Live from Austin!

About 7 or 8 years ago I ripped all our CDs to MP3 and stuck all the music on a house media server.

I used what was, at the time, a good MP3 encoder: LAME, with the --r3mix preset that had been tweaked by the members of an online forum for MP3 enthusiasts.

MP3 encoder quality has made some strong progress since then, and disk space has become even less of an issue. Accordingly, I’m re-encoding my favorite stuff using the latest copy of LAME and --preset standard --vbr-new. Even on my office Cambridge Soundworks speakers, the difference is noticeable. I figure this will be the last time I do this, in a couple of years I’ll just rip everything lossless.

iTunes also got much better at encoding with version 7. So if you ripped your favorite album to MP3 some years ago, it might be worth re-doing it and giving yourself a free audio upgrade.

(To my ears, LAME encodings still sound better than iTunes, but iTunes 7 is way better than earlier versions. That said, there’s a free friendly Mac audio ripper/encoder front end called Max that will call LAME for the encoding.)

I gather that increasing numbers of people these days use their cell phone to tell the time, and don’t bother with a watch.

However, the watch is fighting back. Behold, the quad band GSM phone in a wristwatch, with Bluetooth (so you can pair it with a headset for phone use) and OLED display showing analog hands. Plus 1.3MP camera, kinetic battery recharge, and MP3 player.

At 13mm thick it’s still pretty bulky, but not much worse than my Casio G-Shock.

Pete Green: “I don’t have a MySpace, because MySpace fucking sucks.” ADLTS obviously.

I just picked up some more Christmas music from the Amazon MP3 store. For all that I like the iTunes Music Store, the Amazon MP3 store is better in every way.

First off, the selection is far, far better. I say that because I don’t buy DRM I can’t easily remove, so the iTMS’s rather anemic selection of “iTunes Plus” albums compares badly to Amazon’s library.

Secondly, there’s the format issue. For all that 256kbps AAC is theoretically better than 256kbps MP3, in practice I tend to encode with LAME’s standard preset, which averages less than 256kbps and is practically indistinguishable from CD in my personal testing. I think it’s easy to be too picky about digital audio. If I could approach my vinyl-buying self of 1983 and offer him his record library in 160kbps MP3s on an iPod, he’d leap at the chance. So given that the quality is good enough, I’d rather have MP3s I can play anywhere than AAC files I can only play most places.

Amazon have the convenience angle sorted too. In fact, it’s a little bit too convenient–it’s one click to buy an album once you install their downloader. The downloader automatically files everything neatly in folders by artist and album, and adds the tracks to iTunes when it’s done.

But enough about the technical jiggery-pokery. The actual music is what counts. First of all I picked up the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s album of music from A Charlie Brown Christmas. I’m not a jazz fan, and I’m not a big fan of the TV adaptation of Peanuts either, but somehow the soundtrack is perfect.

Next I picked up a couple of Cocteau Twins Christmas singles from a compilation. This is where digital downloads really shine–I can buy two songs for 89¢ each rather than a 4-CD compilation I don’t want.

I then went looking for quirky Christmas music, and found Tis The Season For Los Straitjackets.  I already have a Tijuana Brass Christmas album and a two different Moog Christmas albums. I’m kinda disappointed that Señor Coconut hasn’t tried his hand at a Kraftwerk Christmas album yet.  Ah well, at least there’s the 8bits of Christmas.

Also in my collection are Mark Mothersbaugh’s Joyeux Mutato, and the Illegal Art A MUTATED CHRISTMAS release. Plus, of course, a hefty dose of bootleg/mashup Christmas tracks downloaded from the web.

If anyone has any other recommendations for quirky but listenable Christmas albums, please post ‘em.

German company TrekStore make MP3 players. For several years, they’ve had a series called the i.Beat series. Which was fine, until they decided to name the new model “blaxx”. Resulting in:

The TrekStore i.Beat blaxx.

