the art of writing is discovering what you believe
This page spells out clearly enough for even me how DISCID’s are derived, and demonstrates how to verify them. Very nice. Of course, this means DISCID is not written to disc but is instead derived from what’s already on the disc, so if the tracks and offsets differ from the canonical, ie RIAA-approved, version, freedb lookups will never work.
Rats.
Continue reading “a-ha! Perhaps this answers my question about DISCID”
One day I got tired of typing in song names to the albums I was recording and encoding to ogg.
I knew that a lot of the albums I was recording had song listings available via the CD database at freedb.org.
So I took an .xmcd file, and I wrote a perl script to read xmcd and create ogg files using the output files I got from gramofile (processedxxx.wav’s)
[ . . . . ]
This worked so well that I set out to automate as much of the whole gramofile process as possible. Xmcd2make is the result of this work.
Very nice, indeed. But I wish there was some way to label the disc itself. mp3s are all very well, but I still like shiny discs and handlabelling them takes me back to making cassette tapes.
Jon Udell: LibraryLookup homepage
If your local public (or college) library is one of these Innovative, Voyager, iPac, or DRA Web-enabled libraries, find your library on the list and drag its link to your browser’s link toolbar.
[ . . . ]
After you’ve “installed” your bookmarklet in this way, you can look up books at your local library. Let’s say you’re on a book-related site (Amazon, BN, isbn.nu, All Consuming, possibly others), and a book’s info page is your current page. (Specifically: its URL contains an ISBN. Choose a hardcover edition for best results — see tips below.) You can click your bookmarklet to check if the book is available in your local library. The bookmarklet will invoke your library’s lookup service, feed it the ISBN, and pop up a new window with the result.
This is is very clever, and since I belong to two iPac-using libraries, it’s twice as cool for me.
It makes me think I could do this to make affiliated links for Amazon a lot less painful.
For some reason, when I first tried it, it didn’t work until I replaced the encoded spaces (the %20 characters) with spaces. This morning, it works fine. Wasted the author’s time, I’m afraid, but I found that replacing “spl” with “kcls” makes the King County Library System just as accessible.
javascript:var%20re=/[\/-](\d{9,9}[\dX])|isbn=(\d{9,9}[\dX])/i;if(re.test(location.href)==true)
{var%20isbn=RegExp.$1;if(isbn.length==0){isbn=RegExp.$2};
void(win=window.open(‘http://ipac.kcls.org/ipac20/ipac.jsp?
index=ISBN&term=’+isbn,’KCLS LibraryLookup’,’scrollbars=1,resizable=1,width=575,height=500′))};
Getting Involved with mozilla.org
I built the beast again (twice today) and on the second pass got the calendar built as well. Looks nice: I’m essentially following the UNIX build instructions and getting a Cocoa app. I’m still seeing some issues with how calendar parses ics files. Perhaps another bugzilla visit in my future.
How do Stirling Engines work?
Are Stirling engines really the most efficient engines possible?
If Stirling engines are so efficient, why don’t I have one in my car?
Who was the Rev. Robert Stirling anyway?
What are Stirling engines being used for today?
Who invented this type of Stirling Engine?
The world has thousands of low temperature difference heat sources why don’t you build a full power engine that uses them?
Does American Stirling Company build any full power Stirling engines? If not, do you plan to build any?
Where can I get a 5 to 25 kW Stirling engine for my house, car, boat, etc. that will run on any fuel from cow chips to sunshine and be price competitive with a Honda generator of the same capacity?
Could a good Stirling engine be built by starting with a small-block Chevy V8, or perhaps an air compressor, and converting it to a Stirling?
I had heard about Stirling engines is passing but had never really understood them. Now that I have found this site (thanks to RJL20), it’s easier to understand.
Here in the Pacific Northwest, we don’t get as much rain as we’re rumored to, but we get very intense sunlight. Something to do with the angle of the sun or something, I think. Anyway, I’ve often wonder if there was a way to harness that for electrical generation or mechanical work. Since the Stirling engine derives its power from heat differentials, I wonder if we get enough heat/light drive one of these.
This ties into another idea that’s been bouncing around in my head. 30 years ago, during one of the oil price shocks, an uncle of mine in upstate New York switched from oil heat to a wood stove. Being a plumber by trade and a pretty clever fellow, he figured that it was all very well to generate heat, but storing it was more useful: being able to have heat without a fire — making it possible to let the fire go down at night or during a warm spell — would a good thing to have. So he built a heat vault. It was a large (6-8 foot on a side) cube of sand, in a wooden box. Inside the vault was a spiral of plastic water piping: the notion was to heat the water, pump it through the vault and heat the sand. Then later, draw the heat back out by pumping water through another pipeline.
