A few random things:
- Your Humble Blogger has a stage sword of substantial sentimental value that has gotten rusty. I know, and I feel really bad about it, but can anybody help? What products are there for this sort of thing? I would like ideally to (a) remove rust and prevent further rust, and (2) make the thing shiny again. Does anybody have any experience with this sort of thing?
- While I’m at it, if anybody wants to advise me on my computer, which has become so slow, so slow. In particular, having Firefox, Thunderbird (email) and iTunes open simultaneously slows me down to thirty-second or longer waits whenever I need to change programs. Even when not all running simultaneously, any of those three is likely to slow down to a crawl (thirty-second or more waits) if they are open for any substantial length of time. I’m running MS XP 2002 version on an HP, 2.20 GHz, 120MB of RAM. I know, it’s a two year old machine (purchased Jan 2004), but I don’t have a new one budgeted for the next few months. I have Symantec Anti-Virus running, and it doesn’t tell me I’ve got viruses, and I have recently run malware/spyware checks, and nothing comes up there, either. Feh.
- Somewhat related, Gentle Reader Dan P had an interesting suggestion to do a Tohu Bohu group radio station at last.fm, which would essentially be a way to automatically tell everybody in the group what everybody is listening to. In order to do a group, there would have to be ten people signed up, each of which would have to load audioscrobbler and have a (free) account with this company that keeps a log of what music you listen to. Oh, and you’d have to listen to music through the computer often enough to have the thing be interesting. I am reluctant to add anything new onto this computer at present, just because I’m having enough trouble, but are Gentle Readers interested? I could be persuaded, particularly if 9 of y’all want to join in.
- Somewhat related, if any of y’all have music recommendations based on what I’ve mentioned I like, send ’em along. In particular, I’d like to have a band/artist that is still producing albums, whose new albums I would eagerly anticipate. Given my disappointment with the last couple of Elvis Costello albums, and with the last David Byrne album, I’m down to a small handful of people who produce new albums I’d be willing to find a record store to buy. The Dirty Dozen Brass Band (and with them, I prefer their old stuff, without the keyboard), Jim’s Big Ego, Eddie from Ohio, the Klezmatics, Mark Knopfler. Maybe a few more that don’t come to mind just now.
- I asked this before, but does any Gentle Reader have a recommendation for a home-library catalog program? I don’t mind typing in ISBNs, but I’d be willing to buy a bar-code scanner, if the program really worked. I would also be as likely to be interested in some community library thing (like the Library Thing) as the music thing, although the scrobbler appears to have the advantage that I wouldn’t have to do any actual work.
- Do any Gentle Readers do the Mechanical Turk? I was vaguely interested in the idea, both philosophically and, you know, as a way to pick up spare change whilst my Perfect Non-Reader is briefly entertaining herself, but my natural indolence combined with a certain hesitancy to ground-floor this thing, and now that it’s been up for a couple of months, I’m curious how it’s working. The initial page shows only three or four jobs when I load it, but I suspect that there are scads of jobs you only see when you’ve actually completed a few jobs. Anyway, I’m just curious if any of y’all have dipped a toe in that particular water. Quite likely, my computer would be slow enough frequently enough to prevent my actually doing it, anyway.
OK, that’s enough random stuff for a while.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.
* sword no info.
* add RAM, keep the computer from doing its thinking on the hard drive. RAM is very cheap. 256MB, 512MB on one stick are both good options. 1GB would probably stretch the life of the computer an extra year. datamem.com is one good source but may not be helpful identifying what specs the computer requires.
* last.fm would be more useful if i could listen to what people were listening to instead of last.fm’s idea of what they would be listening to if they had different and more widely available music.
* recommendations: i was writing my response as you were writing the request. parallel human computing at its finest.
* library catalog: no info.
* turk: creepy! you don’t get to know who you’re working for! except that it seems to involve lots of real estate work at the moment and you get pennies out of the boom. rats.
Sword: You want NevrDull, I believe. When I bought my sword at the Ren Faire years ago, they sold me a can of it. Using the stuff is extremely tedious, but it’s the sort of thing you can do with your hands when you don’t need them (eg, television, storyreading).
But if it’s really rusty, you probably want to skip straight to a wire-brush, and then polish with NevrDull after that.
