02.04.02
Posted in Tech
at 10 am
Samuel Butler’s Erewhon chapter 24, titled “The Book of the Machines”:
“So that even now the machines will only serve on condition of being served, and that too upon their own terms; the moment their terms are not complied with, they jib, and either smash both themselves and all whom they can reach, or turn churlish and refuse to work at all.
How many men at this hour are living in a state of bondage to the machines? How many spend their whole lives, from the cradle to the grave, in tending them by night and day?
Is it not plain that the machines are gaining ground upon us, when we reflect on the increasing number of those who are bound down to them as slaves, and of those who devote their whole souls to the advancement of the mechanical kingdom?”
Published 1871…
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02.01.02
Posted in General
at 7 pm
A list of strange acts by criminals and other regular humans.
4. THE GETAWAY
A man walked into a Topeka, Kansas Kwik Stop, and asked for all the money in the cash drawer. Apparently, the take was too small, so he tied up the store clerk and worked the counter himself for three hours until police showed up and grabbed him.
Click the Read More to see the other 7 blurbs…
Read the rest of this entry »
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01.27.02
Posted in General
at 12 pm
Make sure you have the proper tax form ready to go. http://www.thoughtpolice.com/bayboyz/1040.html.
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Posted in General
at 2 am
There’s been a lot of discussion regarding the horrors of the JPEG Compression Monster. However I think it’s important to remember that JPEG is not an inherently lossy format. JPEG uses a formula for encoding the color data that uses ‘wavelets’, so to speak. [1] Imagine the top of each wave as being a point of color in the image.
In fact when you set the compression settings for saving a JPEG, you’re setting the minimum size of those waves. By setting a low quality compression (a 2 or 3 setting), the waves are made larger and fewer waves are used to express the image, and the smaller the file size that results.
In the same way, setting a high quality compression (the 10 or 100 setting) uses more and smaller waves, waves that can produce more detail in the images.
Look closely at a more recent version of Photoshop and you’ll see something interesting. “Now the dials here go to… 11?” [2] Once the waves are smaller than a pixel (usually the ’10’ or ‘100’ setting in most export dialog boxes), then you have a lossless compression scheme! Setting your compression to 11 or 12 will make sure all the detail in an image is captured in the waves.
JPEG: The Compression Chameleon.
[1] I cannot speak to the mathematics myself. However I do comprehend the basics of the idea. http://www.wpdfd.com/editorial/wpd0199.htm#comment
[2] See “This is Spinal Tap”, the movie. The DVD version includes a voice over by the band which is not to be missed.
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Posted in General
at 1 am
http://www.io.com/persist1/logs/1011904114.html
I’m with Ben on this one. The whole “Googlewhacking” thing is pretty silly. Particularly because the more popular it is, the more difficult it becomes. Eventually someone will put up a page that has a set of generated pages that includes a pair of each of the words in the English dictionary and end the game once and for all.
The game has always been much easier to play with the Mac-oriented version of http://www.google.com/mac.
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01.24.02
Posted in General
at 11 pm
I’m really excited about seeing Two Towers next year. Amy found some great stuff about it:
“Just wait until the 2nd movie, The Two Towers, comes out. Seems people are already complaining about the title, saying it ought to be changed to something less reminiscent of 9/11. Oy.
“I was reading in a forum where Tolkien fans were discussing the suggestion that the The Two Towers title be changed, and they came up with some funny alternate titles:
Orcs! Orcs! Orcs!
Mordorian Boogaloo
The Two Completely Fictitious Towers
Merry & Pippin Get Their Groove Back
Fellowship of the Ring II: More Tales of Walkin’ and Singin’
I Sauron What You Did Last Summer
Dude, Where’s My Ring?
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01.22.02
Posted in General
at 11 am
I just had a chat with a friend who was looking into QuickTime Streaming and I did a bit of research and pulled up some intereting links. They center around Mac-oriented solutions of course…
Those last two links are of very interesting content.
