For the life of me, I cannot---absolutely cannot--- write in a consistent manner. You see, I'm pretty shaky. If I hold my hand out, it's pretty easy to see that my fingers are going crazy, and everything leading up to them isn't much better. The result is that anything I write looks an aweful lot like someone was murdering a chicken which happened to have a pen in it's mouth. And as hard as I try I can't make a signature even remotely similar as the next.
The doctors say that it's some neurological thing but that I probably don't have to worry about parkinsons or whatever else. It gets terribly worse with caffiene, but alcohol slows it down quite a bit. Unfortunately, I like my liver.
But, hey... At least I could write good ransom notes (which I guess counts on the FBI to decipher my writing, something that I wouldn't personally bank on:D)
Heh, didn't even think of checking the caches... Thanks:D
Hrm, look at this:
Booking is not possible on my version - you can get all the way to the final stage but I have disabled the credit card form. This site is not secure, your credit card number would be transferred in the clear, and I can't do anything with the details anyway, not being able to access the Odeon site securely. Also, I wouldn't give my credit card number out to some random site just because they made an accessible version (of course I am nice, though other people may not be).
Obviously, my site is taking stuff from the Odeon website, so depends on it being operational. I also clearly do not have access to the backend software running their site, so have possibly missed out very important stuff - so that's another reason why I wouldn't let you book using this site. This also means my site will probably not cope with everything the Odeon server can throw at it, so don't be surprised if it stops working if you try and mess it up. Be gentle.:)
Looks like he didn't even accept personal information... because, well...he couldn't!
Out of context? Clearly, those words are very contextful.
Why should he be given a chance to investigate and prepare answers? So he can come up with a bunch of horse-hockey, and avoid the question like he always does?
Face it... He was caught with his hand down America's pants--fondling our naughty bits and all. Why should we give him the chance to say "Oh, sorry! My bad! I thought those were MY pants. And besides, I only accidentally brushed up against your package. I wouldn't know, for example, if you have an 12" penis, and balls the size of water chestnuts--for example that is, purely hypothetical. What's that? You want to smell my finger? Why, gosh-darnit? What? You say because you think I was toying with your anus? Oh, you're sure of it, are you? Well... Too bad. It's my finger. I'm the only one that can sniff it! Nahhnahhnah!" *runs away to daddy (Dick Cheny)*
Not only that, but you would think that it would make more sense to do it that way from a fire-safety aspect. I know that if I were designing such a place (room with no other exit), that I'd make the door swing out. Senseless.
Say there's a fire. You can't just run out the door. You've got to open it, then hold it for the next guy (optional step, but for the sake of making my point...), and then go through. Clearly not nearly as efficient.
Interesting. I haven't been to a Best Buy for years, so things have changed, eh.
I guess the extra rebate receipt would be pretty nice and convenient for honest customers, but with the accepting of non-defuct stuff and that together, they've rolled out the red carpet right over their own backs, ready for people to walk all over 'em.
Pretty much all rebates are on the condition that you send the box's UPC and your original receipt, right?
How are the customers returning goods that 1) are not fit for resale if they're non-defective (cutting the UPC pretty much does exactly that), and 2) don't have the original receipt of sale?
It would seem to me that the individual stores need to lay down the law on their return policy--and stick to it ridgidly--before they have any right to complain about their customers.
My buddy is an off-roader, and I go with him occasionally. I've seen the H2 in action, and trust me, it can't get out of it's way. I've seen one basket ball player, and one foot ball player, each driving his own H2, on two seperate occasions.
We had to winch both of them out with his K5 blazer (which is now painted on the side "H2 RESCUE TEAM".)
The H2 has the same transmission as many many many chevy vehicles, geared identically. How come they don't get 10MPG? The H2 is designed to be a gas guzzling, curb sitting POS, so people with more money than sense can look down on the commoners.
All pilsners are lagers. But not all lagers are pilsners. Get it straight, man.
Re:R/C car modding
on
Old Toy Modding?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Bullshit?
