Wait, wait, wait; hold the phone. There's more‽ I thought "Creature Comforts" was a one-off! OMG SQUEE!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmJuY1QzGXk
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Last week I was driving down in Washington, on a trip to retrieve an item from careful custody since the 2019 end of my/grandparents' house down there. I had NPR on the radio, and behind one or another talking segment there was an intriguing piano rendition of "Miss Gradenko", by The Police.
I like that song, and I liked what I could (almost sorta) hear of that rendition, so once back home I set out to find it. It wasn't hard to home in on the Hazelrigg Bros; I found this rehearsal version on EwTube.
Cool, neato, excellent, but not quite the version I'd heard on the radio. Eventually I found the wellspring. These Hazelrigg Bros "intepreted" (their word) the whole of the Synchronicity album on piano and cello and drums.
No samples, not even five-second snippets. No availability but via a staggeringly precious, obnoxiously up-themselves distributionship full of selfgratulatory audiophile piffle. The album is preferentially proffered as tracks in a format the likes of you certainly hasn't ever heard of—your DAC probably only cost four figures, if you even have one, god!
Look, just…fine »exasperated sigh« you can buy the album as regular ol' normal ol' boring ol' inferior ol' gross ol' terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad .wavs if you're not really serious; please do it quickly and go away before you stink up the place overly much.
Oh…oh, did you think that was all? You thought you'd what, pay the money and download the files? »indulgent, scornful little half-chuckle« Er…no. Pay the money, then you will download and install our bespoke app. You can ignore the "Welcome to the community" email; that's auto-generated and certainly isn't meant for…your kind.
Once you've installed the special Chinpòkòmòn app, then you may enter this key code we're giving you—don't think it makes you as good as us; it doesn't—and proceed to download the tracks from within the app. Now go away.
Thusly I got the tracks, then immediately converted them to .m4a (.mp3 would've been fine with me, too), and I'll listen to them in awhile when the yuck from the procurement experience has faded.
Jesus tapdancing Christ on a 3-speed Schwinn. I understand that audiophilia is a thing, and there are people who get off on it. Thing is, there are people (such as @octothorpe ) who manage—somehow, some way—do so without being fœtid douchenuggets about it. So it is possible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAEtRQ9PIIw&t=11s
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When llllllogic
Annnnd proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead,
And the White Knight is talking backwards,
And the Red Queen's off her meds,
Rememberrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
What the Dor! Mouse! said:
Feed your heaaaaaaaad!
Feed your heaaaaaaaaaaaEAD!!
[#]LyricsAsTheyShouldBe
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Sorry, but…what is Pixelfed? Is it a platform, a sort of para-mastodon? Is it a plug-in? An app? I'm trying, but so far I don't understand.
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This is gonna get extra super nerdy and long, so buckle in.
A couple years ago we had a heat pump installed. Our gas furnace was 23 years old and working fine, but there was an unusually tall stack of incentives and rebates for getting a heat pump, and that would also give us A/C, and it's less traumatic to replace a furnace on our schedule rather than the furnace's.
I had the installers cut into the air return duct in the basement where it passed by the wall, to provide an air return inlet down there rather than just the one on the main floor. That worked well, but the plastic grille they installed doesn't take kindly to the trick of pushing a twist of paper napkin between the slats with a few drops of essential oil on—sandalwood or rosemary or whatever—to help out after a smelly cooking operation or otherwise like that. The plastic goes sticky in re the oil, and doesn't let go the remains of the napkin.
So I thought I'd replace it by a metal one, what I picked up at Home Despot. Made in Canada; I was shocked (tho I probably shouldn't've been; registers and grates and grilles and suchlike are still an industry here).
Its screw holes were a fraction of an inch closer together than the plastic grate's ones. Not enough to stop me fitting it, just one of the screws went into the wall hole slightly cockeyed.
The next morning I was putting breakfast together when I became aware of a noise, sort of a droning/ringing. Maybe a hydraulic pump, one of the nearby restaurants getting its grease traps cleaned or something? No such trucks out in the laneway, and sticking my head outside made it clear the noise wasn't out there.
It got louder when I took a basket of laundry downstairs to the basement, and I was instantly time-transported nearly 40 years back to…
…I grew up in a U.S. suburb. A decade and half before we came along, our house had been built to order for a General Electric macher. Everything in it came from GE that could've; appliances, switches and outlets, and the two furnaces—a vertical in the basement for that and the main floor; a horizontal in the attic amidst the itchy rock wool for the upper floor—each with a de luxe GE electronic air cleaner (they didn't work by the time we lived there) and corresponding dual A/C (which did).
Even the thermostats were GE items, and the install had been posh as well. Across the upstairs hall from my bedroom were two full-width air returns, one near the floor and one near the ceiling, presumably to optimize temperature control in both heating and aircon seasons.
A lot of this was wankery; the house wasn't small, but neither was it anywhere near big enough to warrant the fancy GE intercom with a speaker in each room and one next to the front door. And the climate wasn't extreme; I reckon the house would've been fine with one each furnace and A/C, appropriately specified.
Nevertheless, there were two. By and by, the upstairs furnace needed replacement at a few over 20 years old, as they do. Dad's father was a very good HVAC engineer, and he helped guide the selection of the new furnace and equipment.
The furnaces of the late 1980s were rather more efficient than what had gone before. One of the differences was higher-speed, direct-drive blowers to move more air. Very fine.
