Posted on by mwhybark

Natural recorder

Natural Recorder, currently only for Nokia series 6, does exactly what I need it to. Eric, who has been helping me with my cell phone research, discovered this.

He also mentioned that he’d found fora noting that the audio-recording apps I cited yesterday do not offer the internal-recording feature I need, but can only record ambient sound; thus to record a call, one would have to use the Treo as a speaker phone. I swear I had seen specific feature description for PAR that enabled internal recording, but I have run out of time to do homework.

UPDATE: DO NOT purchase and install Natural Recorder without noting this: “Automatic recording of all phone calls … No user intervention required.” While it (to date) operates successfully in easily, transparently recording calls, the default mode of the program is to record every single call placed or received. Among other things, that means that unless you’ve scrolled though your contacts and identified them as ‘do not record’ contacts, you will find yourself with recordings of all of them on your memory card. Not to mention the telemarketers and new contacts who just happen to call.

Oh, this is so maddening. So far, by working the stick on the phone, I saw no global toggle to invert this setting. I’m really hoping there is one. I also found no mention of starting and stopping recording within a call – recording starts at the top of the call, and runs as long as you’ve configured the app to run, in minutes.

Part of what is so frustrating about this is that the transparency of the UI leads one to expect that the app will work the way you want it and at the same time retain significant user-customizability.

Posted on by mwhybark

Research Cell

Haven’t fixed a one of the other blogs’ commenting yet!

I’ll pick one to do tonight, I think.

Last night and much of today was devoted to a research frenzy on my chestnut of a topic, cell phones. I presented the problem, albeit with much greater specificity, in May of last year to the same venue with slightly differing results.

The upshot of all this is that I am pretty settled on a Treo 650, with the intent of installing one of several voice-recording software apps on the thing in order to allow an all-in-one replacement for my microcassette recorder, Palm PDA, and recording adapter. The apps under consideration include SoundRec, Audacity, and PAR.

(UPDATE: The preceding may be in error.)

My intended workflow is to record phone interviews to the Treo’s SD card. I have SD cards already, for camera use, and so can experiment with the approach before forking out for a large-capacity card.

In discussing this with Viv, I realized that our cell-use pattern is very likely to change when we have two cells in the house, and that therefore it makes sense to set up the new plan as a family plan, so that we can call each other without using time. Viv currently invests about $20 a month, so I can simply add that to my plan estimate. In the end, it does look as though Cingular has plans that will work well for us and our price point.

The problems come in when I try to think about how else I might use the device. It lacks wifi, for example, forcing me to rely on subscription data-access at Cingular, which had pricing that made me quite unhappy enough to simply not consider using the feature. Things got more ridiculous when I tried to set up a Family plan with two different phone models, as Viv doesn’t need or want the Treo.

“Cain’t get thar fum heah,” the pixels on my screen told me. I was unable to reach a Real Person (TM) even at the neighborhood Cingular store to check if the 650 is in stock or if it’s possible to get two different phones.

I did reach a real person at Fry’s, and he told me they only have the Sprint 650s, and that obtaining an unlocked 650 can only be done over the internet. I looked at Sprint’s pricing, and it’s crazy.

So as usual, I find myself nearly ready to cell out, but stymied by the bewildering pricing plans and purchasing decisions. I have a secret weapon, though. I know where all the PalmOne stores in the US are. If a plan makes sense, I don’t have to rely on the hardware the carrier provides.

That said, I doubt that I’m going to geek out about locked v. unlocked cells; I mean, last night, as I went to bed, I had only the vaguest idea what the hell the term even meant. Convenience and immediacy, given the specific hardware, will surely rule in this instance.

—

Viv and I traipsed about the town today. My vintage car coat is coming undone, so I’m looking for a new one; a couple of weeks ago, I lost my beloved ninteen-sixties Pendelton wool fedora, and my ten-year-old glasses are falling apart. So I dealt with this by clawing through bins of the eyeglasses of what I have always assumed to be the recently dead, pawing though coats intended for sale to the indigent, and conducting a whistlestop tour of the vintage-merchant precincts of Fremont. No promising hats or eyeglasses were found. A fine specimen of car coat was fitted for me from the always-pristine stock at Private Screening, but alas, it proved too small.

