The Boredom Blog

John Gray - Straw Dogs

Just to continue this update splurge (which is a way for me to test RSS of course, still it's not working quite how I want it to, the updates will become less frequent soon), I'd like to bring your attention to this book:

Just when you thought nihilism was dead, you discover it's alive and well and working at the LSE (and having worked at the LSE myself for five years I'm surprised I didn't ever run into this guy). Anyway, this is a book that everyone ought to read. That's not to say that it's necessarily compelling, or even very well argued (often it isn't), but the central thesis is undoubtedly fascinating and *huge*. It's a very very dark work (just look at the cover) within which Gray pulls apart some of the central assumptions of humanity's existence, goes at Christianity with all guns blazing, and leaves in his wake a rather bleak and hopeless landscape of complete pointlessness.

It starts brilliantly in that he talks about our relationship with the Earth and Nature and that how ultimately it's going to kill us all. Possibly sooner than we want to believe. Darwin is at the centre of course and he wants us to understand that the lives of animals and humans are precisely the same. We are all just 'life' carrying on our evolutionary path. He dismisses progress as imagination, technology as a side-show (but one that also may well come back and bite us) and the human brain as a very complex entertainment machine that shields us from the truly catastrophic banality of our real existences. In essence, the human species is a piece of wonderfully intricate machinery whose sole purpose is to deceive itself throughout its lifespan. Oh, and the discussion of 'The Self', something I always enjoy reading, is also rather top-notch too.

I found the middle section of the book sagged a little although the discussion (or let's call it a brief historiography) of the great Philosophers is deeply interesting. The dismissal of Postmodernism within the space of half a page is somewhat of a liberty but Gray is far keener on getting his point across than discussing other sides of the argument; so you have to sort of pretend other theories don't exist in order for you to be able to finish the book before you chuck it in the bin. Some of the excerpt stories used from The Holocaust and Russian Gulags smack of cherry-picking obviously (it's as if acts of selflessness didn't occur during these dark times - which they did, and are well documented) but nonetheless you can't help but want to read more. His comments on morality and ethics are some of the most disturbing parts of the book and had me stopping and thinking at every passage. Mercifully the book ends strongly with a superb discussion on technology and economic development that is at times truly ground-breaking. For anyone who works at the cutting edge of technology and reads Gray's prediction of complete redundancy for all human labour, bar entertainment, can't help but feel he's probably hit the nail on the head with that one (the BBC's documentary of IBM's Deep Blue vs. Kasparov also brought this home last night).

In the end I came away both loving and dismissing this book in equal measure. It *does* border on the pompous (maybe Gray can't quite shake off his righteous-Thatcherite past), and it *is* often far too lazy (compare to Richard Evans' 'In Defence of History' where every source is footnoted in-line), but as a broad work of modern philosophy it draws you in, chews you up and spits you out with a contempt I've rarely ever encountered. To be honest, most of the central arguments I believe in anyway so to some extent he's preaching to the converted which partially explains some of the eulogies on the back cover, and indeed one beautifully sneering Guardian review. The reality though, and this is what I take from Gray, is that humanity needs to get humble and needs to get humble quickly if it's not to expedite extinction, whether or not that extinction is inevitable isn't something to worry about too much.

MultiPlay

Gaming all last night round at a mate's gaff including inevitable rather gay sleep-over. Three of us desperately trying to win the World Cup on Liveware Evolution but continuously failing. Much multiplayer PSP was had and I'm pleased to say it's wonderfully easy. Apart from a Matchplay bug in Tiger Woods which gets the score wrong which is f***ing ridiculous. Tired now.

RSS Screwey

Having a few weird problems with RSS usage so apologies if it ends up being a little screwey. No link as yet until I fix it properly.

Ma PSP Est Arrivée

My PSP arrived yesterday from PlayAsia so I spent most of last night getting to grips with it and playing a few games. I ordered Tiger Woods, Lumines (Japanese version as it has much nicer box art, unlike the American one which is super-dull), and Wipeout Pure.

First thing that hits you is the beautful user interface. The screen itself is bright and crisp and the contrast is nicely set-off against the machines black casing. Everything is wonderfully clear. The PSP itself feels robust and well made and all the buttons and controls are nicely positioned so that it feels much like a PS2 controller. Indeed there are gadgets off Ebay that allow you to click the PSP into a casing that closely resembles a Dual Shock controller thereby making the thing a little easier to hold.

The UMD format I'm not so sure about, plus using the proprietry (and more expensive) Memory Stick Duo instead of SD just gets on my nerves. To hold 3 or 4 movies on a stick is going to require a 1Gb card and these don't come cheap. The UMDs themselves are fine if oddly bulky, I dunno, even Minidisc feels old fashioned to me, and game loading times can be somewhat lengthy. Tiger Woods in particular suffers from long pauses as the UMD whirrs away loading up data. Compare and contrast to the instant gratification of the DS, although really, comparing the two machines is so obviously unfair once you've used 'em both. The PSP is more akin to one of those Archos multi-media devices.

