PowerEx” nickel metal hydride cells from Maha and haven’t actually had the patience to run one down yet. They are good for at least two or thee days of heavy usage.

The unit comes with cheap earbuds, an alkaline AA cell, a detachable neck strap, a CD-ROM that is of no interest to Linux users, a USB cable, and a case made of vaguely leather-like material that has a belt clip and which will serve to protect the unit from scratches. The iRock, with NiMH cell and case, has a mass of 83g. Basically, it’s tiny. It will fit in the watch pocket in a pair of jeans. I paid $95 for mine, including tax.

The iRock has a small but quite readable backlit, three-line LCD. You can set the backlight for always off, always on, or between one and sixty seconds after the last button press in unnecessarily fine one-second increments. Navigation through subdirectories is about as easy as it can be on a device with a three line display and a little up/down/select switch. When playing it scrolls the filename or id3 title tag, shows how many files are in the current directory and which number this is (e.g. “2/9”), shows a battery level indicator, displays the equalizer setting (one of flat, rock, jazz, classic, or pop, whatever that may mean), and the elapsed time. It cannot show file sizes or remaining or total time. If the file is variable bit rate it alternates a not-necessarily-accurate elapsed time with the indication “VBR,” as if the listener cares if the file is VBR or CBR. I suppose it serves as a warning that the time may be wrong. It does play VBR files fine.

It can also play, according to the manual, “WMA” files, and supposedly, if you have the right software, even DRM-encumbered WMA files, though I wouldn’t know. It cannot play OGG Vorbis files, which is unfortunate but common.

It contains an FM radio tuner. It offers 20 presets that are a bit of a pain to set and can scan for the next station on the spectrum. I have an old radio that is bigger than this device….

It will remember which file it was playing when powered off and will offer to start playing it when turned back on but it cannot remember where in the file it left off. It can only be paused for one minute before automatically shutting off. Since my major use is listening to long audioblog postings and IT Conversations interviews, this is a problem. As far as I know, however, it is a problem with just about every devices that plays audio files. I have not even been able to find any software for my desktop machine than can remember where in a file it left off. I understand that iPods can set bookmarks, but only for the AAC files, not MP3s. Furthermore, even if you can remember that you were 43 minutes into the file, fast-forwarding by 43 minutes is rather time consuming on the iRock. The notion that all audio consists of three-minute songs seems to be deeply held by everyone who designs audio players.

My workaround for this is to use mp3splt to split the long files into a directory full of five-minute segments, which makes these issues far more manageable. There is a slight pause as the iRock moves from one segment to the next, which in a spoken-word interview may be unnoticeable if you are lucky and the split falls between words or may be noticeable but not a major problem if it does split a word. The files always seem to show up on the iRock in order, but the first file in the directory listing is not always the first chronologically, for some reason. I just set it for “repeat all” mode and scroll down to the first segment manually and it will play fine. I’m not sure how files get sorted by the iRock.

The sound quality is fine. I’m not going to try to do an audiophile-style evaluation of the thing, but I can say that the sound is certainly free of obvious defects.

Having some experience with it I now have some thoughts on memory size and flash memory verses hard disks. I’d say that 128 megabytes is minimal but usable. That’s good for about two hours of music-quality MP3s and around four hours of the IT Conversations-type low bit rate spoken-word audio. There are days when I might listen for longer than that and wish for more space for more material, but it is a usable amount. I would advise buying a 256 megabyte model if you can, though. Even with 256 megabytes, these sorts of devices are tethered to the computer. You decide what you want to listen to, put that on the device, listen to it, then hook it up to the computer again to delete it and put something else on. With just a few hours worth of space you have to decide in advance what you will be listening to. The hard disk based audio players are bigger, more expensive, and probably more fragile, but have vastly more space. Those you can just put a bunch of stuff on and then go listen independent of the computer for a long time. They can also be used in a fully automated fashion for podcasting.

“Podcasting” is a term currently being used to describe the publishing of RSS feeds with enclosures pointing to audio files with the intent that the audience will use so-called “iPodder” scripts to automatically scan the RSS feed for new material, automatically download it, and, ideally, automatically add it to the iTunes or other software’s playlist, from where it can be, yes, automatically, “synced” with the user’s iPod or similar device. In effect, it’s TiVo for Internet audio. New stuff just shows up magically on the iPod, to be listened to whenever the user feels like it. I’m currently using the “iPodder based on the iSpider engine” script to fetch audio from IT Conversations, Adam Curry, Dave Slusher (iSpider downloads the bittorrents automatically), Rasterweb, and Scripting News. The transfer to the iRock, though, has to stay manual given the need to decide what to delete and what to add at any one time.

