episiarch

10% off at Elusive Disc until 6pm EST Monday 15 Feb -- enter VDAY in special instructions field of checkout page. "The discount WILL NOT be reflected on our website. We will download your order, adjust the price, and then bill your credit card the discounted price." More fine print: Other Elusive Disc promotions or "special sale" items cannot be combined with the specials in this email. This Sale CANNOT be combined with our current 20% OFF Select Music Offer. Normal Elusive Disc, Inc. policy applies to damaged or defective items. Email special items may only be returned for store credit. This offer cannot be applied to any previous orders. NO Exceptions! Cannot be applied to PRE-ORDERS, already discounted items and items notated on our website as 'Not Eligible For Further Discount'. Most 45rpm 180g 2LP Sets are NOT eligible. Price and availability subject to change without notice. Orders with both preorder and in-stock items will have all in-stock items shipped immediately. This offer applies to most items we sell. Some manufacturers such as Aesthetix, Musical Surroundings, Immedia and other products are excluded from these specials. We will contact you if any item you order is not eligible for this offer.

Assorted Android Bug Reports from Randall Munroe, author of XKCD.

Ric, thanks for posting that! I'd been wondering where I could find out about the show specials. A couple notes: - The coupon code they provide for Crossover Mac also works for Crossover Games. I've been using the trial version for a couple of days to play a couple of PC games that I've kinda been missing since I switched to Mac full-time. It works well to satisfy the occasional PC gaming itch, at least for me, though I'm not particularly hardcore. Haven't tried Crossover for non-games yet, but based on my experience with running games, I'm convinced it's both solid and less annoying than running a full Windows environment in VMWare, so I'm going ahead and buying it. - Any Frank Miller fans here (I'm guessing we have some) should have a look at Gelaskins' new offerings. Their market is mostly Macs and iThings, but they cover other devices too.

Penzey's sure spoiled me. Their stuff is so vastly more vivid than what we get elsewhere, it's hard to be satisfied with anything else. Now that we're in the UK it's harder to get their goods (I think last time we got them shipped via a helpful Stateside relative), but we go with Penzey's when we can. Any cooks here who don't know Penzey's yet, treat yourself. The products are really good. It's like going up a solid level or two in some audio system component, but way less expensive.

This is a little off-topic. But since this is the closest thing to a social-networking thread I've found here, this is where I'll post it. A blog post whose title contains the words "Facebook" and "login" turns up high in the Google search results for the words facebook login. The blog post's comments are full of people who apparently got to the page via a search engine and thought they were on Facebook. And then tried to log in. And then complained about not being able to. The fact that it looks nothing like Facebook did not give them sufficient pause to make them have a look around and figure things out. They were trying to log into Facebook, and this unwanted page had shown up; what was Facebook thinking? Seriously, go have a look at those comments. It's mind-boggling. Even if you give the benefit of the doubt to every single comment that could be interpreted as ironic, sarcastic, or trolling, there are still a stunning number of people who misidentified the site, tried to log in, got angry, typed something, and hit Submit before engaging their brains. No wonder phishing attacks work. It's not like I'm unaware of how many nitwits post without thinking. I've seen my share of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAtBki0PsC0, and others. But this instance of Idiocracy-come-true has me honestly groping for words. Credit where due - found this via John Gruber, who commented, [url=http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/11/facebook-login]"All this argument over whether the iPad is too simple

Looks fantastic! And +1 on the Penzey's products. We're big fans.

The occasional squashed blueberry. My daughter is sitting on my lap chomping her way through a basket, and she stuffs the rejects in my mouth.

My Edit Profile page looks nothing like the illustration in that blog entry, and I still can't find the "show the list of people ... in my public profile" checkbox. So for now I'm not buzzing, and my profile says only that my superpower is irritability. Despite this I have one follower, a 'Heather' whom I've never heard of (and whose pic looks like a Second Life avatar unless I miss my guess). So irritable guys, take heart. Apparently there are women out there who are into us. Though they might be purely virtual.