I've been a long time R/C car racer. Started when I was 8. Some cars DO have a mechanical speed control hooked up to a servo (variable resistor, or many different resistors, hooked to conducting plates). In fact, my very first car had such a speed control (metal plates) (an Associated RC 10). I wouldn't at all doubt that many cheap Wal-Mart cars have similar--it is indeed very cheap to do.
See THIS What's that on the left side of the car? Thought so--and that's a new KIT.
Why not just nuke messages that have a certian threshold of jibberish--use their tactic directly against them? I suppose that could catch some sincere communication, but honestly, who would want to read it anyway?
A leather jacket won't do jack shit for a stabbing.
With a bit of practice and a sharp pointed knife you could stab through a car door or kevlar armor, let alone a measly piece of leather. Leather is good for protecting against cuts and abrasions, and that's about all. It will help if your attacker is swinging, trying to CUT you, but it won't matter if he's trying to impale... And honestly, anything short of a steel plate won't help in that regard.
Maile won't stop a thrust, either. That's why many of the thin, very sharply pointed swords were developed. You can stab right into the maile, splitting it's rings, defeating it all together. Maile is great for edged swinging weapons, though. Stops 'em cold, but it'd still hurt like hell.
Yes. Purchasing a car is about as good as throwing your money out of the window. Note I say purchase. It's a good. You purchase goods, and USE them, thereby depleting it's value. Saying that a car is an investment is about as logical as saying that a banana is an investment.
Collectible cars, however are often a good investment. There are cars that sold for mere thousands of dollars when they were built that are worth many tens of thousands of dollars today. It's all about relative scarcity, and demand. There aren't many Pintos around these days, but not many people want them anyway. Go looking for a rarer factory condition 70's muscle car. You'll quickly see that the prices are quite outstanding $40,000 and maybe as much as 70-80k for the rarer cars. Well kept super-cars often keep their value, and older Ferraris often beat inflation.
A beat up Honda Civic is going to be a helluva lot less collectible than a 71 Hemi 'Cuda. That's just the way it is.
1) Aluminum cans have a thin coating of plastic on the inside to provent the soda's acid from etching the aluminum. 2) they have all sorts of paint on the outside. That's what smells bad. Not left over soda.
But, onto the other point: many geeks like high amounts of kinetic energy. It's true. Often, this love tuns into the irrational lust for wanton destruction of random objects. Sometimes, something is learned by the results, sometimes not. But it's the journey that's important (fun).
Yes. Searching is database driven, and compared to the iPod, the iRiver is ages behind in that regard to begin with. iPods' Smart playlists and all are pretty nifty, best you can do with the iRiver is play by genre. The database seems to be more of a hack to me at this stage, which is unfortunate.
However, It's not that big of a deal if you're willing to organize your songs by folder--which is mostly done whilst ripping anyhow. I find that a directory structure of artist=>album=>song with a file name of (artist)-(track number)-(track name) is pretty easy to find specific songs with.
If they ever get the database function to work correctly, and with all supported formats, it'll be the player to beat, I think. I'll be estatic anyhow. I'll still probably use shuffle, though. Gotta love shuffle. I also like to listen to albums as a whole, so the search thing isn't much of an issue to me.
The only other bugger is that it dosen't take m3u playlists generated by most unix programs (\ versus/). Guess a simple script would take care of that, still a pain, though.
You ask about ogg players and OSX, I'll address this one first. I'm using the ihp-120, from iRiver, it's a nice player, with features geeks can appreciate. Price is the same as an iPod (got mine for $344 from newegg, free shipping)
It's about as supported on OSX as it is on Linux or Windows, the one exception being that there is a Windows only tool to create a database of all your mp3's ID3 tags, allowing you to play based on genre, etc... I believe there is an OSS project to do this for unix-y systems, haven't tried it. Haven't even tried the program iRiver supplies either--mostly due to the fact that it dosent work (at the moment, anyway) with oggs.
