I’m trying to get graphics handled nicely (for at least Safari and Firefox), and it appears that web servers are behind the times.

Plan A, was to put up PDF files, which display great in Safari, but not at all in Firefox.

Plan B was to put up SVG files:

gs -sDEVICE=svg -dNOPAUSE -sOutputFile=`basename $1 .pdf`.svg $1 < /dev/null

but they were really big.

Plan C was to put up compressed GZ files (.svgz), but despite claims all over the web that this was the way to do it, it didn’t work, either in Firefox, or in Safari. However, Apache configuration is notoriously arcane and horrible.

The web server that handles these requests:

http://homepage.mac.com/dr2chase/WP/SVGTest.html

http://homepage.mac.com/dr2chase/WP/HV_ctlr_6_crystal_imon_filled.svgz

needs to include the Apache equivalent of

    AddEncoding x-gzip .svgz

I have tested this fix on my own laptop, running MacPorts Apache2,
serving files from my local disk. Failing to include that directive
yields either (for the direct reference to the svgz file)

This page contains the following errors:

error on line 1 at column 1: Encoding error
Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error.

or little broken-graphic boxes if they are embedded.

The MIME type IS being set correctly, but the compression is not.

“Don’t worry as its completely SAFE…”
Brilliant, to pretend to be Adobe intruding into your browsing to update Flash (with no close button, of course), because that’s just the sort of abuse I’ve learned to expect from them. So maybe it’s Adobe, maybe not, who can tell?

I fix my (car) brakes, and I fix my (car) stereo. The rest, oh well.
The new speaker did not fit in the old speaker mount, despite being the same “size”. Marine plywood to the rescue. This is the second one I’ve made like this, and it went unexpectedly well. A dremel is wonderful — and I just set the saber saw at 45 degrees, and free-handed a marked circle, and it came out nice. But, again, marine plywood wins big — strong, no cutting, no splitting. I don’t think I could have cut low-grade plywood or regular wood that close without cracking it in the process.

Turns out, you do it with Quality of Service. Infinitely low, that’s the answer.

And don’t forget to click “Save” at the bottom of the page.

Terrafugia brought their car to the Unconference at Sun Thursday. I think I like the idea of the flying car, more than the actual thing; or rather, for that money, I like other things more. But still, a flying car!
Click the pictures for full size — you know you want to.

1300 pounds of carbon fiber, 100 horsepower of aircraft motor (but runs on auto fuel).

The weird triangles on stalks on the elevator are a “fix” on the prototype to improve the handling. (I asked.)

Nothing says “safety” like an explosively deployed rocket parachute.

And the wings really do fold automatically, it was fun to watch.

Friday morning I installed Tomato 1.25 on a Linksys WRT54G 2.2 router, and it went swimmingly.
Except for changes to the admin/root account info and dynamics DNS, it picked up all the settings from the previous (Linksys) firmware.

Other than tweaking the power slightly upwards, I have not looked into the bells and whistles much, except to study our bandwidth use. If it turns out that we’re not using, or not getting, the peak bandwidth promised by our cable company, I’ll have a look at DSL. I’ve checked performance at DSLreports and it looks good there, but I would be completely unsurprised if they noticed test connections to that site, and gave them priority (I have, in fact, worked on benchmarking in the past, and know that cheating is industry-standing behavior).

Well, gosh darn, I think I have to take back some of the bad things I’ve said about Comcast. To test bandwidth, I fired up Vuze (= Azureus = BitTorrent) and pointed it at the South-by-SouthWest 2009 showcasing artists, gigabyte 1 and gigabyte 2. Uploads were running at about 2Mbit/s, which I think is a lot more than is advertised. Downloads were something like 3 times that. The timing for the bandwidth was a little wonky; it went like gangbusters for a while, then it backed off (why?) but when I tried it experimentally just now, vroom, 2Mb/s, no problem.

And the mighty-fine tomato router software lets me look at this. And it also makes it pretty obvious why ISPs might be a little grumpy about P2P; the P2P parts of the graph just dwarf all the rest.

