This page contains all entries posted to Manufactured Environments in December 2007.

New Year’s Resolutions

Downtown Leadville, Colorado

With it being New Year’s Eve, I thought it was time to bring out the New Year’s Resolutions. I don’t normally go in for that sort of thing – seeing as it’s usually a delusional waste of time – but I did have one idea in mind for something I wanted to do more of this year.

In 2007, with a new job and moving to a new state, I didn’t have a whole lot of time for travel. But travel or no, I’d like to shoot more photos this year. Maybe that means taking a Saturday afternoon and going down by the Oneida Street Bridge. At any rate, my cameras were underutilized during 2007, and I’d like to correct that.

I’ve got this Flickr account that’s been sitting dormant. And I haven’t added any shots to Manufactured Fotos this year.

So that’s my New Year’s Resolution: to take more photos. I’ll have to let you know in six months how this turned out.

Tags: new year · new year's eve · new year's resolutions

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Cloudbursting with Kate Bush

Boys love her. Girls love her too. One artist who has made a lasting impression on me is Kate Bush. She started out in 1978 with Wurthering Heights, and went on to release five albums before releasing a greatest hits package called The Whole Story.

There’s something magical about her music. It’s beautiful and full of longing. It really fills the soul. If you aren’t into greatest hits CDs, I’d recommend her Hounds of Love, which is remastered and contains six bonus tracks.

Her music is very artfully done. It still sounds new and fresh to my ear. Kate Bush made a lot of female artists after her possible. She was the original who paved the way. Artists like Tori Amos borrow heavy from Bush’s legacy.

Here’s Kate Bush on iTunes . Unfortunately, iTunes doesn’t have The Whole Story, but they have a number of albums by her.

So if you’re in for something different, something refreshing, check out Kate Bush.

Tags: itunes · kate bush · music · the whole story

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Happy Holidays

I hope you have the opportunity to spend the holiday with friends & family. It’s an exciting time of the year, especially for the kids. Just to recap the year, I thought I’d share with you the top 10 (by traffic) posts from the year.

1. Hot Pink Deal (Seagate 6 GB Pocket Drive for $30)
2. Typographic Beauty
3. Google Apps: full-featured email and more solution
4. Smashing Magazine smacks it down on CSS
5. Glyn’s modest proposal
6. 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2006
7. The Writing University
8. Freeform Faust’s playlist for March 10, 2007
9. Thoughts on Music
10. Go to college on Sub Pop’s “Loser Scholarship”

By the looks of it, March was a good month on the blog. The highest traffic months of the year were June and July, with July topping out at about 160,000 page views. That coincides with my June project, which I called 30 Poems in 30 Days. It was just like it sounds: I wrote a poem a day for the month of June. That was a fun project. It was a lot of work, and it turned out well.

I hope your 2008 is pleasant and fruitful.

Update: Since the Top 10 skewed so heavily to posts in March, I thought I’d take another slice of data: the top 3 posts from each month. So here goes.

January 2007

1. 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2006
2. Flash Player 9.0 available for Linux (plus an MT update)
3. Freeform Faust’s playlist for January 7, 2007

February 2007

1. Thoughts on Music
2. SXSW does the mega-music download again
3. A daft punk freakout

March 2007

1. Typographic Beauty
2. Google Apps: full-feature email and more solution
3. Glyn’s modest proposal

April 2007

1. Hot Pink Deal (Seagate 6 GB Pocket Drive for $30)
2. Movable Type template for an Atom 1.0 feed
3. It’s not about the blogs, anymore

May 2007

1. Smashing Magazine smacks it down on CSS
2. News Junkie: Getting going with Google Reader
3. iTunes Plus: A work in progress?

June 2007

1. 30 Poems in 30 Days: True Love
2. 30 Poems in 30 Days: A Dormant Muscle
3. 30 Poems in 30 Days: My Glorious Song

July 2007

1. Steve Jobs / George W Bush mashup
2. Interview with Front 242 at First Avenue
3. Contra Home Depot Eco - N:Vision bulb doesn’t fit in Heath/Zenith 150 Degree Motion Sensor Security Light

August 2007

1. Daniel appears on Fox 11 WLUK Newscast
2. How does ’80s vinyl compare to new releases?
3. The eBay Connection: Buying and Selling Music Online

September 2007

1. Interpol is enlightened: Vinyl and more
2. Analogy: Ubuntu is to WordPress as openSUSE is to Movable Type
3. Get me some of those 10-minute songs. Pronto!

