This just in! I now understand why Iridial Recordings gives away their recordings for free. They seem to specialize in Avant Garde ‘music,’ and man, you can’t give that stuff away no matter how hard you try.
Have a listen. If you can force yourself to sit through to any of their albums all the way through, I will pay you twenty dollars. Particularly painful is the one album composed entirely in Mario Paint.
Yes, Mario Paint on the Super Nintendo.
You know those spy radio transmissions I was talking about a few days ago? Well I found that the publisher of The Conet Project, Irdial Recordings, has an extremely liberal free music policy which applies to their entire catalog. That is rocking.
So now, for your enjoyment, here is the complete downloadable four-CD set of the Conet Project.
Wow. It must suck to work for Steve Jobs. This excerpt from a new book documenting the birth of the Segway HT is an interesting read.
Big news. Radio Shack just sent their new digital trunking scanner to the FCC for approval. Photos and the manual are now online.
This is significant because right now Uniden manufactures the only two digital trunking scanners on the planet (BC250D, BC785D) and they charge the ripoff price of $375 for each. But wait – If you actually want to monitor digital systems with those scanners, you spend another $300 for a digital decoder expansion card. So in the end you’re paying almost $700. Total ripoff.
The good news about this Radio Shack scanner is that it’s got all the guts to decode digital signals built in! No extra expensive crap required! Pricing hasn’t yet been announced, but I’m willing to guess it’ll be a good deal less than $700.
Let’s hear it for competition!
I just figured out how to get the most out of this Mac keyboard under Windows XP.
I came up with a little registry hack that solves all my problems! Try it if you’re feeling adventurous. It could screw up your whole key mapping if you’re not careful, though! Again, this works on my Design Concepts keyboard, and the CompUSA SKU is 299283.
The registry hack below does the following:
Makes the left alt/option key the left Windows key.
Makes the left squigglebox key the left alt key.
Makes the right alt/option key the right Windows key.
Makes the right squigglebox key the right alt key.
Makes F13 act like PrintScreen.
Makes F14 act like ScrollLock.
Makes F15 pop up the ever-handy Calculator (tee-hee)
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout]
"Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,08,00,00,00,5B,E0,38,00,
38,00,5B,E0,5C,E0,38,E0,38,E0,5C,E0,37,E0,64,00,
46,00,65,00,21,E0,66,00,00,00,00,00
Go ahead and import that into your Windows 2000 or XP registry. The “ScanCode Map” line should be one long line, but I wrapped it here for clarity.
I couldn’t figure out how to make the power/sleep button do anything, and I mapped it be Power, Sleep, and Wake, all of which did nothing. I’m not really sure why, but I’ve never actually used a button of that kind under Windows before, so I’m not sure how it’s supposed to work anyway!
If you’re not happy with my key mappings and want to make your own, you’ll find everything you need to know in this article. To find out which hex codes YOUR keyboard uses for non-standard keys, (and there is some variation in USB keyboards) PassMark’s KeyboardTest is invaluable.
The one holdout on the keyboard was the eject key. I can’t seem to make that guy do anything. I think it’s being blocked at the BIOS level because KeyboardTest responded in some way to every key that was pressed EXCEPT the eject key, so who knows what’s up with that.
Here’s a helpful PDF that gives you the low-down on keyboard scan codes. Unless you want to get really confused, you should just use it as a reference for what you want the keys to do. Stick to using KeyboardTest to find out what scan codes your keyboard uses. For the purposes of remapping keys in Windows, you’ll want to refer to the column labeled “PS/2 Set 1 Make” in that PDF. Also, if you see anything in that column listed as, say, “E0 5E”, you should enter it into the registry as “5E,E0″.
It sounds harder than it is, but really you were never meant to remap keys in Windows, so this is kind of a hacky thing to get it working. And brother it works!
Another thing that I don’t like about Firebird is that the ‘notify me when a bookmark changes’ feature doesn’t appear to do anything yet. It worked in Mozilla!
