Category: freecycling

she said it

Devil Titty:

They’re almost inevitably prudes who believe our bodies are to be secreted away lest Jesus weep, but if the Almighty had a problem with women getting their tits out in public, then he would have put our nipples on our thumbs.

Albums V642 Shakespeares Sister Shakes4 Babybooby

I read some of the quotes on this when the story came out a day or two ago. I like that image — the baby’s eyes are wonderful — but overall, the picture has an Erotic Value of 0. Anyone who thinks someone’s gonna get a rise out of that, so to speak, Has Issues.

the buzzing sound

I have been looking for help Fixing iMic Hum. I sold my old G3/4 so I no longer own any modern Mac hardware with an line in (I do have an old iMac G3 but I haven’t tried using it for this — yet). And my old technique, using gramofile on my FreeBSD machine, no longer works: I rashly removed gramofile and it will no longer build due to some changes in the legacy system I am using. The SHM_LOCK issue didn’t crop up in older releases of FreeBSD 4.x. 

shmbuf.c: In function `init_shm':
shmbuf.c:157: `SHM_LOCK' undeclared (first use in this function)
shmbuf.c:157: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
shmbuf.c:157: for each function it appears in.)
gmake[1]: *** [shmbuf.o] Error 1

So I am using the iMic II with Final Vinyl with limited success. I get a lot of hum (I assume ground loop hum) but when I drop the needle, it goes away, and I can then hear a much more faint buzzing sound that gets worse with more gain. I think the unshielded iMic is at fault.

I suppose I could try Audacity as well, to eliminate any software-related problems. As noted in the link above, this gets more complicated: I have never used the the Audio MIDI control panel before, not that it helped.

Any ideas on how to add some shielding will be welcomed.

Flatland, by Edwin A. Abbott

Flatland: Section 14 How I vainly tried to explain the nature of Flatland

Thinking that it was time to bring down the Monarch from his raptures
to the level of common sense, I determined to endeavour to open up
to him some glimpses of the truth, that is to say of the nature
of things in Flatland. So I began thus: “How does your Royal Highness
distinguish the shapes and positions of his subjects? I for my part
noticed by the sense of sight, before I entered your Kingdom,
that some of your people are lines and others Points;
and that some of the lines are larger –” “You speak of an impossibility,”
interrupted the King; “you must have seen a vision; for to detect the difference
between a Line and a Point by the sense of sight is, as every one knows,
in the nature of things, impossible; but it can be detected by the sense
of hearing, and by the same means my shape can be exactly ascertained.
Behold me–I am a Line, the longest in Lineland, over six inches of Space –”
“Of Length,” I ventured to suggest. “Fool,” said he, “Space is Length.
Interrupt me again, and I have done.”

I apologized; but he continued scornfully, “Since you are impervious
to argument, you shall hear with your ears how by means of my two voices
I reveal my shape to my Wives, who are at this moment six thousand miles
seventy yards two feet eight inches away, the one to the North,
the other to the South. Listen, I call to them.”

He chirruped, and then complacently continued: “My wives at this
moment receiving the sound of one of my voice, closely followed
by the other, and perceiving that the latter reaches them after an interval
in which sound can traverse 6.457 inches, infer that one of my mouths
is 6.457 inches further from them than the other, and accordingly know
my shape to be 6.457 inches. But you will of course understand that
my wives do not make this calculation every time they hear my two voices.
They made it, once for all, before we were married. But they COULD
make it at any time. And in the same way I can estimate the shape
of any of my Male subjects by the sense of sound.”

“But how,” said I, “if a Man feigns a Woman’s voice with one of his
two voices, or so disguises his Southern voice that it cannot
be recognized as the echo of the Northern? May not such deceptions
cause great inconvenience? And have you no means of checking frauds
of this kind by commanding your neighbouring subjects to feel one another?”
This of course was a very stupid question, for feeling could not have
answered the purpose; but I asked with the view of irritating the Monarch,
and I succeeded perfectly.

“What!” cried he in horror, “explain your meaning.” “Feel, touch,
come into contact,” I replied. “If you mean by FEELING,” said the
King, “approaching so close as to leave no space between two individuals,
know, Stranger, that this offence is punishable in my dominions by death.
And the reason is obvious. The frail form of a Woman, being liable
to be shattered by such an approximation, must be preserved by the State;
but since Women cannot be distinguished by the sense of sight from Men,
the Law ordains universally that neither Man nor Woman shall be
approached so closely as to destroy the interval between the approximator
and the approximated.

“And indeed what possible purpose would be served by this illegal
and unnatural excess of approximation which you call TOUCHING,
when all the ends of so brutal and course a process are attained
at once more easily and more exactly by the sense of hearing?
As to your suggested danger of deception, it is non-existent:
for the Voice, being the essence of one’s Being, cannot be
thus changed at will. But come, suppose that I had the power
of passing through solid things, so that I could penetrate my subjects,
one after another, even to the number of a billion, verifying the size
and distance of each by the sense of FEELING: How much time and energy
would be wasted in this clumsy and inaccurate method! Whereas now,
in one moment of audition, I take as it were the census and statistics,
local, corporeal, mental and spiritual, of every living being in Lineland.
Hark, only hark!”

So saying he paused and listened, as if in an ecstasy, to a sound
which seemed to me no better than a tiny chirping from an innumerable
multitude of lilliputian grasshoppers.

