Archive for November, 2007

Who You Gonna Call?

Friday, November 30th, 2007

I got home tonight and the woot Fairy had left me something: a pair of Jabra C820s noise-canceling headphones. I haven’t tried them much, but so far, I like them.

I was an early adopter of noise-canceling headphones. I still have my original NCT NoiseBuster NB-DX, though the foam earpads have turned to a sticky goo (stay tuned!) so I haven’t tried them lately. Other than being a bit cumbersome (the electronics and battery are in a separate box), and eating (9V) batteries a bit faster than I’d like, I loved those things. I’d wear them just to kill the building thrum where I worked without even feeding them input.

Recently I got some Philips SBC HN060 in-ear noise cancelers (even cheaper than they are usually- gray at Goodwill) I use with the iPod when I’m on vacation. They work OK for their price, size, and accessories, but I’m always afraid they’ll eat my brain like those bugs in Star Trek.

The Jabras come with a couple of cables and all the adaptors you usually need. They also have a nice, rigid, zip-up case to keep them in. I plan to use them while shooting video and here in the lab when I’m mixing music and sound, but they might get some recreational use now and then.

While I was typing the paragraph up there, I picked up my NoiseBusters to look for a manufacture date to guess how old they are (I got them at CES when they announced them). I made the mistake of touching The Black Goo. Man, that stuff is nasty. I had held out hope I could get it off without destroying the speakers, but I don’t know. I had to wash my hands two and a half times to get most of it off me. It’s really gross.

Guess I won’t be comparing the NBs with the Jabras anytime soon unless I want to have sticky black ears for a week. I’m sure they dust the Philips ones, though.

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‘Tis the Season for Giving

Thursday, November 29th, 2007

One Laptop Per Child: Give 1 Get 1The OLPC G1G1 donation offer has been extended. I’ve already donated because I’ve been impressed with Negroponte‘s vision and am eager to see how well-implemented it is. Besides, I could contribute software and corrupt mold the minds of a generation.

So, if you need some more charitable donations this year for tax or karmic reasons, you’ve still got a chance to do it too. More importantly, Hiro wants you to. :-)

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Def Leopard

Thursday, November 15th, 2007

I upgraded my office iMac to 10.5 yesterday. Went pretty smoothly, and my concerns so far have been those of a user from the nosebleed section. Here’re the things I had to do to get back to working right:

My existing SpamAssassin didn’t work. CPAN wouldn’t update it. Upgraded Xcode, and then that worked fine. I should’ve changed the install directory to /usr/local so it’ll survive another upgrade, but I wasn’t that clever, so I removed my old ones and update my old SystemStarter package (which was still intact) to have the other path.

My old Postfix configuration wasn’t happenin’. I changed the user and groups to have a “_” in front. Guess I should’ve just not specified them as that’s surely the way it’s compiled.

Had to change the mode on /var/mail so nmh would be happy.

My comsat wasn’t happenin’ either because it uses utmp, which is apparently old and busted now. I tried to use Apple‘s and it didn’t work. Hmmm.

Turns out getservbyname() now uses /etc/services, but aliases don’t work. This is a bug, and a pretty bad one, but it can be worked around by adding more lines to services, so I did that for now.

10.5.1 came out today, so I patched up and tried again. No, still doesn’t work, so I’ll keep my workaround for now. I reported the bug.

I then got Apple’s comsat source and put my changes back in. Guess I could send it to them, but who besides me runs procmail and nmh on a Mac? For now, I just replaced their binary with a link to mine, but I should probably replace their service definition instead.

My old CUPS configuration was preserved, but doesn’t work. I tried using the new default one with a BrowsePoll added, but that doesn’t seem to work. I’ll have to mess with it some more.

So far, other than printing, seems OK. My Amanda hooks are still working, though I don’t recall putting them where they are- the upgrade might’ve done that. I should’ve kept better track.

Haven’t really had a chance to evaluate the new stuff yet. But after I look at performance, I’ll probably get it for home pretty soon too, especially if it’s faster.

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Phase One: A New Roof for An Old House

Monday, November 12th, 2007

I’m still waiting for the pictures the roofers took themselves, which should offer better close-ups, but I managed to take a few myself. Here’s one I took from my bedroom window of progress on the porch roof.

This is the back of the house with some guys on it. I like this one because it looks like the guy on the right is just chillin’. The brown wood you see in the foreground is the addition to the house that we’re removing next, so, no, they aren’t roofing that part.

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Senator, You’re No Josephine Joseph

Thursday, November 8th, 2007

I’ve always liked Freaks. I mean, I like freaks too, but I’m talking about Freaks, the classic from the 1930s. Any movie with a cast of old-school circus oddities is bound to be interesting, but it’s more than interesting- it’s good.

It may come as a surprise, then, that I bought the nice new DVD of Freaks months ago but hadn’t watched it yet. (Yeah, I do that a lot.) I pulled it out for Halloween and had it planned to watch it ASAP.

So, I’m at the local Hollywood Video which appears to be closing (no surprise, the company’s closing stores all over) to see if there are any deals on ex-rentals. Kind of. They mixed together all the cheaper discs so they’re all $4 each now. Considering I had been buying the $2.50 ones, that’s not great, but there’s better stuff in there now too.

I find a lot of curious things, which is what I’m looking for, but one in particular catches my eye: Freakshow. The cover says “In the tradition of Tod Browning’s Freaks“. Quotes and all. The back says “Includes a cast of actual sideshow performers”. That’d be the tradition, I’d say. For $4, I’ll bite.

So I brought it home (along with a couple dozen of it’s little disc friends) and sat down to watch Freaks first, and then Freakshow. How closely does it follow “tradition”? Truth is, it’s a remake. It’s pretty good, actually. It’s also way, way more gory (not recommended for even the mildly squeamish) and has some sex- though none with real freaks. Not that I was hoping for that, but it seems like a wasted opportunity to do something really different. Think about it.

Anyway, I was pretty happy until I started watching the extras. They go through several behind-the-scenes pieces and a full-length commentary and never once mention Freaks. Considering they cribbed not only the casting idea, but the plot, several key scenes, and some stylistic quirks from the movie, you’d think a reach-around was in order. No dice.

Worse than that, they go on about how the writer had been working on his script for years and had all kinds of other stuff they cut or shaped in editing. After much deliberation, they decided to focus on the storyline of people wanting to rob the circus folk and paying for their transgression? (No spoilers here today, but, yes, in the same ways.) Seems like an awfully long road to get to a copy of something that’s been around for seventy years. Did they think we wouldn’t notice?

I don’t know how many of The Asylum‘s titles I have or have seen, but they seem like they’re decent guys trying to make decent movies. Not crediting the source material strikes me as a serious lapse in judgment.

It’s not as audacious as the last uncredited remake I saw (that’d be Naina) because it’s not working directly from the original script, but I think it owes more than a little credit. Trust me, you don’t want to piss off freaks…

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