art taylor

Take the seedy Chatroulette site, write a bot to iterate through potential flashers, log the IP address and match it against a GeoIP database, and plot it on Google Maps with a screenshot.

If I were a troll stalker or this troll's poor mother, much drama would ensue.

This is much, much more interesting than Chatroulette itself.

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DateListPlot in Mathematica. Every new version since 1.0 I have looked for this, and been astonished that it did not exist.

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I keep forgetting I have this blog and almost always use the other one now. I felt guilty. :-)

When I bought this house, it was new, so we didn't have a clothing washer or a drier. Dryer? De-moistifier.

Being the dummy that I am, I bought a front-loading washer, because they're cool. I bought the spiffiest one I could find, and discovered that the ultra-high-speed spin cycle feels exactly like a really long 4.5 earthquake when you put the thing on the second floor.

I put up with it for almost a year now (viz., dummy) and finally gave up and bought two packs of these.

No more noise. They block the transmission of the vibrations almost completely, so I actually thought the machine skipped the spin cycle.

That's all. See you in another six months.

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Whether you see the code as Lisp or Smalltalk depends upon whether the method's s-expression is converted to text by the LispFormatter or the SmalltalkFormatter.

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I would probably remove this section from my home page.

Yes, I know I'm misusing the term "home page", but bite me, ok?

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"With prostitutes you don't have to work out. They love you for who you are."

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Pursuant to an earlier post, I bought the Creative Zen Vision :W player in advance of a trip to NYC last week.

First off, this thing has just about the worst name in the world. It also has an awful splash screen at startup with a big "ZEN" that I would cover up with my hand so the guy sitting next to me wouldn't punch me in the nads.

That said, it's pretty groovy, with some serious downsides that make me think the PMP market is about where the GPS market was in 2004, right around the time the Nuvi came out and solidified things remarkably. 

I'll go through the problems with this player first, because they may be enough to make you run away. It's also about 90% of my content, because it's all well and good if it plays a nice music file, but if you can't use it, it's just a waste of money. Besides, you can get all the positive propaganda you want from the website. 

The first is that there is no official Mac support. It's an MTP (Microsoft's Media Transfer Protocol) device, so all the software and support relates to Windows. This is obviously not an issue if all you have or care about is Windows support.

With XNJB, the lack of Mac support isn't a huge deal. You can still push media on, and pull it off, the player. You are pretty limited in media types (careful with ".mp4" files, which will go strange places) and you can't mess around with subfolders yet, but if you're just throwing something in the "Video" or "Music" directory for a train/plane ride, it'll be fine. XNJB is pretty fast over USB, as I was able to transfer a 700.9MB video in about 110 seconds. Not super fast and I wouldn't want to use it as an external drive, but acceptable.

Second, this thing is a brick. I was thinking about getting an iPod Video because it likes the Mac, is well-integrated into iTunes, etc., but when I thought about it, I preferred my Nano if I was actually carrying an iPod around during the day, and the iPod Video has a tiny screen compared to the Creative. It's just not a good compromise device. Instead, I decided to try the Creative as a video player and use a Nano for something I'd want in my pocket. The Creative is about 2-2.5x bigger than my old 3G 40GB iPod, and is less of an obvious "compromise device" than the iPod Video. However, as I mentioned, it's a frickin' brick and you're not going to be walking around with this in your pocket.

Third, codec support is pretty iffy. It doesn't like older versions of MSMPEG4, so if you ripped movies from DVD a few years ago, be ready to re-rip. I would strongly hesitate against transcoding (in general but especially in this case) because the video seems especially jumpy. It also doesn't like AAC or AC3 audio, and of course DRM support is nonexistent, so forget about using your iTunes Music Store files with this. Unfortunately, I ripped all my CDs to AAC and didn't feel up to converting them.

Transcoding audio is a lot easier than video. ffmpeg -i infile.avi -vcodec copy -acodec mp3 -ab 192 outfile.avi works just fine, or you can use VLC's painful command line, which delegates to ffmpeg or mplayer anyway. It's important to avoid variable bit rate audio, because the audio will desync from the video, and then you'll get in that nasty situation where you can't look at actors' mouths without feeling a little sick.