I knew this when I got the player, so I'm not dissappointed. It was a non issue. Despite some of the problems the player has (most of which I believe could be resolved in firmware), I'm still quite happy with it.
So, otherwise, all you do is copy your files over from anything that can mount fat32 (OSX works fine, in my experience). I personally use a shell script with a single rsync command to sync my player and Linux machine. It's about as brainless as one could hope for (aside form the obvious iPod/iTunes combo.) Dunno if OSX comes with rsync by default (might have to get it via fink?), but it would work just as well on a Mac.
The one thing that the iRiver dosen't support (currently) that I would appreciate is gapless playback. It's playback gap is short (maybe ~500-700ms, guessing), but nonetheless, it's slightly annoying, especially for techno, or a few rock albums that were layed out that way. The hat switch is a little annoying, too. Not as cool as the iPod, and a bit slipperty--some vinyl and adhesive took care of that. The one thing that's super cool about it is the optical out. Hooks up to my receiver beautifully. Supposedly, it's DAC is superior to iPod's, too. Doubt I could hear a difference, though. *****End Advert:D --I just think this little gadget is the coolest, and that it's worth supporting a company that managed to come up with a usable ogg player. FWIW, I'm not affiliated with newegg or iRiver.
Okay, with that out of the way, onto my experience with vorbis/mp3.
With mp3, even LAME (128Kbps, mind you--320 LAME is indistinguishable from CD to me) I can almost always hear cymbals waffling, and distortions in lower freqencies, especially 100hz, which is enough to put me in a bad mood/give me a headache. I'm not exactly sure what the cause is.
This wasn't so much an issue with my headphones (honestly, I'm not sure that they have any response 50hz), but it was very apparent on my theatre system (sub is good to 30hz). Vorbis at q 6 dosen't seem to do this to me, and cymbals and other noisy things (like snare drums, though they're not heard outside of classical often) seem to be rendered well... Compared to MP3.
Brass instruments sound great with vorbis. I used to play trumpet and trombone, so I'm sort of sensitive to their sounds. French horns (which always seemed to sound flat in MP3 sound great, too.) Unless I was listening very hard, I don't think I could tell the difference between the q6 ogg and the CDDA on even very complex classic music...
Vorbis seems to bump the bitrate up on music like that, as I said before, by default it's VBR, and seems to be pretty intelligent. Simple stuff like techno can go as low as 140kbps in my experience, and still sound exactly the same. Vocals sound good, too.
For mixed home/portable listening, I think q 6 vorbis is a sweet spot (between storage space, battery life*, and quality), but I'm not exactly an audiophile--some people either gotta have lossless digital, or vinyl, tubes and $10,000 solid silver cables, so there's just no pleasing some people--but I do like my music, and I like to listen to it comfortably--when cymbals sound mushy and bass that's not there creeps in, something is bady wrong.
I'd recommend you do some testing of your favorite CDs, as nolife previously recommended... I
I could encode all of my music at 500kbps Vorbis... But that would be STUPID.... For the simple fact that I like to listen to my music on my portable player.
500kbps is almost four times the amount of data to shuffle around vs. 128kbps. That means that the players boffer is emptying almost four times as fast, and that my players disk is spinning up almost four times as often, meaning that ultimately my battery life just got divided in four.
Add to this the fact that my player's capacity for reproducing audio isn't probably as good as it could be, that my headphones aren't that good, that I'm usually in a noisy environment, and that my hearing isn't like it once was, it would be an extremely bone-headed thing to try to bring along acurately reproduced symphony on my side--the costs outweigh the benefits.
That said, I encode everything at -q 6 (about 192Kbps)--for the purpose of playing on my stereo system. Sometimes vorbis encodes at up to 220Kbps on more complicated music. Oftentimes, it's around 160-170Kbps. The difference isn't appreciable between 192 or 320 or even 500, im my experience.
