Out of stock. Dammit.
Fez-o-rama looks promising!
The Tiki King’s Fez.
To zidane
Zidane: to headbutt. Act to verb in three days. See the following: ZIDANE a new way to solve problems.. make it like zidane….
zidaner: je zidane. tu zidane. vous zidanez. nous zidanons. ils zidanes. il zidane.
j’ai zidanait.
tu zidanais. et cetera. et je suppose on peut eventuellement zidanerait.
Multimedia message
Fair Miss in the Garden
I happened to hear a great old-time tune from my iTunes pile the other day, “Fair Miss in the Garden,” by Roscoe Holcombe from Mountain Music of Kentucky, a fantastic collection of field-recorded tunes laid to tape on the porches of Hazard County in the mid-fifties. To my aggravation, nor Google nor Digitrad unearthed the lyrics. Adding to my frustration, I have not yet found any references to the song but the two-or-so released versions. The song, in form and language, sounds very much like a Childe ballad, medieval ballads that survived into the twentieth century in various backwaters and which form the foundation of the cult of authenticity in folkloric circles, to my personal derisive amusement and pseudohistoricist fascination.
Ah well, I’m reduced to the same technique I employed some twenty-odd years ago in seeking to lean the lyrics of songs by the commercially unsuccessful likes of The Gizmos or the (1980s) Ramones. I’ll hafta transcribe ’em.
EyeDrops
In the continuing saga of ironing out the bumps in the deployment of the Mini and the EyeHome in the living-room A/V stack, even after the downgrade, the EyeHome has an irritation habit of dropping the audio, stuttering in the annoying manner familiar to internet audio stream listeners. The troubling aspect of this is that the datachannel should be much larger than the amount of data running to the box.
The current setup has the data running through the Mini from an external HD via USB 2 and thence to the EyeHome via 100-base Ethernet. The EyeHome then runs video out via S and audio via optical. Still, it takes a noticeably long – and aggravating – period of time before a song loads and begins to play, and inevitably, it stutters. This is less impressive performance than the wireless streaming device I inherited from Manuel, and much less impressive than the little iTunes/printer-server/ airport widget I was initially using to stream. Currently that’s a dedicated printserver but if it can do optical out it might be a better device for audio.
Playing the audio directly from the Mini via iTunes is also, surprisingly, producing some audio stutter, and looking at RAM usage may provide a clue – I did not upgrade the box from the vanilla 256MB config and EyeHome is reported as requesting a staggering 1.5GB of virtual memory, along with an ever-increasing number of threads (25 last time I checked), making me strongly suspect the application of some not-very-neat memory usage techniques.
An additional annoyance when playing audio directly via iTunes is the hushed line-level output of the headphone mini-jack. I am nearly sure that there are iTunes plugins to address this issue.
Oddly, video playback via the device is seamless and stutter-free, despite the memory usage issue. I wonder if it’s a function of the size of the asset bases – less than 100 media files in the video-playback archive versus about five thousand in iTunes.
Calendar
Word on AskMe is that this is a basecamp clone for selfhosters. I wonder if it accepts data from and publishes in iCal formats?
Pie Rrrrate
Some anarchist (I take it) examination of Pirate Utopias.
The film was pretty good, but not as great as the first, which has stood up well indeed. Viv and I just watched it yesterday evening and even as familiar as it it is now, there are repeated moments in which I shook my head in wondering appreciation of the spectacle laid before me.
The first film included a wonderful reimagining of the Buster Keaton gag wherein a house’s front falls just so, leaving Keaton wonderingly untouched. Verbinski recast this from comedy to destiny as Barbosa strides though the hurricane of battle, his falling mainmast raining rigging about him. In this film, I counted at least one direct Keaton quote and an indirect reference to Keaton by way of Chuck Jones’ roadrunner cartoons.
I did find myself rolling my eyes in a couple of places. For pete’s sake, can’t the filmmakers cast a person of African heritage in a major supporting role other than that of a mystical witchy woman?
Despite that, several of the action sequences were grandly satisfying, and the final image on screen of Captain Sparrow is likely to resonate with me and I imagine the rest of the culture as powerfully as the Wyeth illustrations for Robert Louis Stevenson’s piratical did in establishing the contemporary visual idea of the 18th Century pirate.
I submit for your consideration, however, that Cthulu might well find the idea that a seaman driven to immortality by a broken heart is the elder lord’s primary aspect or incarnation earth – or under seas – demeaning.
EyeRitation
From the EyeHome FAQ:
“Originally, EyeHome could also use aliases or symbolic links, instead of full movies, pictures or music.”
Meaning, of course, that they’ve pulled features from the software. I’m downgrading immediately. I noticed that the current version also removed the interactive view-by-view option to invoke shuffle and buried it as a universal option for listening to music, a seriously stupid thing to do.
Oh well. Software companies making stupid decisions? Not news.
Delete!
Apparently Gmail is finally rolling out a delete-all feature for the spam bucket. Hope it shows up in my account soon!
Hot Thighs!
Adam Engst runs an amusingly-styled look at what may well be dangerously hot running temps in Apple’s current MacBook Pro line. Get a CoolPad!