BeigeJournal

Another item I discovered at Future Green is Pangea Organics “Pure & Scentless Organic Herbal Shower Gel.” I was attracted to this product by the ingredients list: Water, Saponified Coconut, Olive, Hemp & Jojoba Oils (w/ Retained Glycerin), Vegetable Gum (Guar), Aloe Vera Gel, Glycerin, and Rosemary Extract (all of which are labeled as “organic”). In other words, this soap consists, primarily, of…soap, soap being what saponified fat is.

Lots of products contain lots of ingredients that either serve no purpose other than sounding good on the label or else serve a purpose related more to marketing than function. Hydrolyzed silk protein enables the marketing people to put “Silk Protein” on the shampoo label, which sounds great, but I rather doubt it does anything, and if amino acids are useful there must be a cheaper and better source than silk, but silk sounds good. Lots of cleaning products of all varieties contain ingredients to generate the maximum amount of foam humanly possible. Foam isn’t actually useful, it’s actually sort of a nuisance, being a pain to wash away, but the marketing department loves it. I’m not so happy spending minutes trying to wash foam out of my ears, but I’m apparently considered to be in the minority.

The Pangea soap, as the “scentless” label implies, has only a faint, pleasant smell. It gets me clean, it leaves my skin feeling good, it doesn’t foam up, and it’s easy and quick to wash off. Rather than being greasy, it leaves a slightly sticky feel, presumably from the glycerin. I prefer it this way. I’ve tried a lot of shower soaps, looking for something that doesn’t have a strong smell and doesn’t dry my skin out yet isn’t greasy. This is by far the best I’ve found.

I’ve been purchasing some new towels from my local painfully organic vendor, Future Green located on 2352 S Kinnickinnic Ave in Milwaukee, an area that is a pocket of low-rent hipness these days, with a coffee shop, a Harry Schwartz bookstore, a bookstore called “Broad Vocabulary,” a nice little sandwich shop by the name of “Wild Flour Bakery,” and a bunch of other interesting places, like a small guitar shop. It’s a fun area, easily reached by bike from downtown.

The towels are from Under The Canopy, and are the softest, fluffiest, nicest towels I’ve ever had. They are made, of course, of organically grown cotton. The washcloth was $9, the big towels about $30. I honestly don’t know what good towels of the non-organic variety go for these days, but these are very nice and I’ve figured out that this is the sort of item that lasts for years, so I’m satisfied. Recommended.

If you want to buy cooler t-shirts, you ought to read Preshrunk, the cool shirt blog. It was there that I discovered this:

The Preshrunk entry says, “But when my girlfriend said that this design from B1 Originals is ‘so adorable that it hurts,’ I put aside the shirt I was going to run in favor of this one. But don’t think I’m running it because she lets me touch her boobs. No sir, I actually think she’s on to something.”

My girlfriend also thinks it’s just adorable. She also lets me touch her boobs. That said, I doubt anyone will let you touch her boobs just because you’re wearing this great shirt. But it can’t hurt. From B1 Originals.

I just bought a new cell phone, an LG 6100, which I use with Verizon’s service. I tried activating the web access on my old phone, a Motorola vc120, which I wrote a blog entry about around six months ago. I concluded at the time that it wasn’t very useful. My new phone, however, has a bigger screen with color and WAP 2.0 support. This time around, I’m a lot more impressed.

Specifically, the killer-app, for me, is weather radar on the color screen. That’s genuinely useful. There are various sources of weather data formatted for cell phone usage, including several on Verizon’s menu, the best of which is probably Accuweather, which offers limited but better-than-nothing animated radar loops as well as satellite images. My overall favorite weather site is Weather Underground, which offers a cell-phone page with conditions, a radar still, and the forecast all in one page. I’ve tried WxServer, a pilot-oriented weather site for phones, and while I think it’s a very good service, those of us who are not pilots will probably not be able to justify the fee for just the weather information. The airport information might be very useful for pilots who do a lot of cross-country flying.

There is other fun to be had. The Onion has a mobile page. Flickr has a WAP interface to your contacts’ pictures, comments on your pictures, and more, which is a great time (and airtime) waster. There are gateways to post to LiveJournal. My phone has T9 text entry, which makes things like Livejournal posts tolerably painful.

The browser is really slow and unresponsive. Expect to wait a while after hitting the scrolling buttons. Even the backlight doesn’t brighten immediately upon a button press. I haven’t found any way to bookmark sites by navigating to them and then selecting some sort of “add bookmark” option, the way all browsers on the desktop operate. Instead you have to record the URL somewhere and painfully type it in manually on the keypad, or possibly add it using a regular browser on a regular computer, if you can figure out how to log in and do that. Verizon’s whole user interface approach to their “portal” seems to be airtime-maximization rather than customer-satisfaction, as you’d expect from a phone company. The tiny screen and limited browser still make ordinary web sites mostly unusable—only phone-specific sites are really usable. If anything, the color screen and WAP 2 make that problem worse than on the old phone, because it will try to render the colored sidebars and such that decorate web sites but which are entirely unusable on the tiny screen. The browser will crash from time to time, occasionally requiring pulling the battery to reset the phone, which (so for) has been non-destructive to the phone’s configuration settings and stored information.

