An orange in an apple orchard
One of those times when I’m scrolling for something to watch and decide, “Eh, screw it,” and decide to watch–and end up very much pleased.
The film does pretty well at capturing a late ’80s vibe without making a big deal of its setting, and manages to be a weird and amusing spin on a tale old as time, or uh, graveyard love stories gone off the rails? Anyway, I was quite amused :).
One upside of sorting through old CDs, is the opportunity to restore files that kind of disappeared two or three laptops ago. Another, is content for a recent experiment but that’s still a work in progress :^o.
Something that I also find curious is how tastes have changed. Less so my taste in music, more so my taste in interfaces. The last time that I ripped and organized these CDs, I had my own fairly strong notions of how things should be organized–and it mostly pissed me off. It’s hard to have a very uniform, tightly organized music collection in my experience. And experience has shown that often one method is as good as another until you start to stress specific problems like the maximum number of files in a directory, so meh.
My archival structure is more or less based off Plex’s format with a relatively lax level of adherence, since it’s easier to just import things like a Steam soundtrack as is, and a stack of old CDs is too much effort to value to sit around writing scripts to munge into the desired filesystem structure.
Which kind of brings me to two things that surprise me. One is that Apple Music will happily import audio CDs despite the emphasis on streaming subscription, and it’s a pretty snappy decoder. MPEG-4 containers with AAC-LC is perfectly acceptable to me as a format today due to the level of openness and support, and the iTunes Plus profile of 256K is good as anything shy of giving me a FLAC file. The other thing is that I don’t hate how Apple Music munges my rips, so much as I don’t care how Apple Music munges my rips.
The last time that I really touched anything Apple and music ripping was probably iTunes 6 or 7, which at the time was ‘current’, and let’s just say that XP was still sexy back then. Most of my friends liked iTunes, and not to big a surprise since most had an iPod even if few had Macs. But I was very perturbed by how iTunes wanted to assert its own definition of how to organize my content instead of obeying my system. Combined with being more of an XMMS / Amarok / MPlayer kind of guy, suffice it to say that I was never a fan of iTunes as a media player nor a library manager.
Fast forward to today, and what’s the real big difference there? Well, honestly the way that Apple Music manages imported CDs seems about the same that I remember from almost 20 years ago. The difference? I don’t want to manage my music through a file system. It doesn’t do my life well to organize such things in terms of files and directories built around tracks, albums, and artists and any other hoopla–no, it’s about the data model not about fitting that model to the file system.
It’s actually a lot like my contemporary relationship to notes taking over the past decade, and Android/iOS software in general. I don’t really want a model built around files when a model built around data is more practical. The obvious consequence of course, is that means decent tools. If you can’t do better than find/grep and so on then don’t bother making a fucking interface!
If files are a natural model to a problem: good. At some level most things should be files because we have good tools for working with files and it’s a fundamental aspect of data storage. But raw files are bad at metadata, at search, at relationships, and a host of other things that are more database like or more structured in nature than a stream of bytes. Files are good at storing that information not expressing those concepts, even more so when portability is a consideration. So while I still don’t like the way Apple Music organizes content anymore than I did iTunes, I can appreciate that it provides a reasonable interface particularly for the import part.
And of course the archival path is still tossing the resulting files into my own structure, lol.
One of the periodic thoughts that I have is about how easily my brain comes up with random shit from its inputs that often is some kind of amusing. That tends to remind me that as a child, I was often bored and had to entertain myself for hours at a time. Recently, that train of thought made me recall one of my favorite past times from that stage in my childhood: designing Jedi traps!
It’s a great problem, it works like this: your goal is to kill the Jedi in the trap but they are a bloody space wizard with a laser sword, so they can do just about anything! Literally, you’re trying to stop someone who can do nigh anything.
Let’s say you drop a Jedi through a trap door. Okay, let’s put shooters to storm him, a dozen blasters! Well, between a lightsaber and the force that won’t work for long. The Jedi could deflect the blaster bolts back at them, go melee with their saber, even knock them over with the force or fling lightning bolts until we run out of cannon fodder.
Okay, let’s make it turrets that are remote controlled! But the Jedi could deflect bolts, so let’s put shield generators to protect the turrets. But what if they rip the cameras off the walls with the force? Okay, if the shields can’t guard agains that then we make the turrets automated – blast anything and everything ahead of them.
But, what if the Jedi just keeps deflecting blaster bolts until the shield fails? We can make redundancies, we can make multiple turret systems. We can solve that!
Alright, damn it, the Jedi will just do some foolish shit like cut a hole through the floor and escape. Okay, let’s put spike traps on the lower level and when they force magic themselves out of that deadly drop, we put dart throwers or more turrets to plunge them back into another more deadly trap.
