The Mono

I got a little package in the mail today. UPS stuffed it in the mailbox, which puzzled me for a little bit as I hunted around for the parcel that was listed as "delivered". They're not supposed to do that. :)

I used up daylight hours to unpack it, which (in this season of spending every available moment in the garden) says a great deal about its importance.

My first thought: it's really small. It fits in the coin pocket of my jeans. I now have a little, bitty, shiny, kickass mp3/mp4 player. This makes me happy.

( details )

So I have portable music, and a sweet kitty asleep on my bed, and seeds sprouting in the light rack, and the melon bed is dug. I'm going to go have dinner. Life does have its up sides sometimes. :)

I'm feeling a bit cranky. I'm also tired. That means I don't want to work hard outside; I'd rather tinker on the computer. Since I'm out of sorts, I want music. In fact, I have the time and inclination to compile a bunch of tracks off the random AHDJs discs to make a "best of" of my favorite tracks, so I don't have to go paging through each 8-hour disc trying to figure out where the good tracks are. I also have another five discs or so of music waiting to get put on glass media so that it can go out to get playtested in the car.

Then I remember that the last few times I've tried to burn a disc, K3B has aborted with a cryptic error. I tracked it down to some issue with cdrecord, though I'm not sure whether it's a bug in the version, or an interaction with permissions which may have changed with the last upgrade, or...

I keep thinking "oh, maybe I should just go find out", except what's wrestling with a cryptic bug which has patchy coverage on the help forums (last I looked) going to do? Make me cranky and tired. Right.

Maybe I should just go read my book.

Richard Stallman convinces Cuba to switch to open-source.

My head hurts.

I've been fighting with my wireless drivers.

It feels like I'm always fighting with my ( wireless drivers. )

She's gotten better at writing exams.

( Killing time by babbling )

I got a lot done today, and I'm still going.

I haven't really paused to compile a list of things I'm thankful for... that's mostly because I tend to do that about once every week or two all year. I tend to be very aware of just how lucky I am in what I have, including the friends around me. I very narrowly avoided being in a completely different, and much worse, place than I am now, and I'm reminded of that almost daily.

So I spent my time instead doing stuff that needed to be done. ( I'm tired just reading the list. )

( Then there was the computer excitement. )

I've eaten well -- the Williebird was great as always, and the gluten-free stuffing (which is always a gamble) came out very well this time -- and I've had some pie. I'll tweak my laptop a little more, then go out and finally soak in the hot tub, which I've been waiting to do for days. Then I get to enjoy another day off tomorrow. Life is good.

I can't get the wireless connection up anymore. It keeps coming up with "TX timeout" errors a second or so after associating and starting the DHCP request... there's very little out there about this, except that I found a recent discussion on a kernel mailing list about it. Apparently it is a known bug, and they're still hashing out why it happens; the symptom is that the timeouts crop up after a random amount of time, or after reawakening a hibernated system. Not entirely sure that mine failing every time on startup is quite the same, but I'll keep looking.

Frustrating. This might be fixed in the next stable kernel -- but I keep thinking that it was working fine last night!

For those who don't read geek, the upshot of the previous post is that I've got wireless access on my laptop again. (A routine update managed to break it in a big way, and I've been fighting for a few days to get it back.) There are still a couple of kinks to work out -- namely that the signal isn't good enough for me to use it in the living room, as I used to -- but the overall setup seems to be cleaner and happier than it used to be.

It was more painful than it should have been, less painful than it could have been, and I'm happy to be cable-free again. Yay!

Okay. Just for my own notes, really... ( Realtime notes on getting my wireless working. )

I upgraded some packages on my FC4 system, and it managed to break the ndiswrapper setup for my wireless card.

( cut for the jargon-phobic )

Am I the only one who listens to "The Statue Got Me High" and thinks of the Melkur?

(Talk about geek confluence... not sure how many people out there would even get both references.)

Edit: Apparently no, I'm not the only one.

