If you’re going to play around with nuclear fission, it’s probably best to do so on a distant planet where (almost) zero humans are endangered by your efforts.
Author: Karel Kerezman
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Re-ripping The Classics
On my way to the grocery store yesterday morning I discovered that one of the songs playing on my phone was misbehaving a bit. It skipped forward randomly for most of the first minute or so before settling into something resembling normal playback. In a moment of brilliant forethought I made note of the glitch (thank you, Obsidian) to check on once I got home.
Sure enough, that song (and indeed every song on its particular album) had been ripped with a barely-out-of-beta version of the Ogg Vorbis codec, which means it hadn’t yet been optimized for decoding in mobile device environments. Then I checked a number of other albums by the same artist and… all but a few were ripped at basically the same time with the same (new then, but obsolete now) codec. Clearly at some point in 2002 I was super busy ripping CDs.
Guess what I spent yesterday afternoon doing! Ripping CDs again!
On the upside, I have dbPoweramp‘s CD Ripper software on hand and a solid & reliable LG optical drive to work with. On the downside, some of these CDs are quite old and are showing their age. (Plus, in some cases, there’s actual physical damage. The kids got into my CD collection once when they were very very young…)
Overall the operation went well, and the only three tracks which indicated failures in the ripping software were tracks I don’t particularly need. (The first is a duplicate bonus track available in remastered form on a different album, and the remaining two are live versions of songs I can probably source elsewhere.)
Why even bother, then? Because this time I have more advanced codecs available, at higher bitrate (thus slightly better overall quality), and if anything went horribly wrong with my source CDs (further bitrot or an actual physical catastrophe of some sort) I want the (reasonably) best available archival copies I can get. (No, I didn’t FLAC these albums. They’re not important enough to me to justify the vastly increased storage requirement.)
And now when those songs come up on my phone in the random playlist, they shouldn’t go all glitch-y on me. Priorities, y’all.
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Are You Experian-ced?
Dealing with financial stuff is already on my list of least-favorite activities, but when you pair that with a security breach at the Oregon State DMV, it’s just doubly frustrating. See, it turns out that identification information for 3.5 million Oregonians was being shuffled around on a file transfer platform called MOVEit, which recently had a series of security vulnerabilities disclosed.
(Let’s just pretend I wrote a very lengthy rant asking why, in the name of all that’s holy, ID info for millions of citizens was being shuffled around on the Internet without being, oh, at the very least, encrypted in some meaningful fashion. It’s late and I’m tired and if I get started, before long I’ll just be keysmashing in fury. So let’s not and say we didn’t.)
The point is, the State of Oregon has basically said, “Welp. Guess you need to start watching for suspicious activity in your credit reports. Have fun!” But what we actually did, in this household, was freeze our reporting.
Mind you I didn’t even know that was a thing until this event. On the upside, the three credit reporting agencies seems to deal with “freezes” fairly regularly, as evidenced by the fact that all of their websites seem to lead with, “Are you here to freeze your credit reporting? Here’s a big friendly button.” It took me about forty minutes all told to get signed up at Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion… and that included some general puttering around trying to get a feel for things, not to mention some concern & annoyance over one of the services’ “security questions.
At any rate, theoretically it should be more difficult for identity thieves to use our names to ruin our credit by doing whatever-it-is they do with the information that the State of Oregon DMV so carelessly mishandled. Yay.
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Satisfactory – Rail Tour Video
I put this together last weekend and eventually remembered that I should post it here:
Please enjoy 18 minutes of a train moving along train tracks through video game scenery. Note that the rail network shown in this video is far from complete. There’s the planned nuclear power site along the north coast of the Rocky Desert region yet to build, never mind the expansion into the Dune Desert and south from the Oilands. But if I waited until I was “done” building new rail segments in this game, I’d never get a video made at all. So, here we are.
As a learning experience, making this video also taught me a simpler way to “slide” text on the screen in Davinci Resolve than I’d used previously, cutting the production time on this one down considerably from what I originally expected. I’m not 100% happy with the look of the text itself, however. I think it needed more contrast on the edges to avoid readability issues on complex backgrounds.
Anyway! Until next time!
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Hoyt Arboretum Trip – June 2023
I’m on vacation this week. One of my goals for this block of time off was to get out of the apartment for a bit and point my (actual, not phone) camera at some (actual, not virtual) trees and such for a couple of hours. It was too hot the last couple of days to do it, and Monday I had an appointment to keep, so today was my first chance. I got the camera charged up, threw it into the camera bag, and off I went. My chosen destination? The arboretum up at Washington Park. My chosen project? To see if the “burst mode” of my camera (a Panasonic Lumix DC-FZ80) would allow me to do hand-held photography and still get usable results better than half of the time.
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The State of the Gamer in Mid 2023
I’ve had zero creative energy this year so most of my spare time is spent watching documentaries (CuriosityStream and Nebula and PBS for the win), listening to music, and playing games. Quite a bit of playing games.
But not a whole lot of games. Just a few.
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