Further update: hard to tell, after two weeks, we had a spell of really wonky behavior. Despite my best attempts to debug it, cannot tell if it was the router or the ISP. Similar problems (and my reply) reported here.

Once upon a time, Apple wrote this great book on human interface guidelines. It seems nobody reads it any more.

Here’s an example of an insultingly bad error message. A “build” failed (it means, there was a bug in someone else’s program). It pops a little error message window, with the option to show the “details” of the failure. Curious guy that I am, I ask to see them. I get this:

The additional information in the “details” is “assertion failed”. No hint of a log file to look at, no stack trace, no clue as to the cause.

The best part is not quite clear just looking at this picture. Clearly, when I made this image, I had selected the text of the “details”, so I could copy it into a bug report to tell them about how the message was really quite uninformative, and needed to be better (I have my suspicions about the cause of the build failure — however, with no details, who knows?). HOWEVER, this was pointless, because though the text was selectable, it was not copyable. I took this picture so that I could capture the text to file the bug report.

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=272012

I am aware that my bug report lacked diplomacy. I hope that you would recognize that Eclipse has serious deficiencies along the path to making a good bug report. If it is not important enough to announce the location of the log files in a dialog from which I can select the name, are those log files that important? (and the crash put them in an unexpected place!) If it is not important enough to put the plugins in a form that allows me to quickly summarize which ones I’ve got, is that information that important?

In short, the Eclipse UI does not look like it was designed to generate good bug reports — it put several STUPID extra steps in my way, and left it up to ME to find the information that might be relevant, or not.

This bug is, for me, 99% reproducible, and has been for weeks, through at least the 3.4.1 and 3.4.2 releases. I suggest you try installing the plugins that I installed (you want a concise summary, you make Eclipse generate it more easily — I gave you an ls -l, you ought to be able to grep out the irrelevant ones), wait 24 hours, and get the latest-and-greatest Scala plugin and watch it crash.

I think it is highly unlikely that you actually tested this, since you need to wait for a plugin to get updated. A link to a “how to politely report bugs” site is not evidence that you tried diddly squat.

Furthermore, the bugzilla UI leaves plenty to be desired. It should let me know that there will be a chance to add attachments in a later step, it should make it clear ahead of time that there is a 65536 character limit BEFORE I generate 65k characters. This lack of design induces pilot error and leads to pissed-off pilots, who will then not really give a rat’s ass about your snotty instructions about how to file bugs. You think you’re an expert, yet present me with this crap UI (unselectable text in important messages)? Puh-leeze.

And I think this matters. I am a long-time Eclipse user, and my enthusiasm about recommending Eclipse has gone down in recent months. After all, I’m going to look like an idiot if I recommend a piece of software that crashes on every update, aren’t I?

This is here only so search engines can find it and other people can avoid this mistake.I bought a PIC ICD2-Pocket from SparkFun, intending to program it from my MacBook.

Long story short, there appears to be no Mac OS drivers for the USB chip. I can find lots of advice online that tells me about PC drivers, but I have a Mac, so that is not useful.

This guy seemed to be making a stab at it (in particular, his vendor ID matches), but his page is two years stale.

Here’s drivers for handheld devices, but those seem slightly non-serial (IP?)

This looks better yet. Allegedly a serial driver, for a variety of devices. Perhaps it will suffice to edit the kext properties.

I’ll update this if I succeed. If YOU succeed (with a Mac, not a PC), please let me know in the comments. Otherwise, this is a dead end.

This also suggests that communication with between the USB on a PIC18F2550/4550 will not work so well. That seems implausible, but lack of a driver, is lack of a driver.

Update: libusb (from MacPorts, for example) can see devices without kext drivers. I bought a Pickit2; that seems to be the better choice, and both Pk2cmd and piklab can see it (note that piklab from MacPorts does not build out of the box because it depends on arts, which is broken). I have not yet successfully programmed the PIC, but I have not yet given it a serious try with the new programmer.