Slashdot Mirror
For the life of me, I cannot---absolutely cannot--- write in a consistent manner. You see, I'm pretty shaky. If I hold my hand out, it's pretty easy to see that my fingers are going crazy, and everything leading up to them isn't much better. The result is that anything I write looks an aweful lot like someone was murdering a chicken which happened to have a pen in it's mouth. And as hard as I try I can't make a signature even remotely similar as the next.
:D)
The doctors say that it's some neurological thing but that I probably don't have to worry about parkinsons or whatever else. It gets terribly worse with caffiene, but alcohol slows it down quite a bit. Unfortunately, I like my liver.
But, hey... At least I could write good ransom notes (which I guess counts on the FBI to decipher my writing, something that I wouldn't personally bank on
Hrm, look at this:
Looks like he didn't even accept personal information... because, well...he couldn't!
Um, if his site were still up, that would be pretty easy to tell, but it's not so we can't tell for sure.
I put my money "passes data to Odeous's site", and the only data he collects are IP addresses in his log files.
stuff that matters.
Out of context? Clearly, those words are very contextful.
Why should he be given a chance to investigate and prepare answers? So he can come up with a bunch of horse-hockey, and avoid the question like he always does?
Face it... He was caught with his hand down America's pants--fondling our naughty bits and all. Why should we give him the chance to say "Oh, sorry! My bad! I thought those were MY pants. And besides, I only accidentally brushed up against your package. I wouldn't know, for example, if you have an 12" penis, and balls the size of water chestnuts--for example that is, purely hypothetical. What's that? You want to smell my finger? Why, gosh-darnit? What? You say because you think I was toying with your anus? Oh, you're sure of it, are you? Well... Too bad. It's my finger. I'm the only one that can sniff it! Nahhnahhnah!" *runs away to daddy (Dick Cheny)*
I'm betting they're going to fix it in an equally weird way as they "fixed" the Klingons from the original show into the Klingons of TNG.
Something along the lines of "I don't want to talk about it!" Mmmm. Wonder which episode that was.
Not only that, but you would think that it would make more sense to do it that way from a fire-safety aspect. I know that if I were designing such a place (room with no other exit), that I'd make the door swing out. Senseless.
Say there's a fire. You can't just run out the door. You've got to open it, then hold it for the next guy (optional step, but for the sake of making my point...), and then go through. Clearly not nearly as efficient.
Interesting. I haven't been to a Best Buy for years, so things have changed, eh.
I guess the extra rebate receipt would be pretty nice and convenient for honest customers, but with the accepting of non-defuct stuff and that together, they've rolled out the red carpet right over their own backs, ready for people to walk all over 'em.
Adapt, or die.
Pretty much all rebates are on the condition that you send the box's UPC and your original receipt, right?
How are the customers returning goods that 1) are not fit for resale if they're non-defective (cutting the UPC pretty much does exactly that), and 2) don't have the original receipt of sale?
It would seem to me that the individual stores need to lay down the law on their return policy--and stick to it ridgidly--before they have any right to complain about their customers.
My buddy is an off-roader, and I go with him occasionally. I've seen the H2 in action, and trust me, it can't get out of it's way. I've seen one basket ball player, and one foot ball player, each driving his own H2, on two seperate occasions.
We had to winch both of them out with his K5 blazer (which is now painted on the side "H2 RESCUE TEAM".)
The H2 has the same transmission as many many many chevy vehicles, geared identically. How come they don't get 10MPG? The H2 is designed to be a gas guzzling, curb sitting POS, so people with more money than sense can look down on the commoners.
4 foot thick concrete?
Holy shit, where do you live? A missile silo?
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist."--Salman Rushdie
Fuck the EU. (and a special Dagnabbit! towards the French)
No, as much as I usually distain case-modding (looks like he's missing an R-type sticker--kidding).. This is definitely art.
Face it--If H.R. Geiger were a case modder, he'd probably have come up with something like this.
All pilsners are lagers. But not all lagers are pilsners. Get it straight, man.
Bullshit?