Overall, I think it’s a useful service, and this time I plan to keep it enabled. The weather information is what justifies the fee, and there is plenty of goofy entertainment available as well. I’ve signed up for a package of web access and 500 text messages per month for $8/month. Weather Underground can send severe weather alerts by text message, and Hz.com can send TAFs and METARs, among other things, via text messages, so that feature is useful, too.

I live in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and have Time Warner cable television (and broadband Internet) service. I have had their digital video recorder (DVR) service for about a week now. They charge an extra $6 per month for DVR, which last time I checked was half the Tivo service fee, plus the cable company DVR includes two cable tuners built in. I can now, for the first time since I was a child, record one show while watching another. We could do that easily in pre-cable days, but with cable you’d need a second cable box, and who wants to pay for that?

The box is a Scientific Atlanta product, as usual. The thing works. It records shows, it plays them back. You can record two at once and watch one of them or a previously recorded third show. It won’t tell you how close to full the disk is, and there seems to be no indication at all how much capacity it has. I guess the cable company wouldn’t want to confuse their customers by telling them the most basic bit of information about a recorder. It can be set to record a single show or each episode of an entire series, but it has no concept of reruns, so if set to record a series it will get the early east-coast showing, the later west-coast showing, the rerun the next afternoon, and if they rerun it on the weekend, too, it will get that, too. You can and will end up with two or three (Or more! They rerun the “Daily Show” a lot) copies of each episode that you will have to delete manually. I don’t know if Tivo has the same problem. It does retain whatever information about the show that the program guide has, so you can do your deleting on the basis of that without having to watch a minute of each to see which are the same.

The remote control that the thing comes with is excellent. If you are geeky enough to read the instructions and type in lots of codes, you can get it to power up and down the cable box, TV, and stereo with one button press. You can get the volume control buttons to operate the stereo system’s volume. Very nice.

It does add one more faint sound to the noise background of our lives, a very faint whir of the spinning disk and the more noticeable ticking of the disk seeking constantly. It never spins down the disk, and it never stops seeking the disk, either, though it seeks just two or three times a second when it “isn’t doing anything.” It isn’t really a problem, but it is easily heard from across the room in the TV-watching couch.

I keep getting the feeling that lots of companies trying to sell us commercial entertainment product imagine that we are all extremely bored, desperate for entertainment, and willing to put up with any hassle and pay any price to get it. They come up with complicated, incompatible DRM schemes. They expect us to go out and buy new computers running approved operating systems so we can install new, proprietary software, figure out how to use it, enter all our personal information, and enter credit card numbers. Only then can we download “content” that has so much DRM we probably won’t be able to play it anyway. But we’re supposed to be obedient and desperate consumers and put up with it all.

Me? I have a hundred-odd feeds in my aggregator. I read a few Spanish sites in an effort to improve my minimal ability with that language. I play two musical instruments and get together with friends regularly to share music. I listen to some podcasts. I write for this blog, a Livejournal, and put some of my photos on Flickr. I keep buying books at used book stores and have a long list of books to check out from the library. I buy DRM-free, hassle-free music from Magnatune.com and filk music—a genre that doesn’t exist as far as the RIAA members are concerned—both online and on CD.

If someone wants to sell me “content” and insists on making it difficult for me, or just generally behaves badly and won’t play well with others, it’s very easy for me to ignore them altogether. I already have, readily accessible, more great stuff (bundles of passion, as Dave Slusher says) than I have time for, besides my own writing, music practice, and occasional song writing.

I first saw Koyaanisqatsi quite a few years ago and I loved it. Unfortunately, it was out of print at the time, so I could not buy my own copy of the tape. Now, in the DVD era, it is again available, and I picked up a copy the other day. I paid $11 at the downtown Milwaukee Borders. There are two more in the series, Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi, which I’m going to have to see as well.

It is not really a normal movie. There are no characters, no dialog. It consists of images, mostly time-lapse or high-speed, set to music. Time-lapse clouds and traffic. Pedestrians in both time-lapse and high-speed. Factories in time-lapse. It is just beautiful. It is very much a case of what you get out of it depends on what you bring to it. (As Tom Lehrer said, “Life is like a sewer. What you get out of it depends on what you put into it.”) It is not really explicitly anti-technology (it isn’t explicitly anything), and could be read as something of a celebration of technology, tempered by the realization that so much of what we’ve built is tacky and ugly, and the shear quantity of technological stuff the Earth is blanketed with.

I have to mention my favorite scene, which is the last one of the movie. An Atlas rocket is shown lifting off, accelerating in the sky, and blowing up. A piece of the rocket, I think the sustainer engine still attached to a bit of the structure, is followed by the camera as it spirals down, burning, smoke and flame puffing out as it rotates in the air. Organ music plays. What you get out of it depends on what you put into it, but I really like this.

The DVD includes an interview with director Godfrey Reggio and composer Philip Glass which is very interesting.

I highly recommend it.

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’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.