Update 2: The new version of Piklab at MacPorts recognizes the Pickit, but is surprised by the firmware version. Pk2cmd seems to work, once the firmware upgrade is applied to the Pickit. To do that, you must install pk2cmd, and then type “pk2cmd -DPK2V023200.hex” to download the new firmware.

MacPorts has support for sdcc — no, not really, things fail later. Better to follow these instructions instead, which first require installation of gputils.

Gputils you can download from sourceforge. Be sure to choose a directory that has no spaces in its path name. Then configure: “./configure –prefix=/opt/local”, and “make”, and “make install”. This installs it into the MacPorts /opt/local area, which might be a mistake, but that’s a problem for another day. It seems to build and install ok.

Using the instructions above (which seem a little dated, I sent email to the author, but no reply yet) I got a good deal further and installed sdcc, but assembly of part of the test program failed. It could be for some stupid reason, but I ran out of steam. Mail to author:

Your instructions are more helpful than anything else I have come across, but they seem to be getting maybe a little dated, and there's at least one step missing.

Dated:

3.5. Compiling/Installing the Remaining Device-specific PIC Libraries

this part doesn't match what is there any more; perhaps it is not necessary, I cannot tell for sure.

Missing:

How to get crt018.o ?

"Obviously", do this, but then it fails:

gpasm -c crt018.asm
crt018.asm:5:Warning [205] Found directive in column 1.
crt018.asm:5:Error [176] incorrect syntax. use `CONFIG KEY = VALUE'
crt018.asm:6:Error [152] Executable code and data must be defined in an appropriate section.

(Source code follows  -- perhaps there was a mistake in the cut/paste, or the html?)
----------------
   processor  18F2550
   radix  DEC
   include "p18f2550.inc"

config CODE
   DATA 3F32H

IDLOCS CODE
   DATA 1234H

etc.

Apple now provides a tool to help you write phone plugins for iSync, but it does not work. Long story short, I tried to use it to create a script, and it didn’t work.
The standard explanation for this is that, of course, the user is a dummy. However, this user is not usually a dummy, and what I noticed was that the application kept asking me to answer questions that I had no way of knowing the answers to, and in the one case where I did know the answer (because I asked the phone, and copied its answers) the application didn’t like my answers, and reset them.

As further proof that the problem lies in the application, not the user, I did in fact create a script for syncing my phone. I took an existing script, modified it in the standard way (s/V195/V197), laboriously created a TIFF file for my phone’s icon (seriously, took a photo of the phone on top of green surface, selected all the green, and embarked on a Gimp McGuffin to figure out how to make the green transparent — try it sometime, it’s like a bleeping treasure hunt), and then, copied in the magic response strings from the phone (scroll down, it’s there, I used GSM Remote to feed it the AT strings). Put the phone plugin in my Library/PhonePlugins directory, fired up iSync, and shazam, I’m sync’d.

The tool is willing to test my script for me, and claims that my script is defective, and is not even capable of connecting to the phone. I am a tool-writing guy myself, and this sort of thing is ultimately depressing. When you hear about some guy using vi, or emacs, (or, perish the though, “ed”) instead of some fancy IDE, it’s because they’ve been burned one time too often by a know-it-all tool, that lies to you, has crap documentation, fails inscrutably, and cannot even justify itself when you ask it what the problems are.

David 1, Tool 0. Remember, the purpose of the tool is to help me get the job done, and it didn’t — it never succeeded, and the computer equivalent of rocks and sticks got the job done faster, and apparently correctly.

Update — after cribbing carefully from the Motorola K1 plug-in, I got it all the way to recognizing the phone (I replaced some arrays of single string, with plain old string). And now, says the Plug-in Maker, “This phone cannot be tested with this plug-in”. Hel-lo? Is that all the information you can give me? Is this error message going to help the user (me) get past the problem? If only someone, somewhere, could write down some Human Interface Guidelines, that would guide developers in the better construction of error messages, so that I would not waste time at this unproductive impasse. Golly, looks like that book is already written, sitting on the shelf right next to me — the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines. “Macintosh” — I wonder if that has anything to do with “MacBook”? Do you suppose it is the same company? Surely not, that would be such an embarrassing mistake. On the other hand, maybe books are just too expensive and take up too much space; times are hard, after all. I guess I could understand that, if the book were not available for free PDF download.