And on the subject of the games there can be no complaints. Tiger Woods is superb, it plays similar to the console versions and although the graphics aren't quite up to their main console variants, they are excellent. Sweeping through the course in 3D in glorious techno-colour on such a small screen is quite an eye-opener. The sound fx are top notch and there's plenty of depth and longevity in there. Wipeout Pure is probably the best showcase for the PSP as it sports console-like graphical touches and superbly sensitive controls and gameplay. Wipeout is nothing new of course, but watching it zoom by at a solid fps makes you realise you do indeed have something close to a PS2 in the palm of your hand. It's a revelation, and a leap in technology that seems to have come upon us rather unexpectedly.

Lumines is equally fun and is a sortof stroboscopic Tetris on steroids. Soothing electronica flows out of the speakers/headphones (a lot of it is very Underworld) and you soon find yourself sucked into the simple but visciously addictive game mechanic. Matching falling blocks to the time of the music and a gloriously spacey light-show backdrop is a very Zen-like experience, not dissimilar to Rez on the Dreamcast, a game that shares the same designer I believe.

All-in-all I'm impressed, very impressed. This technology is clearly a quantum leap. The only things that worry me are the price of the media sticks (coz you're gonna need a few of the larger ones) and the games release schedule. The PSP badly needs killer games to make use of its superb hardware, otherwise I fear it'll be squashed both by the next-gen console wave and the much cheaper and cheerful DS. And for God's sake someone get a shoot-em-up released for it. Right, I'm off to meet up with a pal who also owns a PSP for some multiplayer golf and racing. Tutty bye.

Really Stupid Spazmo

Having looked at the BBC RSS feed it looks like they use a much simpler xml file for their headlines so I've now dumped the RDF format and gone for the more straight-forward RSS. I'll probably try and write a small utility to automate new feed updates, just depends if I can get a couple of hours to do it.

At the moment the RSS Feed is not working till I get 30mins to have a look at it. :-) Should be back soon.....

RSS Feed

I'm such a sucker for punishment because now I've added an RSS feed to this site. And just like a proper idiot, I'm hand-coding it in TextWrangler rather than finding some nifty automatic way of doing it. I'm sure there's a little app out there somewhere on version tracker, but I can't be bothered to look for it right now. I'm an old vi C coder so by-hand feels right.

Anyway, this is the first entry just to see if the damn thing works. Writing the RDF file brought back horrific memories of working in Library IT Departments and watching dreary session papers on DublinCore. /shudder. (I like it really). Oh, and the RSS time-stamp and this one will be slightly out of sync as I rush to edit one after the other.

Vinyl to iTunes

Put your hand up if you've got a load of analogue sources of music that you'd quite like in iTunes? Good, so have I. Mostly tapes of varying quality, but especially vinyl. So last weekend a pal of mine spent a couple of days here and brought with him a cool selection of LPs, stuff that I badly wanted.

So anyway, we ended up smoking and drinking and listening to some records. At the same time, I was experimenting with recording said music into my Powerbook. We didn't have much time but in the end managed to record 14 albums worth, so not a bad haul. Seen as others might be interested in my experience here's a run down of what we did.

Equipment

Bush TT2 Turntable - it's crap. Cost me 40 quid from Richer Sounds. My mate owns a Michell Orbe so this was a come-down. It did however get the music off the record.

Esoteric Audio Research 802 pre-amp - fucking brilliant tube-amp from the master. The turntable has a built-in phono stage but hard-wired leads so I had to pipe its two phono output plugs into this pre-amp.

2x RCA to 1x mini-jack lead - necessary to go from the output of the pre-amp (two plugs) to the line-input of the Powerbook (one jack plug). Obviously if you're using a seperate phono-stage this is the lead to hook that up to the computer.

Software

Audio Hijack Pro - a really nice recording software package. It's able to rip *any* sound from *any* input including websites and audio-streams. Most people use it to record internet radio (it includes a timer), but it also works for line-level inputs. More info on this in a bit.

Audacity - freeware audio editing app. It's basic and purely functional but when you need to split or merge audio files its the most cost-effective option.

Set-Up

Now, there are some inherent problems with recording from analogue and they can be categorised into two key areas. The first is sound-quality, and the second is file editing. I wasn't hugely bothered by sound-quality hence the shit turntable and bog-standard lead. To some extent my recordings are temporary. However, if you're serious about archiving your vinyl and want the best possible sound you need to consider:

• A good turntable/cartridge to get the music off the plastic with good transparent results.
• An outboard soundcard. There are plenty of good and cheap ones available and these should give a slight edge in quality. They'll usually connect direct to the USB or Firewire port keeping the signal digital once the ADC has been done. And all will have either 2x phono or line-in.
• A decent cable, unlike the one I used.

Audio Hijack Pro also includes some sound filters. Now these can help either remove pops and cracks, perform some EQ, or indeed up the gain level. I prefer not to use them, apart from a tiny bit of gain, but you might find them useful if you experiement. There is a more pro-level filter available but it costs $99 and the details are in the help file.