October 2007

1. 45 RPM: The 7-inch Single
2. Halloween 2007 mix
3. Halloween Festivities

November 2007

1. Coding pure in Eclipse
2. Siouxsie’s first solo album: Mantaray
3. KMFDM’s original glory: Naïve re-released

December 2007

1. Collaborative Media
2. Apple AirPort Express frees your music
3. Rules for grad school

Tags: march · top 10 of 2007 · traffic

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Tweaks, rip-offs and snake oil in high-end audio

Music has always been a part of me. Starting with piano lessons in the third grade, I’ve always enjoyed making and listening to music. In the fifth grade, I started buying LPs (Weird Al and Herbie Hancock mostly) and have always enjoyed the vinyl format. With the analog production of music – whether coming from a piano or a turntable – there is a lot one can do to improve the sound. When you’re used to playing on upright, studio pianos, and then suddenly you’re playing on a Steinway concert grand, it blows you away. And less significantly, switching to a higher grade moving-coil cartridge on a turntable can make significant improvements in the sonics.

The one thing that has disappointed me about high-end audio though is the amount of snake oil out there. In junior high, I used to go to this shop called Salon One Audio. They specialized in American manufacturers. I used to love going there. At some point, I discovered an area in the front of the store where they had “tweaks,” that is, little devices, gadgets and whatnot that had the express purpose of improving the sound of your audio equipment. That’s when I first came across Sonic Circles, or whatever they were called in the ’80s.

As you can see from that link, they’re still sold. Ten rings for $10. It’s a thin plastic ring that adheres to the top of a compact disc. What do they claim the rings can do? Well, you will hear “added clarity as well as deeper, more natural, bass and mid-range.” And here’s where I’ll make a significant distinction. While some tweaks for analog reproduction do have a little effect, audio tweaks purveyed from high-end audio retailers for digital formats are pure snake oil. That these rings have been sold for 20 years doesn’t indicate that they work, it indicates that there are a lot of stupid people out there.

I say that simply because there is only one metric to measure a tweak for a compact disc. That is, because it’s a stream of bits (0’s and 1’s), the only possible tweak is one that enables the disc to be read with higher accuracy. The sound of a CD is affected by the quality of the D/A conversion process (digital-to-analog). The notion that adding mass to a CD will produce more natural bass, etc. is inherently false and deceptive. If they said, it reduces read errors by 0.005%, I might say it has some effect. But you know what? There is no effect from these rings. They won’t reduce read errors, and there is no data that proves they do.

It’s a clear misrepresentation of how digital formats work. The compact disc is read by a laser. Either that data stream is accurate or there are errors. And in terms of minor errors the stream is self-correcting – there are checksums built into the spec. More major read errors result in skipping, which I’m sure you’ve heard from a CD player at some point.

For our second exhibit, we increase the price tag considerably. Instead of spending $10, how about spending $1,800 for a Furutech DeMag Demagnetizer. You can use it on LPs, which I suspect has no effect on playback. But they also bill it for demagnetizing your CDs and DVDs. (I am suppressing laughter.) First of all, have you ever noticed a magnetic effect from your CDs? Small metal objects attracted to your CDs? No, of course not. Doesn’t happen. Anyway, let’s play along.

So what will the Furutech do? It will produce “great increases in clarity, transparency and extension” on your demagnetized CDs. If you haven’t noticed, those are meaningless words. They use words of imprecision because it has no effect. Again, we have to ask the question: does demagnetizing your CDs cause them to be read more accurately? Remember, it’s one’s and zero’s floating through – there’s no physical contact of the media coming through. Another approach is to ask the reverse: does a magnetized CD (if such a thing were to exist) cause the CD transport to read the disc less accurately? That is, what effect would a magnetic field have on the laser?

As another example of this I offer you the Acoustic Revive RD-3. On this CD demagnetizer they claim that you will hear “better tonality, a wider, taller and deeper soundstage and more air between instruments.” This one costs only $389. (Sarcasm.) Again there is no language that it will improve the accuracy of the laser reading the disc. You will hear more “air” – specifically, in your wallet.

Despite these clear abuses of the buyers of high-end audio gear, there is still a lot to like. As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I’m thrilled by the revival of the LP and turntables. I upgraded my turntable about five years ago, and I’m glad I did that because there is so much more software available to play on it.

