Geekery, thou art a harsh mistress

[andrewducker]

Currently I am:
Downloading music from AllofMP3.com that is at a higher bit-rate than the music I had (discovered that all of my Sisters of Mercy was at 56kbps, having been encoded about 9 years ago when space was at a higher premium than quality).
Copying all of the music I like onto my new 8GB iPod Nano.
Converting this fantastic talk on MITs fabrication labs into avi (so I can watch it on TV rather than the PC). (cheers to heron61 for that one)

Strangely, my PC has ground to a near halt. If I did this kind of thing a lot then I suspect I'd need one of those fancy multi-core things I've heard so much about :->

Comments

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

I was surprised at just how noticeable the difference in quality was when going from an album I'd downloadz0r3d as mp3s to the actual purchased CD.

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

Having been using Windows at work for a couple of months, I've found that it seems to cope miserably with having more than one process demanding CPU at the same time. It's most strange, even with do disk access my workstation can become unresponsive when I'm running 3 or 4 compute-intensive things at a time.

Manually tweaking the process priorities in Task Manager to keep them below interactive levels helps a bit, but not that much. I find it very... perplexing. Scheduling CPU for interactive systems is supposed to be a solved problem, goddammit. And in fact some of the people that helped solve it are working for Microsoft Research.

And while I'm at it, how on earth am I supposed to get Windows to swap the caps-lock and control keys round? I still haven't figured that out...

[alpha-c3ntaur.livejournal.com]

Why would you want to do that. It would make it so much more difficult to press Ctrl + Alt + Del

[recycled-sales.livejournal.com]

I've noticed it's mainly down to USB devices. As soon as there's a sustained transfer over the USB bus it seems to nerf performance.

Then again, nerfed performance with 2Gb of RAM and an A64 3500 isn't too bad :)

[andrewducker]

Yeah, it seems to be IO that really blocks windows. If it's reading from the disk (or USB) then things really slow to a halt.

[andrewducker]

Google is your friend:
http://www.manicai.net/comp/swap-caps-ctrl.html
http://johnhaller.com/jh/useful_stuff/disable_caps_lock/

You didn't look very hard, did you? :-P

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

zounds! Page last updated, October 2006... round about just after the last time I looked. Awesome!

With one fell swoop, Windows on my ThinkPad becomes usable. Ta.

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

If there are any of the Sisters of Mercy albums you can't get there, let me know as I just bought a moderately large stack of CDs from a chap at work at 50p each :-)

[andrewducker]

Well, I managed to get Vision Thing before I ran out of credit (and it won't let me refill). The rest of them I still need to pick up.

If you have them in MP3 format I'd be terribly appreciative...

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

Sure, what bit rate and do you have an FTP site or similar I can upload them to (I could try emailing them I guess, but probably FTP is easier ... I could stick them in my CiX space but I think I only have 100Mb there and that's like one album :-) ... any thoughts?)

[andrewducker]

server: ducker.org.uk
username: sisters@ducker.org.uk
password: mercy

Let me know when it's there, and if there's anything I can offer in return...

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

Stuff uploading overnight

Stuff I can lay my hands on quickly
Albums:
Napalm Gods
Welcome to the Temple of Love

Singles:
Doctor Jeep
More
Under the Gun
Echoes Vol II
Echoes Vol III
(Echoes are live+demo tracks including Jolene, Ghostrider and Louie Louie)

My copies of Some Wander ... and a Slight Case of Overbombing are in my lockup and I can get them later if you need them)

BitTorrent:
Floodland
Disguised in Black
First and Last and Always
Some Girls Wander By Mistake
Vision Thing

(I've downloaded a number of albums, some of which may have been "wrecked" by the uploaders with bursts of static or switching in the middle of a song for ten seconds to a different song ... I haven't tested these particular downloads, but I do have alternative downloads at different bit rates for some of them so anything that doesn't work, let me know and we'll try a different version)

I'm getting an upload speed of around 40-43KBps, which means an average track takes around 2-5 minutes to upload, and as there are over 100 tracks, this is going to take some hours.

I've started with the torrents (though in mucking about I think I need to restart sending Floodland), and in the morning (if they are finished) I'll start the actual CD rips

There may well be some stuff you've got I'd be interested in ... you'll have to let me know what categories of music you're likely to be able to lay your hands on...

... and if you've got a couple of good "this are the classic tracks everyone knows" compilations for goth, industrial or EBM I'd certainly be interested in those!

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

Ok, disk quota reached ... I assume that means your ftp site is now full :-(

I don't know if I have an upper limit, but I know they charge me some ridiculously high amount if I go over my average quota for the month, so I'll stick stuff up on my webspace for one day, so if I'll leave the upload running to
http://www.magician.co.uk/som/
Grab the stuff as soon as you can and post back here to let me know I can delete it off again :-)

[andrewducker]

Ran out of disk space (I allocated 300MB, and had another 50MB spare on top of that, but some large emails must have come in). I've downloaded the stuff that went up though, and deleted it.

Cheers for the stuff so far - I'll post a list of what I have lying about tonight, so you can see if there's anything you'd like.