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01.20.02
Posted in General
at 7 pm
I haven’t thoughtfully checked my e-mail in days. I’ve been toally wrapped up in trying to put together 4 VCDs worth of Depeche Mode video clips, as I’ve downloaded them from depechemode.com. The encoding process to convert the QuickTime files to MPEG-1 files takes about 10 minutes for each 1 minute of video. So it’s taken a while. Worse, I haven’t found a way to encode a folder full of files, so I’m reduced to baby-sitting the 80-odd files, getting each encoded one by one.
However, I’m making headway. Disc 1 (1981-1989) and Disc 2 (1990 – 1999) are done. I’ve got the VCD version burned and the individual MPEG encoded video streams burned onto a Mac/PC hybrid disc. It looks like there will be a 2000-2001 Disc A and Disc B, as I’ve got enough material for more than 1 hour of playback.
I’m thinking of trading these VCDs with other Mode fans. I might be able to get some good quality captures of the early Mode music videos.
But what I’d really like to do is get a cheap LaserDisc player ($60 at Stuff) and get my Devotional LD burned to VCD, along with Strange Too. As well I need to rent a good quality VHS player that I can hook up to my Mac to capture Strange which has yet to come out in a digital format.
All of this will take time of course, but I’ll get to it at some point.
I’m been going through blank CD-Rs like a madman. I really need to get another CaseLogic CD Booklet. I really like these 48 pocket versions. So far I’ve got one for Music and one for everything else. I think I need another one to hold the VCDs and other media ‘projects’.
“Such as?” Such as a set of Nick Cave concert recordings that I have on CD-R that I need to cut into tracks and get some cover art designed for. The Goodson list (which I haven’t posted to in years) recently had a thread regarding delinquent projects, and this was one of them.
Not that I’ve read my mail lately.
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01.12.02
Posted in General
at 4 pm
This morning I’ve been working on a couple of things, but getting Closed Captions into a QuickTime movie is my biggest goal of the morning. I took a video from dm.com, a clip of Jeopardy, the game show, where “What is Depeche Mode?” was the correct response.
Through some trial and error, a couple of online tutorials, I figured it out and actually got the video to come out pretty well. If you’re interested you can see it at: http://http://homepage.mac.com/rosso/JEOPARDY320-CC.MOV
I added that captioning by hand, with a lot of tweaking and messing around to get it just right. After I finished that I started looking for some tools to do it right and came across a few good pages:
Apple’s Quicktime Text page
Other Tutorials at Apple
QTTT – QuickTime Text Tool written in Hypercard, no less. Not that great of an interface, but I did do a version of the video clip that had the captioning scolling across the video like those news tickers on the cable news channels.
I’m trying to see if I can get a closed captioned QuickTime burned as a Video CD. It’s a small thing, but I’m trying.
I really see this as a area for self-education that I can play with now that I have QuickTime Pro and Toast, a whole bundle of new tech is open to me to learn about.
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01.08.02
Posted in General
at 10 pm
Well that was interesting.
I got home knowing that the DSL service should have been activated. I went into my TCP/IP control panel and put in the ISP’s settings. I quickly unwrapped a few cords and the DSL Modem (a Cisco Router).
Each time I plugged a cord in, I was rewarded with a new green light.
Power cord: Green light.
RJ-11 phone cord from the wall: Green light after 20 seconds.
Ethernet cable to my Mac: Green light.
I opened a browser window and boom. It worked. It simply worked. I followed through step 4 of 7 and it worked.
So I plug my Mac back into the ethernet hub, and switch back my G3’s TCP/IP settings. I plug the Cisco Router into the hub as well. I open up the Airport Admin Tool. I give it the same settings I just gave my Mac.
I turn the router off and on, save the Aiport’s settings.
I open a browser window. It worked. I open a browser window on Amy’s G4 Titanium…
It worked.
It just worked.
It just fucking worked.
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