As the reality distortion field begins to fade, people are starting to wake up to the iPhone’s shortcomings. I’ve been assembling a list of issues I’ve seen mentioned:

• No SDK.
• No Flash.
• No Java.
• No Bluetooth file transfer.
• No DIY MP3 or AAC ringtones.
• Although the camera takes 2 megapixel photos, the only way to get them out is to e-mail them, which resizes them to 640×480.
• No Bluetooth keyboard support.
• Need a new battery? $80 and you have to mail the phone to Apple and wait 3 business days.
• Poor talk time.
• No instant messaging.
• No modem support for using it with your laptop.
• Recessed 3-pole headphone jack doesn’t work with regular headphone plugs.
• No video support from the camera.
• No MMS (multimedia SMS).
• Glass front invites disaster.
• No unread mark support in mail (IMAP).
• No filters in mail.
• No voice dial.
• Regular SIM cards don’t work, so you can’t get an overseas SIM and avoid roaming charges.

So yeah, definitely not buying one. But I bet iPhone 2.0 in a year or so will rock.

Well, at the weekend I had my first SXSW experience, and it was a good one. Last year I managed to miss John Watts, but this year I was prepared. We went to The Hideout downtown about an hour early, and waited in line. The rule was SXSW badges first, then wristband holders, then if there was still space in the venue proletarians could pay $8 each to get in.

The band before Watts was Asakusa Jinta, a kind of psychedelic heavy metal marching band from Japan. They apparently had a lot of buzz, as the venue was full to capacity and there were 20 or 30 people lined up in the hope of getting in. From what we could hear from the corridor, Asakusa Jinta are indeed pretty awesome, but not necessarily a band you want to share an enclosed space with, even if you have earplugs.

Eventually the band stopped, and lots of people left. John Watts wandered past with his promoter handing out flyers. The line thinned out, and we were left standing with some Germans, and two local girls who were apparently hosting Mr Watts during his stay, but were unacquainted with his music.

Back in the late 1970s, John Watts founded Fischer-Z. At the time they were compared to Talking Heads and XTC, but for some reason they never had the commercial success of those bands. The original band broke up after 3 albums, but Watts then reformed Fischer-Z with a new lineup.

The style of music is the usual pop/rock range, but sprinkled with the musical twists that keep my interest. The lyrics are sometimes melancholy, occasionally angry, but there’s always humor there that prevents things slipping into punk (or Depeche Mode) territory.

It all strikes me as very English, but for some reason their biggest fans were in Germany. If you want to hear some Fischer-Z right now, your best bet is either to switch the iTunes music store to think you’re German (using the drop-down at the bottom of the front page), or to head to FineTunes Music Shop, a German MP3 vendor. [Update: Fischer-Z albums also available from Audio Lunchbox.]

Anyhow, John Watts has now moved into solo performance, and seems to have taken on a kind of “wandering troubadour” role. For his latest album, he bought a 30 day railcard and traveled around Europe talking to random people—and then wrote songs about their stories.

His SXSW performance was just him with an amplified acoustic guitar. I particularly appreciated that he was picky about the sound, and insisted on getting it to a loud-but-comfortable level, with the vocals clearly audible. If only all artists were prepared to argue with venue sound guys.

So all in all, one of the simplest—yet also, one of the best—live music experiences I’ve had. Hopefully he’ll be back next year.

I bought a Nokia N800. It’s an Internet tablet, about the size of a large PDA or a small thin paperback book; almost exactly the same size as a Nintendo DS Lite, in fact. It runs Linux. It connects via WiFi or Bluetooth.

I bought it because I spend a lot of time reading web pages, PDFs and other electronic documents. In particular, my “killer app” was to be able to read the electronic edition of The Guardian with my morning coffee—ideally, in bed.

Yes, there are laptops. However, if you’ve ever tried to casually read the newspaper in bed using a laptop, you’ll probably agree with me that a kilo or so of hardware gets tiring on the arms, and trackpads aren’t conveniently located for use when the computer is propped up.

The N800 is the first portable device I’ve used that has a decent web browser. It’s Opera, in fact. The Guardian’s web site works on it. So do Google Mail, Flickr, Slashdot, Google Maps, and Wikipedia. While the text starts off small in order to squeeze a whole web page on the screen, it’s crisp and readable, and buttons on the top of the device make it easy to zoom in and out. For web browsing it easily beats a Palm handheld, Sony Ericsson P9xx Smartphone, Windows Mobile device, or Blackberry. (I’ve tried ‘em all.)

