Archives for April 2005

links for 2005-04-29

Posted by PJ on Apr 29, 2005 | Comment |

Audiophile on the Cheap, Part I

Most of my music listening takes place in front of my computer while I’m working. I’ve put a great deal of care into selecting equipment to enhance the experience. I’m actually quite pleased with my current listening rig. I currently have an M-Audio Firewire Solo recording interface between my computer and my monitors. I connect the balanced outputs on the interface to a pair of independently-powered KRK Rokit 5 reference monitors. For headphone listening, I plug a pair of Grado SR-60 cans directly into the Firewire audio interface. The Grados are an amazing value, if a tad on the uncomfortable side.

Listening Rig

All my CDs have been ripped and encoded with the Apple Lossless codec. I manage my music library with iTunes and I listen to everything flat (with no equalization).

Twisted Sister sounds better than ever.

Posted by PJ on Apr 28, 2005 | Comments Off |

Channelling Dom Deluise

Gene tagged me with the Caesar’s Bath meme:

Behold, the Caesar’s Bath meme! List five things that people in your circle of friends or peer group are wild about, but you can’t really understand the fuss over. To use the words of Caesar (from History of the World Part I), “Nice. Nice. Not thrilling . . . but nice.”

So here’s a brief list of things I just don’t understand:

  1. HDTV: If a movie or television program isn’t worth watching in NTSC, it probably isn’t worth watching. One thousand and twenty lines of interlaced resolution isn’t going to make it any better. When my TV eventually breaks I’ll replace it with an HDTV monitor, but I’m not voluntarily upgrading any time soon.
  2. Podcasting: What, exactly, is so revolutionary about linking directly to MP3s of radio broadcasts from RSS feeds? Internet broadcasting has been around for years. It’s just another case of old wine in a new (XML) bottle.
  3. Vietnamese Food: One of the best things about living in the DC area is the almost unlimited access to ethnic cuisine. That being said, I can’t understand why everyone I know is always gunning for the Vietnamese restaurants when the time comes to pick a place for dinner. Everything just seems so bland.
  4. The Old Crow Medicine Show: I love bluegrass, but the OCMS isn’t really that good. I think they’re trendy because they dress and look like hipsters.
  5. The Raven in Mt. Pleasant: It’s a dive. It’s a bar. But it’s lacks the character required to make it a truly great “dive-bar.”

I’m tagging Brian.

Posted by PJ on Apr 25, 2005 | Comments Off |

links for 2005-04-22

Posted by PJ on Apr 22, 2005 | Comment |

links for 2005-04-21

Posted by PJ on Apr 21, 2005 | Comment |

Return ‘Rewards’

Last week, the Chicago CBS affiliate’s news division interviewed my dad, who is a personal financial planner, for a story on responsible ways to spend your tax refund.

Here’s the streaming video in several formats for your viewing pleasure:

  1. Quicktime
  2. Windows Media
  3. RealVideo

Posted by PJ on Apr 21, 2005 | Comments Off |

links for 2005-04-20

Posted by PJ on Apr 20, 2005 | Comment |

TiVoToLie

When a company tries to sell me a product by lying about their plans for interoperability, I consider their DRM fair game.

Look no further than TiVo’s FAQ for their new TivoToGo™ offering:

Are TiVoToGo™ transfers available for Apple Macintosh computers? At this time TiVoToGo transfers are not available for Apple Macintosh computers. TiVo is working hard to enable TiVoToGo features available on TiVo Desktop for Mac. We are currently working on ways to enable playback on Apple Macintosh computers. We will let our customers know in our newsletter as soon as this feature is available. If you do not already subscribe to the newsletter, you can go here to do so.

But David Courtney, TiVo’s CFO, is quoted in yestarday’s Daily Pennsylvanian in direct contradiction to the claim that TiVo is “working hard” on future interoperability:

“We haven’t committed to any plans [for integration] to it because of the cost,” Courtney said.

He added that being able to watch media on Apple computers using TiVo seems unlikely “unless we find a way to record it under the current platform, and I don’t think that will happen in the next few years.”

I hope the CFO just doesn’t know what’s going on in some developer’s cube, because if they’re going to lie to me, I’m just going to start firing up GraphEdit.

Posted by PJ on Apr 15, 2005 | Comments Off |

links for 2005-04-13

Posted by PJ on Apr 13, 2005 | Comment |

[AJAX][1] is the new buzzword du jour in the web development world. It’s an acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript + XML. Among other things, it enables developers to create web applications in which form field values update as soon as they are entered. Jack Shedd makes the following [good point][2] regarding the interface implications. > Personally, I’m not a fan of immediacy when dealing with data. Jef Raskin makes a case for it in The Humane Interface, and I’ve longed disagreed with him. While immediate auto-saving may have made sense back when computer’s were largely unstable, the current batch of operating systems are stable enough that a crash simply won’t occur often enough to warrant risking the customer’s data by saving every little change as they make it. Worse, customers have gotten used to the web’s ‘Click to Submit’ metaphor, and retraining them now is dangerous. While I disagree with him somewhat regarding OS stability, I do believe it’s dangerous to change a fundamental metaphor that most users are finally beginning to understand. I also think that in most cases users prefer to be able **review** a set of entered data before clicking “submit” and finalizing their request. [1]: http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000385.php [2]: http://www.stolensheep.com/archives/020394.htm

links for 2005-04-08

Posted by PJ on Apr 8, 2005 | Comment |

links for 2005-04-06

Posted by PJ on Apr 6, 2005 | Comment |

The Blackstronauts

This faux documentary on “The Old Negro Space Program” is the funniest thing I’ve seen this year. The director managed to perfectly emulate Ken Burns’ style.

The doctored historical photos are a riot. Every detail is absolutely brilliant–it even lampoons the poetic Sullivan Ballou letter prominently featured in The Civil War.

Posted by PJ on Apr 6, 2005 | Comments Off |

links for 2005-04-04

Posted by PJ on Apr 4, 2005 | Comment |

links for 2005-04-03

  • Wikitex
    A modular system for incorporating LaTeX objects with MediaWiki output.
    (tags: Useful Tex)

Posted by PJ on Apr 3, 2005 | Comment |

links for 2005-04-01

Posted by PJ on Apr 1, 2005 | Comment |

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