Well? Are you?
Python seemed like a fun language, so I put together a little animated pumpkin face, on the grounds that it might, possibly, get me out of some carving.
(A small video is available for watching. Source code for those of you with Python, GTK and pygoocanvas is on SourceForge.)
With Siri only $199 away, I feel that now is the time to share Don Norman’s thoughts on this distopia from his 1992 book Turn Signals Are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles:
Let’s assume we’ve reached the time when the power of information technology has increased enormously, with the whole country—nay the whole world—wired so that anyone anywhere can connect to the huge communication network. As a result, society has evolved to the point where everyone always carries a portable computer with them, except that it is thought of not as a computer but as a personal, confidential assistant.
Each of us would have our own portable device, all the time. In fact, by starting out with a personal assistant at a very early age—from two or perhaps three years of age—it could help us learn to read or write, draw and sing, spell. Because the devices would be handed out early in life, the version for young children would be soft and cuddly, like a Teddy bear—hence the name “Teddy.”
By starting so young, the Teddy could store within itself all the information and experiences of a lifetime. We would become quite intimate with our Teddys. They would know all about us, while also giving us complete access to the world’s databases of knowledge. I assume that by the time such devices are possible the speech recognition problem will certainly be licked, so we could communicate with Teddy by talking. We talk to it, it talks to us.
My 1 and 3 year old kids can already use an iPhone, but I haven’t let them loose with Siri yet! (And they disdain most fluffy toys, too.)
I’ve been playing around with Asterisk, the free PBX. And I’ve found that IP phones go for close to 10cents on the dollar on eBay/Craigslist. Hence, I picked up some Polycom IP500s and the Nortel 1535 video phone.
I wanted the Nortel because of the inexpensive video phone part. There’s also a Video Supervision mode, where you can monitor the camera on another phone without anyone picking up. It’s not documented well (I couldn’t find any!), but on the camera side: set the “Video supervision” “Number” to the extension that will be calling it, and “Userid” to the extension and proxy. E.g., on my system I needed to enter “206” and “206@10.0.0.7” respectively into the camera phone. That allows extension 206 to dial it, and the camera phone will pick up after 3 rings automatically.
I recorded The Sorcerer sitzprobe for Lyric. This is so that we could have a recording for next time we do a Sorcerer promo where we own any rights.
Since “pro”-audio is great fun, I had picked up a few new microphones to play with. A pair of M-Audio Pulsar II mics (used in X-Y for the orchestra), a pair of Karma K10 mics (used in X-Y for the chorus), and a Behringer C1 side-address mic for various leads. These all fed in to an SM-Pro pre-amp (modded with improved op amps and new input capacitors) and the E-Mu Darwin recorder.
Overall, I was happy with the sound recorded (and pleasantly satisfied with the $40 C1). However, the performance was patchy. The K10s displayed in interesting feature: they emit perfect 1/f noise (normal) all the way down to 3Hz (curious). Also, one of the K10s was significantly noisier than the other. The 3Hz was a brief problem in mixing, because I kept hearing a high ringing tone in the 5 to 10kHz range. But after trying first to filter it out (unsuccessful) and then find it in spectral analysis in a quiet section (also unsuccessful) I figured it out. The DACs in my HDMI monitor can’t cope with low frequency! Putting in a 2nd order high pass filter at 20Hz did the trick. Weird.
Update: See the whole post for download options. Continue reading ‘Sorcerer recording’
I was getting weird “unknown error occurred (-3259)” from iTunes for the Freakonomics podcast. There are many web solutions to this. Unfortunately, mine was not among them.
It turns out that my Windows 7 Pro 64 had set the MTU size to 1504 bytes. Why, I do not know. Solution was to run a command shell as admin and…
netsh
interface ipv4
set subinterface interface=XX mtu=1500 store=persistent
where XX is your network interface; find it with:
netsh interface ipv4 show subinterfaces
Solved! Bleah.
I accidentally volunteered to make a 30 second audio promo for Lyric Theatre‘s production of ‘Carousel’. Oops.
So I dragged out my E-Mu Darwin 8-channel digital recorder (and a spare external 4GB SCSI drive) along with anything that looked like a microphone cable, connector, or something vaguely audio related and threw them in the car.
When I got to rehearsal, I had forgotten that the Darwin’s inputs are post-pre-amp (-10dBu, where my mics are -50dBu). Not that it would have made any difference—my mix desk is part of a rack that would need re-engineering to fit in my car.
Luckily, my Sony TCD-D7 tape recorder had also made it into my backpack; and with a large contingent of tiny connectors I managed to feed two mics through its pre-amps back to the Darwin. I pulled a 3rd channel from a Roland feedback eliminator which had a switchable 40dB gain. However, the sound was almost unusable from this processor (the bass had disappeared).
Perhaps the biggest surprise was that my dynamic vocal mics, with a tiny 2.7mV/Pa, and a 20m cable run, sounded great when recording a full orchestra in a smallish band room. Just goes to show.
And I got a fairly decent promo, with voiceover and a splice of “You’ll Never Walk Alone (finale)” in the background.
(Last week I picked up an inexpensive 8-channel microphone pre-amplifier so this set of mis-steps shouldn’t happen again.)
Here’s the result.
The blog has been a bit quiet, because Sara and I have two crazy kids. Ashton, at 20 months, loves himself. Brennan, now 3 months, when not sleeping, drinking, and many other less pleasant -ings, does this.
Finally after 445 days, with the addition of two new bookcases…
… we are unpacked!
Followers of this blog will have noticed that there hasn’t been much to follow. So this picture may amuse you…
… while you contemplate asking me about Mlle. Modiste, moving to Mount Hermon, preparing to be a dad, various Christmas concerts, trying to sell a house, forming a start up and how many cookies I ate at the cookie party.
After The Quaker Girl closed at the end of July, we took a long weekend in a secluded home in Midpines (near Mariposa) and Yosemite.
There wasn’t any gold in the places we were allowed to look. I think it’s just to attract the tourists.
We did, however, spend a lot of time in the hammock, the hot tub and on the couch
at the cabin.
