2015 — 7 December: Monday
Hello, pension!1 Now I shall be able to afford a fresher crust and a less mouldy cheese. Nine hours of sleep — an unusual quantity for me — has also helped. I wonder what new adventures the day has in store for me?
One doesn't wish...
... to speak too soon, by the way, but my newest little toy (the Xonar U7 USB external soundcard) has bedded down nicely, showing no current inclination to go AWOL. One day, Linux pulseaudio may even deign to recognise this new device and advance to the point where I'll be able to try out its digital side. I'm in no rush, having been very impressed by the quality of its analogue output. However, the digital lead to the pre-amp is already in place:
"DTV" connection is an optical lead from the X-Fi's SP/DIF output; "VCR" is a stereo phono lead (how quaint is that?) from the Xonar's Front (R) and Front (L) outputs.
Where's Bertie...
... when we clearly need him more than ever? (But that's what it says in the [insert preferred text2 here] so it must be true!)
When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man.
Most of the greatest evils than man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.
Source, and some weirdly-Goreyesque cartoons, here.
Having fended off the unwanted services of an itinerant garden tidy-er-upper I think it's time to eat. Before dusk, that is.
As I therefore munch...
... my delicious (but rather late) light tuna and salad lunch snack I find myself puzzled by the fact that Peter Gabriel's music "Passion" (written for a 1989 Scorsese film I've still no real desire to see) is so, erm, old already. Oops. I'd substituted one of the tracks with a 2002 re-mastered version from a later compilation and the "transition" is not smooth. (It completely fooled the Banshee player, which drives itself along by meta tag data. VLC is [almost] unfazed, being happier [I suspect] just to play tracks one by one as it finds them.)
Lunch was pushed aside...
... still only half-eaten, to field a call from a guru who talked me through using alsamixer to un-mute SP/DIF on the Xonar. But now he's as puzzled as I am as to why he, too, gets no tell-tale red glow on his matching little box from the depths3 of its combined optical and co-ax SP/DIF phono socket. It's possible, I gather, to completely bypass part of the Linux audio software stack and just pipe audio data directly from a source to a specified device via the command line. That doesn't sound quite as convenient as just clicking on a "Play" button though, does it?
My Xonar is...
... soundcard device #2 and I have just proved (by whipping the optical lead out of the X-Fi and plugging it into the Xonar) that it does, indeed, play digital audio perfectly — at least when that audio is a file of type .wav (which the Test Sounds for "Front left" and "Front right" announcements happen to be):
david@BlackBeast $ aplay -D plughw:2,1 /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Right.wav Playing WAVE '/usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Right.wav'
While the lady says "Front Right", the little blue "SP/DIF" light on the Xonar glows, as does the red LED inside the co-ax socket. Digital audio playback problems must therefore be deeper in the Linux audio software stack. Knowing my luck, this means near the Balrog.
I had to stop...
... and just listen as I played (again) the "Late Junction" programme of 4th December last year. Verity was chatting to Tobias Kaye from Devon, and playing music from the glorious wooden sounding bowls that he hand-crafts. (More here.) They are being increasingly used in therapy, and demand to be touched and played. In fact, they remind me of an eerie little SF story that I read 50 years ago.
"The Hypnoglyph"...
... by "John Anthony" (John Ciardi, the poet) was my first encounter with the concept of "tropism". I read it in a Robert P Mills anthology ("A Decade of F&SF", 1962) that I bought in 1964 but have long since culled. Ciardi's pseudonym was to conceal this shameful SF from the reviewers of his poetry — some had already branded him a Philistine for having appeared in the "New Yorker"!
He bashed out the story to win a bet that he had made with some SF writers at one of Fletcher Pratt's regular New Jersey weekend house parties late in 1952. The bet? That "any literate person could turn out (and sell to one of the top three magazines) the stuff". At the time, he was slogging away at a translation of Dante's Inferno. Hypnoglyph eventually brought in some $1,500. He was tickled pink, though never wrote any more SF.