Month: March 2016

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Quote of the Day

Sorry, guys, but the right spent decades blowing dog whistles. Now that you've got a candidate who has graduated from a dog whistle to a bull horn, you shouldn't be surprised when some of his supporters decide that thank God it's time to stop being politically correct and fling out fascistic symbolism in this new, accepting environment. Disavowal is difficult when the difference between Trump's tactics and the ones the right has been using for numerous election cycles is in degree, not kind. You get to own this one. Enjoy it." ~ John Scalzi

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My Flickr Has Become Unmanageable

I've been using Flickr for the last twelve years or so. It started out as as a way for me to showcase and share my "serious" photography—i.e., only the images I'd shot with my DSLR.

But then a couple years ago I dumped the entire contents of my Instagram account in there along with photos I'd captured on various phones and even uploaded a large but undetermined number of scanned photos from my days of shooting film.

In short, it had become a hot mess.

I knew that by throwing the phone and Instagram photos into the mix there would undoubtedly be duplicates created, but I kept trying to convince myself that there would only be "a few" and their presence in the collection would concern no one other than my own anal-retentive self.

So of course I had to do something about it.

And it turns out that thanks to a few different online scanners, I learned there were significantly more than just "a few" duplicates in the collection. In some cases, there were multiple copies of the same photo. Unfortunately, while the various scanners were able to identify the duplicates, they were powerless to actually tag the photos for later removal. I don't know if Flickr's APIs changed after the services went online or what exactly happened, but the scanners (all of them) were unable to actually apply the tags so I could easily locate the dupes and delete them en masse.

Adding to this nightmare was the fact that the number of albums I had organized my photos into had become unwieldy and the groupings no longer made any sense. Initially I had organized everything by type, i.e. "Denver Downtown." But then, in order to easily share newer photos with friends and family via links, I started dumping photos into event albums, i.e. "Phoenix Downtown 11-12-2015."

Friday afternoon I discovered a very easy way to download everything in my Flickr account. You head to your camera roll, highlight the photos and videos you want, click on Download, and Flickr will spit out a Zip file. (Flickr says this function allows you to "download thousands of photos and videos at once," but in reality it limits each individual zip file to approximately 500 images and will create multiple Zips.) I had my camera roll set up to show everything by date taken, so it was a simple matter to highlight each year's worth of photos into a single (or in a couple cases, multiple) Zip files.

Once I did that, I unzipped the files and ran the lot through PhotoSweeper to cull the duplicates (there were approximately 300 out of 4300 total photos). I then made a copy of the "clean" set of photos onto an external hard drive just in case and I went back to Flickr and used the same process to highlight the photos again. This time, instead of choosing download, I selected delete. Within a very short time, my Flickr page was a blank slate.

Since there was also no logic to the way I had initially named my photos, this process gave me the opportunity to assign some consistency to the new, duplicate-free collection of photos. For the sake of simplicity, I named everything YYYY-xxxx, where YYYY was the year and xxxx was a sequential number starting at 0001 for the first photo shot that year. At some point after everything is uploaded new (it should be finished by the time I publish this post) I'll go back and add something more descriptive in the description field of each image, but with 4300 photos, that isn't going to happen overnight.

I also realize that this purge has probably broken hundreds of links on this here website thingie itself, because for a while I was merely linking images to Flickr to conserve disk space. But at this point I just don't care. My Flickr account was a disaster and needed to be cleaned out.

I still don't have any idea how I'll ultimately organize the photos. By Event or by Type? Events nested by Type? Do I even bother putting things in albums any more?

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Just Because

Emperor Joseph II: My dear young man, don't take it too hard. Your work is ingenious. It's quality work. And there are simply too many notes, that's all. Just cut a few and it will be perfect.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Which few did you have in mind, Majesty?

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Stolen (and Edited a Bit)

We don't need to take America back. No one stole it. It's right here…you're sitting in it. Chillax.

Mexico isn't going to pay for the wall and we're not going to deport millions of people and break up families. If you think either one is a good idea, you're not smart and probably not a person I want to hang out with.

We don't live in a democracy. Technically we are a Federal Republic. But in reality we are ruled by an oligarchy. If you don't know what that is, look it up. Reading will do you good. You probably need to do more of it.