I just signed up for a UC Davis email account. ("astewart" was, amazingly enough, not yet taken.)

Back when I was applying for college in 1993/94, one of the perks I was really looking forward to was getting an email account. It was something that only college students and some employees got to have; my brother had one, plus access to the school mainframe, and I thought it was soooo cool. I couldn't wait, and filled in the spot on the (paper) college application with excitement.

Then I got a xocolatl.com address the next year, and I had my choice of email on a (seriously outdated and overworked) VAX cube, or a little BSD box running in a friend's house. I learned the joys of Pine, and I was one of the geeks because I had two email addresses.

Signing up for an official Davis account gave me the same excitement. I have, what, four email addresses, not counting the official ones (admin@, webmaster@, etc.) already... but I filled out the form with glee. Okay, it's another step to establish me as a member of the student body -- but it's also that I have an official university email address again! squee!!!



*deep breath*

We are marked by the era we pass through. Yea, truly.

I've had a song running through my head for quite a while now, refreshed on Tuesday by watching the season finale of the Chris Eccleston Dr. Who again. High-energy techno, on loop in my head. It was driving me batty.

It absorbed me to the point that I ripped the audio track of the entire episode off a DVD and fed it into Audacity, so that I could harvest a couple of good clips. (DVD ripping in linux has gotten a lot more mature, and I'm still singing the praises of Audacity for audio editing.) It took a couple hours, but I had to have the music that was in my head.

Then I started looking it up, and wondering. And then Nick started playing the full, unadulterated track on his computer. He had found it.

( Very minor spoiler for those who haven't seen the 9th Doctor, and plan on doing so )

So now I have the whole (enormously catchy) track, without having to edit anything. Yay!

And I asked Nick to grab a copy of Stevie Wonder's "Superstition" while he was at it. I'm not really big on his music, but that song has always been a favorite of mine, between the horns and the syncopation.






For those who are wondering, the cut-tag is because I'm very sensitive to minor spoilers about things I'm planning to see, and want to be at least as considerate as I'd want others to be. And I mean minor spoilers. I like it when I haven't seen any trailers for a movie, only heard it was worth seeing, because then I'm not anticipating anything. The mutters about who's in the next season of Doctor Who annoy me -- if they're bringing back so-and-so, I want it to be a pleasant surprise. So I figured that, despite the fact that anyone who sees the episode will have the information in the first five minutes, it was a surprise to me the first time around, and I don't want to deny anyone else that discovery.

Sermon over. :)

Imagine my grief when I managed to take off some of the lacquer on my copy of Sasha's "Communicate One", right in the two spots where I loved it best.

Then there was hope, when I realized that I had the tracks in mp3 format on my computer... and frustration when I discovered that the encoding process had introduced blank space at the end of each track, breaking up the smooth transitions of the mix.

I have just spent about an hour in Audacity, working with the decoded WAV files, looking at some very fine-grained wave forms and making judicious snips. I got rid of blank space, plus a couple of encoding artifacts (the "thud" as the encoder reaches for more data and falls off the end of the WAV file). Then I threw the files back into WAV, burned them to CD-RW to spare me XMMS' hesitation as it changes tracks, and started playing the disc to see whether I could detect any remaining flaws in the transitions.

I can't hear any bad ones, even with a trained ear which is also very familiar with the CD. A slight pop in one spot, similar to a small speck of dust on a record. Otherwise, I haven't been able to tell when the transitions occur. Not at all.

I have my CD back! *dance dance*



Now I get to look for Communicate Two -- I know it's around here somewhere, in its case...

Every time I hunt on Google for CD creation software on linux, I find people singing the praises of XCdRoast.

I can't fathom why. I keep trying to use it, and it continues to be a an impossibly arcane, useless piece of crap with a horrendous user interface. No matter what I want to do, none of the buttons will open a dialog to do it. Want to write audio files stored on your hard drive to a CD? Good luck selecting those files, unless you add all relevant directories to a list by hand. Want to pull files from more than one CD for a compilation? If it lets you do that, I haven't discovered how. Half the time it can't even find the CD/DVD drive.