The only real measure of audio gear though is how it sounds. If it sounds good to you, that’s the important thing. Once in a while, you’ll find a salesperson in a high-end audio store who won’t sell you snake oil, but in the end, even the nicest guys are there to make a sales goal. It pays to do research, and definitely don’t do your research in the store. If the shop you go to allows it, get a loaner, and bring it home and listen to the gear yourself. That’s the only real test. With the salespeople ready and eager to walk off with thousands of your dollars, it’s good to be skeptical.

Tags: demagnetization · digital formats · high-end audio · snake oil · stereo equipment · tweaks

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Faust Gertz takes a bow

Given that this is the time of the year to be thankful, I’d like to give a shout out to our very own Faust Gertz and thank him for his two and a half years of service on Manufactured Environments. Early in 2005, it was clear that it was going to be a banner year for blogging. A lot of my friends, who previously hadn’t been blogging, started. It was a fun time. At the time, I extended an invitation to Faust to join me on ManuEnvi. I made it a pretty low-key commitment. I said he could blog if and when he felt like it, and I think that approach worked well for him.

On 10 March 2005, he posted his first post here, entitled Faust loves WFMU even though they hate Sun Ra. He went on to post 96 more times over the next two and a half years, ending with MusicBridge - A Shameless Plug on 21 September 2007. If you check out the Classic Entries page, you can find links to the highlights of Faust’s blogging.

So I thank Faust for his input into the blog, and wish him well on his future endeavors.

If you want to keep up with Faust, he’s on virtually every social networking site in the free world. So just login, “friend” him, and drop him a line!

Tags: faust gertz · transitions

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Circuit City rocks the Vinyl

The more re-issues I see on vinyl and the compelling selection of new releases, the more I think that vinyl is here to stay. I’m amazed at the selection at the Exclusive Co. But the gaps in the local store’s selection can be filled by the copious amounts of vinyl found online. I’ve linked before to musicdirect, a fine purveyor of vinyl and audiophile SACD and DVD-A releases. They also have a nice selection of gear.

But it has come to my attention that one of the big box electronics retailers has an extensive selection of vinyl on their website. Indeed, Circuit City has a mammoth selection of vinyl. There’s a Circuit City in my town, but I’ve never been inside. I’ve never ordered anything off of their website either, so I can’t really speak to what their service is like. But they do have a lot of great releases on vinyl at fairly reasonable prices as well.

You can search by genre or by label or by price or by decade, etc. They have a total of 10,566 different LPs in their catalog, with 8,849 costing less than $20. It’s pretty amazing actually. Who knew that Circuit City had so much vinyl? This may be the most complete collection of new vinyl that I’ve seen. Wow.

And that’s just the LPs. They also have 5,149 12” singles available as well. And if the banner ad is to be believed, they have free shipping on orders over $24. This is definitely one-stop shopping for vinyl.

Tags: 12-inch singles · circuit city · lp · musicdirect · vinyl

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YouTube: The definition of lazy blogging

Over the past year, there’s been a sharp increase in lazy blogging. Lazy blogging seems to happen when people don’t seem to have much to say but are tickled by the latest, greatest YouTube video. Surfing for blogs, I come across so many that have little more than embedded YouTube videos. People don’t even bother to preface what they are about to show you, each entry is simply an embedded YouTube video.

Now I have seen a couple instances of purposefully curated video blogs that link to videos of a particular type. But sharing random YouTube videos seems to be a mode of expression cultivated by the especially lazy. I didn’t think it can really even be called blogging. It’s such a banal form that one wonders what the motivation is. “Hey, check out this cool video I saw” repeated day after day ad nauseam.

It’s okay to link to YouTube when it enhances your point or provides explanation. And very rarely there is a video just worth linking to. But when the videos aren’t your own and that’s all you’re providing, is there really a point? The point is that blogging takes effort, and it takes time. Posting YouTube videos is a waste of space, and there are probably better things to do with your time, you know?

In other news, if you’re looking for some bastardized Christmas music to download you’ll want to check out dj BC’s Santastic One, Two, and Three. You might also want to check out Suburban Sprawl Music’s Holiday mix collection going from 2007 all the way back to 2002.

Tags: christmas music · video · youtube

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Guilty pleasures, Thanks, and Building out a library

They played The Henry Rollins Show back in June. It was definitely not what I was expecting. Indeed, I was pleasantly surprised. I guess I had pretty much always ignored them. “They’re metal,” I would have said to the interviewer who asked me about them. “And I don’t really listen to metal. Atonal literal metal-scraping-metal? Yes, I’m still a fan of Einstürzende Neubauten. But, Metal? Not so much.”

