Tag: toys

First they came…

I thought everybody knew and had reflected on the famous poem:

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out
— because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak out for me.

But I had dinner with a friend last night, and was telling her
about my
neighbor being arrested. I said that the fact that they’d
siezed his computer and all the peripherals and his cameras made
me feel I should have off-site backup.

She said, “But why? You don’t grow marijuana.” So I pointed
out all the other stories of people being arrested without having
done anything illegal: Gates,
the
father who took pictures of his kids, and the more recent story
about the grandmother who’s being prosecuted for buying
two bottles of cold medication in one week.

She said, “You’re not black,” and, “You don’t have kids,” and
“You don’t live in Indiana.” (This last one still has me
puzzled.)

About this specific problem, she’s just plain wrong — I’ve
been worrying about the hole in my backup
procedure that it doesn’t produce an off-site backup for some
time, and of course I’m worried more about it because my
next-door neighbor in the same building has been in a situation
where he should have had one. After all,
even if there’s no conceivable situation where the police would
break into my apartment and steal my computer, someone else
certainly could. And there’s the risk of fires and natural
disasters. Having an off-site backup of the things that are
important to you is just a Good Idea.

But I’m concerned that she doesn’t empathize more with all
these people getting arrested. Especially the grandmother in
Indiana. Her grandchildren all live in the same household at the
moment, but if her other son ever gets married and has kids (which
is something she wishes for), I would think it quite likely that
she could buy two bottles of something for the grandchildren in
one week.

Then they came for the people who had two children with
offspring and I did not speak out — because only one of my
children had offspring?

Truce in the browser wars (on my machine, anyway)

I wrote previously
about my efforts to find a browser to replace Firefox 3.0, which
has major memory leaks and takes over the sound system.

I seem to have settled on Firefox 3.5 for the moment.

I still like the interface on chromium-browser from google, but the linux
version was too incomplete, and so I had to keep a firefox
browser going in addition. In addition, because it was
undergoing such rapid development, I was having to restart it
every day, which is a nuisance.

They have actually gotten flash working, so you could use it to
watch youtube videos, but I’m still not able to publish my
daily blog entry. And they frequently have problems with the
interface with X windows, so that you can’t move or view the
window the way you expect.

Firefox 3.5 still has some memory leakage, and of course when
it’s using 13% of my current 8G, that would have been more than
100% of the old 1G system. But it takes at least a week to get
to be a nuisance on the current system, and by then I’ve usually
had to restart it so that I can listen to the MIDI files when I’m
transcribing music. (This is a point for Chromium; I can play
midi files from the command line even if I’ve just listened to
music on Chromium.)

Another major advantage of Firefox over chromium is that there
are all those plugins, including one that lets you use emacs to
edit text fields, and the one that lets you share your bookmarks
between all your computers.

I’ve heard people complain about problems with Firefox 3.5, but
the only one I’ve hit is that my bank site complains that I’m
using an untested browser, but then it lets me do my banking
anyway.

So for now, I’m putting up with Firefox 3.5, but I’ll let you
know if chromium grows up enough to be worth another shot.

Digitizing Vinyl

I had some vacation ideas, none of which seems to be happening,
so I’m feeling like I deserve to spend some money on something.
I’ve looked at some knitting books, and surround sound systems,
and ordering gourmet spices and chocolates.
This morning what seems to be itching is the idea of digitizing
my collection of LP’s.

I was buying LP’s from 1968 when I went to college until about
1988 when I bought a CD player. For some of that time I was
making reasonable amounts of money, and when I wasn’t I was
living near record stores with $.99 sale bins, and that was the
period when my musical tastes were forming. So having my CD’s
digitized and easily accessible on the computer is good, but it
would be a bigger contribution to being in touch with my
personal history if I had the LP’s.

I was convinced enough that I wanted to do this to dig up the
right set of cables to put the output of my stereo system into a
computer sound card, when it turned out that my turntable from
1973 was pretty sick. I kicked it a while, and when it didn’t
get better I put it out for the trash on a Wednesday afternoon.
(Trash collection is on Thursday in this part of the world, but
electronic devices don’t usually last that long on this busy
street near MIT and Kendall Square.)

At the BLU
meeting Wednesday night, someone said that they had
digitized their videotapes by buying a gadget that copied them
to cd’s and then ripping the CD’s to their computer. It really
seems like that’s the way to go for LP’s, too.

So I currently have this in my Amazon
shopping cart. I may convince myself that this isn’t what to
spend money on, or that I won’t want to spend the time putting
the LP’s on the turntable and labeling the CD’s. But for now,
that’s what’s next on the toy-buying list.

I have a further fantasy that I can rent it for small amounts
of money, or gift bottles of wine, and that when I’ve digitized
the records some of them can be sold. But I certainly wouldn’t
spend the money if I couldn’t afford it without monetizing it.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B001MZTZCG&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Blu-ray discs

It took a while, but I finally convinced my new
computer (not the exact model) to play a blu-ray disc. (The problem was that the
system as shipped needed at least two upgrades. It wasn’t
trivial to set up the sound either.)

The picture on blu-ray is indeed better than with a standard
DVD, and I don’t have a problem with paying Netflix an extra
$2/month to get blu-ray discs when they have them.

Unfortunately, the plan is to move this computer upstairs to be
my desktop. I don’t think the old computer is powerful enough to
play blu-ray even if I bought it a drive. So I’ll probably go
back to watching regular dvd’s when I finish setting up this
one.

If I decide after doing that that I miss the blu-ray enough to
buy a player, I’ll let you know. Of course, ideally I would be
able to play the disc on the computer upstairs and watch it on
the TV downstairs, but I think they work pretty hard to stop you
doing things like that. I’ll definitely let you know if I figure
that one out.

In case you’re wondering, the movie I watched was Slumdog
Millionaire. I was a bit disappointed, given how much some
of the people I know had liked it. It was a good movie, with
one likable character, and good acting and photography, but it
was just a Hollywood movie. It was about an interesting
culture, but didn’t really have anything very enlightening to
say about that culture.

The advantage of watching this kind of movie at home
instead of in the theater is
that you can go feed the dog during the scene where they gouge
the child’s eyes out. So it is expecially nice to have the
extra resolution on a movie where there’s one scene you want to skip.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B001NXDBFY&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr
http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B001P9KR94&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Netflix Watch Now

I put a fair amount of effort after getting my new TV into
having a computer that could use it as a monitor.

I expected to run MythTV on it. I did in
fact once have MythTV set up to record off-the-air shows for
playing later, but I reinstalled because something else wasn’t
working right, and really haven’t felt the
need to set it up again.

You do get better results from mythtv than you do from
hulu.com, but hulu.com is a lot less trouble, and seems to get
most of the things I want to watch on over-the-air TV.

At the moment, I’m also paying for Comcast digital TV with HD,
which is necessary if you want to watch baseball games or tennis
matches or some of the political debates, but is disappointing as a way to watch movies or tv
shows. You can find things if you work hard enough, but there
isn’t the variety of TV reruns and old movies that you would want.

But if you have a Windows computer hooked up to your TV, and a
Netflix account only a
couple of dollars a month more expensive than the cheapest, and
a fast broadband connection, you
can watch an increasing number of things with the click of the
button.

I had been using it only intermittently until last week, but
last week Comcast sent me a postcard claiming they’d doubled my
connection speed, and suddenly, watching online seems about the
same quality as watching DVD’s.

I’d always assumed that when there was enough stuff available
and the quality was good enough you’d want to watch some movies
that way on the nights you wanted a movie and didn’t have a
DVD. This saves you paying for more DVD’s at a time than you’re
generally going to watch.

But it turns out that what it’s really good for is when you
come home tired and want to watch a comedy for a bit before
going to bed. I’ve been watching the first season of 30 Rock, which I didn’t get hooked on at the
time. It’s really a lot easier than channel surfing on the
cable box (which is unnecessarily complicated), and you get
something you know you’re in the mood for.

It would probably be even more virtuous to not use TV to unwind
at the end of the day, but given that’s what I’m used to doing,
and given I’ve spent all the money anyway, this seems like the
way to do it.

I don’t recommend spending lots of money just to get this, but
if like me you’re paying for a fast internet connection for
other reasons, it might be worth paying netflix and setting up
an old computer so you can do this.

What to put on a Linux netbook

A friend who’s going to England soon and doesn’t want to carry
his Macbook, but wants to be able to check email, bought a
used netbook with Linux on it. He’s used Unix at work quite a
lot, so he wasn’t expecting to have much difficulty with
Linux.

