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Friday Apple Fun
It's the weekend, and it's Friday the 13th (depending on when you read this), so have some fun making your Mac windows unusable and buying copyrighted (and copy-protected!) silence from iTunes Music Store. Read on for details.
Crazy Window Effects
ZackSchil writes "Open a terminal window and type on the prompt: killall Dock. Don't press return. Position a large window behind the terminal window, then shift-click on the large window's minimize button (so it goes slowly). While still holding shift, quickly hit the return key to execute the command and kill the Dock (it comes back right away). As soon as the dock's process is killed, the window will cease minimizing, leaving you with a working, draggable, active window halfway through the warping animation! While the system is at a loss how to translate mouse clicks to the window, you can still move bits that haven't changed location too much. After having some fun, just press Command-M to get the window all the way into the Dock and click to get it out again."
I had a similar experience with iChat the other day: I somehow caught a chat so the window was transparent. And more fun: open System Preferences, click on Network, and before it loads, move the window; when Network opens, the whole window moves back to where it was when you first clicked on it (this isn't new, but it annoys me).
Paying for (Copy-Protected) Silence wayneh writes "As the Apple Turns turned out a great story about several silent tracks available via the iTunes Music Store. They are all subject to the same digital copy protection as tracks with actual sound and at least one has a thirty second preview. Interestingly, a number of them are listed as explicit and have alternate clean versions available as well. Next time you need a few minutes of quiet time, consider purchasing it from Apple."
I hope the estate of John Cage is getting royalties for the silence... they would all seem to be infringing on the copyright for 4'33".
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Nah, I prefer to pirate my silence.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
...you insensitive clod!
-CowboyNick
It ought to be plainly obvious why those silent tracks are there.
If you think it's dumb, you really should be laughing at the artists who think low enough of their fans to put silent tracks on their records.
That's the beauty of the 9.99/album dealy thingy.
If an album has a bunch of bs silence, and you're one of those people that has to buy the whole album (not a bad thing, I'm the same way), you aren't paying 99 cents per silent track.
Albums like Tool's AEnima have 4 or 5 BS tracks that nobody could possibly consider music, or need (not want, need). That albums comes out to less than $10 (and far less than an hour) when you buy the tracks individually.
I had a little trouble doing the window trick (it didn't seem to take the return character), so here's another method:
1. type "sleep 1; killall Dock" without the return
2. Hover the mouse over the minimize button
3. hit return
4. You have up to a second to shift-click the minimize button. (for more time, use "sleep 2" or 3)
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
A great musician once said:
"Silence is also music."
How about making your computer malfunction on purpose?
Just some more proof that yes, we ARE all crazy.
Goo goo g'joob.
Who wouldn't pay $.99 (or a lucky Pepsi cap) to listen to the grass grow? It's such a novel idea, I imagine someone's already working on a "one-click method for buying silence".
"See you, space cowboy." -Spike
> it says 1726 bytes in body next to where it says read more. I haven't seen that feature before.
OK, its there in the previous ask slashdot and the previous book review. I must be new around here.
SURELY NOT!!!!!
It's been there for a long time. I'm surprised with your low user id, you haven't noticed yet.
That crazy window effect is absolutely amazing. All the window functions are still functional, the mouse clicks just mapped slightly wrong. Thanks for sharing.
at least give credit where credit is do! (me) :)
in case you want proof, here is my 1st publishing of the above directions (including an example)
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
This hack works almost the same if you kill the dock while doing expose thingies. See
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story
I'm posting this from a very unusually shaped Firefox window. It's like drunken typing.
If it's Friday the 13th when your reading this, then it's Friday the 13th.
Wow!
Which format is best for my silent recordings?
How long would it take to download 5 minutes of silence on a 56k modem?
I made a PHP/MySQL library that prevents SQL injection & makes coding easier!
Well I run Gentoo-unstable, does that count? I'm compiling unreleased kernels with unreleased GCC versions built on a system with a prerelease glibc version.
What do I get out of it? Not much. I can file bug reports so the bleeding edge becomes the cutting edge in less time.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
As with all conceptial weird ideas, the idea itself is nice, but I can't imagine myself cranking up the stereo to have a good listen...
I think, therefore I am...I think.
USA?
""
Enjoy!
- C
So if a tree falls in the woods with no one around, does it have to pay a royalty fee to John Cage?
Slashdot Eds Link Anonymous Posts With Logged Posts
They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
Actually, if you want to see a *really* cool effect, trying doing this minimize/kill-dock thing with a movie in the Quicktime player. Since it plays the movie even while it's minimized in the dock, it also plays it on the way there...so you can catch it half way, and watch the movie all skewed up. Quite interesting. :P
:)
Here's the one I got... I'm surprised it doesn't even seem to have an effect on the framerate, either. Strange stuff.
-Munki
Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.
% touch hush.c
% gcc -o hush hush.c
ld: Undefined symbols:
_main
%
End of Line.
... and have a still usable window. Using Camino and Terminal, Minimize the Camino window (the Slashdot page is very effective). Type the killall Dock command into Terminal. After you shift-click the Camino window and can see it starting to crawl out of the Dock QUICKLY go over to the Terminal window and hit Enter. If you time it well (you can also try the sleep version if you are having timing problems), you will be left with a Camino window that is still usable, although squished. I did this and had the top part of the window full and the bottom part at about 1/3 size. I was able to browse a few websites with the window like that. It actually will draw everything to fit in that skewed perspective!
