Praise for Rockbox

October 3, 2008Leave a comment

I have two MP3 players, a 1st generation Ipod Nano and a Creative Sansa 250. I have issues with the software on both of them, and last week I installed Rockbox on the Sansa to experiment. It’s going on the Ipod this weekend, because Rockbox completely rocks. I could go on and on about how much better it is in terms of features, but it really came down to several key things: 1) Bookmarks. The thing automatically creates bookmarks for whatever you were doing when you turn the power off, and it keeps a library of them for you. You’ll never lose your place in an audiobook again. Apple’s had like what, 5 years to figure this out and still has a crummy, botched bookmark implementation? 2) File formats. Rockbox plays all the formats you’d expect, instead of being stuck with only a handful that Apple and Creative choose to support. Lossless audio for the win folks. 3) You can configure it to speak the user interface. No need to look at it, just scroll around as you drive and it will tell you where you just clicked/navigated etc.

The rest of the cool stuff – editable playlists, skins, games, utilities, a true browsable file system – they’re all just gravy. Rockbox is free, has a great little installer, a huge support community, and tons of mods. If you have a player which Rockbox supports, it’s definitely worth considering. One downside to be clear on – if you install this on an Ipod, you can’t use Itunes to manage the device anymore, it becomes a mountable volume on your computer and you copy files over. There are other media library software that will do this for you (things like Mediamonkey for example) but it also means losing access to the music store integration and so on. Not that you should have been buying music with DRM baked into it to begin with… but that’s a post for another day.

My impression of the VP debate

October 3, 2008Leave a comment

Here’s my take on how the debate went last night. Imagine the following exchange:

Ifil: Next question. Governer Palin, you first. Can you explain to us how you would bake a chocolate cake?’

Palin: Sure, I’d be happy to. Let me tell you about the time I was at the game with the hockey moms, and I sucessfully negotiated for cheaper hot dog prices for all the kids from the vendor at that stadium. It just goes to show how my experience as an executive demonstrates my experience! And did those kids enjoy those hot dogs? You betcha!

Ifil:… Senator Biden? Would you like to respond?

Biden: …err… [big fake smile, demonstrating he thinks Palin’s charming] well, back in PA, my mom made the best chocolate cake, and let me tell you how, but before I do, let me just mention that John McCain voted against chocolate cake 37 times since he’s been in the senate….

God help us if the Republicans take the White House again. Everyone’s giving Palin credit today for not blowing it, but I’m completely appalled that anyone could watch last nights exhange and continue to count Palin as a credible candidate. I got up this morning and did the same thing I did after watching the last debate: went over to the Obama campaign’s website and donated $100 to their campaign. Here’s hoping they win, we’re all in deep shit if they don’t.

An ode to the Poot

September 29, 2008Leave a comment

My sister’s dalmation Helena (more commonly ‘the poot,’ or ‘pootie) passed away recently. Pretty sad news, I really loved her. She had a great, full life, and made a remarkable recovery from an infection of the heart to live to a ripe old age of 13. My sister’s written a wonderful eulogy to her over on her website, and you can scope out some photos of the poot in action over on her website. Give your pets a scritch behind the ear in honor of good old Pootie, I’ll miss her.

{wp-gallery-remote: gallery=0; rootalbum=1944; imagefilter=include:1959;}

{wp-gallery-remote: gallery=0; rootalbum=1944; imagefilter=include:1956;}

{wp-gallery-remote: gallery=0; rootalbum=1944; imagefilter=include:1968;}

Are we also facing a food crisis?

September 29, 2008Leave a comment

Lost in all the noise about the economic crisis we’re facing is that we may also be facing a crisis in our food supply. The same rationale of deregulating the financial markets appears to be impacting the oversite of our food supply as well, the chinese milk melamine tainting scandal being only the latest issue to crop up. This stuff is creeping out in the global food supply and it’s making me increasingly leery of processed foods. From numerous ground beef issues over the past couple of years, spinache, lettuce, tomatoes, and more, there’s a constant stream of news about tainted food, and with the global connectedness it’s really hard to track where this stuff turns up. What set me off about this today was news that Cadbury had to pull some of its chocolate off the market because they detected melamine in some batches of it and another vendor of creamer for coffee had to do the same. None of this particular scandal’s food has been detected in the US food supply as of yet but I’m not going to be surprised if it does, and increasingly I feel like folks are best advised to steer clear of processed foods. That frozen pizza won’t seem as convenient if it turns out the cheese was made with melamine, and that bag salad will stop seeming like a time saver if you end up ingesting ecoli because it had cow poop on it.

I should note I’m not really sure what to make of all of this. I read an analysis in the last couple of months that suggested the food supply has actually never been safer, it’s just that regional threats like ecoli outbreaks get more widely reported than in the past. At the same time though there’s overwhelming evidence that the Bush administration systematically went after regulatory systems, and it’s not clear to me what impact that had at the FDA and other government inspection and regulatory bodies that oversee the food supply. It seems better to be prudent than sick is what I guess it boils down to.