The iRock 830 is not especially cheap but is apparently reasonably well made and is quite usable. I’m inclined to recommend 256 megabytes, though. I suspect that I will be buying a hard disk based player at some point, quite possibly an iPod, but it’s nice to have this in the meantime. Being very small and light as well as less expensive and thus requiring a bit less paranoia about loss or damage, the iRock may still be of use.

This is a combined review of Magnatune and two albums they offer, John Fleagle’s Worlds Bliss and American Baroque’s recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

Magnatune’s slogan is “we are not evil.” I suppose in the music business this is a bold new way to operate. Their contract terms with musicians are quite friendly and they are certainly customer-friendly as well. While I’m pointing to two recordings here that I, at least, like, you can stream 128kbps MP3s of the entirety of them for free and decide for yourself before spending any money. They don’t charge a fixed price but provide a pull-down menu with options from $5 to $18 which you select depending on how generous you feel. They suggest $8. One half of what you pay goes to the artist. Besides a warm, fuzzy feeling, you also get access to download high-bit-rate lossily compressed files in MP3, OGG Vorbis, and AAC format and losslessly compressed (FLAC) or uncompressed (WAV) files. They plan to offer burn-on-demand CD-Rs in generic packaging at cost, $5 extra, for those people who don’t want to download several hundred megabytes of FLAC files, but if you have the bandwidth the download is the way to go.

FLAC is an open format with open source implementations available for all the usual modern operating systems. Most Linux distributions include FLAC utilities. K3b, my current favorite DVD/CD tool, will burn an audio CD from FLAC files with no extra steps. The WAV files are roughly twice as big but will certainly present no compatibility problems. Folks like me will just get the FLAC files and transcode as needed ourselves but customers are welcome to download the MP3, AAC, or Vorbis files as well.

Magnatune is DRM-free, uses standard file formats, and is simply trouble-free. They appear to regard us as customers, not enemies.

I am very much enjoying John Fleagle’s Worlds Bliss—Medieval Songs of Love and Death. John had a great voice and Shira Kammen—another Magnatune artist—adds wonderful violin. Twa Corbies, familiar to me from Heather Alexander’s rendition, is very nicely done. I’m also especially fond of Da Day dawn.

I have also purchased American Baroque’s rendition of Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. I’ve been occasionally playing bits of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s arrangement of “Spring” for solo flute (something that’s going to need a lot of practice), and it occurred to me that although I have an old tape of the Seasons somewhere, I didn’t have a more convenient, that is, digital, recording. As they promise, it is a bit different from the generic rendition, but not radically so. I rather like it.

I have an old 32MB USB flash memory device that works fine on a number of Linux systems. All that was needed, given that the USB support was already in the kernels, was a line something like this:

in /etc/fstab to allow mounting of the drive.

Several people with newer, higher capacity devices have not been able to use them with the old RedHat 8 box at work, however. We’d get errors in /var/log/messages such as the following:

kernel: Device not ready.  Make sure there is a disc in the drive.
kernel: sda : READ CAPACITY failed.
kernel: sda : status = 1, message = 00, host = 0, driver = 08
kernel: Info fld=0xa00 (nonstd), Current sd00:00: sense key Not Ready
kernel: sda : block size assumed to be 512 bytes, disk size 1GB.
kernel:  sda: I/O error: dev 08:00, sector 0
kernel:  I/O error: dev 08:00, sector 0
kernel:  unable to read partition table

I was unable to find any useful advice on the web. I took one of these drives home to test there and it worked fine on that system, an old P-III with Fedora Core 2 and a 2.6 kernel.

The answer to the problem of some USB flash drives working and others not, apparently, is upgrade to a current kernel.

I just purchased an HP dvd530i DVD/CD burner. This is a DVD+R, -R, +RW, -RW, +R DL, CD-R, and CD-RW drive, with up to 8x DVD+/-R, 4x DVD+/-RW, 2.4x DVD+R DL, 12x DVD-ROM, 40x CD-R, 24x CD-RW, and 40x CD-ROM speed claimed. This drive cost me $110.