If you need the plugin yourself, click the phone, unzip, and move it to Library/PhonePlugins/ (either the main Library, or your own Library).

Oh yeah, this is for USB syncing. You want Bluetooth, you figure it out yourself (but please let me know the incantations, if you do).

Lost them once, never again. This watch has no other ID on it, it has a black body and strap, yellow buttons and trim.
Set/Reset takes you in and out of setting mode. This is not a watch to leave rattling around in your pocket, purse, or backpack. Initially, the seconds (little circle, upper right) blink.

Mode takes you from seconds to hours, minutes, month, day, weekday, 12/24.

Start/stop advances whatever you are setting.

To set the alarm, use Mode to change to alarm mode. In alarm mode, the alarm can be adjusted with the Start/stop button. Set/Reset takes you to/from time setting, where you can choose the hour and minute for two different alarm times (which by default, seem to be the same time).

Lost the instructions once, never again.All the settings seem to go through the start/stop button. If you hold it down for 3 (not 2, not 4, but 3) seconds, it toggles in and out of “set the watch mode”. You can tell you are in it because the seconds at the bottom go all blinky. Use (quick press) start/stop to move from seconds, to minutes, to hours, to year, to month, to day. Mode subtracts, reset adds.

To set alarms, etc, first put the watch into Alarm Mode (Mode button, again).
Use the reset button to move to the selected alarm (1-5).
Hold the start/stop button for 3 seconds to toggle into “set the alarm mode”.
Quick press of start/stop moves between things to set (kind of alarm, hours, minutes).
Mode subtracts, reset adds.
3 second hold of start/stop takes you out of setting mode.

I saw an article in today’s Boston Globe on wind power at Block Island. They pay 65 cents per kilowatt hour there. We pay 17, and I thought that was high. Seems like these guys would be likely customers for efficient lights.In the last year or so, the LED manufacturers turned the crank again, and the new LEDs, available in quantity one over the web, are unambiguously more efficient than fluorescent bulbs (technically speaking, white LEDs are also fluorescent). Our old undercabinet lights were halogen, hot, inefficient, and a pain to replace when they burned out.

The most efficent LEDs, unfortunately, look too blue, but when the selection at my favorite LED supply company included new “neutral white” CREE LEDs, I decided it was time to make the switch.

I bought 10, using one for a battery-powered helmet light, leaving nine to be run from a LED regulator. My steps to manufacture the mounted lights were:

1. Solder leads onto star-mounted LEDs. Do this first, because it is easier to solder before it is mounted on the heatsink, and you won’t overheat the epoxy. Use lead-free solder, because you’re putting it into a kitchen, ok?
2. Cut aluminum flat stock into pieces.
3. Drill 2 holes per aluminum piece for screw mounts on diagonally opposing corners.
4. Glue stand-offs onto back of aluminum pieces (on corners of other diagonal). The stand-offs ensure that the there is some air behind the aluminum plates for convection.
5. Glue the LED to the aluminum plate, with epoxy or thermal epoxy, using two strong clamps on two sides of the “star” to squash the glue down as thing as possible.
6. Screw the aluminum plates to the underside of the cabinet, taking care not to tighten the screws any tighter than snug — otherwise the plate will flex and pop the LED loose. If you do, either redo the epoxy, or just tack it back up with non-gel superglue (you want the thinnest possible layer of glue).
7. Trim and solder the leads together, all in series.

This is sort of what it looks like under the cabinet. The red wire in the pair is connected to the series-connected LEDs (4 shown here), the black wire in the pair is the return. All the connections are soldered, the current is .35 A, the maximum voltage across the pair at any point is 28 V (limit of the power supply, and also of 9 3 volt LEDs in series). It is worth noting that these LEDs could run as much as .7A, but the light does not scale up proportionately, and the increased heat might require a less casual approach to heat-sinking.


