The clever folds that kept letters secret - BBC Future:
How do you keep snoops from reading your mail in the days before envelopes? As I think James Burke said in one of his pop-science BCC programs, our ancestors were not stupid. They just knew different things. And they could be much cleverer than we give them credit for.
The Symphonies of the Planets | Daniel Karo:
While on their missions Voyager 1 and 2 recorded the electromagnetic vibrations of the planets and moons of our solar system. Even though space is a virtual vacuum it doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t sound in space. Although you can’t hear sound in space sound still exists as electronic vibrations. The scientific instruments on the spacecraft ran experiments to record these vibrations and send them back to Earth through the Deep Space Network. All of these recordings had vibrations within the human range of hearing and were put together in a five track album by NASA entitles Symphonies of the Planets. Each track is around 30 minutes long and consists of recordings from the Voyager spacecrafts. Each recording is the sounds from a different planet or moon. The sounds in the recordings come from a few different sound environments. Here is a list of them from NASA.
Found via the BandCamp article “Lost in Space Music: Records That Explore the Outer Limits”
My Apple Music app 1 has 12,000+ tracks, many of which I’ll bet I’ve not heard in a long time. To help reacquaint me with my own collection, I use the Genius Shuffle feature.
Doug Adams, maestro of the essential Doug’s Applescripts for Music, TV, and iTunes, also likes the Genius Shuffle feature in the iTunes and Music apps. If you like Shuffle’s on-the-fly assortment of tracks, his AppleScript code lets you save the tracks to a playlist.
Doug explains how to copy the code into the Script Editor and where to save the script so you can use it.
IMPORTANT: In macOS 10.15 and later, you will need to replace “iTunes” in the code with “Music”.
His code automatically names the playlist “Genius Shuffle.” Doug prefaces that name with the music style or genre – “70’s Funk - Genius Shuffle”, for example. I prefer to preface mine with the playlist’s first track, so “Kathy’s Waltz - Genius Shuffle.” And then I move it to a Genius Playlists folder.
If you spend way too much time lovingly curating your collection of ripped and downloaded music, then get to know Doug’s scripts.
Related links:
Why, oh why did they get rid of the perfectly good “iTunes” name to go with the blander “Music”? When I’m Googling to troubleshoot issues with the app, I get too many false positives with Apple’s music-streaming service. Infuriating. ↩︎
“Hell is where time has stopped”
She opened her eyes. She was on her knees in a sea of weeds: in love with every drop and twig of the universe. Born again, probably not for the last time.
From the novel Cobalt Blue by Peggy Payne
I have been using Libib.com intensively the last several weeks to scan in my graphic novels. I have gone full-nerd on ensuring better cover images are in place, even for books I know I will be shedding.
My Libib.com graphic novel library totals 210 books right now – didn’t know I had that many! The bar-code scanning goes well most of the time, but direct market or older books (25 years+) don’t scan in well, so I manually enter the ISBN and that usually works a treat.
As with many collectors, when I processed a pile of books I was surprised to see things I’d bought and intended to read one day but never did. The classic rubric for getting rid of something is forgetting you had it, yes? It is ruthlessly efficient. But it is not as strong in me as the delight in discovering a book that is ripe for rediscovery.
There are some other graphic novels/comics lovers in our community who would like to plunder the collection; we’re talking about maybe having a lending library bookshelf or three stationed on the various floors of our building. We’ll see.
I’ll likely go through and keep the stuff I really want to tend, find digital equivalents if they exist, and then export a CSV of the rest and shop it around to local comics shops to see if anyone is interested. I’m discovering old editions of things that are listed for rather high prices on Amazon and Ebay, though whether they see for those amounts is a data point for another day. I know that I don’t want to get into the business of being an online bookseller; I’d rather find a good home for the collection where others can enjoy them.
When I was a reporter, one of the most tedious jobs I had was transcribing my interviews from a handheld cassette recorder. The only way to make the chore a little easier was to use a Radio Shack foot pedal to start and stop the recording. Still, transcribing a 2-hour interview would take at least twice as many hours.
I find that I still have a use for transcribing audio, whether for the interviews I do for the Bull City Commons newsletter or for random podcasts and recordings where I want to keep a specific quote or passage in Evernote.
Thank the Lord for automatic transcription, surely one of the good things that AI has wrought. No more foot pedals!
I was quite happy using Otter.ai, but I maxed out the free tier recently and needed an alternative. I did not want to pay a large subscription fee for an occasional service.
In searching for alternatives I was surprised to discover an automated transcription feature in Microsoft Word 365 online, which I already subscribe to. If you have an Office 365 subscription, then you have access to this really neat feature. (The transcribe feature is for the online version of Word only, not the desktop app. You can dictate into the desktop app, but it cannot transcribe an audio file.)
As the Microsoft support page says:
The transcribe feature converts speech to a text transcript with each speaker individually separated. After your conversation, interview, or meeting, you can revisit parts of the recording by playing back the timestamped audio and edit the transcription to make corrections. You can save the full transcript as a Word document or insert snippets of it into existing documents.
I used Word’s transcription feature recently to transcribe the audio from a Zoom interview with two other people, and also a 90-minute online conference with about six different speakers. The transcription was excellent, certainly on a par with Otter if not a little better. Highly recommended if you need this niche service.
A fun post by Mumbai-based writer Phorum Dalal.
The Quantum library holds the books you love rereading, while the Antilibrary holds the unread books that you know hold something in store for you – even if you never get around to reading them.
I have far more unread books, and I seem not to reread books as time goes by. So much wonderful new treasure floating my way all the time, I rarely go back, though I do hold on to books that evoke a sharp memory of joy or a time and place. My personal time capsules.
I use RipIt to rip DVDs to my hard drive. Depending on the DVD, I will tell RipIt to create an MP4 of the movie or contents or I’ll use Handbrake to process the ripped contents. 1
Ripping a DVD to the Mac creates a .dvdmedia file, which is actually a set of subdirectories packaged to look like a file.
DVD Player, though, does not like to play a .dvdmedia file. My usual workaround was to use VLC Player, an open-source video viewing utility that is serviceable, but crashes at the least provocation.
Lots of searching on this issue uncovered the following interesting facts:
Thanks to a comment on a years-old Apple discussion thread, here’s the procedure:
The video should play just fine in DVD Player. You can delete the original .dvdmedia file.
In RipIt, select the Compress button to create both a compressed playable file and a .dvdmedia file. ↩︎
