2016 — 5 June: Sunday
Brightly dawns, etc etc. Chop, chop.1 There's just time to rescue a couple of stray raisins that escaped from my cinnamon hot cross bun before repeated toasting processes transform them into stone hard lumps of, erm, whatever stuck firmly to my often-unused grill.
I could get...
... very used to Sunday deliveries from Amazon Logistics:
Though listening to the final part of Wyndham's "Kraken Wakes" is more than a little unsettling. It's basically outlining, much accelerated, the effects of global warming on a particularly pestilential species that it often seems to me the planet could probably well do without.
To see ourselves...
... as others see us:
It was a conscious decision to ignore the UK because of the way your country has drifted in the last decade or so. It's been disappointing to those of us who admire a lot of what the British have done. Many of us believe Tony Blair was worse than Bush because Bush we expected. And then, the thing that so-called New Labour did to try and unravel the social safety net in Britain. It's sad how like us you are becoming.
Or like this?
So, British friends, have courage! Let yourself be won over by such brilliant leaders as Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, who in their hearts simply want what's best for Europe. We promise we'll let you back in in 20 years. On our conditions, of course, in sackcloth and ashes: a small price to pay to save the European dream.
AL Kennedy has a lovely turn of phrase:
... on the chances of David Cameron's limbic area abandoning him to find a human host...
Having asked around...
... and dug around, I've settled for just adding the FLAC codec (via the Software Manager) to the version of the CD ripper Asunder in the Mint 17.3 repository to see how it gets on. I did get hold of the latest build of Asunder (easy enough) but lack the know-how to install that. Guru to the rescue! Interesting reading here. And a great deal more here about the easy scripting of all sorts of audio encoding and ripping possibilities.
While I've no intention of getting back into the re-ripping lark with FLAC encoding, I was making a copy and wanted to give its recipient the widest choice of audio options in the long term. As the Hydrogenaudio KB puts it...
If ... you are determined to erroneously regard any sacrifices to the audio to be a risk to or reduction in quality ... you should not be using MP3 at all; rather, you should use a lossless format.
My first audio recorder...
... was the Sony cassette radio2 I bought in 1971. It was mono, had a decent FM receiver, and suited my impoverished student budget perfectly. I still have a small handful of the audio tapes I recorded off-air. It pre-dated Dolby noise reduction. Sony cassette radio #2, in 1973, was stereo, but still no Dolby, and a nasty audible artefact from interference between the 19KHz FM stereo pilot tone and the bias frequency of the recording circuitry when recording stereo broadcasts. It cost £88 — a lot of money for an apprentice engineer. Except that by then, I had stopped drinking, so I actually had spare cash.
In mid-1974 my ICL writing mentor Vic bought a Teac Dolby B cassette deck and let me hear it. The tale here is germane. I still recall an editorial in "Studio Sound" magazine in mid-1975, too. The front cover had a pink elephant with a knot in its trunk to shut it up. It was a special issue on noise reduction, and mentioned the incoming wave of digital audio that would quickly render analogue technology obsolete. It was correct. Today's little experiment:
Two of these three files are lossless audio (a concept that has no meaning in analogue recording terms). The MP3 is lossy, but is the highest-quality variable bit-rate possible. Just this one file is larger than the total hard disk space I had on my Acorn Archimedes RISC OS system in 1989. BlackBeast's Intel i7 CPU probably encoded these files as fast as the CD could be read.
I've just read...
... an anecdote (originally from a state-sponsored SF convention in China) in the Gaiman book. It's the best refutation ever to dear Mama's assertion, tirelessly-repeated, that SF was rubbish and a waste of time:
We make your iPods. We make phones. We make them better than anybody else, but we don't come up with any of these things. You bring us things and then we make them. So we went on a tour of America talking to people at Microsoft, at Google, at Apple, and we asked them a lot of questions about themselves, just the people working there. And we discovered that they all read science fiction when they were teenagers. So we think maybe it's a good thing.
'Nuff said!
Oops!
It's been pointed out that I didn't actually say anything about those three audio encodings. Not much to say — I can't hear any difference between them on playback in VLC or Decibel.
I've just re-read...
... this (after more than quarter of a century!) to remind myself...
... of Gaiman's first paying gig in comics (in 1987). He was glad not to get busted for blasphemous libel.