Reference to reports that in an Apple internal Town Hall meeting (company-only meetings that are open to all employees, at least that's what they were when I was there) Jobs called the don't-be-evil slogan bullshit. [url=http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/01/googles-dont-be-evil-mantra-is-bullshit-adobe-is-lazy-apples-steve-jobs/]Google

Jami Sieber - Hidden Sky Eclectic cello plus sorta tribal instruments plus voice. Cool if you like that sort of thing. It's one of my favorite albums to work to. Click the album cover to go to a free legal streaming of it from Magnatune. (I check out a lot of Magnatune music since their purchase license allows you to do things like use it as backing music for a slideshow.)

Multiple privacy concerns, and some other issues, thoughtfully discussed in Google Buzz: Not fit for purpose

Google's shut down a number of music blogs, making the whole blog's content and archives inaccessible not only to readers but to the blog's authors themselves. The issue seems to be accusations of DMCA or other infringement that breach Blogger or Blogspot's Terms of Service, but bloggers are claiming they had permission and encouragement from artists and labels to post the material. More details in the article. The Twitter topic is #musicblogocide2k10. (Yes, it's normally Ric who posts these things, but at this hour I'm assuming he's sleeping the sleep of the just. Hope he won't mind my stepping in.)

Likewise. Brief impressions: it's more Sade. That I haven't heard before. If I were a legitimate music critic I'd be saying something like "the twentysomething ingenue who ensnared us with Diamond Life is back, and while the music is still in every way Sade, it reveals a growing maturity and sophistication..." yada yada etc etc But since I'm just me, my impressions are just: it's some good new Sade and I'm enjoying it.

Here in Windsor it just now went from a few random flakes to serious, partial-whiteout snow, in the time it took me to walk five or six short-ish blocks. We're not going to get dumped on like the mid-Atlantic states, but over here, even a couple inches is seen as a big disruption.

Al, I wish I could tell you. Instead I offer this quiz: What mad holiday will leave Britons consumed with lust next Tuesday, and bring the nation to a near-standstill for hours? Mardi Gras! - Carnavale! - Carnival! - Pancake Day!

Whoops, sorry. I looked away from Voltron's post too fast to catch the headline there.

I don't own a BDP-83 but I read the manual the other day specifically with an eye to seeing if something like that were possible. It does not look like it is. The USB ports support only connection of a storage device. Edit: To amplify a bit on that point: when the BDP-83 is talking to a USB thumb drive or hard drive, it is acting as the master in the connection, and the drive as the slave. When the Mac Mini talks to a USB DAC, the Mac Mini is acting as the USB master and the DAC as the slave. So there is not even close to being a protocol match between the Oppo and the Mac Mini: each expects to be the master in the connection. And a USB storage device just isn't a USB audio device in terms of structure and protocol...among other things, storage devices use the USB block device protocol, while DACs use a streaming protocol (usually isochronous I believe, but I haven't looked into this in a while . . . anyway, it's not a block-structured device like a disk drive).

That's the cheese rolling at Cooper's Hill, isn't it?

Looks like it's just the update of Aperture, no MBP revs that I can see. They're all still Core 2 Duo.

I'm joining the club. Anybody here have experience with hand held audio, JH's UK dealer? I can also order through JH directly, but going through the UK dealer *seems* simpler. I'm thinking black eye blue with clear backplate. Nobody's experienced any yellowing of the clear casings, right?

Oh, another interesting difference. Do I understand from the above that the HA-006+ has volume-controlled preamp outs on the back? On the Gilmore Lite they're just passive loop outs. (GS-1 has both.)

I have to admit that's an upgrade possibility I hadn't given a lot of thought to.

Boarding passes.

I think it would actually be quite interesting to compare an HA-006+ with a Gilmore Lite and, if possible, a GS-1 -- though with a range of headphones, not just JH13s. Certainly a Gilmore Lite and a GS-1 exhibit audible differences (especially in dynamic passages) and it would be nice to know where the HA-006+ falls in comparison. Edit: by audible differences I don't mean things that require hours of listening to pick out -- in this case I mean I really did not want to learn that my beloved GLite was so thoroughly bested by its bigger and more expensive brother, but the realization was rapidly forced on me. YMMV.

The YouTube introduction of the app, with Ira Glass narrating as they show off the features, is a lot of fun.