LookIt

Some early Cisco hardware

I recently received the technical specs and schematics for the Cisco model 9A5. The Internet community might benefit from seeing the internals of this hardware, and I didn't see them online anywhere else. The hardware certainly seems more primitive than I would have expected from Cisco.

3D disappointment

We saw "Alice In Wonderland" in 3D yesterday, and the movie was quite fun but the 3D was not very good. The 3D experience was noticeably worse than when I saw Avatar in 3D a few months ago, even though I saw both in the same theater and I had a more central seat for Alice than I had for Avatar

Alice in 3D some unpleasant artifacts in some of the darker scenes, particularly falling down the rabbit hole and many interior shots. Any action where an object was supposed to be flying out of the screen or zooming by in the foreground came off as a muddy blur. Just to be sure that it wasn't my 3D glasses, I switched glasses a few times, and both pairs were identically bad in the same scenes. Also, the poor 3D was not universal in the movie: many scenes had depth exactly as one would hope. It seems likely that the Disney/Pixar 3D process is simply worse than that used for Avatar, or didn't do proper quality control on the 3D process throughout the movie .

Having said that, the movie itself was great. The acting was quite good, but the thing that stood out was a very appropriate balance of live action to high-quality animation. I will go to see the 2D version sometime in the next few weeks just to enjoy the movie, but I will probably not bother with any other Pixar 3D movies and hope that they fix their production process.

Living in a multi-browser world

Most people use just one web browser, but some of us prefer to have two or more. We might need them to see how various web designs look, or because our most-of-the-time browser doesn't work on all web sites. If you are a Mac user in this situation, there is a great $12 tool for you: Choosy.

Choosy works as your "default browser". When you click on a link or a URL in an application such as a mail program or note taker, instead it taking you directly to a browser, Choosy pops up a tiny graphic that lets you choose between all the browsers on your Mac. Click one, and there you go. The configuration for Choosy lets you select which to put under your cursor so you can do a quick click, and the order of the others, and so on.

I have mostly switched to Chrome, but sometimes need to launch Firefox for some sites, so Choosy is really handy. It also allows me to quickly go to Safari to see how a particular site looks there. It's not that I really want to use it all that much, but the only use cost is the extra click from external applications, and the flexibility makes it worth it. There might be something similar for Windows, but I haven't found it and would love to, given that I have similar needs there.

Losing metadata in MP3s

When you buy an MP3 music file from a service like Amazon and install it in your MP3 player, you player already knows lots of information about the song, the album, the artist, and so on. This information, properly called "metadata", is stored in a special area at the end of the MP3 file so that players can use it. MP3 metadata is called "ID3 tags".

What is frustrating, however, is that while most hardware MP3 players show you the metadata while they are playing a song and when you are sorting your music, many don't. Here are a few of the MP3 players on my Mac: notice that none of them show the metadata such as artist and album name, and only the last one even shows the song title:
Firefox:
Safari:
Chrome:
VLC media player:

Note that the first three of these players actually can't know the metadata until they have downloaded the whole file; however, even after they have done that, they don't add the metadata to the display. To see this, open an MP3 that has ID3 tags, and notice that the MP3 player is unchanged.

The MP3 format is over 15 years old, and yet many software players are still rudimentary. I don't want to have to launch a separate program like iTunes or QuickTime just to see the title of the song I am hearing: my browser knows it, it just isn't telling me.

How to rip sound from a DVD on Windows using freeware

I am amazed and appalled that none of the answers I got from Google on this worked with the DVD I had. Codecs and formats are still beyond standardization, I guess. Fortunately, Doom9 came to the rescue. The short answer is to rip the raw sound from the DVD as a WAV file, edit it, and save it as an MP3. It takes two freeware programs.

• Get eac3to, a command-line Windows tool.
• Find the VOB file on the DVD that has the sound you want, and copy it to your hard drive.
• Open a command window in Windows, and give the command
  eac3to.exe source-from-dvd.vob dest-temp.wav
• Get Audacity, a wonderful freeware sound editor.
• Edit the dest-temp.wav file, selecting just the bit you want. Export that bit as a new MP3 file. Audacity has a zillion other tools you can work with to clean up the sound.

I tried three other methods, and they all failed, but I'm fairly sure this will work with other DVDs that I have. I have heard that BeSweet can be used instead of eac3to, but haven't tried it.

(Edited the original article to remove the need for VLC, which makes the process much faster.)

Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, with Pete Seeger thrown in for fun

In the mid 1960's, Pete Seeger put together a wonderful TV show called Rainbow Quest. Some of the shows can be found on Nexflix, others (probably illegally) on YouTube. If you like old-style black blues, some of the best from the 40's through the 60's came from Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. They appeared on one episode of Rainbow Quest, and completely wailed on one of their faves, Rock Island Line. Pete plays a bit on the song, but mostly turns it over to the masters.

Delectable new music: the Carolina Chocolate Drops

If you like old skool roots and blues and what to try something new, by all means check out the Carolina Chocolate Drops. This recent show is a great sampling of their live style: fun, complex, and historical, all at once.

Terrapin Station, live

The fad in the past few years for bands that have been around for a decade or more is to perform an entire album live. The Grateful Dead never did this (thankfully), but people have fixed that problem by putting together mixes from shows that match the album. Here is one for Terrapin Station that is made up of performances just before the album was released. It's surprisingly sweet, although later performances of the title song went out further.

If you don't want to sign up for Lossless Legs and start torrenting (or that link dies), drop me a line and give me your postal info and I'll email you a CD made directly from the torrent.

On Facebook statuses and their visibility

Many Facebook users don't understand how status changes are seen by their "friends". In conversations with my non-geek friends, I somewhat consistently hear that they think all their friends see their status changes. Those of us who know a bit more about web apps and social networking know that this is not the case: your friends only see your status change if Facebook-the-corporation wants them to.

As an experiment, I changed my status last Sunday to "is conducting an experiment. Please send me an email (to any of my addresses) when you see this Facebook status. Results to be reported later." Of my 272 "friends", 11 responded to my proper.com (personal) address, 3 to my vpnc.org (current business) address, and 1 responded to my Gmail (mixed) address. Only 1 responded in Facebook email. Everyone who responded did so within 24 hours. I kept that status for the whole week, only changing it Saturday morning.

For me, some interesting results of the experiment were:

• It seems likely that Facebook only showed my status change for about a day, and only to a small number of my "friends".
• A few people thought that responding to the status message itself constituted email.
• The people responding were widely distributed among actual friends, business contacts, and barely-known people with whom I have become "friends".
• Probably no one looked at my Facebook profile during the week.
• Facebook users don't think much about Facebook email, or they don't consider it one of "my addresses".
• No one uses my imc.org address any more, even though it was my primary business email address for many years.

It's clear that Facebook's rampant popularity will definitely change the way people think of online communication.

Avatar 3D

Surprisingly good. Almost no gratuitous use of 3D for shock value. Lots of "war is bad and ecology is good" messages, but too many splosions. The 3D definitely added to the value of this movie in ways that I suspect will not be true of the slew of Disney 3D movies that were previewed. There were a number of kids in the theater; this movie is not at all appropriate for kids, for all three of swearing, war gore, and [spoiler elided].