I reserve the right to edit comments for correct spelling and grammar
These are the coolest thing I’ve seen in a while.
I can just imagine a hardened lecturer wearing a tight Tshirt with one of these held to their shoulder under the sleeve, and some junior tutor coming up to them in the refectory asking “Hey buddy, can I bum a Kafka?”
I was walking across town last night after work to meet my SO for a ride home.
I was carrying my Holga, in case anything of photographic significance should have made itself apparent to me, and was trying to put my headphones on (or in) at the same time.
My headphones are the in-ear type, comprising the hard, plastic bit that houses the speaker and, surrounding that, the soft, silicone rubber bit that conforms to the shape of the ear canal, creating a seal and shutting out much of the outside noise.
The cord had become all twisted and I was trying to fasten the little clip near the microphone (it’s part of my phone/mp3 player setup) onto my shirt… while I was holding my camera… while looking for anything cool to photograph. I had my bag half open. The other end of the headphones, not yet attached to the phone, was dangling around my knees.
So I got the clip sorted, finally. Then I got the other end and plugged it into the phone. I changed the position of the camera in my hand. Then I went to put my headphones in and realised one of the silicone bits had fallen off.
I hate losing these things. It makes the earpiece not fit in your ear, rendering the headphones pretty much useless. While they give you extras with the phone, I won’t be flippant about losing them because it would suck to have to buy new ones and I just know it would cost about $20 for four grams of silicone, which I wouldn’t want to pay on principle. I lost one walking to work down Memorial Drive once. I retraced my steps for five minutes or so and found it.
So I started to do this, in 5pm foot traffic, walking slowly, gazing downwards, looking for a grey bit of rubber on a grey footpath covered in shadow. I went back to where I thought I still would have had it, then walked back again and gave up.
Luckily, because I had a phone stolen a while ago, I have two pairs of headphones. The other pair went a bit spaz so I stopped using them but still have them in my bag. I plundered them for a silicone earpiece and spent the rest of my walk to Dequetteville Tce happily strolling with Regina Spektor.
This morning, C dropped my on Pulteney St and I walked up Grenfell towards work. I crossed King William and realised I was in the spot and thought ‘It can’t hurt to have a look’ so I slowed, only slightly, and went over the same bit of footpath again.
Nothing.
But 10 m further down, there it was, protruding like a nipple on an otherwise flat-chested footpath. It hadn’t even fallen into a crack or been kicked into the gutter or anything. It was just there and had been all night.
I’ll stick it in a cup of near-boiling water to sterilise it and put it back in circulation.
It seems so odd when fortunate things happen. In a good way though.
It’s not often I spruik software (or anyware) but I’m loving Media Monkey. I’ve thought for a while (as long as I’ve had an mp3 player that’s not an ipod) that there should be an easier way to contain a music library and synchronise songs and podcasts with my K800i.
I don’t like itunes (for the same reason I didn’t like iphoto) because of the way it takes all your files and hides them in a labyrinthine structure of folders and subfolders whose names bear no resemblance to their contents.
WMP has sufficed as a general listening tool. C has a wifi laptop that I’ve networked with my music folder, so we can plug it into the hifi and do decent playlists but I’ve really been missing a good syncing tool.
Till now, I’ve been using Feedreader as my RSS client. It’s good for catching up with blogs, etc but when downloading podcasts, using it meant I had to check the filename of the mp3, go into Disc2phone, find the file and transfer it as a normal track. I’ve now deleted all my podcast feeds in Feedreader, as MMonkey can download them automatically and sync the ones I want with the phone. I can do a global sync or I can just go to the music list, find the podcast I want, right click and send it to the device. The great thing is you can determine the directory the files go into, as well as create subfolders according to the ID tags, so everything is set up nicely.
The only problem with syncing with the k800i is when you have albums containing multiple artists, it creates a new folder for each artist but this is a shortcoming of the phone, not the software. On the phone, you can’t sort by album, only by artist, so if you want to play a various-artists album, you have to either make a playlist in the phone (which is a bit of a pain; I don’t think it supports .m3u files) or change the artist tag to ‘various’, which is a pain if a song comes on and you don’t know who sings it. Support for the ‘album artist’ tag would help here.