I’ve totally been in the closet about being a fan, but here it is live and in-person on my blog: I like Queens of the Stone Age. They’re good. Really. I guess I should have realized that they weren’t knuckle-dragging metalheads by the name: Queens. Clearly this band is not whatever image I had in my mind about them. It’s amazing what a little exposure will do you.

And what image was that? Probably stereotypical long hair, nu-metal stylings, etc. They are anything but. So if you feel like checking out something that you haven’t heard, pop a QOTSA disc on the turntable and rock the fuck out.

In other news, thanks to Faust for sending along a copy of Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World’s Top Bloggers by Michael A Banks. It looks to be a good read. I had a good laugh at the subtitle: “…the World’s Top Bloggers.” They all appear to be American or perhaps Canadian. I don’t know how cosmopolitan it’ll be, but at least of American bloggers, it appears to be a good sample. I appreciate the sentiment, el-Faust, and a Merry Christmas to you!

Oh, the other thing I was going to mention is this social networking site for book lovers called LibraryThing.com. It’s not quite as slick and polished as some sites, but the dude who runs it really built in some fantastic search functionality. You can build up a library of your books. It’s super, super easy to do – you just put in the 10-digit ISBN number from the back of a book. Lightning fast, the search function finds all the details about the book even including cover art. What the site lacks in polish, it makes up for in sheer technological prowess. It’s free up to a library of 200 books, and $10 a year after that. I’ll have to do a fuller write-up once I get a little more into the site.

Tags: blogging heroes · librarything · michael a banks · queens of the stone age

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Collaborative Media

Derek Powazek has some interesting and useful thoughts on a recent web happening in which a copyrighted photo was used in a web video without the photographer’s permission. Two thuggish camps emerged – one supporting the web video creators with the idea that if it’s on the internet it must be free counterbalanced with a group that supported the photographer’s right to request attribution or removal of the photo. Derek titled his post “Rule #1 for Collaborative Media: Ask First.” And that’s a good one-liner to summarize what so often doesn’t happen on the internet. I get requests from people to use my online photos for various purposes. And I see a lot more people who steal my images and don’t provide attribution or anything else. They will even steal my bandwidth (I’m looking at you, BlogSpot!).

In other news, Grinderman is really goddamn fantastic.

Tags: collaborative media · derek powazek · grinderman

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Christmas Shopping Redux

I managed to get most of the Christmas shopping done yesterday. I’ve got a few things to get my nephews and niece, but otherwise it’s pretty much wrapped up, which reminds me that I still have to wrap the gifts. I’m pretty much a speed shopper. I usually have a pretty strong sense right away whether something would make a good gift for someone.

I started out in a bit of haze. I wandered around for about 20 minutes not sure what to get or where to look, but then I got a grip and focused. Once I got my focus on, things went swiftly. I found a couple of perfect gifts – gifts where I don’t think I could find anything better for that person – and some more good gifts, although perhaps not aspiring to that perfect level. I’m still going to write my grandparents a letter, because I think that would be the best thing I could give them this year. They have no need of anything else.

In the meantime, I spent some more time reworking Manufactured Environments. I think I’ve pretty much settled on the new design. I may tweak a few things here and there, but it’s basically done. One thing I noticed was how easy it was to do the redesign. I didn’t redesign every aspect of the blog, but I did some significant reshifting. It worked out pretty since I’m using the new modular template design for Movable Type and the design is basically CSS-driven. There were some places where I needed to tweak the template code, but it wasn’t much.

Tags: christmas shopping · focus · haze

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Christmas Shopping

I decided earlier this week that this weekend would be it. This would be the weekend that I finish up my Christmas shopping. I sense some reluctance though to face the crowds and deal with it all. I tend to go with a theme year to year for all the gifts I get. I’ve already decided on this year’s theme. It’s just a matter now of filling in the gaps in my shopping list and deciding on the perfect gift for each person. I like to customize as much as possible the gift to the person, but it takes time. It’s probably too late to go the online shopping route without paying extra for expedited shipping. But this is the weekend.

I made it to the coffee shop okay. It was relatively quiet for a Saturday morning. I’ve had some ideas for alternative gifts – things that I could craft that would be unique and meaningful to that person. My grandparents, for example, are in their late 80s. What to buy them? I thought about writing them a long letter reminiscing on good times with them. And I think I will still do that. The question becomes, should I expand that effort and rely less on consumerism and more on the work of my own hand. Letters take a long time for me to write – I tend to be pretty exacting – but I’m sure there are other things I could craft.