[windows[me]|linux|BSD|contiki|mac|BeOS|ReactOS|WI NE]
ad infinitum?
Instant 20" display (to scale :)
Ahh, CFLAGS. I did a lot of hitting the GCC manual and diffing binaries to see what worked best. I've been hooked on Gentoo for two years, and was building packages from .srpms for years before that.
I've got an Athlon-XP, functionally equivalent to your CPUs, and I use:
"-O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer -march=athlon-xp -mfpmath=sse"
I know, you're thinking I must be nuts, but I've found that -O2 is FASTER and SMALLER than -O3 in MANY instances, especially when your CPU has decent L1/2/3 caches (mine's a barton, so 640K total). Also, the -msse -mmmx options are INTRINSIC to the -march=athlon-xp switch, so there's no good done by explicitly enabling them.
The -mfpmath=sse option tells GCC to use sse for all floating point math, instead of the i387 emulator on the chip. I'm actually not sure if it helps that much since almost nothing I do is FP-intensive. My guess is that it really boosts apps that do 'big math'.
Other advantages to my conservative CFLAGS are:
It's easier to manage multiple machines when there's less to change in the flags, all I have to do is change the -march= option to build for a Pentium3, 4, or C3.
I KNOW that when something doesn't work or my system pukes that it's not my CFLAGS, it's something -I DID-. My bug reports are worth a lot more than some kid with 30 flags. And I can safely run more cutting-edge stuff than most, because more flags = more issues to work out before 'stable'.
Compiling is significantly faster, -O2 and -O3 are the SAME THING except -O3 adds -funroll-loops, which takes a lot of work on the compiler-end, and can actually SLOW DOWN code that would execute faster if it could all fit in the cache (which a lot can't when it's been 'unrolled').
I find that the real beauty of Gentoo is portage as a package manager, and the 'build from scratch' capability. Granted, setting my own CFLAGS is what brought me to Gentoo in the first place, but after about a year of tearing my hair out as a CFLAGS junkie, I decided to just cut my losses and build stable, working systems. Life's been much better since then.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Strangely, I think the article doesn't explain the 4'33'' meaning, which was 273'', as -273 Celsius, aka Absolute Zero (0 Kelvin). Like the deep calm that ends this piece representation.
The conceptual aspect of the performance is still the fundamental of this piece and I don't believe WinAmp (or iTunes or mpg123) can't do the trick as well as a full concert hall. But perhaps the buying act can do a little, but should be organized, theatralized, like a performance.
ClaudeBBG
...and secretly everyone thought "What the fuck was that? I just PAID for that?", but were too embarrassed to admit they got duped, so in a hurry, they thought up some shit about getting to listen to the audience. Which we do at every performance anyway, usually when some fucktard thinks it's really necessary to go "WOOOOO!" as everyone else shuts up. If you want to toss instruments out to the audience and say "hey, play something and then pass it on!", not only would you truly have an audience-based musical performance, you'd get some acting to boot, as any doctors in the place went insane just thinking about how unsanitary the whole thing was.
...and this is why the "art" world has gone insane. I could take a bathroom sink from the dump, and put it in an art gallery. Then sit back and watch as people talked about how existential it was, how it conveyed the notion of the drudgery of every day life, blah blah(see, I can make up shit that sounds just like an art critic, on the spot). And yes, I've actually seen this in an art gallery. It's bullshit. It's "I'm too lazy or untalented to come up with something", not "vision" or "talent". Same thing goes for the morons who throw(literally) paint at a canvas. They deserve to be working in some diner bussing tables, not sipping wine and eating cheese explaining their "inner rage" or some bullshit like that.
To call 4:33 of silence a "sonata", to call John Cage a "composer", is an insult to musicians and composers everywhere. It's called a -scam-, folks.
As for the silence bits- they're there because a lot of albums have silent tracks that last for a short bit to space tracks out. It's the sign of a mastering company that doesn't know what the shit they're doing, because you can accomplish the same thing with the CD's TOC(table of contents).
Please help metamoderate.
if anyone is interested, here's a screenshot of a partially minimized safari.
wasn't there also a version of the sheet music
that was written of a vast flow of rests, timed to a resting heart beat, to produce the 4'33" of Silence.
For starters, it actually states that it doesn't adhere to the standard red-book CD audio format (I forget what is said exactly). That alone should have you thinking "why on earth not?".
And then somewhere else in really small print: "Nick Cave and the [evil three] would like to remind that you that 0 is also a number"
It took me 2 different CD players (no CD-ROM's I know of rewind into negative numbers) and about 1/2 an hour to figure out that there's about 8 minutes and 33 seconds (or thereabouts) of audio before track one! It was a rather interesting track as well. I never managed to get it recorded to my computer, since it doesn't technically exist...
I'd pay good money to get that track on iTunes!
click-clack, front and back. I'm not moving this car otherwise.
There's a whole deeper almost satanic meaning if you listen to 'em backwards.
Hmm. I've had good luck with portdir_overlay, but I've moved mine from /usr/portage/... to /usr/portage-overlay, so it's not INSIDE the tree. also, after you edit your custom .ebuild, you may have to 'touch -acm' it. that's what the problem probably is, the access date on the portage copy is newer, so portage tries to use that instead of your custom copy.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails