Posts by Bart Janssen
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Let's wait a bit shall we.
At the moment the police are saying stuff all. That is appropriate because it's an active investigation and anything they say could prejudice any case they may bring.
At the moment the only sources of info are people not directly involved in the group in question - because the group in question are being held by the police.
So the only info is guesses and rumour.
However, folks that want to remove themselves from the control of the NZ Govt and yet still ocupy the country are by definition opposing the Govt. So the folks insisting that they are not opposing the govt, yet still want to create a separate state are a bit confused I think.
IF someone has been playing with napalm, they should go to jail. Napalm is a disgusting weapon that has no place in civilisation and anyone who thinks different really needs to be removed from society. IF such people are playing around in the bush then I want our police to intervene with as heavy a hand as they feel appropriate.
But as I said up front we know few if any facts, untill we get facts we need to be cool OK?
cheers
Bart -
Rob
Taking out the crackles and pops: a lot of me old vinyl is a tad scratched as well...
Audacity is nice. Opensource as well :). Actually the documentation was really helpful. As for getting rid of scratches - well a couple of my albums had some "issues" that I could remove - at least well enough for listening on the iPOD.
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Hi James
I have a lovely turntable, and I still haven't digitised anything. And it might even have the deep base richness in a digital file that the CD format allegedly is missing.
I've digitised a few of my records (including Little Feat!). Sadly at home, with the equipment I used, you don't capture the vinyl sound. It's better than a music download and in some cases more alive than ripping a CD but usually the ripped CD is better quality.
That said I'm ripping to play on an iPOD using earplugs so the quality for that is just fine. When I want to hear the real sound I put the vinyl on.
The big minus is it takes a lot of time - you have to play the record at normal speed - then I have to spend at least the same amount of time again "cleaning" crackles and pops that seem more obvious when digitised - then about half that time again to get it into iTUNES organised the way i want it.
BTW I used free software Audacity to process the files and captured them using an http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/imic/\iMic from
Griffen to feed into my Ti lapbook. It takes a bit of getting used to but the process is fairly easy - just time consuming.cheers
Bart -
Hi Matthew
MS even provided instructions for people to update versions of Windows that are no longer supported, which is far beyond what Apple has given us.
I'm disappointed, Russell, that you are so easily swayed by "Pretty, shiny, ooooh" over "We can't be bothered supporting our terribly expensive product".I agree entirely that Apple dropped the ball in NZ over this. But remember for the longest time Apple had the novel concept that operating systems would/should be backwards compatable. In comparison MS have always taken the view that a new OS should force users to upgrade/spend more money.
Those were the old days for Apple and some of their more recent work has been more er "business like"
However to suggest that MS are better than Apple because MS have better support ... really hard to swallow that sorry.
It is worth noting we are a really tiny market - not that we should have been ignored.
Personally I'll take a week of my computer thinking it's a bit early to be awake for the pretty shiny and ridiculously grunty machine that just works.
cheers
Bart -
But Brent mate, I'm trying to send you a bottle of whisky! You won the Whisky Galore ad copy comp for last week. Feel free to get in touch with your delivery address ...
Russell just send it to me and I'll pass it on to Brent tomorrow at pub triv - honest:).
cheers
Bart -
actually, retail is $3049 if you take 2GB of RAM, which you'd be silly not to, even though that makes it a build-to-order spec, which means you have to wait up to two weeks for your computer
Just buy your machine from the nice folks at Ubertec, they were happy to whip my iMAC (not this brand new model which may be different) upstairs and plug in the extra RAM on the spot. Took 10 min, which of course meant I was looking at the goodies in their shop for 10 min.... :)
cheers
Bart -
Regarding Cassava
Some quick reading makes me an expert in its origins (not) but as far as I can tell from my reading Cassava (__Manihot esculenta__) as we know it now is very much domesticated and probably the result of some hybridisation (crosses between different wild species) and introgression (fancy genetic term meaning traits/genes from one species get bred into another species). All of which makes figuring out the wild progenitor difficult. But the best guess seems to be some derivative of Manihot flabellifolia which has its range in Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Argentina.Domestication appears to have been started 5000-7000 BC in the Amazon basin. As for how the Africans got Cassava well that seems to have been the Portuguese in the 17th century rather than the Polynesians and the Spanish took it to Asia.