In other news, I spent a little time tweaking the blog. I changed the header from the big orange blob to something that eats up a little bit less screen real estate. I scanned in some graph paper and used that briefly as a background, but ultimately I decided against it – it didn’t really jibe with the rest of the design. I don’t think it totally done yet, but I’m finished with most of the changes I wanted to make. I should also note that I added the reCAPTCHA plug-in from Carnegie Mellon University to the comments section on individual blog entries. You have to enter in the two words shown. So far this has totally collapsed the comment spam, but more importantly it also removes the need for me to moderate comments. So when you post a comment now, it’ll appear immediately on the blog. I hope reCAPTCHA continues to work.

Tags: christmas shopping · gifts · recaptcha · redesign

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Apple AirPort Express frees your music

A few years ago, I received an Apple AirPort Express as a gift. Few devices have changed my listening habits so radically (the other one I can think of is my iPod). Anyway, the AirPort Express is a really fantastic device. It is small, inexpensive ($99) and has many talents. I’ll focus on the one I use mine for, namely, streaming music digitally from my computer to my home theater receiver.

In my computer room, I have all of my music on CD ripped to my desktop computer. I use iTunes as the media player. If you have an AirPort Express on your wireless network, there is a button that shows up in iTunes. The button allows you to select where you want to send the music, that is, whether you want to play music on the computer speakers or whether you want to stream music to the AirPort.

The crucial detail that really makes this a stellar device in my opinion is that the data path is completely digital. iTunes streams the music at full-bit resolution to the AirPort. And if you want to do your digital-to-analog conversion downstream, you can connect the AirPort via a proprietary cable that plugs in to any standard digital Toslink cable connector on a home theater receiver. So the music reaches the receiver in full resolution. With that digital stream you can apply digital effects such as Dolby ProLogic II for 5.1 audio or just send it straight to the D/A converters for 2-channel reproduction.

The point is it sounds great. I encode my CDs as 320 Kbps AAC audio, and that sounds about as good as it’s going to get from CDs. And with the digital stream, it’s easy to manipulate.

The one thing the AirPort lacks is a way to control the music from where you’re listening to it. You need to go back to the computer if you want to change the playlist. Any playlist you can play on iTunes will work. I often throw it into the Party Shuffle mode, and just let it pick songs randomly. It’s like having my own personal radio station in the living room. And it sounds far better than any radio station does.

For $99, it’s a great device that works very, very well. It’s easy to setup, and once you setup there’s nothing to change. It just works. It works with either 802.11g or 802.11b networks, and it’s compliant with WPA2 security, if you use that on your wireless network.

Of course, I still listen to a lot of vinyl on my setup, but sometimes it’s nice to just put the music on and let it go. I should note that if you want to use the completely digital setup like I have have, that is, connecting to a Toslink connector on your receiver, you’ll need to purchase the $39 Stereo Connection Kit with Monster Cables. The kit comes with an analog audio cable and the proprietary digital one. If you want to digitally output audio from the AirPort Express you’ll need that special cable (a standard Toslink cable won’t work).

Tags: airport express · apple · digital audio · toslink · wireless

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Rules for grad school

I was having coffee this morning with a friend who’s in a grad program for epidemiology, and I was reminded of some online grad school advice. I’ve done the first step and got my master’s degree six years ago. But if you’re considering grad school – especially if you’re looking at the PhD track – then you’ll definitely want to head over to orgtheory.net for this compendium of posts with salient advice for the aspiring grad student. Lots of goodness to be had within.

It helps to have some strategies in hand for managing the flood of work you’re in for. And above all I hope you find what you like in grad school. Depending what field you’re applying for, Dec 31 can be an important deadline for grad school applications. If you’re in the process, good luck!

I still remember the process of writing my grad school application. It was an old school form that you could either fill in by hand or type. I didn’t have a typewriter, but I knew someone who did. So I headed over and proceeded to type my application. It was an old school form on an old school typewriter that didn’t have a correction strip. I only had one copy of the form, and I was butting up against the deadline. It had to be perfect the first time out. I’m a good typist, and I write a lot so writing my application essays in my head turned out to be a good strategy. It was probably the best application I’ve filled out for anything. And it got me in. Of course, writing good essays is only the first step to the world of grad school. I would do a lot more writing over the following two years, and I loved every minute of it.

Tags: grad school · grad students · phd · rules

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