And on and on it goes from the prospective that yes, that darn space wizard with their laser sword, I mean, that really cool Jedi with a lightsaber, can basically cheat their way out of anything that you can think up, but if you make the trap large enough and keep the pressure up, eventually the Jedi either escapes or they are overwhelmed by exhaustion or they just happen to make a mistake and get unlucky. May the force be with them.
Yeah, as a kid I was often really bored and often had to wait around for stuff or be dragged around as an extra bump on a log. The kind of mechanical, orderly problem solving type of thinking that designing Jedi traps calls for can also be pleasant for passing the time. It also has a fair bit of room for creativity, unless you just assume the Jedi will have a force vision of your trap and decide to hide in your closet to whack you over the head with a rubber hose instead of letting you turn them into a rat in a maze.
It was probably a good thing that my mom bought me a GameBoy Color at the pawn shop, lol.
Various posts about the Google Anti-Trust ruckus and the question of whether the Big G is a monopoly occasionally provide nuggets of enjoyment. But I think my favorite is the quip that no price Microsoft could ever offer, because it’s pretty much true.
Having lived through the era that was MSN Search in the 1990s, I have a mostly negative inclination towards Microsoft as a search provider, although the times I’ve ended up using Bing (usually not willingly), I haven’t had any particular complaints about. Nor other major providers this side of millennium.
But I think it’s still a simple key fact that Google does dominate search. DuckDuckGo, for example, is rather successful. We even have several general search engines, and some (maybe even most) don’t suck. But there’s no chance in hell that most would ever stand a chance at unseating Google in monetary terms such as getting made the default engine. Nor, do I really anticipate them being unseated by simple technological advancement or their own ineptitude because unless Google Serious Fucks Up(tm) they will likely remain dominate.
So yeah, there may be more than one search engine, but good luck competing with that. Ya know, it’s billion with a B, right?
Encountering a nifty article on Robert Sawyer’s recent release of WordStar, I can’t help but think that by now, even the creators of WordStar would agree that it is abandonware.
Actually, just about any piece of software with its heritage in the CP/M era should probably be considered past its commercial viability. In the sense that if you’re still making a living off software that is over 40-years old, it may be time to encourage your customers to upgrade their software đ. I’d be surprised to find many younger than myself who even know what the program is, never mind learning it today, because it’s been quite a freaking while since it was a popular program.
WordStar 7 at least is a version from a time where MS-DOS was mature, and still predates most of what people younger than me identify as a computer. Looks like Mr. Sawyer went full-tilt boogy with trying to make it a full release, if anyone is fond of old software, it’s probably worth a shot. As for myself, I’m more of a vi kind of guy once we start going down that hands on keyboard rabbit hole.
I’m reminded that one of the best parts about using a docked laptop rather than a desktop, is when the power goes out, your shit might disconnect but your main body of computing power just happens to have its own integrated power supply :D.
Also yay for few clocks to reset.
Reading a recent article on the 13th/14th Gen Debacle, I’m reminded of how problems with Intel typically roll:
My mind kind of flashes back some years to the errata documents for various SoCs that I was working with, and deciding not only were there a scary amount of Won’t Fix and Even We Don’t Know What Will Happen items and other run-away-screaming level worrisome things mentioned, it made me rather start to wonder what does Intel ever actually resolve? Because quite frankly, my Latitude experienced similar issues to some of the errata items despite being 3 – 5 generations older than the SoCs that I was working with at the time.
Actually, that’s the main reason Zeta was built on an AMD platform. Having been an Intel brat since Tandy made computers (đ€Ł), I’ve tend to prefer Intel processors over the years. Having to work more closely with hardware for part of my career, rather soured my relationship and goodwill towards Intel. What do I say that? Well, Zeta’s my first AMD machine in about 17 or 18 years….and that gives me the startling realization that it’s been almost two decades since my darling Dixie, my first laptop.
Experiences with Rimuru’s 10th generation processor and various motherboards, further exacerbate the feeling that it will either be my last conventional desktop PC, and that Intel Inside probably won’t be a boon when building or shopping for its replacement someday.
One of those occasions where I’m reading, and just go “oh” at a realization. Reading through Wikipedia’s article on diacritic marks, I couldn’t help but notice a superb example of both what sound diacritics represent and homographs in my language.
A homograph is on for more words that are spelled the same, but differ in the pronunciation or meaning. Something that, frankly as a native English speaker, I rarely notice. I’m not sure if that’s because of many fail to stand out that audibly when you’re been made accustomed to spelling our fucked up language from an early age, or not.
Loanwords that frequently appear with the diacritic in English include café, résumé or resumé (a usage that helps distinguish it from the verb resume), soufflé, and naïveté (see English terms with diacritical marks).