I don’t know that it was especially difficult, but he was
complaining about how time-consuming it was while he figured out
the package management system and found the names of all the
programs he needed to load.

I have a lot to do this morning, so I thought posting this
correspondence might be useful and quick.

At one point, he wrote me:

Spent far too much time figuring out the netbook. Have better
understanding of the Package Manager now. Installed emacs, ed,
lynx, audacity, ghostview and some other stuff. Still need
ssh and scp. Still need codecs for audio and video — probably
a big list, including h.264 and AAC/FLAC for sure. And MIDI —
Acer’s version of mplayer won’t play midi files!

Any suggestions for codecs, utilities?

and I replied:

I use timidity for playing MIDI.

In ubuntu there’s a package called something like nonfree-extras that
has all the codecs you generally need. It will install it if you try to
play something it doesn’t have the codecs for.

If you don’t have xpdf, you need it. The default in ubuntu [evince] has some
bugs that make the lilypond output look bad.

If you run into audio problems, gnome-alsa-mixer can usually fix them.
It has more knobs and buttons than the other mixers. Their names don’t
make sense, but if you twiddle them for long enough, the audio starts
working.

If you want to read books, get FBReader. The latest version will go out
to the web and get anything out-of-copyright for you.

For system monitoring, I use something called gkrellm, which has a bunch
of little programs (called krells) that will tell you the weather and
the phases of the moon and how busy your cpus and disk drives are.

ssh is probably called openssh, and you probably need both server and
client.

I don’t know what you use for graphics, but getting imagemagick is
probably a good idea. Gimp is overkill unless you really want to do
high-powered stuff, but being able to convert between formats is good.

I find gnumeric less bloated for spreadsheets than openoffice. And you
can read Word documents with just the wv package.

Hope this helps.

Later, in a message titled
Yahoo! Acer runs stuff!, he wrote:

I saw more of the useful ssh stuff in Add/Remove today,
Oh is there stuff. Pages and pages of stuff, most of which
I’ll never need nor want to put on here.

and I replied:

I forget what the command line search for rpm’s is [rpmfind], but I never use the
GUI for exactly that reason. On ubuntu, I would say something like
“apt-cache search openssh”, and pipe it through grep if it gave me too
much stuff to read.

Roasting coffee

Some of my homebrewing
friends have been experimenting with roasting their own
coffee. I’m not able to taste the results of their experiments,
because I’m extremely sensitive to caffeine, so I only drink
decaffeinated coffee, and that isn’t what they brew.

But the smell of what they do is certainly tantalizing, so I
spent some time drooling over the Sweetmarias.com website. I
ordered some coffeemaker cleaning stuff, and a new
German-engineered coffee grinder, and found I was enjoying
spending a bit more time on my coffee-brewing method and getting
better results. So last week I took the plunge and ordered a Fresh
Roast Plus 8 Home Coffee Roaster and eight different kinds of
decaffeinated green coffee beens.

If you want to try this without spending money and kitchen
space on a single-purpose gadget, you can read the instructions
for doing it in a popcorn popper at SweetMaria’s, or this instructable.

Anyway, I have roasted one batch of Kenya AB
Auction Lot WP Decaf coffee and I can
report:

  • Next time I will follow the instructions to do the roasting
    under the stove hood, or outdoors on the fire escape. Compared with how
    good all the other smells to do with making coffee are, the
    smell of beans roasting just isn’t the way you want your house to smell.
  • But once you’ve roasted it, and are handling the beans, it’s
    definitely worth it to smell the fresh roast. I like opening a
    new bag of commercially roasted coffee, and this is much
    better. The description of this coffee on the bag is:

    Lively, bright cup with citrus, meyer lemon,
    caramel and floral sweetness.

    You can really smell
    most of that without brewing the coffee at all.

  • I knew I was going to have to make adjustments to my brewing
    method when I changed my buying and roasting methods. This
    first batch is definitely not as strong as I like my coffee, but the
    flavor is really good.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B000PC3FNM&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Recorded Music Library on Linux

Compared with people who use ipods, I’ve been late getting my
music on line and computerized.

The reason I don’t use ipods,
or some more open version of the same thing, is that I don’t
really enjoy listening to music through earbuds or
headphones.

So when I’m home or in the car, there’s no problem playing CD’s
through speakers. When I’m somewhere else, I either listen to
whatever music is playing there, or don’t listen at all.