This is what it looks like, cloudy day, other lights off. It’s a completely adequate light, and the power meter says it’s pulling 11 watts (the power factor is 60, but compact fluorescents are no better — I checked).

Asuming I did the heat sinks right and there’s enough air movement, those lights should be good for 50,000 hours of run-time.

And no, it’s not cheap — each LED cost $8.50, and the power supply was $31.50. However, undercabinet lights tend to be pricey, and are often inefficient, and even then they frequently look like crap. This is the killer app for LEDs — they have a great low profile, are not at too much of a price disadvantage, the low voltage/no glass/no mercury is a good thing in a kitchen. A true safety weenie would cover the exposed solder pads with a little epoxy or nail polish, and run the whole thing off a GFI protected circuit.

Useful websites for figuring stuff out

State bicycle laws (includes many state vehicle code pointers): http://www.massbike.org/bikelaw/statelaws.htm

Massachusetts Education Reform Laws: http://www.doe.mass.edu/lawsregs/603cmr10.html?section=06

Massachusetts Municpal Actual Revenues and Expenditures

Many statistics comparing countries: http://www.nationmaster.com/index.php

and states: http://www.statemaster.com/index.php

Demographic data by zipcode: http://www.zipskinny.com/

MCAS results: http://www.boston.com/news/education/k_12/mcas/

Mass.gov Belmont page: http://www.mass.gov/?pageID=mg2localgovccpage&L=1&L0=home&L1=Resident&sid=massgov2&selectCity=Belmont

Educational profiles (Mass): http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/

Inflation data: http://www.minneapolisfed.org/community_education/teacher/calc/hist1800.cfm

Income dispersion:
Income Inequality (1947-1998)
Historical Income Inequality Tables

If you ever wondered why things look “wrong” under fluorescent light, this is why.
Carpooling to Vermont with a physicist, he explained what I had already once seen with my own eyes, which is that fluorescent lights dump all their energy into a handful of colors. Not around a handful of colors, but exactly on a handful of colors. You can see this yourself with a diffraction grating (one can be found in the Klutz Exploratorium book). White LEDs, in contrast, emit a smear of colors closer to what we expect from a traditional light bulb (but with much less infrared, also known as “heat”).

Compare these two lights. The first is a halogen light in a ceiling flood.
Notice how the colors (the spectrum) are a continuous smear.

The second is a compact fluorescent in a ceiling flood.
Notice how the colors appear as distinct, separated images of the flood light.
The light is only producing exactly those six or seven colors that you can see there,
and nothing in betweeen. When you illuminate something with that light, it’s no wonder
that it looks a little peculiar.

Here’s the spectrum from a (bright white, I think) LED strip light.
Notice how the colors are more or less continuous; not quite as good as the halogen,
but close:

By combining white LEDs of different color temperatures, you can get a good distribution of colors.

People have studied how much energy it takes to produce food. It’s interesting. You should read about this, too.The definitive book to read seems to be Food, Energy and Society, edited by D. Pimentel and M. Pimentel, published in 1996. They studied the energy cost of obtaining food in many, many different ways. The main result is that high-productivity farming (like the kind we practice in the US) uses a boatload of energy. Converting grain into meat by feeding it to mammals (cattle, pigs, sheep) uses many calories of grain to create one calorie of meat, so meat is even less energy-efficient. There’s a huge amount of information in this book, much of it interesting, some of it depressing. It will make you want to tear your hair out every time you hear someone talking about farming fuels; odds are, it just won’t work. Besides the fertilizer inputs, there’s also water, and the fertility of the soil. (People need to get serious about driving less, and driving much smaller cars, and they need to do this as soon as possible.)

This paper (which is more quickly accessed) builds on this to demonstrate just how much energy this is, and also studies the greenhouse gas effects (which are not 100% correlated with energy). Animals, and their manure, produce both methane and nitrous oxides. The difference in greenhouse gas emissions between a meat-heavy diet (generally, a typical US diet), and either a vegetarian, or poultry-light diet, can be as large as the difference between driving an SUV and driving a Prius.