I've been a long time R/C car racer. Started when I was 8. Some cars DO have a mechanical speed control hooked up to a servo (variable resistor, or many different resistors, hooked to conducting plates). In fact, my very first car had such a speed control (metal plates) (an Associated RC 10). I wouldn't at all doubt that many cheap Wal-Mart cars have similar--it is indeed very cheap to do.
See THIS What's that on the left side of the car? Thought so--and that's a new KIT.
Why not just nuke messages that have a certian threshold of jibberish--use their tactic directly against them? I suppose that could catch some sincere communication, but honestly, who would want to read it anyway?
Yeah, I getcha. Street thugs aren't as smart as Samurai.
Those things still don't stop a skilled thrust--in the worst case scenario anyway.
A leather jacket won't do jack shit for a stabbing.
With a bit of practice and a sharp pointed knife you could stab through a car door or kevlar armor, let alone a measly piece of leather. Leather is good for protecting against cuts and abrasions, and that's about all. It will help if your attacker is swinging, trying to CUT you, but it won't matter if he's trying to impale... And honestly, anything short of a steel plate won't help in that regard.
Maile won't stop a thrust, either. That's why many of the thin, very sharply pointed swords were developed. You can stab right into the maile, splitting it's rings, defeating it all together. Maile is great for edged swinging weapons, though. Stops 'em cold, but it'd still hurt like hell.
Yes. Purchasing a car is about as good as throwing your money out of the window. Note I say purchase. It's a good. You purchase goods, and USE them, thereby depleting it's value. Saying that a car is an investment is about as logical as saying that a banana is an investment.
Collectible cars, however are often a good investment. There are cars that sold for mere thousands of dollars when they were built that are worth many tens of thousands of dollars today. It's all about relative scarcity, and demand. There aren't many Pintos around these days, but not many people want them anyway. Go looking for a rarer factory condition 70's muscle car. You'll quickly see that the prices are quite outstanding $40,000 and maybe as much as 70-80k for the rarer cars. Well kept super-cars often keep their value, and older Ferraris often beat inflation.
A beat up Honda Civic is going to be a helluva lot less collectible than a 71 Hemi 'Cuda. That's just the way it is.
1) Aluminum cans have a thin coating of plastic on the inside to provent the soda's acid from etching the aluminum. 2) they have all sorts of paint on the outside. That's what smells bad. Not left over soda.
But, onto the other point: many geeks like high amounts of kinetic energy. It's true. Often, this love tuns into the irrational lust for wanton destruction of random objects. Sometimes, something is learned by the results, sometimes not. But it's the journey that's important (fun).
Yes. Searching is database driven, and compared to the iPod, the iRiver is ages behind in that regard to begin with. iPods' Smart playlists and all are pretty nifty, best you can do with the iRiver is play by genre. The database seems to be more of a hack to me at this stage, which is unfortunate.
/). Guess a simple script would take care of that, still a pain, though.
However, It's not that big of a deal if you're willing to organize your songs by folder--which is mostly done whilst ripping anyhow. I find that a directory structure of artist=>album=>song with a file name of (artist)-(track number)-(track name) is pretty easy to find specific songs with.
If they ever get the database function to work correctly, and with all supported formats, it'll be the player to beat, I think. I'll be estatic anyhow. I'll still probably use shuffle, though. Gotta love shuffle. I also like to listen to albums as a whole, so the search thing isn't much of an issue to me.
The only other bugger is that it dosen't take m3u playlists generated by most unix programs (\ versus
Yeah. There is supposedly this feature.
Is there a tool to do this reliably at this point?
Last I heard this did not work nicely (if at all).
You ask about ogg players and OSX, I'll address this one first. I'm using the ihp-120, from iRiver, it's a nice player, with features geeks can appreciate. Price is the same as an iPod (got mine for $344 from newegg, free shipping)
:D --I just think this little gadget is the coolest, and that it's worth supporting a company that managed to come up with a usable ogg player. FWIW, I'm not affiliated with newegg or iRiver.
