A Growlery?

 General  No Responses »
Oct 122013
 

Sometimes people get amused when they see my blog’s tag line (“Grumbles from the Growlery”), because they get the word “growlery” confused with the word “growler”. Just to show this isn’t that sort of blog, I’m going to define it.

It’s a room for growling in; nothing more and nothing less. See “Bleak House” by Charles Dickins which has: “This, you must know, is the growlery. When I am out of humour, I come and growl here.”.

Other definitions come from :-

  1. The Collins dictionary: “a place to retreat to, alone, when ill-humoured”.
  2. The Phrontistery list of unusual words (you have to scroll down): “a retreat for times of ill humour”.

And you can probably find many other definitions yourself.

The Growlery

The Growlery

 

Autonomous Vehicles – Who Needs A Driver?

 General  No Responses »
Oct 122013
 

If we are getting to the stage that autonomous vehicles can drive themselves – probably safer than most human drivers – do we need to think about whether a human driver is necessary at all? Although there are people who enjoy driving, not everyone does and even those who do may not enjoy it all the time.

Why bother with a driving license if you can get a robot driver to do all your driving for you?

Did Ralph Really Hate Britain?

 Media, Politics  No Responses »
Oct 042013
 

Ralph Miliband, Ed Miliband, and the Daily Mail. No prizes for guessing who the villain is; even blue-rinsed Conservative party card carrying reactionaries are beginning to think that the Daily Mail is on a sticky wicket with their latest story. But that part can all be best summed up with :-

The Daily Mail have somehow decided that Ralph was an evil person, hated Britain, and so Ed Miliband is an inappropriate person to lead the country. Which is bizarre on several levels, but rather than concentrating on whether Ed is suitable or not, or looking into the Daily Mail’s deranged reasoning, let’s have a look at poor old Ralph.

After all, Ralph is dead so he is hardly in a position to defend himself, so someone should do it for him. The Mail picked up on something he wrote shortly after arriving in Britain (after encountering anti-semitism: “The Englishman is a rabid nationalist. They are perhaps the most nationalist people in the world …”. Whilst it may be a little extreme, it is understandable coming from a Jewish refugee arriving in London in the middle of war fever, and not being aware of the Battle of Cable Street.

And of course Ralph was a prominent Marxist which is the sort of thing that will cause any Daily Mail editor to start frothing at the mouth. As a Marxist, Ralph was probably not too keen on the monarchy, and the British establishment. But hating the way that Britain is governed is not the same as hating Britain.

What the Daily Mail would rather have you overlook is that Ralph fought for this country during the war. And at the end of the war, he chose to stay in this country rather than return to Belgium, or take up any number of opportunities in the USA. Sure he was a Marxist and if he had managed a worker’s revolution and liquidated the whole of the Daily Mail, I would be the first to call him evil.

Let’s be honest, if we have to pick one of the Daily Mail or Ralph to label as “evil”, then the only answer is the Daily Mail.

MOC: An Audio Player I Can Live With

 Computing, Linux  No Responses »
Sep 292013
 

I know … we’re all supposed to use graphical music players these days. I tried … honest, but I just couldn’t find one I liked well enough. This one had a habit of crashing randomly, that one was too database driven, this one was worried too much about a good interface for streaming music, that one liked play lists too much.

What I need in an audio player is :-

  1. The ability not to play a wide choice of audio codecs, but at least the codecs I use for encoding audio (FLAC) plus codecs for audio that gets downloaded – MP3, and OGG.
  2. The ability to play audio files from the filesystem without imposing some sort of database driven interface – specifically it shouldn’t say “Hey! I’ve noticed that your media files have changes; I’ll just spend 20 minutes rebuilding the database before I’ll let you play anything”.
  3. To start quickly and to quickly let me pick the audio files I want to play. Spending time figuring out what I was doing last time is unnecessary.

Note the lack of any fancy graphical interface or the requirement to plugin extras such as a link to last.fm such features are fine, but for me unnecessary.

So I found moc (Wikipedia link because the official website was broken when I wrote this) … an “command-line” (actually text screen based) music player with extensive configuration options. This is not so much a review as a discovery of the configuration options …

The first thing to find out is what file moc uses for configuration. Simple: ~/.moc/config. By making changes to this, and restarting moc I was able to make gradual improvements. The ordering of the options below is in the order of my discoveries which was greatly assisted by reading the example configuration in /usr/share/doc/moc/examples/config.example.gz

First, I wanted moc to start off by automatically changing to a specific directory :-

MusicDir = /media/ibox/albums
StartInMusicDir = yes

Next, turn off the use of mmap() as it is apparently slow on NFS and my music files are on an NFS server :-

UseMmap = no

The end result is a simple player that works in a terminal window.

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