It’s also interesting, and depressing, to study the behavior of what I can only call energy-gluttony-apologists. If we cannot get more people to understand what is (probably) going on, we are so screwed. Even one meter of sea level rise will do a lot of damage to coastal cities all around the country, never mind other countries. It’ll mess up drainage and mess up water tables, even if it doesn’t directly flood property.

What I find most incredible is the notion that we simply cannot cut back; that no car can have fewer than 100 horsepower (I learned to drive in a 45 HP car, a Saab 96 with a filthy 2-stroke engine); that our cars must be gigantic; that bicycling is not an option; that every meal must have meat. The stories that people construct in their head to justify not changing their behavior are ludicrous — somehow, amoral, profit-seeking corporations (the oil industry, the coal industry, the big ag business, and the auto industry) are giving us the straight talk, but people who spent years in school learning how to study experiments, data, and phenomena to figure out what’s going on — we’re all Bond villains, or something, intent on imposing our diabolical will on the world. Is it perhaps possible that these profit-seeking corporations are being every bit as deceptive and mendacious as the tobacco industry was? It sure seems that way to me. Seems to me that the Bond villains were on the good side of that issue, at least all the ones that weren’t in the employ of the tobacco industry.

And sure, energy gluttony is fun, but given how we produce energy now, it’s got costs. We’ve got to move our asses, right now, and cut back on some of our most-ridiculous overconsumption. Freezing in the dark is no fun, but driving a Civic instead of a HumVee, that is not much of a sacrifice. Chicken, instead of beef, is not much of a sacrifice. Cutting meat portions in half, is not much of a sacrifice. If you can afford to replace your old crappy leaky windows with new ones, that’s costly, but new windows are actually nicer. LED under-cabinet lighting is expensive, but you get a good light, it takes up no space, lasts a dozen or so years in ordinary use (7+ years if run continuously) you get your choice of (and can mix and match) color temperatures, and it doesn’t get fire-starting hot like halogens and incandescents. That’s not a sacrifice. Places where there’s lots of sun and not much freezing weather, should move to install solar hot water heaters, right now. In southern states that is low-hanging fruit.

Riding your bike a few dozen miles per week may sound like a sacrifice to people who have never done it, but it will help you live longer, and live healthier. I’ve tried dieting to keep weight off, and THAT is a sacrifice. Biking, I lost 20 pounds, and it stayed off. If I don’t bike, something goes wrong with one of my knees, and the doctors I discussed this with suggested that if I didn’t like surgery, perhaps I should keep on biking. Surgery, that’s a sacrifice.

More on this.

And from the National Corn Growers Association.

Two more from Pimental, including the alarming/surprising estimate that we consume more energy than plants create from sunlight.

I read somewhere (New York Times?) that broadcast HDTV, converted to old 3:4 TV format, is very crisp and clear.

In fact, it is. I wasn’t too optimistic because we live in a sort of a bowl, and analog TV reception was never that good. But Circuit City was gung-ho with their return-it-if-it-doesn’t-work, so I gave it a try. I bought a cheap ($10, just an expensive wire) UHF antenna, and used AntennaWeb to figure out how to align it. And hey, it worked. We get WGBH in old-style and letter-box format, we get all the other TV stations that we don’t watch, and we get WGBX in about 4 different flavors (World, Create, Kids, and regular).

The alignment and obscuring of the antenna do matter; if I stick my hand in front of it, I get badness on the screen.

Additional information: not only do we live in a bowl, we are also in the footprint of a 50 KW AM radio station, which tends to get into everything, but the digital signal still works well.

Before you buy one of those converters, you should request your (one or two) vouchers. It takes a while to get them, the program may run out of money, you may need to certify that you do not have cable. It takes a while to receive them, too. So, you may need to buy from someone who will take the voucher later, you may need to do without cable for a while.

The converter we bought is a Zenith DTT900, and it worked as well for us as this review claims.

I read that Verizon is looking into enhancing P2P, not fighting it. Smart guys.