So there are two possibly related ideas here. The heat storage idea would be useful in a cool clime like ours, but I also wonder if it could be useful in driving a Stirling power generator. It sound like the required engine would be extremely large — nothing like a Honda generator — but I could envision it being underground or in an outbuilding with the heat vault.
As the folks at American Stirling note, price per power unit is still very much against the Stirling. But that may change.
This kidney stone isn’t going anywhere on its own, so I have an appointment to have it removed. They’ll use a holmium laser to explode it (see excerpt and link below). If that fails, they will have the sonic lithotripter on hand to pulverize it with sound, and if that doesn’t get it, they have something else in mind, but I don’t know what it is.
Laser Physics & SafetyIn the case of urinary lithotripsy, the laser heats up and vaporizes water on the surface and within the calculus, the water expands and the expansion causes the calculus to disintegrate.
All in all, a fun day in store: I’ll of course spend most of it in an anesthesia-induced coma, but I’m sure there will be some enjoyable after affects.
Why the name “libpr0n”?
The main goal of the library is to render pornographic images in an efficient way. Plus, the name “imglib2” is boring.
Saw the libprOn tree go by as I was wrestling with Mozilla . . . . what the . . . ? A quick Google search later, I found this site. Evidently, these guys know what most browsers are used for.
Roses are not difficult to grow from seed, if you do it right.
[ . . . . ]
First, be aware that each rose seedling is a new, never-before-seen variety.
Well, after reading
The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View… and doing a little research in rose hips as seeds, I decided to see what kind of strange variants I could get from my rose bushes. I am fortunate in having three good sized hips (the size of a cherry) from three different roses. None of the plants are identified, though my garden mentor — my father — suspects one is a Queen Elizabeth. That’s the one I just worked on. It occurs to me now I should have used the digital camera, and I will on the next one I do (I have found no pictures of the process).
I simply followed the instructions on the page linked to above. We’ll see what happens, come the new year.
Poetry Corner: Communications From Elsewhere
One of the features of the site was a bulletin-board type of thing, where kids could write in and get “published”. A lot of kids wrote in with poetry. Some of it was actually pretty good. You know, for a 12 year old.
Check it out: there’s some interesting things here.
Out of the Box
I found this while I was looking for something else . . .
When you notice yourself sinking into your self-described “bitter feeling, as if I have been wasting my productive years in the wrong places or aiming at the wrong goals,” say to yourself, “Ah, I am inside a box where I am compulsively focusing on myself as an outsider, a misfit. I have bought into this belief to such an extent that I keep myself from seeing the light outside.” When you observe yourself feeling “disenchanted”, say to yourself, “Ah, I am inside a box again, playing out the belief that the grass must be greener somewhere else.”When you find yourself thinking of yourself as “odd,” say to yourself, “Ah, I’m in a box of focusing on my flaws.” When you find yourself saying, “Oh, God, I’m in this box again, I can’t bear it!” keep observing yourself until you can accept yourself as you [are].
I first looked into this a while back and I haven’t given it much thought since. But it still resonates when I read these pages. It goes a little deeper/further than Myers-Briggs, since it deals with psychological motivations, not just types in a vacuum. As noted, I’m a Four, just like these more well-known folks: Ingmar Bergman, Alan Watts, Sarah McLachlan, Alanis Morrisette, Paul Simon, Jeremy Irons, Patrick Stewart, Joseph Fiennes, Martha Graham, Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Johnny Depp, Anne Rice, Rudolph Nureyev, J.D. Salinger, Anaîs Nin, Marcel Proust, Maria Callas, Tennessee Williams, Edgar Allan Poe, Annie Lennox, Prince, Michael Jackson, Virginia Woolf, Judy Garland, “Blanche DuBois” (Streetcar Named Desire).
I also found this on a possible link between MBTI and the Enneagram:
Is there a relationship between the nine Enneagram and sixteen MBTI types? If so, how can it best be characterized? In the course of laying the groundwork, in Part 1, for an answer to this question, we review previous hypotheses regarding the nature of the ‘triads’ in Enneagram theory and offer yet another (a ‘fifth’) approach to this crucial material.