But of course, one of the things computers are good at is
organizing and cataloging things, and CD’s are especially suited
to being catalogued that way, because they usually have all the
information on them, in the metadata.

So in the last few months, I have compacted and catalogued my
cd’s on the computer. They now sit in two large notebooks on my
living room bookshelves, most of them are in a directory on an
external hard drive in .flac format, from which I could recreate
the CD if I needed to, some of those are in a directory in MP3
format which I could play on my cell phone if I wanted to, and
my home network is set up so that I can play the music off the
upstairs computer on either the laptop or the media center
computer in the living room.

SOFTWARE

Here’s the LINUX software I use to do this:

  • sound-juicer takes the CD’s and reads them into the
    directory on the computer. I use flac as the output format. It
    turns out to be important to set the preferences to “strip
    special characters”; otherwise you end up with directory names
    with commas in them, and most of the programs that want to do
    something with the directory (like back it up, or convert the
    flac’s to mp3’s) are going to have trouble with that.
  • I use rhythmbox to play the music on the computer. If it’s
    running on the upstairs computer, you can play the music it sees
    on the downstairs computers automagically, without configuring
    networking drives or anything. It has lots of options for
    having the computer make pretty colored patterns based on the
    music and getting the lyrics off the web (this seems somewhat
    unreliable for the music I listen to) and accessing internet
    radio stations like last.fm. I turn out to actually sort of
    enjoy putting “shuffle” mode on and listening to random songs
    from my entire collection, as long as I’m close enough to the
    “next” button to skip something I”m really not in the mood for,
    or that really doesn’t make sense out of context.
  • I use brasero these days to write CD’s. It definitely beats
    remembering the options to mkisofs and cdrecord, like we used to
    have to in the bad old days. I haven’t been
    making mix CD’s from the music, but I’m pretty sure I
    could.
  • If I just want to play one song and I know where it is in
    the filesystem, I usually use mplayer from the command line.
  • soundconverter converts all the .flac files in a directory to mp3 files in a different directory.

I installed all of these programs from the Ubuntu repositories.

CAR

I did try out one of those devices that transmits music from an
MP3 player on an unused FM frequency that you can tune your car
radio to. It didn’t work consistently enough, so I gave the MP3
player and the radio transmitter to a friend who lives where the
radio spectrum isn’t quite so crowded. I don’t know if she uses
it or not.

One of the binders I put all my CD’s in came with a cd holder
that velcros onto the sunshade in my car, so I just put a few CD’s
into that and play them when there’s nothing good on the
radio.

If that ever seems too restrictive, I might buy a new car radio
with an input jack or an SD card reader. But I think that’s a
ways down the list for the toy-buying budget.

Other places

I can use either my phone or my Nokia N810 to carry music with
me. I also have a small portable Sony speaker that I can plug
into either of those devices. (They do both have speakers, but
certainly you wouldn’t want to listen to music on the phone for
any length of time; the Nokia is less tinny but still pretty small.) So when I buy music from the Amazon
MP3 store, I can still play it to my friends, although not quite
as easily as bringing a CD to a house with a CD player.

Exercise

I usually get a burst of energy for improving my exercise
habits sometime in April. Often it’s after watching the Boston
Marathon, but this year it happened a couple of weeks
before.

I have occasionally been someone who goes to a gym and puts on
funny clothes and works out on a machine for 20 minutes to the
terrible music they play and then
does some yoga. This has always been when there was a gym in the
building I worked in and it was a way to take a break from my
job. I actively like rowing on a rowing machine, and would have
one if there was room in my Cambridge apartment, but there isn’t.

Now that I work at home, there’s a lot less incentive to put up
with the travel time to the gym and the clothes and the music.

I have a clothes rack in my bedroom that if unfolded correctly would be a
Nordic-trak ski machine. I’ve never really liked the noise it
makes, and while unfolding it and folding it back up doesn’t
take as long as getting to the YMCA would, it’s still a fair
amount of overhead.

Anyway, when I have had the aerobic exercise habit, I’ve been
just as obnoxious as other people about its benefits. One that
doesn’t get mentioned very often, but I’m pretty sure it’s true
for me, is that my hair grows longer.

None of this prevents me from getting out of the habit for
years at a time. Since my most common mode of exercise (when
I’m not taking breaks from work at a gym) is walking, I most
recently lost the habit when my hip arthritis got too bad, and
then I didn’t take it back up after the surgery in January of
2008.