I have an old 650 MHz Pentium III system running Fedora Core 2 Linux. This drive replaces an old Plextor CD-RW drive.

I never used any GUI tools for CD burning but I wanted to try out the drive quickly without learning a new set of tools for DVD burning, so I tried k3b, a GUI CD/DVD tool. With an up-to-date Fedora system with yum already in use, I needed only to type yum install k3b to get k3b. I then discovered that I needed the dvd+rw-tools, which is not in the k3b dependency list that yum uses, so yum install dvd+rw-tools installed that. I eventually discovered that if you want to burn MP3s to an audio CD automagically you’ll need the k3b-mp3 plugin: yum install k3b-mp3

There are a lot of rather bad open-source GUI tools and I’m not much of a fan in general of GUI interfaces for this sort of thing, but I am very impressed with k3b.

The main reason I wanted the drive was for backup purposes. I have an old TR-4 tape drive which has stopped working. The tape transport seems to run, but where the bits go no one knows. This drive can store 4 GB on a tape that currently costs about $32. A blank DVD+RW, holding 4.4 GB, costs around $1.40. The DVD drive is much faster, and of course disks are much easier to work with than tapes, so obviously the DVD system is far superior.

This drive, like all the newest ones, supports double-layer DVD+R DL media with twice the capacity of the usual disks, and the very latest version of the k3b software supports this, though I have not been able to actually buy any DL media yet. Once it becomes widely available I suppose this feature will be useful from time to time.

I watch few movies and have not yet bought a DVD video player. I was eager to see if I could play movies on my computer. I bought a copy of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring at Borders. In the United States it is technically a crime to play a legitimately purchased DVD on a legitimately purchased computer using unauthorized software. There are, of course, exactly zero officially licensed DVD player programs for Linux. There is some unauthorized software, however. I had thought that I might end up spending some time installing software, but it turns out everything was already installed. I just typed mplayer dvd://1 and it all worked just fine. It takes around 30% of my old 650MHz PIII to play DVDs. After I have time to actually watch the movie I’ll let you all know what I think of it. I do have to admit that the thrill of breaking the law by watching this movie with open-source software is a bit diminished by the fact that what I’m doing is paying $28.99 for a completely legitimate copy of a movie and then watching it on a computer that I paid a lot of money to buy in a completely legitimate manner. It’s hardly a bold strike against The Man. There is something wrong with the lawmaking system in the USA.

So far I’m very happy with this drive.

Tom Smith has an extensive web site which includes MP3s for sale. Now that I’ve got broadband Internet I thought I’d give them a try. Payment is by PayPal, you are e-mailed a lengthy URL to download the files from using standard HTTP, and the files are standard MP3s, the collections bundled up in ZIP archives. No problems, no DRM, no BS. The one thing to keep in mind is that the URL is e-mailed to whatever PayPal thinks your primary e-mail address is. If, like me, you signed up for PayPal way back when and use it rarely, you ought to log into you PayPal account and make sure it has your current e-mail address as the primary address. The address is not actually displayed at any time during the transaction, and since I’ve undergone an address change, I had to e-mail Tom when it didn’t work. He sprang into action and made everything OK right away, but it is easier to get it right the first time.

The GaFilk 2001 collection is great. It is a pretty good live recording, with Tom recorded quite well and the audience not so well but well enough to hear at least much of their half of the between-songs discussions. I can only describe the songs and their delivery as very Tom Smith-like. If you’ve heard Tom, you know what I mean. Wonderful. Seventy minutes of Tom Smith for $4.99, and well worth the price.

“Badgers and Gophers and Squirrels, Oh My: The 24-Hour Project” is most special. All written in 24 hours, the songs are not all the very most polished, but there are some real gems in there. It must be heard to be believed. Given that, on a good day, I can get part of a verse done in 24 hours, I’m quite amazed. Twenty-seven minutes and also well worth the $4.99.

The Best of ChiCon 2000 stuff is also great, and you might as well get Tom and Luke Ski doing Cthulhu Fthagn too.

Go give Tom money. You can give him money without getting MP3s, but I’d definitely recommend you get the music.