What’s good about the tagging thing, is that MM lets you recreate tags according to filename. Some podcasts have long tags, so you end up with an artist tag, that’s the same as the album tag, that’s also the first part of the title tag. In MM, you can tell it how the filename is setup, eg <artist>- <album>- <title> and it will create the tags accordingly, which is great, as it keeps things shorter. The k800i can’t fit all that text on the screen so will scroll a few words at a time and it’s hard to find out what track you’re on when you have to wait for it to scan through three screens’ worth of words before you get to the episode number or title.
No conclusion, just very happy that there’s a free media player out there that actually works.
In my next geek episode, I might put up some photoshop tutorials if anyone’s interested.
So after writing yesterday about QR codes, I went to the letter box (I almost typed litter box then but had backspaced before I realised how apt it sounded) and got the junk mail. Among the specials on minced beef, cordless drills and label makers, there was a Tel$tra flyer, spruiking their (or should I say “their”) very own Telstra Mobile Code innovation. I watched the short video on their qrious site today. And the implication is quite clear that this is a Tel$tra product; at least, it’s not expressly mentioned that it’s a generic, free tool that anyone can use. It’s also implied that you would need a 3G phone to use the system, which is not quite correct. If you want to link to a web page, then yes, you’d need a web-capable handset, but the SMS feature should work on non-3G phones. Of course, T$ra are linking it to their own data services, trying to get us all hooked on phone internet (which I kind of already am, but not because they claim to have invented it, I’m not even one of their customers. Suffice to say, I don’t use any web content on my phone that was supplied by my carrier: it’s kind of lame and/or too expensive)
But in addition to the link I posted yesterday to get the QR reader, I’ve been looking at QR generators today and this is the best one I’ve found so far. Reason being, it can create a vCard that can be saved straight to your phone’s contacts. At least, it can save it straight to my phone’s contact list. You may have other results. I use a SE K800i, btw.
The one bug I’ve noticed is that (on my phone) it gets the email address and phone number mixed up. My work around is to mix them up also, but again, not having tested it on other phones, this may turn out not to be the best one. I can’t see how it would be the phone’s fault though, it would have to be the software, surely. [...thinking music...] yeah, the software for sure.
If anyone gives it a go on a different phone, let me know how you get on.
I was home from work last Friday and actually answered the door to a guy selling something: insulation. For anything else I would have thanked him and bid him fond farewell but I happen to need insulation. It’s one of those next big jobs we have to do around the house. So I let him do his prepared speech and picked a not-too-inconvenient time for a sales rep to come around and give us a quote. We set this up for Monday night.
They gave me a confirmation call on the Monday morning to make sure I’d be home at the time I said I’d be home. I was thinking, he’ll come in, go through the features of his product, get up in the roof for a quick look, maybe measure up the place, give us a quote, we’ll say thanks but not right at the moment and he’ll be on his way; the whole thing should take 45 minutes, tops, then we can eat, get the kids to bed and begin to wind down ourselves.
Now, the guy who came was lovely. Really nice guy. Had I met him at a party, I would have gotten on very well with him and would gladly chat over a few beers. And that’s rare for me but he was all right. He was into his music and we had similar taste; he was a bit of a rev-head but I wouldn’t hold that against him; his wife is expecting their first in five or six weeks. You’ll notice though, that very litte of that stuff is related in anyway to recycled-newspaper-treated-with-borax-and-boric-acid insulation. Everytime he went off on a tangent, we’d have to bring him back on topic.
“Yeah, I had to go to Port Pirie last week, then drive home. Then they rang me and said they wanted me to go back the next day”
“…so… it’s recycled, you say?”
Two and a half hours later, we finally got to say our goodbyes. Through all this we’ve managed to feed the kids, get them changed and teeth-brushed, put them to bed, get our own dinner on and keep it warm in anticipation. We’d already given him a cup of tea, no way was he staying for the meat & veg. We said our goodbyes, he got his satchel, his ladder and I helped him with his blowtorch. He was packing his car, telling us all about how messy it was and gave us a recipe book some relative of his had done for her year 12 assignment that his boss had loved and had published.
I thought we were getting a quote on insulation; I could have written this guy’s biography by the time he left. C said that’s the strategy: stay as long as you can and be nice, so they feel guilty if they say no. For me, every minute he spent here past the 45 I had allocated in my head me less likely to say yes.
So this morning, when there was a knock on the door, I stayed hidden in the bedroom. I don’t need the latest copy of The Watchtower.