Slow computer:
1) double check for spyware, using other software. I like Spybot Search and Destroy.
2) Firefox can grab a lot of memory, and tends to hang onto it. One workaround is to type about:config in the location bar, right click and select “add->boolean”, and add a line that says “config.trim_on_minimize” with a value of true. What this will do is: when you minimize the browser, it releases all the memory. Now if you just minimize the browser from time to time, it will keep it from getting huge; plus if you’re trying to do something else, you can minimize the browser and have all of that memory available.
3) Click Start->Run, type “msconfig”, and it will bring up the utility to configure your system startup. Look through the Services and Startup tabs for things you don’t need to have running automatically — lots of programs install a little helper app that runs on startup and makes the full app faster. Turn ’em off. If you aren’t sure what a particular item is, Google it, which will probably bring up one of the many sites such as http://www.tasklist.org or http://www.bleepingcomputer.com which offer suggestions on whether to allow various executables.
Sword:
This isn’t by any chance from a certain production I was involved with? Just a guess. Anyway, steel wool/wire brush. Then a polish like “Metal Glow”, or NevrDull, or just a little mineral oil, really. It depends a bit, of course, on what it’s made out of, if you know.
Last.fm:
I remember trying this out once; I installed the software and ran it for a day or so, and then removed it so entirely that I don’t remember why. Probably performance issues.
As the one who brought up last.fm, I have this vague sense that I should stick up for it:
Last.fm just went through a major redesign and overhaul, sometime in the past six months or so. The radio app is very much improved–f’rex, it used to be that when you hit Skip or Ban on a song, it would take another 30 seconds to a minute before the next song would start up. Nowadays, everything is well synched-up and Skip/Ban is as close as the internet comes to instantaneous. The recommendation system also got retooled, for the better (to my ear).
I’m not sure exactly what criticism david is making. It’s true, you can’t just listen to one individual’s track list unless they’ve paid for the Personal Radio option. I’m pretty sure this has to do with licensing fees and the legal need to keep people from being able to listen to whatever they want at any time for free.
The group radio stations, on the other hand, simply play songs selected from the track lists of each of the members (so sayeth the FAQ), so the recommendation system isn’t a factor.
I’ve been enjoying listening to the Cat and Girl group radio station, which seems to have a personality to match the comic. After all the very interesting discussion of music that happens here, I thought it would be fun to hear what other people here are listening to, or at least look over the charts for music ideas.
Okay, I think I’ve done my duty. I won’t be heartbroken if no one else is into it, but I thought it was worth suggesting.
(it seems cool. i could swear i saw something… ah, this:
Last.fm creates personalized radio stations for every profile, so if you find someone you like the look of you can tune in to a station that plays their sort of music.
somehow because of other things i saw on the site i took that to mean that replacements were OK.)
of the last 10 songs i heard only 2 can be played by other people. a source of this is un-fuzziness in the matching: Kurib�ta, Kuribota, Kuribota (Bonus Track), Kuribota (Bonustrack), Kuribota [Bonus Track], and Kuribata are counted as different songs. (none of them are streamable anyway…)
nifty – by tagging songs only by the artist’s home region, i get a sketch of how worldly things are. it mostly shows the bias of what we had before and the sudden interest in nearby black folks’ music. a little bit though shows the availability problem for stuff not in english and not in the G8.
1) Nevrdull working. The sword has gone from nasty-looking to dull. Needs more polishing. I’ll work on that, and refrain from double entendres.
B) trim on minimize seems to help a lot. The other thing I’m doing is running my music off an old iBook (quite old, I mean, running 9 and not wireless enough), so that’s one fewer thing going on.
III) Connected with that last one, since I am currently running my music off a hard drive that is unconnected to the internet, the Scrobbler business is not going to work. Sorry. However, since there are substantial annoyances to that second-computer stereo business as well, a gang of last.fm-interested people might be the impetus I require to get back going on this computer. As I understand it, we need 10 altogether to make it work, and we have 3 (Dan P, david and YHB).
Δ) I don’t really have another topic, I’m just making sure the Delta works.
Thanks,
-V.
Huh, I’ll have to try some nevrdull for my rapier.
swords… polishing…
must… not… giggle…