I have to say that rĂ©sumĂ© / resume is a great example of this in common English. The difference between ‘re-su-may’ and ‘re-zoom’ is spoken distinctly, but in writing is usually rendered the same leaving it to context to understand. Whether that happens to be the logical context, or you know the whole difference between nouns and verbs. Diacritics are increasingly less common outside of publications who care, and virtually unused by the common people writing shit be it by pencil or typed text.
I’ve always been kind of fascinated by such words in other languages, along with words where the distinction in pronunciation between two words are more subtle in how it alters the meaning.
In some ways, I think it is a little sad that diacritic marks are less common in actual practice because of the mess that is English spelling and its representation to how we pronounce words. Diacritics greatly help disambiguate sounds in ways that are less clear (at least to me) without relying on memorization; or as I remember it, literally having English all but beaten into my as a child. In English, we’re pretty much just forced to learn the various oddballs until we remember them. It’s a problem that becomes even more relevant when presented with loanwords and their bastardizations into the vernacular.
For example without knowing nor marking the sounds, the word ‘souffle’ is kind of a “What the fuck did I just read?” kind of word in English. I assume it makes sense in French. Perhaps in English, you might read it and think ‘so-uf-fle’ or ‘sou-uf-fle’ because of words like shuffle (‘shuf-fle’) and soup (sou-oup), which are frankly far more common words outside of the kitchen (and perhaps even within). Yet soufflĂ© is clear as ‘sou-flay’, a word people will probably hear more often than see unless they study French cooking. Whether constructs like ‘ou’ or ‘oÍo’ or hell, even plain ‘oo’, would be a better way to spell a word like soup, are fair debate. Particularly if you discount the existing domination of how letters are input on computers and (gasp!) typewriters. But such things are unlikely to ever change that drastically, given how much now depends on relatively slow to change language practices. Diacritics are darn useful but underused IMHO.
Coincidentally, a lot of the constructs in American English that I find difficult to spell, often have relationships to old French and bastardized latin by way there of. The more germanic influences on English might be more gross in influence, but I tend to find more orderly. I suppose, I should just thank goodness that English has relatively simple constructs compared to more inflection heavy and gendered languages.
Visiting the original mansion again for the first time in this millennium, itâs an interesting exercise in how much Iâve forgotten, how much Iâve remembered, and how much comes back to me when Iâm there.
On one hand, after do many years itâs kind of hard to remember which door leads to zombie ridden stairways and which leads to almost becoming a Jill Sandwich in the name of acquiring a shotgun. Honestly, I donât remember that horrible joke at all even though I still remember the distinction of Jill gets rescued from becoming a human pancake by Barry, while Chris has to bugger about looking for a broken shotgun in order to win.
Access to guides that have been around for years, and I canât even remember the name of it, but thereâs a wiki somewhere that goes into posting the maps and details (Iâve probably written about that here, regarding the RE2 remake); certainly make for a good augment to the old âwhat order should I?â problem but not so much the minute directions.
The mansion has always been a hard place to navigate because of its size. Itâs pretty easy to remember the general flow, especially easily reached locations like the hallway you meet Cerberus or the balcony where you acquire the grenade launcher. But smaller details like which door in the upstairs east hallway leads to the knights puzzle or whatâs at the end of the ground floor dining room hallway, is a bit harder to remember.
This is kinda nice. Like one how itâs easy to remember thereâs little point to grabbing the wooden emblem, but hard to remember when itâs time to bring it to the piano room. Couldnât remember where the knight puzzle was but on the flip side once finding it, I did remember to avoid the poison gas on the first go, lol.
Some parts are a lot harder to remember than others. For example, I have pretty much no real recollection of the layout of the guard house. Just old mental images of things like pool tables and giant spiders.
But unlike the âHuh, what the frell is this?â feeling the GameCube remake always gave me, the GOGâified PC edition is more like an old stomping ground. If one filled with zombies and horrors that want to decapitate you, lol.
Over the years, I’ve generally considered GOG a good thing but haven’t cared terribly much given my focus elsewhere. But much to my pleasure, it turns out they have a real nice treat that I never expected to find: Resident Evil.
While I appreciated the HD version of the remake, I also didn’t enjoy my childhood memories being made useless by the fact that it was built from the GameCube remake rather than one of the original PlayStation releases. Meanwhile, the version recently released on GOG looks like it’s a fairly vanilla build of the PC release of Resident Evil rolled up for modern machines without extra hackwittery.
I haven’t really played the original since the 1990s and the original PlayStation. Within moments of launching the game, I felt like a proper trip backdown memory lane — in just about every way, it’s how I remember it from almost 30 years ago.