Resonant Constellation

Today an odd thing happened: I had watched a movie previously on my laptop (Macbook pro 15.4 inch) while plugged into power, then unplugged it and went elsewhere to work. I was surprised to find that, even though 100% full, my cpmputer only predicted about an hour battery life. I thought this odd, since it is usually around 2.5-3 hours if I’m not trying to conserve power, and about 5-5.5 if I am. I looked up battery issues with my computer model and found that it has about 300 cycles in the battery until it’s supposed to degrade, but this didn’t solve my problem (mine is at about 100, which is not bad for a year old computer).

So what’s the problem? I found a great site with a bunch of tips to maximize battery life. My problem? I had left the DVD in the drive after watching the movie. Turns out that the moving parts and laser diode of the CD/DVD drive burn a lot of power. I quickly rectified this, and followed the rest of their recommendations. I am now “Calibrating my battery,” which includes completely running it down…as it is about to do. I shall leave you now before my laptop dies on me.

Those of you who actually read this blog (I’m amazed there’s any, actually) may remember from my post on the 1st that I said:

I had a hell of a lot of fun, and I look forward to continuing this session. Next week I’ll try to get a recording of the action and post it here.

The moment I wrote those words and pressed the “Publish” button on my WP-admin page, I began an epic quest to find a suitable field recorder. I did not sleep (beyond my usual 7 hours), I did not eat (any more than I usually would have), I spent every waking moment (that wasn’t otherwise occupied by, for example, contemplating naval lint) searching for my next gadget.

Like a true geek, I did my research on this one. I laid out a spreadsheet to compare the properties of each individual gadget to the next (things like frequency response, sample rate, recording format, storage size, stereo mics, price, etcetera). There turned out to be three distinct categories of devices I considered: fully dedicated, hi-fi, super expensive, multi-directional, multiple microphone recorders (Example: Zoom H2, which I still may get if I can scrape together money [ha ha!]), stereo and mono voice recorders which were slightly smaller, and less high quality (usually “CD” quality at 44.1 kHz sampling and ~800Hz-1kHz response), though consistently $50 cheaper (Example: Olympus DS-40), and finally the iPod attachment variety, which is basically a device that you plug into your iPod and record directly onto it (Example: Belkin TuneTalk).

This last category had many sub-categories (mono, stereo, power adapter capable, external source, various quality settings), but the most outstanding feature is that they are practically all dirt cheap compared to the other gizmos I was looking at. My dilemma at this point was that there was no one device which clearly was superior in the price versus quality department, so I turned to the mandolin cafe message boards where I’d seen posts about this kind of product. My question was instantly addressed, and I found a very nice guy by the name of Fred who was willing to send me some recordings made with the Belkin iPod device. The sound quality of these far surpassed my expectations, so I ended up getting the Belkin TuneTalk from Amazon for about $30. Just a few days later, it has arrived and is in my hands! Here’s a quick little recording I made:

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I hope you’ll agree that, besides the playing, it sounds pretty good (quality-wise). Hopefully I’ll get some good recordings at the session this weekend and I’ll be able to share them with you here!

Today I downloaded Apple’s Safari 4.0 public beta, alleged to be the fastest browser in existence. Having used the previous version of the browser for quite a while, I was ready for an upgrade. What I got, however, was far and away better than I was expecting. I might describe Safari 3 as a slightly modified Firefox clone. This isn’t bad-I like the functionality of Firefox and use it as my supplementary, back-up browser when Safari doesn’t have the correct functionality (example: FireFTP). Safari 4, however, has that peculiar Apple flavor that seems to come in all of their products and includes several very nice touches that I truly appreciate.

The first, and most noticeable, is that this browser is actually much faster than the previous iteration, consistently loading non-cached pages in less time than I’m used to. There’s also the addition of top-of-browser tabs and variable tab sizes (the active tab is larger than inactive ones), as well as a general re-arrangement of the buttons on the navigation bar that just feels more intuitive to me.

The other additions all involve the trademark Apple navigation system, cover flow. This allows you to search through your history and bookmarks with images of the web page above, and a new cover flow-like page called “top sites.” This page takes all of the top sites you visit and displays them in pictorial format in a matrix. When the site changes since you last viewed it, it displays a star in the upper-right corner. So far, I’ve found this very useful.

I’m not as much of an Apple fanboy as some are: I generally like their products, but am often annoyed by their seeming idiocy (see the recent massive bugs found in system updates). Safari 4.0, however, is a solid effort and worth the time if you’re sick of your current browser.