It has plenty of options in the preferences, but not a single checkbox for "Do Not Suck". I'd rather tangle with cdrecord, whose man page insists that you need to define a SCSI bus address (it actually wants a normal device) than punch button after button in XCdRoast, trying to find some dialog that will show me a list of files to add individually to an audio CD.

I don't understand how anyone uses that piece of junk. It's the epitome of the type of program people talk about when condemning open-source software; whereas I can defend most of the programs I use as being much more user-friendly and robust than the negative stereotype, I can't bring myself to stand up for XCdRoast. The people who do must be on crack.

Gah. It's done, but it ate two days of my life.

I changed the theme for my LJ... I took Component, mucked with the colors and backgrounds, and created the "Theme Park Disaster" theme (that's from the title of the background image, not some clever pun on my part). It's nice... very teal, but still good.

( In which I neep about LJ styles, which will probably bore most of you stiff. )

Time to go to bed so that I can spend tomorrow doing some of the things that really need doing, like talking to the IRS and tending to plants. I'll try not to fall in like I did today -- if only because I dislike wandering the house in my bathrobe all day. I should tear myself away tomorrow at least long enough to get dressed.

I brought out my Wacom tablet this evening (after my wrist started hurting from doing too many fine movements, naughty me) and plugged it into the USB port. I've been working in the Gimp on a graphic, but this is a new computer, so I had been doing it all with the touchpad because setting up the Wacom under linux usually takes about half an hour even if you know what you're doing. I didn't feel up to it, but finally decided that doing it all on the touchpad was ridiculous when I had the proper tool available.

I plugged it in and, as I always do, gave it an experimental swipe with the pen. Suddenly windows moved, text highlighted, and I was staring in disbelief. They finally did it. x.org has finally integrated the Wacom driver fully into X, out of the box. It Just Friggin' Works now. No more compiling drivers, installing modules, restarting XWindows... Five seconds of plugging it in. That's an easier installation than on Microsoft Windows.

Okay, the driver settings need a little tweaking -- the active area seems to drift, since I suspect it's expecting a smaller tablet than my 11x14. I'll track down those settings and adjust them again... but the driver does support full pressure-sensitivity and all the physical tools. No tilt or any of the really fancy stuff, but I don't use that anyway...

My wrist doesn't hurt anymore. As a bonus, all that practice in the past has paid off, and I finally have a nearly instinctive feel for the tablet. It's aaaaaalmost as easy as pencil and paper. (I'm gettin' there.)

Yay progress!

I'm listening to Sasha ("Communicate One"), ripping "Live in Ibiza 2", and thinking that Ibiza 1 must be in my portable CD player. Somewhere. I lost it a few months ago, though I suspect it's somewhere in this house... I did, however, find a copy of Ibiza 1 while cleaning my room today. Good thing, as this is apparently the only set of Sasha discs I had neglected to rip to MP3. That is being corrected.

( In which I ramble about CDs, music, and technical gibberish )

From lily today:

"100 bits on the bus, 100 bits on the bus, take one down, short it to ground, FF bits on the bus...."
"IO, IO, Its off to disk I go, a bit or byte to read or write, IO, IO IO IO..."

(credit to decoy for both)

"Is that from the same place as Kibo's Magnetic Monopole-O's cereal? It comes in two flavors, but the boxes are stuck together." (credit to masto)

I laughed myself silly.

Three entries in one day. wow.

I now have a Gmail account. I never did hunger after one, but when eyeofcanaan randomly shoved an actual invite my way, I said why not. This is considered to be the last big push before they open it up to everyone, and I've been hearing good things from those who already have accounts. Now, whether I'll find a use for it...

It's the same as my regular email address, just sub "gmail" for "foogod". Easy.