It does seem pretty decent if you stick to the Video Format Recommendations for ZEN Vision/Vision:M page at Creative. The list is limited, but it's better than the iPod.

As for stability, it's a feature that isn't that important to this player. I had to pull the battery twice because I'd hit "Play" for a video and start to fast forward before the video had started. The player hung until I did a hard reset.

It's also incredibly sluggish -- seeking forward or backward can easily cause a 10-second delay before the video will start playing. The player is also unable to process additional seek requests in this period of time, so if I searched, lifted my finger, and searched again, I was out of luck. There's no visual cue when fast forwarding or rewinding, so it should be expected that a user will stop a lot to see where they are.

The last ding I'd make against it is that it has no stand. Some of the Archos devices have a little kickstand that folds out to hold the player up. I was constantly trying to find the right combination of soft but rough surfaces to prop the player up into a viewable angle. Some external cases do have the ability to do this, so consider one a prudent investment.

Those are the negative things, now for a couple brief positive things.

The picture quality is quite nice. It's watchable and not at all embarrassing. It's not great for slow pans or zooms, but for normal movies (and especially, movies on a plane that aren't on a washed out screen overhead or on a 120-degree laptop) it's great.

 
Widescreen video

 
A 4:3 video with black bars

The resolution is lower than some other players, but it's still a small screen, and the widescreen format is much better for watching ripped DVDs while on the road. The "screen door" effect hits at about 18 inches from the screen, depending on your eyesight.

The battery life is pretty good, as well. It takes a long time to charge (6h USB, 3h AC adapter), but I was able to watch three 1.5h movies on one charge and have enough left over to listen to a fair bit of an audio book, which uses less power.

Speaking of which, like many of the Creative devices, the audio is much better than an iPod. There's more control, and Creative apparently has some experience with electronic audio gear, and applied some of that knowledge and technology to their players. If your ears get tired of listening to your iPod for hours, you might look at one of the Creative devices, if you can stomach the industrial design.

Also, last but maybe not least, there's a speaker. This thing is so big it has a speaker. That's awesome for starting a movie or audio file while lying in bed at night. I don't like wearing earbuds when I don't have to, but I also don't like packing around speakers.

I didn't get a chance to try the A/V output, but I have it on good cyberauthority that it works about as well as the source material. I forgot my cables and couldn't try it on the hotel TV however.

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Kat has this great way of telling me about problems. She'll raise her voice and say something like,"Oh my god."

That's it. She'll wait for me to ask. Because I don't like to encourage that behavior, I never ask what she's talking about. So she'll try it again. I'll refuse to ask.

It's important to hold the line firm and be an adult so she learns the proper way to relate.

One of the great things about living in a new house is getting to discover all the construction peccadillos. Especially interesting are the issues that are found due to weather. The rain over the past few days have made life especially unpleasant for earthworms.

Eventually, I asked what she was spazzing out about, and it turns out that a few worms were piling into the house via a narrow opening in a window frame.

It wasn't a big deal, only three...four...five worms crawling into the house, and they were removed outside and discouraged from re-entry with some lemon juice on the windows.

Of course, I'm just adding this to the list of little surprises -- tankless water heater set to 180F, hot water pipe not soldered and leaking into the living room, incredibly easily broken "safety" glass in the door (which is how we were burgled), non-working power outlets on the second floor, etc. At least the roof doesn't leak (yet) and most of the rest of the outdoor wildlife hasn't found a way in yet.

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Hint, it's best to wait for a point release when the upgrade instructions consist of "It's probably best to upgrade to 4.7 before upgrading to 5.0. You should disable your contributed modules and themes first. You should not upgrade it in place because the directory structure has changed. Oh yeah, and for more detail, watch this videocast of mumbling quietly through the installation while typing in a transparent terminal."

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For those of you at work, it's a very unsuspenseful,"Coming up on Mythbusters, can we fold this piece of paper...more than seven times?"

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