Verizon wins for at least three reasons. By embracing P2P, and promoting services that use it, they will create a demand for a product that Comcast cannot match without spending a bit of money to upgrade their last miles. As long as cable users share coax and bandwidth, there are limits to how many P2P users Comcast can support before they run into (local) bottlenecks. This is one reason they’ve been throttling P2P file sharing.

Reason number two is probably a little less popular with the propellerhead crowd. Cable internet providers who throttle P2P bandwidth have driven the P2P users to deploy encryption to make their connections harder to recognize. This cannot make the spooks happy; back when I ran filesharing, I uploaded a terabyte of data, and about a third of that was (RC160, I think) encrypted. The NSA has many computers, but there are limits, and if everyone is making encrypted connections, that is going to obfuscate traffic analysis of encrypted connections. (It is my assumption that the NSA and FBI do have a legitimate need for some wiretaps, and that there are Bad Guys out there that I do want them listening to. Once they’ve got their warrant, I’d prefer that they be able to do their job.) By embracing P2P, Verizon reduces the urge to encrypt. There’s other caching tricks that providers like Verizon can use, if connections are not encrypted, that are somewhat better for everyone.

Reason number three is their trick for tending to localize connections and to provide bandwidth incentives to their customers. Again, this has got to make the spooks happier. When I uploaded my terabyte, I sent bits (often encrypted) all over the world. The more traffic is localized, the less likely I am to ship bits internationally, the smaller the haystack within which the NSA must search for its needles.

What’s fairly used in your (i)phone?

After all this hoo-rah about the iPhone, iTunes, and paying for ringtones (is it really not possible to just treat it like an ordinary GSM phone?) I got to thinking about what was in my phone, and what needed to be there.

Music, such as it is:

Alice’s Restaurant Massacree (intro guitar)

Fish Heads (intro falsetto)

Eat them up, yum!

Institutionalized (intro drums)

Non-alignment Pact (intro squeal)

REALLY ANNOYING. After you finish trying to figure out where the alarm is, you realize it’s your phone.

Perpetuum Mobile (intro piano)

Probably the least-offensive ringtone of the bunch

We Have the Technology (outro)

Sounds:

Appel-1

My son wanted some phone-sounding ringtones, I found this

Dean Scream

Long Raspberry

Viola Chords

Birds:

American Crow

Bobwhite

For Dick Cheney (bang!)

Chuck Will’s Widow

Laughing Gull

Mine! Mine! Mine!

Red-Bellied Woodpecker

I grew up with these in Florida, didn’t know who was making the sound at the time (there’s lots of bugs and frogs and birds in Florida, it could have been a lot of things)

Red-Shouldered Hawk

Red-Winged Blackbird

Can’t use this outdoors near water, too easy to hear a real one and get confused

“Lots to do! Beat the Germans! Save the world! Don’t forget the welfare state!”
The Doctor (“The Doctor Dances”, Doctor Who, Season 27, Episode 10)

So, everyone but me and Max are out of town, it’s hot, hot, hot (the high was 97, and we went bike riding in it), we decided to watch another disk of Futurama (Max’s birthday present). Disk was done, I was still feeling useless, so I clicked through the channels, and lo, it was Dr. Who.

And in this episode, set mostly in London(?) in WW2, “everybody lives”, and as Dr. Who is saying goodbye to a bunch of puzzled people, he says “Lots to do! Beat the Germans! Save the world! Don’t forget the welfare state!”

And I thought that was just wonderful.

What’s best, is when I went Googling to see if I had heard right, I got 6 hits, and the first one I chose (with the best-looking excerpt), was a bunch of humorless Ayn Rand Objectivists, dedicated to their bone-headed philosophy. By trying very hard, they didn’t get it. Thanks guys, you made my day, and I think your hero is a loony-bird.

A Dean Scream ringtone appear in a recent Prickly City strip. I’ve got one of those already. I’ve got several others that I put together using Audacity and Lame , but I can’t release all of them. I do have a child (mine) doing a raspberry, plus two selections from the G-Town Church Samples (Creative Commons license) . I also had excellent luck ripping and editing some bird noises , but those are not mine to redistribute. We should all be choosing our own favorite birds anyhow, otherwise our phones will all sound alike.