Month: January 2003

analog -> digital conversion issues solved

Well, my first crop of LPs -> CDs are coasters, unless anyone really wants to listen to mono recordings.

My problem with the soundcard was all to do with it defaulting to the mic input for recording, and mic is, of course, mono. Feh. So after some discussion on the freebsd-questions list, I found that mixer(8) can be told what port to listen to.


To change the recording device you use one of:



^rec toggles rdev of possible recording devices


+rec adds rdev to possible recording devices


-rec removes rdev from possible recording devices

=rec sets the recording device to rdev

so I set the mixer to use line as the rdev (mixer =rec line).

Then of course, I found that the signal from the receiver was overpowering: the needle in the leadin track was in the red. Hmm. So I took the receiver out of the circuit again, and plugged it straight into the card. Levels are low but the sound is OK. I have to assume the turntable has a pre-amp or it wouldn’t work from all I’ve read about it.
Continue reading “analog -> digital conversion issues solved”

whose classroom is it, anyway?

These “computers in education” posts almost merit their own category.

Professors Vie With Web for Class’s Attention

“When you see 25 percent of the screens playing solitaire, besides its being distracting, you feel like a sucker for paying attention,” Professor Ayres said.

Unless law students are fully engaged in the class, he said, they miss out on the give and take of ideas in class discussion and do not develop the critical thinking skills that emerge from “deeply tearing apart a case.”
[ . . . . ]
Professor Ayres tried to prohibit all Internet use in his classroom. The students “went ballistic,” he said, and insisted that their multitasking ways made them more productive and even more alert in class.

So let them go ballistic. They pay their fees for an education, not to be permitted to waste people’s time.

It would be interesting to see the relationship between in-class surfing and grades.
Continue reading “whose classroom is it, anyway?”

analog -> digital conversion problems

Well, this is not going as well as I thought. It seems I’m only recording a mono signal. Some reading of the support area at Creative‘s website and found out I have a SoundBlaster Live! Gamer card (same guts as the Platinum but without the Live! Drive): I also now know what all the connectors are for. Turns out I was using the mic connector, not the line-in. I’m now using an amplifier between the turntable and the card to the line in.

But now if I use that, I get no audio at all. The indicators don’t move in gramofile. It’s not cabling, since it all works through the mic jack. If I listen in headphones while I record, all sounds fine. Of course, I thought that before. I wonder if the turntable is kaput on one channel? I have no way to plug headphones into the receiver (mis-matched connectors), so I’ll dust off my Advents and see what gives,

<grumble>

the browser war simmers

SPLF: Browser Support

This web site is designed for Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.x and above and Netscape Navigator/Communicator 4.7 and above on a PC and Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.5 and above and Netscape Navigator/Communicator 4.7 and above on the Apple Macintosh.

Other browsers may work fine but are not recommended or supported.

But you never get a chance to see how well supported a browser is: if you try to use anything but one of the ones mentioned, you get this polite but frustrating page. And the supported browsers are 5 years old: an eternity in the internet age.

Of course, Galeon will permit you to change your user agent string. So I just impersonated Mozilla circa 1997 and got right in.

Nothing looked amiss nor did Galeon fail to render anything correctly. It’s a nice looking site, and from all accounts, would benefit from a wider audience: beats me why they want to keep people out of it.