Fortunately Susan and I eat pretty danged healthy and we don’t eat all that much processed food, so here’s hoping our exposure to risk is as minimal as it seems.

Good old Games – one free invite

September 25, 2008Leave a comment

Good Old Games is this fantastic new software store developed by the folks who produced The Witcher. They’re selling old, classic games for $10 and under, with the DRM removed and the games patched and tweaked to run on modern systems. Many excellent games are to be had for ~$6, and it’s all wrapped up in a well designed website. In short, I love it. I’ve already picked up Sacrifice and Hostile Waters (which I’ve mentioned in the past is one of the finest games, ever), and I’ve got my eyes on several other games. I mention all this because the site is still in beta and they’ve started offering gift keys to the beta users. So – if you’re seriously interested in the site, drop me a comment and I’ll give you a key. So far I only have one, and this is first come, first serve. It’s all free of course, aside from the cost of the games, but since they’re really trying to stress test the system, please don’t ask for the key if you don’t intend to buy anything – the point after all is to actually use it. You can check out the current catalog using the link above to get a sense if there’s anything there that you’d like, and I’ll note that so far they’ve been adding 1-3 games a week.

Home sick

September 25, 2008Leave a comment

Not as in missing my hometown, as in like, I have spent the past two days lounging about the house nursing a miserable cold. It’s not excruciatingly bad, it just features sniffles, headaches and a sore throat. Susan is suffering the same fate as I, which we’ve been debating. Is it better to both be sick at the same time, or in sequence so one partner can take care of the sick partner? We haven’t decided yet. Whatever we have has been making the rounds at the office. My weekly IT heads meeting had half the staff out sick yesterday, including me. Must be the time of year.

What happens when you don’t go to a dentist for a decade

September 24, 2008Leave a comment

That’s right – I haven’t been to a dentist in over a decade, with the exception of an oral surgeon who removed my wisdom teeth about 6-7 years ago. I fell out of the practice of getting annual cleanings shortly after college when I moved away from my family dentist and didn’t have dental coverage during my early career. One way or another I always managed to avoid going until yesterday. The oral surgeon didn’t help things much back when I had my teeth removed, because he scoped out my teeth and commended me on them being in such good shape. Unfortunately they’d started to stain recently, and one stain in particular was driving Susan nuts, so after much cajoling I made an appointment.

The good news: no cavities. Brushing and flossing plus some help from genetics seem to have protected my teeth over the years, which I was greatly relieved about. The bad news: I have gum disease and have to go in for some serious under gum cleansing procedures which will apparently be pretty unpleasant. Once that’s done I have to go to the dentist every three months for a couple of years for followup cleanings which should entirely clear up the gum issues and protect my teeth for the long term.

The other good news is that the stains will all come off, and the dentist thinks I should consider a bleach treatment for them once the cleaning is finished, which should remove the yellow coloration. He also thinks I should get braces to fix my front teeth. I’m not sure on the braces but I’ll probably do the bleach treatment next spring since it seems to mean so much to Susan.

Anyway I’m not sure if there are any lessons learned. I avoided a decade of the discomfort of the dentists chair with seemingly little consequence, though I’ll reserve judgement and possibly sing a different tune after I’ve been through a couple of these undergum cleansing treatments.

The real risk is in the credit derivatives market

September 23, 2008Leave a comment

I first started hearing about credit derivatives a couple of years ago, around the same time I started hearing about how there was a looming mortgage crisis. If you want to scare the hell out of yourself, go read this article over on financialsense.com. It will take a while to work through it but it’s a great distillation of what’s going on in our capital markets right now and where this might lead us. I could sum it up in a couple of ways – a) it’s all a giant fucking ponzi scheme that deregulation facilitated and b) the risk in credit derivatives makes the subprime mortgage crisis look like paperoute money. We’re talking 10’s of trillions of dollars here.

Even trying as I am to understand all of this I really don’t feel like I have a handle on it. Still, I will say my gut tells me that dropping 700 billion into the markets as is being proposed isn’t going to do anything except possibly stave off the inevitable. From what I’m reading our capital markets and indeed the entire underpinnings of our economic system are profoundly broken. Propping up these cancerous institutions doesn’t fix the problem, it just keeps the patient on life support while it spreads its disease further.

Anyone counting themselves a citizen should be reading up on this stuff. There’s a wonderful irony to all this, in this season of campaigns promising change: all signs point towards us getting change all right, change so radical it’ll shock all of us, only it has almost nothing directly to do with our political candidates.

Make your own freeze dried meals

September 22, 2008Leave a comment

Backpacker or backwoods camper? Check out this great post over on cool tools that has some handy links to recipes and sources of supply for freeze dried foods that can save you a bundle of money. This is especially great for diabetics whose choices are further limited by the high carb counts in most pre-packaged freeze dried foods.

Dave's Place/Metamusing

News and pictures of the Hamilton Kimballs