—

Right, so: the Oscars are on, and my Oscars feature intended for the mag got cut. So I don’t have to sweat bullets about getting things wrong, although I’m gonna be a little chafed about cutting the tie-in to Dr. John Dee’s stolen crystal ball. I made as many jokes as I could in 200 words concerning the words “ball,” “stone,” and “crystal,” considered in the light of a piece purporting to predict the Oscars.

Are we done here? Am I caught up? No? I have to cook the salmon? OK.

Sleep tight, my sleep-deprived beauties. The world is in fact accelerating, and yes, its’ goal is to sell you more crap faster! Buy in good faith.

Posted on by mwhybark

Fantastic.

Hooray!

All the comments on the other blogs I host are now broken, although I believe that I enabled the default comment templates on each one of them.

Crud, crud, crud.

Posted on by mwhybark

Spaaargh

Alright, closing in here. Christ, my whole frickin’ day has been wasted. The problem with flood-control denied comments stemmed from one of the layers of sparmor. It requires the comment to be funnelled through a preview before it will be accepted.

Posted on by mwhybark

Air

Jerry points out this flight lesson journal, interesting partly becasue it records someone’s experiences obtaining their pilot’s license via lessons based at Boeing field. The opening entry quotes ballpark rates ranging from an “unrealistically low” $4,000 to a top end of $12,000.

I believe I will get my driver’s license first. But after that, who knows?

Posted on by mwhybark

Spammakablam

Argh. I looked at one of the plugins, and found it was easy to install on my main blogsite, but relies on an update to the stored comments templates that I have not applied to any of the additional blogs. So now I need to review the comment templates on the old blogs for design idiosyncrasies. What a pain!

UPDATE: Nice! It’s now 2:30. I think everything is in place. Christ, I sure don’t want to have to screw around with mod_security stuff at the apache level.

Would-be commenters, please email me if you get a big fat denied or 404. Meanwhile, I need to see a man about a horse.

Posted on by mwhybark

Comment Erry

I receieved a succinct email from the proprietor of daymented.com, to wit: “why??”

She’d attempted to comment on one or another of my recent posts but alas, I, acting in my primary occupational capacity of distracted halfwit, had closed the comments along with the trackbacks the other day.

Comments are once again open but moderated. Talk amongst yourselves. My sincere apologies.

UPDATE: um, never mind. For now. The second I opened comments, the spambot pinned my CPU again. That was about an hour ago, and it took that long to wait for the lag in processing the few clicks needed to pull mt-comments.cgi out of the directory.

Unfortunately, I have Things To Do to day and so I shan’t be implementing yet another layer of comment-spam security just this second. Comments are brute-force disabled for now, so sorry for the inconvenience.

Damn I wish MT had just built the stupid local white-listing feature instead of the dumbass centralized key-ID system. It looks as though it builds value, but in the long-term, central user-IDs actually build liability.

Posted on by mwhybark

February made me toasty

I read the paper on the back porch in my shirtsleeves yesterday evening under a bright and cloudless sky. In the sun, it must have been seventy degrees.

While Southern California is experiencing an unprecedentedly wet winter (with the concomitant landlslides), we’re facing an imminent drought. Twice so far this winter we’ve experienced long sunny stretches that essentially melted nearly all the snow off of the Olympics, at least as far as I can see them across the sound.

Rainier still has a white mantle this time, though.

I’ve been thinking about the work schedule for my editor, and while I think it’s vital to produce for him, I can’t see how it’s possible on the schedule we’re facing. My day job makes it effectively impossible for me to conduct any business at all but the job itself for about nine to ten hours a day on most days. In order to clear the decks to be accessible for sources, I would need to go to work at about 3 am and get off around noon for at least two weeks of March.