Note that the N800 is’s not a phone. The assumption is that you already have a mobile phone with Bluetooth; if you want to use expensive mobile data plans, you just pair your phone with the N800. This is an assumption I agree with; in general I want my mobile phone to be small enough to fit in the pocket of a pair of jeans, which precludes giving it a screen big enough to browse the web on.

Here are some other high points:

• XMPP/Jabber chat client.
• Google talk for voice and video chat.
• Streaming MP3 support.
• It’s Linux. If Nokia lose interest, you won’t be totally stuck; the community can continue to fix bugs and improve the OS.
• Want to run Nethack, SCUMMVM, or SSH into it and explore via the shell? You can.
• Assuming you switch it off entirely, it still only takes 10 seconds to boot. Mostly, though, you’ll just let it sleep, in which case waking up is instant.
• Flash works, mostly. It’s not the latest version, however. (Threadless seems to work, bleep.com doesn’t.)

And in the interest of balance, the low points:

• The built in camera is terrible. It makes the camera in my cell phone look good. Forget about using it for anything except video chat.
• PDA basics like address book and calendar are totally absent. I guess the assumption is that you use online services for such things. However, this does mean the device’s usefulness is totally crippled without an active network connection.
• The Maemo platform is currently in the early stages of its life. This means that OS updates often break existing applications, and the selection of applications isn’t great to start with.
• The handwriting recognition is horrible, at least compared to Palm OS or the Apple Newton.
• No Java. WTF? Even my mobile phone has Java. Maybe this will change once Sun finishes making Java available under the GPL.

So the executive summary is: if you want something you can keep in your satchel and use to browse the web at the café, this is currently your best bet. If you like the idea of the iPhone but don’t fancy paying about $2k and being locked out of running your choice of applications, the N800 plus a tiny GSM phone in your pocket is a good alternative, and has more than double the pixels.

(And yes, LiveJournal works on it. If you must.)

I find to my surprise that I’ve not posted here before about EBD. So, here goes…

Over the years I’ve noticed that people who are exposed to Emacs for an extended period of time become unable to use other software. I don’t just mean that they refuse to use other text editors; I mean that they cannot tolerate any non-Emacs interface for any task.

They read news in Emacs. They read their e-mail in Emacs. They can’t use a simple pager to page through their manual pages; they use Emacs, and insist on rewriting man pages as info documents. They use Emacs to assemble and play MP3 playlists. They can’t even use a web browser; they read the web using Emacs w3-mode.

Try to get them to use another piece of software, any piece of software, and you’ll be treated to a lecture on how it isn’t like Emacs, and Emacs is much better.

I call this curious affliction Emacs Brain Damage. It’s a stiffening of the brain cells, an inflexibility of thought caused by excessive Emacs use.

Users of other text editors don’t seem to have the same problem. You don’t see vi users complaining that they can’t possibly read e-mail using mutt or pine. You don’t get BBEdit users refusing to touch iTunes. Eclipse developers don’t use it to read Slashdot.

EBD sufferers will often try to explain away their condition by claiming that the Emacs interface is simply the optimum way to interact with a computer, for all possible tasks. It’s not that they can’t use other software because they are inflexible; it’s because Emacs is simply a better interface than all other software.

I emphatically reject this rationalization for a very simple reason: when I first started using Unix, I used Emacs. I only switched to vi years later.

It’s also worth noting that the RSI sufferers I’ve encountered have almost all been heavy Emacs users. Famous Emacs hackers like jwz and RMS have suffered from RSI. Some Emacs users have written extensive notes on the technology they’ve had to use to enable them to continue to use Emacs. I think that demolishes the “Emacs is simply superior” argument quite nicely.

How to convert RealAudio streams into WAV (which you can then encode to MP3):

1. Install mplayer. It’s available for OS X and Linux.

2. Put the following definitions in your .bashrc file:

   function radownload {   if [ "$1" = "--help" ]; then     echo radownload [url or .ram file] file.ra   else     mplayer -dumpstream -dumpfile $2 $1   fi } function ra2wav {   if [ "$1" = "--help" ]; then     echo ra2wav file.ra file.wav   else     mplayer -ao pcm:file=$2 -vc dummy -vo null $1   fi } 

3. Start up a new shell and convert away:

   % radownload rtsp://www.suckysite.com/media/foo.rm audio.ra
   % ra2wav audio.ra audio.wav

Adapting the instructions for Windows is left as an exercise for the reader.