FoxNews, CNN, and MSNBC have an agenda and are not "fair and balanced" or in any way unbiased. I'll reiterate…read more. Read newspapers (even online ones). Read lots of opinions and sources and then (stay with me here), THINK! Form your own opinion based on as many facts as your can brain can tolerate.

Speaking of facts…there actually is a difference between facts, opinions, and propaganda. You should learn the difference. (Another opportunity to show off your mad reading skills.)

Science is real. We know things because of science. Don't be afraid of it. You have an iPhone and Facebook because of science. It's your friend.

Global warming or "climate change" as the cool kids call it IS REAL. Anyone who tells you it's not real is not a smart person and probably should not be dressing themselves or caring for children.

Racism exists. And you are probably a little racist and should work on that. Seriously.

American Christians are not under attack. They are not being persecuted. They wield so much power in this country that politicians pretend to be Christian just so they will vote for them. No one is trying to take their bible away from them. Gay people are not destroying their families—they don't need any help to do that, thank you. They do a fine job of that by themselves. So stop saying they are persecuted. You sound stupid.

Poor people need help. If you're not helping them but complaining about how the government helps them with your money you are not a nice person.

Be nice to the people who teach your children. Don't send them nasty emails or yell at them. Their job is 10,000 times harder than your stupid job. You are not a professional educator so just shut your mouth and be thankful someone is willing to teach your offspring.

You don't know what Common Core is. You think you do, but you don't unless you're a teacher. So stop complaining about math problem memes on Facebook. You can't do the math anyway.

ISIS is not an existential threat to the United States. We do not need to rebuild our military. Our military is the strongest, scariest, most badass killing machine the world has ever seen. So stop being afraid and stop letting politicians and pundits scare you.

Guns do in fact kill people. That's what they are designed to do. If you feel you need a gun to protect yourself in America, you are probably living in the wrong neighborhood and should move before you go out and buy a gun. There are like a billion places to live where you won't need a gun, or even need to lock your front door.

If you do own a gun, then make sure you know how to use it really, really, really well. Seriously…get some training because you still don't know how to record stuff with your DVR. Go to the gun range and shoot the thing a lot. Learn how to clean it properly and be able to disassemble it and reassemble it with your eyes closed. It's a freaking gun and it deserves that level of care, proficiency and respect. And for God's sake, keep it locked up and away from your kids.

If you are even a little bit crazy, sad, or pissed off…you shouldn't have a gun. And the Founding Fathers would totally agree with me.

Stop being suspicious of American Muslims. I guarantee the guy sitting next to you in the cubicle at work is probably more of a threat to you than any Muslim. He has to listen to your uninformed ranting day after day and has probably already imagined very colorful and creative ways to end you.

Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and all the rest are ENTERTAINERS! Stop getting your opinions from them. (Here's where that reading thing can really be an advantage.)

Stop sharing Facebook memes that tell me to share or else Jesus won't bless me with a laundry basket full of cash. That's not how prayer works, even if it did work. And I don't want money delivered in a laundry basket anyway. Nobody ever washes those things out and they just keep putting nasty dirty clothes in them. Yuck!

We are the United States of America and we can afford to house every homeless veteran, feed every child, and take in every refugee and still have money left over for Starbucks and a bucket of KFC.

Unless you can trace your family line back to someone who made deerskin pants look stylish and could field dress a buffalo, you are a descendent of an immigrant. Please stop saying that immigrants are ruining our country. Such comments are like a giant verbal burrito stuffed with historical ignorance, latent racism, and xenophobia all wrapped in a fascist tortilla.

That's all for now. I feel better.

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Turntable Geekiness

As you probably know from a previous post (not to mention the numerous "Vintage Audio Porn" posts since then), I've been obsessed with audio equipment since I was a teenager. This is one of those quirky obsessions that only other people who share it seem to understand. Thankfully, I still have a few of those quirky friends in my life with whom I can freely converse with.

So if you're not one of those folks, you might wanna just move on to the pictures of the nekkid men elsewhere on the blog. Just sayin'.