Even with my April exercise energy, and even though my ability
to walk (at least on flat terrain) is roughly back where it was
before the arthritis and the surgery, I still haven’t been able
to get back to walking anything like aerobically because I do
most of my walking with the 12 year old dog, and his hips seem to be about
where mine were before the surgery.

I occasionally get an idea for how to do aerobic exercise that
doesn’t depend on equipment or going somewhere you don’t want to
go. I’ve done a certain amount of
dancing to my recorded music collection. A couple of years ago,
when the hip was getting bad, I decided you didn’t have to get out
of your chair if you waved your arms vigorously enough, and I did
some conducting to my recorded music collection. If you do yoga
standing poses with downward dog in between, it’s aerobic.

This year’s idea comes out of this article in the New York
Times. When I actually read it, I didn’t think anything except
that the typical office building stair well sounded even worse
than the gym as a place to exercise. But then a couple of weeks
ago, I realized that I have two flights of stairs in my own
apartment, and if I just go up and down them a few times at a
reasonable clip, that would be the exercise, without going
anywhere I don’t want to go or changing clothes or anything.

So I hum Souza marches and go up the stairs at that tempo.
When I get too out of breath to hum the march, I stop.
Sometimes I do this twice a day. I haven’t been doing it long
enough to grow my hair longer, but it does seem to be having the
normal short-term effects. A new one is that my fasting blood
sugar is much more reliably under control when I’ve done even a
short stair-climbing stint.

Following up

Logitech 550

I said in my first post about my
Logitech Universal Remote that there wasn’t an easy way to program it
under Linux. Further googling revealed that it might not be as
hard as I thought, since the actual interface is actually through
the Logitech web site
and you only need the command line to upload a file to the
remote. I have now tried this out.

I started with these ubuntuforums
instructions for installing concordance and congruity. I haven’t had a lot
of luck getting udev to let me use devices as a user, so I also
used these
instructions
 for running the programs as root.

The upshot is that it didn’t work. The web interface for telling Logitech what you want your
remote to do is the same as what you get running the program on
Windows, but on my system, running congruity on the file the web
program gives you to download doesn’t seem to change what the
remote does at all. YMMV.

But the good news is that the Logitech website does save
everything you did, and when you run their program on Windows, you
get the work you did on the website. So you can
do your programming at the logitech
site, and then run the windows program to update the
remote.

So I have now fixed some of the problems I reported in my last
post, about the volume control on the DVD and the aspect ratio
on the TV set.

Scores

The advantage of posting emails
to lists is that you do get comments on what you said. A couple
of people pointed out that you can get good scores out of
lilypond; it just takes some tweaking. I replied that I had
assumed that (and in fact I do it sometimes for non-renaissance
stuff), but that for me the badness of Lily’s scores is a feature,
since I don’t believe people should play from them.

You can read the whole thread (quite rambling) in the
lilypond-users archives for yesterday, starting at the
contribution before mine in the thread titled “Re: Review of
Valentin’s opera”.

Transcription of Weelkes

I have uploaded the transcription I talked
about on Tuesday.

Taxes

I made a quick post yesterday on the
grounds that I had to go do my taxes. I spent about 4 hours, and got the essential work done. There
will be another session for filing when I get an answer to a
question from my financial advisor, but the fiddly stuff about
finding all the records and adding up all the little pieces is all
done.

The Amazon Download seemed complicated
compared to putting a CD into a drive, but maybe it’s because I’m
not really used to doing much on Windows. Once you got the tax
program downloaded (which required installing the Amazon download
program), you had to find the setup program, which they gave you
the filename of in a text document, so you couldn’t just follow
the link.

TaxCut made one fairly major blunder
which if I hadn’t caught it would have cost me several hundred
dollars in taxes and penalties. It didn’t ask me if the money I was withdrawing
from the Roth IRA was taxable or not, and just assumed it was.
I’m sure this is a bug. It took a bit of clicking to find the
place where I could enter the basis of the IRA, but I think I have
a reasonable number for the taxes now.

MLB TV

I implied a couple of weeks ago that I
didn’t think the MLB TV worked
very well. One of the things I had on while doing my taxes was
the Spring training game between the Red Sox and the Mets, and the
quality on my Mythbuntu box with the DVI
connection to the TV was quite acceptable.