I am a major IT Conversations fan and have become a regular listener of Dave Slusher’s audio entries. I believe it was Slusher’s blog that pointed me to Maciej Ceglowski’s Audio Blog Manifesto, available as audio and as a text transcript. I have to say, I think it is one of the funniest things I’ve listened to recently. The background music really does it for me, I guess. Joi Ito’s audioblogger smashup is pretty good, too.

It’s not clear how seriously to take some people in this debate, and I think the angry people and the funny people are getting confused.

I have started thinking about what sorts of thing audio is particularly good at. The IT Conversations recordings of conference talks make perfect sense, of course. The interviews seem to work well, too. It’s not altogether easy to make an interview work well in text. A conversation really needs a great deal of editing to work as text, which may not be easy to coordinate among the participants. Monologues, in contrast, are easier to edit, and thus easier to render as readable text, though there are times when audio can be valuable.

I seem to have more audio, mainly from IT Conversations, than I have time for, but since audio can be listened to with partial attention while doing other things, it is nice to have. I’ve been working on scanned slides of my vacations in the Gimp while listening to audio.

This site has been hosted by ICDSoft for nearly one year now, and I renewed my contract without hesitation. The current price for a third of a gigabyte of disk and five gigabytes a month of traffic is $60 per year, though as a current customer I was offered another year for only $40. They also now offer one GB of disk and 15 GB/month of bandwidth for $120/year. The service works. There may well have been a time during the year when the site was down, but I wasn’t aware of it. They run mail servers that will accept incoming mail and relay outgoing mail, which work fine. The web-based control panel is reasonably easy to use. The servers run Linux. They’ve never tried to sell me anything I didn’t ask for, they’ve never bothered me at all, they just keep the server running and leave me alone, which is just what I want.

The service isn’t perfect. You do not get the ability to SSH in to the server, and you get the Apache access logs but not error logs. These omissions make debugging the blog software setup more difficult, but I’ve managed. This is, after all, the low-cost end of web hosting.

Overall, I’ve been very satisfied with the service. If you want cheap, no hassle, web hosting for a smallish site and can live without SSH access (or error logs), ICDSoft seems like a good choice.

For my latest installment in the “I tried it so you don’t have to” beverage reviews, I bought a bottle of Acqua Panna water, bottled, according to the label, at Panna Springs, Scarperia (Florence), Italy, by Sanpellegrino S.p.A. of Milan, Italy. Using a small tape measure and a globe I measured the great-circle distance between Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Florence, Italy at roughly 7,500 kilometers. Milwaukee is located on the shore of Lake Michigan, a lake with a surface area greater than the area of Belgium, so importing water from 7,500km away is just plain silly. Normally, I get water from the city water system, which is supplied by the Big Lake that is approximately 10km from my home. The cost to me of this water is near zero. In contrast, one-half of a liter of Fancy Italian Water cost me $1.39 plus tax at the Outpost Co-op. In spite of the price, and the unnecessary environmental degradation caused in shipping water from Italy, I bought a bottle, because I knew that I could get a blog entry out of it. Indeed, a long one, in accordance with what I’ve taken to calling Dan’s Law: The more mundane and simple the product, the longer the review you can write about it.

Acqua Panna “Acqua Oliominerale,” “From the Hills of Tuscany,” comes in a clear glass 500 mL bottle with attractive labels. The bottle is sealed with an old-style, non-resealable bottle cap. I rarely encounter these, but I do have a number of bottle cap tools around the kitchen, on the “back end” of tools normally used the other way ‘round. The water is uncarbonated and uncolored.

It tastes like…water. I carefully compared it to the City of Milwaukee water that I keep in a plastic dispenser in the refrigerator, and, honestly, I can’t tell the difference. I really can’t. I poured some of each into identical glasses, left them on the counter for a while until I forget which was which, and I couldn’t tell them apart. There might be a very slight difference in flavor, but I’m not sure, and I certainly couldn’t say which would be better.

So there you have it. I tried it, so you don’t have to. Don’t bother with Italian bottled water, just move to Milwaukee and drink the tap water here. If your tap water is awful, like, for example, the stuff in Green Valley, Arizona, where my mom lives, and for some reason you don’t want to move to Milwaukee, a nice city with a fine public library, a surprising number of filkers, and a tendency toward snow in the winter, then buy something cheaper.