Only once the new furnace had been installed, there was a weird new noise when the blower was running, but only sometimes: a sort of ringing/droning, always at one pitch, but varying in volume seemingly at random. When it happened, it heterodyned.
The installers came back a few times trying to find and silence it, without success. The furnace and its install were checked thoroughly, multiple times. Grandpa suggested soft rubber isolators between the furnace and the attic floor, and flex joints in the supply and return ducts. Made perfect sense, so these were added, and the noise carried right on.
Eventually we just gave up and lived with it. It was annoying, but the furnace worked fine and we, the installers, and even grandpa had run out of ideas about the noise.
Back to 2025: I quickly traced the noise to the metal grate I'd installed the night before, which went quiet as soon as I put a hand firmly on it.
It was the same noise, minus the heterodyning because 2025-me was dealing with only one grate. It was those two air return grates fluttering at high frequency against the wall in sympathy with the vibrations from the high-speed blower, making alllllllmost the same note, hence the heterodyning. Putting strips of rubber or Velcro or suchlike between the grates and the wall would've silenced it, sure.
I removed the metal grate, took it back to Home Despot, and put back the plastic one for now.
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"Alice's Restaurant" ain't awful, as earworms go.
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"Kudos" is not plural; there is no singular "kudo".
That's all.
@troublewithwords
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It's Billmas!
Happy birthday, my belovèd @3DBill @ytetic !
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I've a friend in a medium-high engineering-administrative position at a large, well-known American corporation, one of the world's few to make their kind of very large, very expensive product used to transport people and things long distances up and away.
The corporation have been experiencing turbulence in recent years, widely attributed to executive priorities focused on quarterly profits rather than the engineering excellence which built the company's formerly-stellar reputation.
The new(est) CEO has decreed that 25 per cent of the corporation's functions shall have "AI" added to them this year.
Surely that will make everything all better without causing any new problems or anything like that; "AI" makes everything better, no matter what, right?
@troublewithwords
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“The findings revealed a significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool usage and critical thinking abilities".
Nawshit, rilly?
https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/15/1/6
@troublewithwords
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…while this, on the other hand, pretty much has to be an inside job.
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In Canada there's a cheap-tools chain called Princess Auto. It's more or less similar to Harbor Freight (Hazard Fraught). This is their house brand of tools; as far as I know they don't offer tee shirts or other branded merch—which makes me guess it's probably not an inside job.
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Have you seen this drain snake? I haven't; not since the September '23 day I took this pic. I've combed the garage, the basement, the cellar, the furnace closet…nothing but nope. Which leaves me only one way to find it: buy another. X-(
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I did not know I speak Swedish.
https://www.dagensps.se/motor/expertlarm-de-nya-stralkastarna-ar-en-trafikfara/
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Well, that was a night. I got up at 2:25am to be ~awake for a string of 11 phone interviews with CBC radio stations across the country between 3:00 and 6:00. Kitchener-Waterloo (3am) cancelled on account of technical difficulties, leaving Montreal (3:10), Cape Breton (3:20), Windsor (3:40), Quebec City (3:50), Winnipeg (4:20), Saskatoon (4:40), Ontario (provincewide, 4:50), Victoria (5:10), Vancouver (5:40), and Newfoundland (6:00, 6:30 in Newfoundland, lol).
Weird way to do syndication. All the interviews had more or less the same lead-up and introduction ("In the quest for road safety, automakers are increasingly turning to LED headlights, but some drivers say they're just too bright and can be distracting/blinding. Here to discuss that is Daniel Stern, Chief Editor of Driving Vision News, a technical journal for vehicle lighting. Good morning, Daniel"). Then some or all of these questions:
• How are LED headlamps different to previous kinds?
• What makes them more glaring?
• Why are automakers using them?
• What do you hear about them from drivers?
• What can drivers do about the glare?
• Are automakers and regulators going to do anything about it?
Then the same wrap up, restating my name and title and thanking me. Some of the interviews were live on air, and some were recorded for later.
This could've been recorded once and instantly sent out to all those stations for use whenever, but then it wouldn't've been each show's host asking the questions, I guess.
Anyhow: I'm sleep-deprove today.
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'Twas the night before Christmas; outside the garage, not a pickup was moving—not even this Dodge.
(Years ago I appreciated my neighbour’s creativity, and pressed my car’s headlamps into service as makeshift photo lighting.)
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@3DBill @Furball (apart from fixins to fix tunafish sandwiches, I mean)
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Minutes ago, a dude with quite an orange beard walked in—wearing a head-to-toe tiger suit—to the supermarket where @3DBill and I were shopping. I got distracted and walked off with some other shopper's buggy. That got cleared up, and we crossed paths with the tiger a few times and gave/got big smiles.
As we queued to pay, I saw a great big box of Frosted Flakes in his buggy. Perfect! What else would a tiger be shopping for‽
@Furball
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ZOMG SQUEE, the Infinite Jukebox is back!!!
https://eternalboxmirror.xyz/jukebox_go.html?id=2pbWkjtGtjkzBdZ95GFINm&thresh=52&bp=64,82,46
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Meshingly.
The word of the day is "meshingly". Replace the final 'y' by an 'e' and it'd sound Yiddish, nu!
From US Patent № 3177728A.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US3177728A
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text/gemini