While I have a good grasp of most of the major players in the field (Pioneer, Sansui, etc.) during audio's age of big iron, I pride myself most on my knowledge of the Technics brand and smugly thought I had uncovered and documented every piece of equipment they sold between 1974 and 1981 or so. Imagine my surprise then a few nights ago when I ran across this picture of a turntable whose existence I'd been totally unaware of—but whose seeming absence from the lineup I'd often pondered.

A bit of history… Starting in the mid 1970s, Technics pretty much without fail offered three varieties of any given turntable model they produced (there were specialized one-off models and whatnot, but they're the exception rather than the rule): fully automatic, semi-automatic, and manual. With the fully automatic models you would start a record playing by moving a lever or pressing a button. The tonearm would move over to the edge of the record and slowly lower to start playing. At the end of the record, the arm would raise up, return to its rest, and the machine would either completely shut off or the turntable would stop rotating. With the semi-automatic models, you would have to manually lift the arm and place it at the beginning of the record to start, but at the end it would raise by itself and return to its rest. The fully manual models are self-explanatory: you did it all yourself (and are the type of decks preferred by DJs).

Technics' triad numbering system for the various turntable lines was always linear: 1300, 1400, 1500 or 1600, 1700, 1800 (with the lower numbers of each series always being the fully automatic versions). They branched off on that a bit in later years, but it was consistent prior to that.


For all these years, the one glaring exception to this nomenclature was their "01" series.

The "01" series were strange critters to begin with, and I remember the first time I saw one in a store I had to do a double-take and say, WTF is that? Physically they were based on and closely resembled the 1600/1700/1800 series, obviously having used the same dies to cast the turntable bases, but their electronics and parts of the the tonearms (but not the tonearm mounts) came straight from the 1300Mk2/1400Mk2/1500Mk2. Likewise the turntable platters themselves resembled the Mk2 series with a brushed aluminum rim with the strobe dots on the underside, but the angle of the edge of the platters was identical to the 1600 series. And also like the Mk2 series, the 01s were also quartz-locked (using all but one of the same ICs)—something that the 1600 series was not. But the quartz difference between the 01 and the Mk2 series was that there was no pitch control, meaning that you were tied to an exact 33 or 45 rpm; and rendering them useless for DJ work. This explained in my mind why there was no manual version of these strange beasts, no 1501.

But as I discovered a few nights ago, there was a 1501 produced and sold—although apparently only in Japan. At first I didn't believe it…was this a one-off machine? A custom logo screened on a repainted 1401?

No, it was an actual product. Further Googling presented me not only dozens of photos of these machines in the wild, but also the product brochure.

And now of course I want one. Only because of its rarity.

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Quote of the Day

Donald Trump is a carnival man, an entertainer, a buffoon. His fans are white, scared, and angry. He will never be elected—not so long as minorities, liberals and educated people vote, but he has certainly exposed the ugly underbelly of conservatives in America today." ~ Stephen King, author

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Like A Tweeker High on Meth, Furiously Masturbating…

…but just can't cum:

A Florida congressman has introduced a new bill that would forbid federal agencies from purchasing Apple products until the company cooperates with the federal court order to assist the unlocking of a seized iPhone 5C associated with the San Bernardino terrorist attack.

In a statement released on Thursday, Rep. David Jolly (R-Fla.) blasted Apple.

"Taxpayers should not be subsidizing a company that refuses to cooperate in a terror investigation that left 14 Americans dead on American soil," he said. "Who did the terrorist talk to? Who did he message with? Did he go to a safe house? Is there information on the phone that might prevent a future attack on US soil? Following the horrific events of September 11, 2001, every citizen and every company was willing to do whatever it took to side with law enforcement and defeat terror. It's time Apple shows that same conviction to further protect our nation today."

Last month, Apple was given a controversial court order to create a customized firmware that would enable investigators to brute force a seized iPhone 5C and get past its passcode. Apple has vowed to fight the order in court, and the company is set to appear before a judge later this month.

At least for now, Jolly's bill is unlikely to advance very far in a Congress that can barely agree on the time of day; GovTrack gives it a 1 percent chance of passage.

[Source]

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Pluto

The images of Pluto that are still steadily trickling in from NASA's New Horizons probe are among the most amazing extraterrestrial images I have seen during the entire course of my life. I mean, just look at that! How can you not be in awe?