Neil wrote about how the hominids viewed Fire. I guess my concern is that it’s really hard to figure out what those hominids were thinking. We all know that different cultures can view quite simple things from completely different perspectives. A local example is the inability of most Europeans to “get” the Maori idea of “family”. For the Maori it’s a very simple and obvious concept and yet it is completely non-obvious to the Europeans (whad’ya mean that hill is a relative???). Similarly we look at Fire and try and imagine what it must have been to the early hominids – but we do it from a completely different cultural perspective. My gut feeling is that the hominids probably didn’t have any concept of god or magic or even the concept that Fire was “strange” in any way. It simply was part of the environment, like a rock or a river, dangerous in some circumstances useful in others. I suspect that any attempt by us to put ourselves in their heads is doomed to failure, our cultural perspective makes it impossible.
BTW don’t get too high and mighty about our intellectual capacity, we actually have smaller brains than some of our hominid brethren. It really is very difficult to know what intellectual ability was achievable by those hominids. It’s quite possible that some of those hominids were quite smart. The interesting thing about the last half a million years or so is that most of the development of humans has been about cultural change rather than biological change. It’s quite possible that those hominids were as smart or smarter than a 10 year old – they just had no knowledge base to work from.
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Hi David
ooo now this is fun stuff. You are of course getting into chicken and egg discussions about which came first. I think you are probably right but possibly skipping over the issue that several factors have to combine before significant changes occur. Fire was definately critical but other factors were important too.
The problem with figuring out the critical event is that the changes in hominid life occurred over such a large timescale that changes that occurred thousands of years apart look like simultaneous events to us. I think one factor in development that you're skipping is the development of memory and language. It's one thing to have fire available but it's another to be able to communicate from generation to generation the methods of handling required and the importance of fire.
However, the link between Fire and Agriculture is rock solid. I'll add one other food we don't think about in the western world much. Casava is the third biggest source of carbohydrate int he world and particularly important in Africa (although it originated in Sth America). What's interesting is the root is very toxic, containing cyanogenic glucosides which get converted to cyanide when the cells are broken. However it is an incredibly productive crop second only to sugarcane. To get rid of the cyanogenic compounds the roots need to be cooked, often for several days. So without fire, this rich food source would not be available.
But again it isn't just the presence of Fire that is important, it's the ability to remember that cooked Casava didn't kill grandpa and the ability to communicate that knowledge.
Even your early hominids with league player jaws had to have enough language and memory to know that cooked meat tasted better and was easier to eat before they could lose their er "manly" jawbones.
cheers
Bart -
Why don't the folks in the TV industry look at the dropping viewers numbers and think for a second
"maybe we're doing something they don't like"You don't have to spend much time at the water cooler to realise everyone (absolutely everyone) hates the overwhelming frequency of ads. And anyone who watches the news is amazed at how shallow it all is.
I realise you need ads to make money. But I also know you don't have to have ads every 5 minutes of a show (especially when Dr Who is reaching the climactic phases of an episode). That's just greedy and obnoxious and only drives people to watch DVDs.
As for the NEWS @ 6. Just maybe if they started paying for journalists to develop in depth news rather than getting pretty reporters to ask how everyone feels - they might just discover that people would start watching the NEWS @ 6.
As it is with 10 minutes of introducing the pretty presenter of the day, 10 minutes of weather, 10 minutes of World Cup waffle and 10 minutes of telling us what they'll tell us after the ad break - that leaves about 2 minutes of actual news (and 18 minutes of ads of course).
And they wonder why viewer numbers drop.
I don't have confidence in freeview to change any of that. I believe those in the industry have lost any idea of what TV is able to do for society. TV is still an important media and has the opportunity to inform and educate as well as entertain - I just don't know if there is anyone left in NZ who wants to bother.
cheers
Bart -
So how much energy was consumed getting David to Auckland to climb the sky tower? Always presuming he actually did climb that tower?
And as a matter of curiosity and in the interest of encouraging home science experiments
How much energy does a screaming baby use?
ooo and is there a way of capturing that energy? Visions of the looming energy crises solved....
cheers
Bart