File editing is also a problem. Basically you can either record each side of the record as a single digital file and split it up as a post-process, or you can attempt to split files as it goes either by pausing after each track or getting the software to do it for you. Luckily AHP has the option to begin a new file after a user-definbale gap. So if you have a nice record where each track is separated by a few seconds of silence, AHP will create each file for you. There is also a very handy 'Split' button that you can click to start a new file manually. This is useful for LPs (like Dark Side of the Moon) where there's no real silence between tunes.

In addition you can add some general ID Tags such as Artist and Album which makes importing into iTunes a little bit easier. I didn't find a way to add track names, say for example by knowing the time duration of each song and entering them manually, but perhaps there is a method to do this. I ended up adding the track names into iTunes myself once I'd dragged my finished files in.

OK, right, once you've set-up the recording stuff in AHP (it keeps your settings) you're ready to go. Oh, one word on encoding. If you want to do post-editing in Audacity be warned that it only really accepts mp3 and aiff. So my advice is to take the file-size hit in AHP and record your vinyl to aiff, it's a nicely transparent format anyway and will go straight into Audacity. That is basically it. Make sure the cables are set-up and all nicely tight in their connections and you're ready to record. I tend to start with a single track to play with the gain and levels and play the resultant aiff file back using the Finder preview (under 'Get Info') to make minor adjustments so I'm happy. Once ready, cue up side one and hit Record. Tea, beer, and/or smokes are optional at this point.

Post-Processing

At the end of recording side two (aaah that sounds good, I remember sides), you'll have a number of shiny new digital audio files on your disk. With a bit of luck everything will be perfect and you can simply drag 'em into iTunes. However, the chances are that you'll have to do some editing. For example I used AHP's silent-gap system to change tracks but of course I had many LPs where this wasn't working. The up-shot is that you may have to either split files or merge files and this is where Audacity comes in.

If you want to split a file into separate tracks it's dead easy. Simply identify the point where the next track begins in the audio sequence, click to add a marker, and then just 'Select-Cursor To End' to mark the whole audio segment to the end of the file. Then hit 'Cut' to remove it, open a new Audcaity window, and 'Paste' the segment into the new blank window. Now save your two new aiff audio segements as the appropriate track names. Easy. Merging one or more files is also a piece of cake, just make sure you get the correct order, then it's simply a case of Copy and Pasting the whole audio streams into one single stream. Job done. Save the newly merged file as an aiff. You may wanna check as you go that it all sounds ok. Whether there is any audio loss in this editing process I really don't know but I wouldn't worry too much as it's largely insignificant.

Finishing Up

Once you've done your final editing (should you need to) you're finished with your final aiff files of your beloved vinyl tracks. I like to leave the pops and clicks and I even leave the needle drop sound too. The only things left to do are drag the files into iTunes. If you've added the Artist/Album ID tags in AHP you'll be able to locate your new songs easier for final cleaning up. I ended up adding the track names manually and the year of release. Once that was done I included the album art, something like Utilitunes is real useful for this (although you may need to get iTunes to convert your aiffs to aac format beforehand via 'Advanced-Convert Selection To' making sure aac is set up as the import format in Preferences). Otherwise there's an AppleScript that'll search Google for artwork.

So that's it, all done. Spanking new vinyl (or even C90 cassette) tracks all nice and snug in iTunes. I add '(Vinyl)' to the album name because it'll allow me to create vinyl-only playlists. Marvel at the sound quality and cry because you may never need to dig out those records again. Well, unless you want to drool over that gatefold sleeve of course.

Grrrrr Tiger

If you own a Mac and haven't got Tiger (OS X 10.4) then why not? Been using it for a week now and it's the most significant upgrade ever. Everything's neater, snappier, sharper and quicker. The key add-ons such as Spotlight and Dashboard are really very very good. I had to laugh the other day when I used Spotlight to search for 'Spaced' looking for my rips of the TV series. Only close to the top of the list were a series of emails from a stoner/hippyesque girlfriend of mine. How immensely appropriate. :-) There are also tons of widgets for Dashboard on the Apple site, so go fetch some.

Quartz Composer is also stunning. If you install the dev pack you'll get this crazy little app that basically allows you to build trippy little screensavers and stuff using a really nice GUI. It's very powerful and will cope with all sorts of complexity and runs perfectly even on my aging Powerbook. Naturally enough some folks over at yakyak put it through its paces.

It also warms the cockles of my heart to know that Apple have still kept the Finder as largely useless as ever.

Election Night Wonderment

So the election's over, and it was a bit shit. No major upsets, no overhaul of the political establishment, just a damp squib of political apathy. Tony Blair is now governing having secured a massive (cough) 36% of the vote, which means in terms of the electorate as a whole, about one-in-five actively want him to be there. Why can't we have IBM's big supercomputer run the country?

I stayed up for most of the night as most hard-core psephologists should. Indeed it was made easier by the truly wonderful BBC coverage. The combination of the sarcy Dimbleby, the brilliantly amusing Andrew Marr, the hyper Snow, and the Rottweiler Paxman, truly is a political dream-team. They made the whole shebang worthwhile and it was constantly entertaining and never dull. The icing on the cake as the sun rose and the birds sung on the early Friday morning was Paxman's interview with the highly unpleasant victorious George Galloway. Superb.