Posted on by mwhybark

Crystal Sets and Van De Graff wheels

I am happy to see that American Museum of Radio is alive and kicking up the Washington coast in beautiful downtown Bellingham. I wsas inspired to google for this place in the wake of reading the teasers for the intriguing-sounding The Phantom Museum, a book featured on the Things Magazine web site.

I visited the radio museum several years ago, and it was a sterling example of the vernacular museum. It’s based on a quite excessively large collection of antique radio and electricity gear; on the day I visited there were two people puttering amidst the cabinets and so forth, In the back was an individual who was clearly in charge. We talked about the internet and he showed me an amazing device, a radio modem. At the time the museum was reflecting some old-time radio program streams (possibly from Shoutcast but it’s quite possible the visit was before they came into existence).

Most wonderfully, that internet feed was also being rebroadcast from a low-wattage transceiver just outside of town, so at the time it was possible to drive around Bellingham listening to Fibber McGee and Molly and the strains of Benny Goodman at the Savoy, an audio timewarp that was on the airwaves via the internet, a conundrum I’ve savored happily ever since.

Posted on by mwhybark

Stella

The ever-excellent Cartoonist notes three old star atlases available online. Most cool. It’s almost embarrassing to just link like this, as the bande dessinateur (if you’ll pardon the expression) is such an exemplary practitioner of le bloguage court.

If you’ll pardon the expression, messieurs-dames.

Posted on by mwhybark

Following up on linkblog tools

Linking to some server-side bookmarking tools made me curious, so I set one up on my local server, the PHP/MySQL based MySQLinks.

It’s described as beta, which appears a bit modest, but I understand the description. There’s no ‘make nice text’ function in the form submit, for example, which means it chokes on SQL operator characters such as quotes.

Although it works with blog pinger update files, it currently will only examine one changes.xml file at a time (so you can’t build a list of the updates with multiple sources, a necessity), and if that file is unavailable, it coughs up raw errors instead of your llist of links. So it’s got a ways to go yet.

On the plus side, setting it up was cake. I joined the mailing list and contributed rewritten bookmarklet code so that Safari would work with the tool, but have heard nothing from them and not recieved any list-mail, which makes me think they project might be dark for now.

It’s got me thinking about data management in general again. On my desktop, I tend to drag and drop crud all month long and then stick it in a folder every month. I have actually gone so far as to find scripts to do the cleanup for me on the first of the month but have yet to implement them because I want it to integrate with a by-filetype filer script I use. I also want all of the above to be available as folder actions in the OS.

Better is the enemy of good, after all. So instead I just do the cleanup by hand, or, better yet, write about it here instead of figring out how to hook it all up.

Hm.

I really should get it all working, and I really do have all the pieces in place. Once I get that settled I could presumably build a front end for the configuration components. I guess the last thing would be a concept that would allow users to grok it as an app instead of a collection of scripts.

Maybe if I call it the Red Swingline? Your Intern? Humina.

Posted on by mwhybark

Remotely

Remote Central appears to be a community web site for universal remote control enthusiasts. Frankly, I’m glad there are such people, because I’m the opposite. I’ve been attempting to cajole various multifunction remotes to see our satellite receiver with no luck. I’m
blogging this so that when I finally concede that the current universal remote I’m a-wrasslin’ cain’t get thar fum heah, I’ll know where to turn the next time the man extracts my ten dollars.

Yeesh, it’s a lotta effort to go through just to watch TV, I’ll tell ya that.

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Combine PDFs

Combine PDFs 1.0, from Monkeybread Software. Does what you’d think. Helpful for me when I’ve edited a PDF in Ilustrator and svaed the resulting one-page files back out as PDF.

Made with RealBasic for Mac OS X.

Posted on by mwhybark

music drill

eMusicTheory.com practice: java-based online drills. Greg is perpetually after me to relearn to read music so I can pick up the melodies from his lead sheets, and he’s so, so right.

So far I’m finding Garageband is not as well suited to my needs as the old free version of ProTools. I’m (at the moment, anyway) just disinterested in the midi stuff, although the audio fidelity of many of the instruments is quite astounding.

I should link to these two methods to get around the irritating lack of midi importability. I have actually long used the quirky but powerful Harmony Assistant and Melody Assistant to learn parts by ear. The great strengths of these programs are unfortunately hidden behind a complex and confusing interface.

The programs import an unbelievable number of music notation formats and – and for me, as a non-reader, this is key – can convert a lead sheet into tab for any given stringed intrument. You can even customize the tuning of the intrument and get tab based on that. Since there are so many midi files floating around the internet, this software would make a good companion to Garageband, without a doubt.