Yes, images from Mars still fire my imagination at the possibility of finding current or past life on the surface, but let's face it: except for the color and the obvious lack of vegetation, it looks for the most part like the American southwest. The pictures that were beamed back from Jupiter and it's moons were beautiful, and in the case of Europa and Io in particular, raised more questions than they answered. The images that have come back from Cassini during the twelve years (gawd, I feel old) it's been in orbit around Saturn and its moons are spectacular, even artistic—but so numerous I can't even begin to scratch the surface to see them all. The photos of Uranus and Neptune that came back from Voyager 2 in the 1980s hinted that something catastrophic happened in the outer solar system in the distant past that knocked one of them on its side, but again they only raised more questions than they answered.

But none of these pictures have fired my imagination the way the images from Pluto have. Maybe it's because until last summer, Pluto at best was nothing more than a tiny, blurry blob in the best telescopes. Or maybe it's because it turned out to be something completely different from what anyone was expecting. Maybe its because the pictures added more evidence to the idea that something big happened in the outer reaches of our solar system in the distant past. (The fact that Pluto is geologically active—flying in the face of everything we thought we knew about the outer solar system—and with its moon Charon bears the unmistakable scars of having collided with something tells me it's not as boring and unchanging at 40AU from the sun as we'd believed.) All I know is that these alien landscapes are filling me a with a sense of absolute wonder that precious few others have done, and it saddens me no end to think that no more probes will be visiting that tiny, fascinating world in my lifetime, much less that I will ever live to see human explorers walk its surface.

That being said, when I was a kid spending summers wearing down my box of 64 Crayola crayons to nubs by drawing the planets again and again hoping to get them just right, I would never in my wildest dreams have imagined that humanity would actually be visiting any of them—much less all of them during my lifetime—and for that I feel extremely lucky.

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Kind Of Obvious When You Think About It

From the Washington Post:

"The hunt for extraterrestrial life—of any kind, including lowly, long-dead microbes—is lofty enough. But the hunt for intelligent civilizations that could be looking for us in return? It's even more of a long shot. In a new paper published in the journal Astrobiology, researchers present one possible strategy for finding these theoretical beings: Assume that they're searching for us in exactly the same way we're searching for them.

Humans detect exoplanets (planets beyond our solar system) by observing their transits in front of their host stars. In essence, space telescopes, such as the Kepler, can watch the way a star twinkles and blinks and determine whether a planet is regularly passing in front of it.

That brightening and dimming can be used to calculate the size of the planet and its distance from the star. Scientists can also figure out what kind of atmosphere the planet has based on the way the molecules surrounding it scatter the light of its sun. Based on these factors (and the kind of star in the system) scientists can make educated guesses about what sort of body the planet is—and whether it could hold liquid water.

NASA now estimates that there are more than 1 billion 'Earth-like' planets in our galaxy alone. It's true that we have absolutely no idea what intelligent life on another planet might look like, but looking for life that evolved on a planet like our own seems like a safe start. After all, we know it happened at least once.

The new study suggests expanding that approach: What if aliens didn't just evolve on an Earth-like planet, but evolved into the sort of beings who would use planetary transits to go looking for other Earth-like planets?

In other words, what if the aliens have their own Kepler?

If that's the case, then those aliens would be within Earth's own 'transit zone'—the thin sliver of space from which an observer could see our planet's passage in front of the sun.

"It's impossible to predict whether extraterrestrials use the same observational techniques as we do," study co-author René Heller of the Institute for Astrophysics in Göttingen, Germany, said in a statement. 'But they will have to deal with the same physical principles as we do, and Earth's solar transits are an obvious method to detect us.'

In theory, we may be able to catch a planet that had already sent us some kind of message long, long ago. And once we knew what direction to listen in, we'd stand a better chance of capturing it.

So how much does that narrow down our potential search? A lot, but probably not enough: There are likely at least 10,000 star systems with planets worth checking out in that region. And in 2010, researchers turned a telescope array on the transit zone for a few days just to check for any obvious alien signals. Like most proposed techniques in the hunt for intelligent life, this idea—while intriguing—is unlikely to drop an alien civilization into our lap.

But it doesn't hurt to look."