As I was running for the train, the fucker dropped out of my bag.
So if anyone would like either
a) a recently refurbished and button-flattened SE K800i, or
b) to return said recently refurbished button-flattened SE K800i to me
there’s one laying in the grass at the bottom of Hawthorndene Drive, just near where it turns into Watahuna Ave.
I’ll be ringing it every few seconds to help you find it.
…later
Phew. Luckily, C has today off, so she nipped down the road and found it. I’m rather relieved, though still pissed I don’t have it with me.
I had to take my mobile phone back to the shop recently to have it fixed. It’s a K800i and the joystick was doing all sorts of weird shit, mostly registering a ‘centre’ button press whenever I was trying to push ‘down’.
It went in just before Easter. They said it would be two weeks. It took three, and I got it back on April 10.
On April 11, I had to take it back. It felt a little weird when I first picked it up and I noticed later that the profile of the buttons was way out; they simply hadn’t put it back together properly so the buttons didn’t sit flat but were protruding at odd angles.
In the meantime I’ve been using an older phone: a once-water damaged w800i that I managed to resurrect and get working.
This morning, I missed a call from the phone company and I have a bad feeling that things aren’t over yet. The message was to let me know that my Blackberry was ready to pick up.
Still, I could go an upgrade…
My beeper/unlocker car thingy stopped working. So the other day I found myself walking past a locksmith, then walking back and walking in and asking if they could put another battery in. It cost me $12.50, which I thought was a little expensive but hey, putting a key in a lock and turning it… sorry, that’s just too hard.
When I picked it up, they said the battery in it wasn’t quite flat. ‘That’s weird,’ I thought.
So I got home and later when C got home with the car, I wandered down the garden path, keys in pocket to do a little RF magic.
Little fucker still doesn’t work.
You can’t have Christmas—not a real Christmas—without those self-righteous types who say it’s all just one big money-grabbing fiesta by the retail sector. There was a letter in the paper the other day; something along the lines of “Oh, they didn’t move xmas to coincide with the pagan winter festival, they moved it to coincide with the Christmas sales”.
They’re essentially saying that if you go out and spend money at Christmas, you’re somehow diminishing it by turning it into something commercial.
And I think that’s a load of merry shit.
I hate the conceit of this attitude; this stuck-up pretension that says “I celebrate this holiday in a more pure sense than you”, or “you may think you have Christmas but I really have Christmas”.
Does anyone think it’s really possible to have a holiday based on the tradition of gift-giving without getting the retail sector involved? I actually enjoy buying gifts for my family. It’s fun in itself coming up with ideas, conferring and colluding with other siblings to make sure we’re not doubling up (something that failed miserably this year but that’s another story), then the happyfest that takes place when we all open them (after the obligatory family portrait in front of the tree).
Do the anti-retail-xmas fanatics expect me to develop an interest in basket weaving come December 1? I tend to think my brother will actually be happier with Season 6 of Cheers than he would have been with a small wicker basket to keep all his spare buttons, paper clips, used batteries and 5-cent pieces in.
And I hate that attitude that somehow says you can’t do the retail thing while also having a very meaningful holiday, whether that meaning is based around family, religion, or whatever. Giving gifts bought from a store does not diminish whatever you want to make of a holiday (unless it’s buy-nothing day) and it’s nice to be given something you wouldn’t normally have bought for yourself. We all work hard these days. It’s nice to have someone say ‘here, have this, spoil yourself a bit, you deserve it’ and it’s nice to give a gift to someone that implies the same.
I know it’s a bit late so I won’t wish everyone a merry christmas but I would like to wish a happy new year everyone (to all four of my regular readers) and I hope you all got lots of cool stuff and spent the day in a way that was meaningful to you.
How disappointing.
I went to Haigh’s this arvo to buy some more Caramel Chocs (C loves them, so instead of flowers, I get her luxury chocoates). There was not a soul in the store and three people behind the counter. I brought my purchase to the counter and the girl expertly wrapped them in the pretty silver bag and handed them to me, then we exchanged cash and change and I was good to go.
I hung on momentarily… waiting.
But she did not conclude the transaction by offering me a sample of their Maltichocs or Peanut Brittle. I was offered no Haigh’s liquorice bullet or freckle. Not even a chocolate frog’s leg.
And when you buy Haigh’s, isn’t that the little extra touch you look forward to? It’s part of their branding.