“Truly,” replied I, “your sense of hearing serves you in good stead,
and fills up many of your deficiencies. But permit me to point out
that your life in Lineland must be deplorably dull. To see nothing
but a Point! Not even to be able to contemplate a Straight Line!
Nay, not even to know what a Straight Line is! To see, yet to be cut
off from those Linear prospects which are vouchsafed to us in Flatland!
Better surely to have no sense of sight at all than to see so little!
I grant you I have not your discriminative faculty of hearing;
for the concert of all Lineland which gives you such intense pleasure,
is to me no better than a multitudinous twittering or chirping.
But at least I can discern, by sight, a Line from a Point.
And let me prove it. Just before I came into your kingdom,
I saw you dancing from left to right, and then from right to left,
with Seven Men and a Woman in your immediate proximity on the left,
and eight Men and two Women on your right. Is not this correct?”

“It is correct,” said the King, “so far as the numbers and sexes
are concerned, though I know not what you mean by `right’ and `left.’
But I deny that you saw these things. For how could you see the Line,
that is to say the inside, of any Man? But you must have heard these
things, and then dreamed that you saw them. And let me ask what you
mean by those words `left’ and `right.’ I suppose it is your way
of saying Northward and Southward.”

“Not so,” replied I; “besides your motion of Northward and Southward,
there is another motion which I call from right to left.”

King. Exhibit to me, if you please, this motion from left to right.

I. Nay, that I cannot do, unless you could step out of your Line altogether.

King. Out of my Line? Do you mean out of the world? Out of Space?

I. Well, yes. Out of YOUR world. Out of YOUR Space. For your
Space is not the true Space. True Space is a Plane; but your
Space is only a Line.

King. If you cannot indicate this motion from left to right by yourself
moving in it, then I beg you to describe it to me in words.

I. If you cannot tell your right side from your left, I fear
that no words of mine can make my meaning clearer to you.
But surely you cannot be ignorant of so simple a distinction.

King. I do not in the least understand you.

I. Alas! How shall I make it clear? When you move straight on,
does it not sometimes occur to you that you COULD move in some other way,
turning your eye round so as to look in the direction towards which your
side is now fronting? In other words, instead of always moving
in the direction of one of your extremities, do you never feel
a desire to move in the direction, so to speak, of your side?

King. Never. And what do you mean? How can a man’s inside “front”
in any direction? Or how can a man move in the direction of his inside?

I. Well then, since words cannot explain the matter, I will try deeds,
and will move gradually out of Lineland in the direction which I desire
to indicate to you.

At the word I began to move my body out of Lineland. As long
as any part of me remained in his dominion and in his view, the King
kept exclaiming, “I see you, I see you still; you are not moving.”
But when I had at last moved myself out of his Line, he cried in his
shrillest voice, “She is vanished; she is dead.” “I am not dead,”
replied I; “I am simply out of Lineland, that is to say, out of the
Straight Line which you call Space, and in the true Space, where I can
see things as they are. And at this moment I can see your Line,
or side–or inside as you are pleased to call it; and I can see also
the Men and Women on the North and South of you, whom I will now enumerate,
describing their order, their size, and the interval between each.”

When I had done this at great length, I cried triumphantly,
“Does that at last convince you?” And, with that, I once more
entered Lineland, taking up the same position as before.

But the Monarch replied, “If you were a Man of sense–though, as
you appear to have only one voice I have little doubt you are not a
Man but a Woman–but, if you had a particle of sense, you would
listen to reason. You ask me to believe that there is another Line
besides that which my senses indicate, and another motion besides that
of which I am daily conscious. I, in return, ask you to describe
in words or indicate by motion that other Line of which you speak.
Instead of moving, you merely exercise some magic art of vanishing
and returning to sight; and instead of any lucid description of your
new World, you simply tell me the numbers and sizes of some forty
of my retinue, facts known to any child in my capital. Can anything
be more irrational or audacious? Acknowledge your folly or depart
from my dominions.”

Furious at his perversity, and especially indignant that he professed
to be ignorant of my sex, I retorted in no measured terms, “Besotted Being!
You think yourself the perfection of existence, while you are in reality
the most imperfect and imbecile. You profess to see, whereas you see
nothing but a Point! You plume yourself on inferring the existence
of a Straight Line; but I CAN SEE Straight Lines, and infer the existence
of Angles, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and even Circles.
Why waste more words? Suffice it that I am the completion of your
incomplete self. You are a Line, but I am a Line of Lines called
in my country a Square: and even I, infinitely superior though
I am to you, am of little account among the great nobles of Flatland,
whence I have come to visit you, in the hope of enlightening your ignorance.”

Hearing these words the King advanced towards me with a menacing cry
as if to pierce me through the diagonal; and in that same movement
there arose from myriads of his subjects a multitudinous war-cry,
increasing in vehemence till at last methought it rivalled the roar
of an army of a hundred thousand Isosceles, and the artillery
of a thousand Pentagons. Spell-bound and motionless, I could
neither speak nor move to avert the impending destruction;
and still the noise grew louder, and the King came closer,
when I awoke to find the breakfast-bell recalling me
to the realities of Flatland.

O, LazyWeb, I crave a boon

I would like to be able to create universally-accessible groups of email addresses, say for a project team or other like-minded souls.

I would like to be able to create universally-accessible groups of email addresses, say for a project team or other like-minded souls. Here’s how it works:
* I go to some web page, request a group be created, and get some identifier (could be user-selected to be more memorable or it could be random like tinyURL does it: the former makes more sense but boon-cravers can’t be choosers).

* I add the email addresses of the folks I want to be able to reach.

* I can then use that address, share it, publicize it, and because it doesn’t live in anyone’s email client, it’s immediately and equally useful to everyone in the group.

As a point of order, it could notify everyone who is added and give them the keys to remove themselves or add others, change their delivery address, whathaveyou.

This would be useful to organizations that lack an IT infrastructure of their own, who need or want to leverage the tools without taking on the responsibility or costs.

Now playing:White Tornado by R.E.M. from the album “Dead Letter Office” | Buy it