Recreating eighties recording tech
Dual cassette decks used to be king. You'd copy your records (vinyls) to cassette so you could play it in your Walkman (huh, just realised how lame I am; I get annoyed at people saying iPod and here I am saying "Walkman"), or off the radio if you we're feeling cheap/naughty, and with the second deck you could make your own mixtapes from even other tapes. Did the Recording Companies care? Not too much as they knew you couldn't do a perfect copy; with each generation the quality degraded so (...)
More words on words
It's interesting how some terms become standard and then last beyond them making sense. Including a few that have multiple meanings so context is required. Like "record". It's main meaning is a permanent account, but it also means to make one, and there's the usage that covers phonographic discs. Thus recording a record on a record makes sense. 'course you could call the physical object a "vinyl"... but that requires context as well. Then you have words like "movie"; (...)
Your reality and your memory
One thing I find funny about being in the military is being repeatedly yoinked from your life plans to do defence plans. You just have to put much of your life on pause and jump into a new reality that has been imposed on you. What I find most interesting is after a few days you tend to fall into the new routine and your other life seems like a dream. (Or nightmare, depending on your perspective I suppose.) It's interesting really, and highlights how our different levels of (...)
Job Loss Job Gain
So yeah, I'm not a good runner and I have trouble maintaining my weight, fitness and health. But I tend to stay in shape more these days simply 'cos I have a job that requires me to. It's a bit lame really, but it's nice sometimes to have that extra push. It's like getting up in the morning. I used to find it harder, as I knew that getting to work early or even on time was not rewarded as working late (without compensation) was common so I started planning on working late. Not an issue in my (...)
Five years later the quest is over... mostly
I was watching a movie on UHD and it had a song in the credits which I liked. I bought the soundtrack, but the one in the credits was superior.... so I decided I wanted to have a copy that I could play outside of the movie... but how? Years ago I used to solve that problem as my stereo system had a Compact Cassette recorder, but I don't have one working right now (I have one to repair; more on this later!), and even if I did it's not really a solution as I'd want to digitise it later. This (...)
The Art of Making People Do What You Want the Way You Want
I've been involved in the military for a while, and I find it such a good example of a micro society, a society designed to behave how you want them to with minimal external effort. It's all quite magical in a slightly worrying way. People enter the system as seaman/soldier/airman or as an officer, are trained by more experienced members, and (if they pass) they come out as reformed people ready for the actual job they signed up for, where they if they can work within the (...)
Running into weight loss
I'm not really a running person. I've tried. I've watched Conan the Barbarian, watched Arnold run forever with ease, and thought "this would be cool", but in practice I've really got the wrong body type. My legs are too big for good running, and I prefer it that way. I could just be making excuses as humans are so very good at, but looking at good runners the facts fit. Anyway, as I said I have tried, but I hit a wall pretty soon. But I still have found that running is an (...)
Photography Subject Specialisation
A common question I get when someone sees me with a camera is "What do you take photos of".. and I generally struggle to answer. Does one need a specialisation? Do other photographers have one? Do you need to be good at it?
Some stuff I like to take photos of, such as aircraft and stars, but often the opportunity, and to a lesser extent the equipment, make it hard. I take photos of sports events, but since I'm not into most sports and I generally don't even know the rules it'd be (...)
EMail has been around for over 40 years
..yeah. Really. It's been around in some form in the 70s, more standardised in the 80s, and was decently embedded in education and business in the 90s. Heck, there was a movie that was about an EMail based romance in the 90s... yet.... people keep making same embarrassing mistakes with stuff like replies. Not sure why. I still see cases in professional environments where people reply to a group EMail, expecting to get to the sender when in most cases it'll just go to the group (or at best an (...)
Dual and half double are sadly not the same
I've been into multi screen for 20+ years. Obviously it started with computers but it extended to laptops (probably a rant in itself) and phones as well. First time I got one was a on-sale LG V50. A very clunky device that was almost exactly what I wanted. I could at last solve the old problem of referring to X while working on Y, as well as monitoring Y while doing X. Sadly after a few years of use the case hinge cracked in a very odd way and I lost the second screen. Case? Yeah. The V50 is (...)