It's about as supported on OSX as it is on Linux or Windows, the one exception being that there is a Windows only tool to create a database of all your mp3's ID3 tags, allowing you to play based on genre, etc... I believe there is an OSS project to do this for unix-y systems, haven't tried it. Haven't even tried the program iRiver supplies either--mostly due to the fact that it dosent work (at the moment, anyway) with oggs.
I knew this when I got the player, so I'm not dissappointed. It was a non issue. Despite some of the problems the player has (most of which I believe could be resolved in firmware), I'm still quite happy with it.
So, otherwise, all you do is copy your files over from anything that can mount fat32 (OSX works fine, in my experience). I personally use a shell script with a single rsync command to sync my player and Linux machine. It's about as brainless as one could hope for (aside form the obvious iPod/iTunes combo.) Dunno if OSX comes with rsync by default (might have to get it via fink?), but it would work just as well on a Mac.
The one thing that the iRiver dosen't support (currently) that I would appreciate is gapless playback. It's playback gap is short (maybe ~500-700ms, guessing), but nonetheless, it's slightly annoying, especially for techno, or a few rock albums that were layed out that way. The hat switch is a little annoying, too. Not as cool as the iPod, and a bit slipperty--some vinyl and adhesive took care of that. The one thing that's super cool about it is the optical out. Hooks up to my receiver beautifully. Supposedly, it's DAC is superior to iPod's, too. Doubt I could hear a difference, though.
*****End Advert
Okay, with that out of the way, onto my experience with vorbis/mp3.
With mp3, even LAME (128Kbps, mind you--320 LAME is indistinguishable from CD to me) I can almost always hear cymbals waffling, and distortions in lower freqencies, especially 100hz, which is enough to put me in a bad mood/give me a headache. I'm not exactly sure what the cause is.
This wasn't so much an issue with my headphones (honestly, I'm not sure that they have any response 50hz), but it was very apparent on my theatre system (sub is good to 30hz). Vorbis at q 6 dosen't seem to do this to me, and cymbals and other noisy things (like snare drums, though they're not heard outside of classical often) seem to be rendered well... Compared to MP3.
Brass instruments sound great with vorbis. I used to play trumpet and trombone, so I'm sort of sensitive to their sounds. French horns (which always seemed to sound flat in MP3 sound great, too.) Unless I was listening very hard, I don't think I could tell the difference between the q6 ogg and the CDDA on even very complex classic music...
Vorbis seems to bump the bitrate up on music like that, as I said before, by default it's VBR, and seems to be pretty intelligent. Simple stuff like techno can go as low as 140kbps in my experience, and still sound exactly the same. Vocals sound good, too.
For mixed home/portable listening, I think q 6 vorbis is a sweet spot (between storage space, battery life*, and quality), but I'm not exactly an audiophile--some people either gotta have lossless digital, or vinyl, tubes and $10,000 solid silver cables, so there's just no pleasing some people--but I do like my music, and I like to listen to it comfortably--when cymbals sound mushy and bass that's not there creeps in, something is bady wrong.
I'd recommend you do some testing of your favorite CDs, as nolife previously recommended... I
I could encode all of my music at 500kbps Vorbis... But that would be STUPID.... For the simple fact that I like to listen to my music on my portable player.
500kbps is almost four times the amount of data to shuffle around vs. 128kbps. That means that the players boffer is emptying almost four times as fast, and that my players disk is spinning up almost four times as often, meaning that ultimately my battery life just got divided in four.
Add to this the fact that my player's capacity for reproducing audio isn't probably as good as it could be, that my headphones aren't that good, that I'm usually in a noisy environment, and that my hearing isn't like it once was, it would be an extremely bone-headed thing to try to bring along acurately reproduced symphony on my side--the costs outweigh the benefits.
That said, I encode everything at -q 6 (about 192Kbps)--for the purpose of playing on my stereo system. Sometimes vorbis encodes at up to 220Kbps on more complicated music. Oftentimes, it's around 160-170Kbps. The difference isn't appreciable between 192 or 320 or even 500, im my experience.