The Hulk looks like such a god-awful movie that I want it to fail miserably, and I haven’t even seen it. Does that make me a bad person? I think it just means I have taste!
Wow what a weekend.
Friday we spent the night at my parents’ house in lieu of being there on Father’s day. We gave my dad his gifts; I got him a grillin’ cookbook and Carl Reiner’s memoir.
Saturday afternoon we left for our Walk in Walt’s Footsteps tour. That was really cool. I heard lots of stories that I had heard before, but also plenty more that I hadn’t. The maximum tour group size was 15, but there were only 6 of us registered for the 2:30 trip, so we had a nice intimate tour with two older couples and Mary, our tour guide. As Mary was going on and on about how exclusive Club 33 was and how the member list was kept down around 400, we felt like pretty hot shit when Tammy mentioned that we had been there before.
The trip ended with a sandwich lunch up on the patio of the Disney gallery and a tour-exclusive souvenir pin. All in all, it was definitely worth the money and I’d recommend it to anyone with more than just a passing interest in America’s first theme park.
Sunday morning we met Tammy’s family at i Cugini in Santa Monica for a Father’s Day brunch. It was also her grandmother’s 80th birthday, so it was really two events rolled into one. LA radio station, 94.7 was doing a live broadcast from inside the restaurant too!
Right after that we went straight to Pasadena to see one of Tammy’s former co-workers get married. It was a nice quick ceremony – the best kind there is! The only problem was that we had about an hour to kill between the end of the ceremony and the start of the reception at the Hilton down the road in Monrovia. Soooo…We stopped at CompUSA and I picked up a new keyboard. It’s a Mac keyboard, made by “Design Concepts” which is just a fancier way of saying “CompUSA Brand”. It has those three Mac audio keys that I thought wouldn’t do anything in Windows XP, but amazingly they actually work! The only key that doesn’t appear to do anything is the eject key, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to figure out a way to map that to another function eventually.
We went to the wedding reception and met some of the bride’s co-workers. They and the bride are Anaheim police dispatchers and it sounds like they really have a great time together.
When the wedding was over we went to Glendora to visit with Tammy’s parents for a little while before we finally drove back to Anaheim and collapsed on the bed.
I brought my new keyboard into work today to break it in, and things seem to be working well so far. The keys are definitely a little more spongy than the Dell QuietKey keyboard that I’ve been using up until now, but I kind of like it! I’d link to it at compusa.com if I could, but it doesn’t appear on their website at all! It’s basically a cheap clone of the Apple Pro Keyboard.
Type type type!
Spin a CD fast enough (with a Dremel tool) and all sorts of fun things can happen. The CD can jump off the tool and climb up walls, or it can shatter spontaneously. Dorm-room footage of these events is now available.
What would you say if I told you you could get satellite TV in your house without having to pay a monthly subscription fee? You’d say “That’s great, but I don’t want to go to jail.” And I’d tell you not to worry, because there’s a way to do it LEGALLY!
Granted, the channel selection is not so great and the equipment start-up costs are pretty high, but it’s a good alternative to over-the-air antennas.
This type of television is called Free-To-Air and all it takes to receive it is a mini-dish and a receiver, just like a typical DirecTV or Dish Network installation.
I found this company selling a starter kit for $199. That includes a 30 inch dish, a single-output LNB, and a reciever.
Here’s a list of the Free-to-Air channels currently available in North America.
Programming is spread across multiple satellites, so you need to also buy a $99 rotor to rotate the dish to tune in to some stations. And I don’t think that tuning is entirely automatic, so I think you may also have to buy a mini-positioner to get the dish pointing where you need it to, if not forever than at least initially. I’m not sure though.
Google hasn’t really been much help in locating more detailed information about Free-To-Air TV in North America, so I’m really not sure of the particulars.
Anyway. Seems like a cool technology if you’ve got the bucks to mess around with it!
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