The P-I ran a short interview with Pete Bagge yesterday, apparently the official release date for the Buddy Bradley book I wrote about a few days ago. I had seen this as I read the paper, but Paul Beard was also kind enough to call it to my attention.

Another correspondent, Per Egil Kummervold, the developer of personal fave Chordie, thoughtfully dropped a line.

He has revamped the website and is adding a multiple-instrument chording engine, to allow one to select the particular string voicing one wishes to see the chords for. He pointed out the guitar-based iteration as the initially-deployed incarnation of the tool.

While I’m running down this list, I should note that I ran into official friend of the Donk Patrick Murphy at the bus stop the other day. He looked well, and we exchanged a few words about Ken’s recnt visitor. My bus came before I was able to suggest getting a drink, but I feel certain we’ll bump into each other again.

And finally!

The amp we picked up the other week lacked a dedicated phono line in, and so I forked out about $20 on ebay for an external, powered phono prre-amp. The results are satisfactory. However, either my hearing is going in the low end, or the amp itself is waaay skewed to treble. The old, non-functional amp had an integrated graphic equalizer and I miss the feature – this one only has three generic audio presets, “jazz,” “hall,” and “concert,” singularly uninformative.

Right. Time to swap the laundry about. Ta-ta!

Posted on by mwhybark

Route du Pavement

[map.search.ch] offers a quick-zooming interface presenting satellite photos of Switzerland overlaid with maps. I was able to find my teenage home in Lausanne after one false start, which had me poking around the countryside to the north of the town.

We lived in a ville-radieuse of upper-middle-class apartment block towers, swaddled in Le Corbusier’s greensward and literally on the highest point in the city. The basement of the apartment complex, which included about fifteen twenty-story-or-so towers, linked all the buildings atop the shorn and flattened hill. The basement complex had at least five levels, each level equipped with hermetically-sealable blast doors and generous supplies of industrial-sized drums, marked with the Swiss symbol for civil defense. I never did actually find the bottom of the basement complex, as below minus five we never found a light switch. But it was very clear that the complex could house many more persons than the inhabitants of the apartment buildings surmounting it.

Asking my Swiss peers about this remarkable find – even more remarkable for the fact that it was not in any way locked or marked as off limits to the general public or nosy teenagers – yielded bored teen “pffoouh” sounds. Apparently the Swiss building code had required all buildings over a certain size to incorporate fallout shelters and provisions since sometime in the fifties.

The whole of the built-up countryside, then, in my imagination, grew enormous, unmapped complexes of cavernous underground spaces.

Many years later, in Brussels, my sister, her boyfriend, and I went to a secret party, a sort of proto-rave, held in an abandoned industrial building on the outskirts of town. The building, a decrepit mass of brick archwork looming unlit in the night, was host to a conventional nightclub on the main level.

But we squeezed into a sort of crevice in the women’s bathroom, which led to a long, narrow hallway. At the end of the hall, a shaven-headed fellow in a leather jacket was collecting vouchers and cash before admitting people to a square-plan spiral stair that went down, and down, and down.

As we descended, music began to be audible, and dust began to make people sneeze.

After a long descent, we emerged into a cavernous space, defined by what I now know are groin vaults and brick columns, towering fifty or sixty feet above our heads. A parachute draped low over a makeshift bar was illuminated by portable halogen lamps.

Flashing strobes from several directions illuminated three separate music stages on which performers strutted and yowled through the haze of gritty dust. The floor was the source of the dust. It was made of fine powdery dirt, possibly sedimental. It was not laid flat, but rose and fell across the vast interior space. The gentle hillocks and hollows combined in some places to entirely occlude lines of sight.

At no point while in that remarkable exile from Piraeus’s Piranesi’s prisons did I see an opposite wall.

[argh! stupid Word spellchecker!]

While there, I amused myself by imagining that it was possible – likely, even – that were I to set off into the darkness beyond the lights’ reach I would eventually emerge beneath my old apartment atop Lausanne.

Who can say that in another direction I would not have found myself emerging from a cavern in the vicinity of a small town called Lascaux?