Thefoggiest.dev

August 05, 2024

A few days ago, I mentioned, in a post about Bluetooth vs analogue audio, that my beloved Sennheiser Momentum 2 headphones would outlast any wireless device I own, simply because it has no lithium-ion battery inside which will over time crystallise, making the device unusable. Though I still think that was a valid point, the picture that post had of said headphones showed them in a less than perfect state. Since I bought these headphones in 2017, I've been using them daily, and the wear and tear on the cushioned ear pads had recently become apparent.

My Sennheiser Momentum 2 with the damage encircled.

The problem wasn't that I couldn't use them any more, it was just that wherever I would put them, on the table, in its pouch or on my head, it would leave these tiny black crumbles, each of them warning me about the further demise of what was my favourite way of enjoying Bach and other music.

Not inclined to merely replace them, which would, after all, be the modern thing to do, I set out to find two replacement pads. But there I encountered the other observation I also made in that post, namely that it is quite challenging to search online for wired audio device parts, and my headphones were, after all, ancient. Seven years is nothing short of an eternity in the cut-throat world that is selling high-end personal audio apparel with German brand naming, or indeed, capitalism. So I did what anyone would do in my situation and fired up my internet modem to ask the friendly and always helpful people at Reddit what to buy. Sadly, Reddit, it seemed, had moved on as the rest of the world had.

I found that there are in fact pads for all types of headphones, and quite a few seemed to have the precise measurements of my headphone's ear cups. Attaching them was mentioned as somewhat tricky. The back of the ear pad had a little edge that had to be inserted into a very thin slot that circumvented both cups. I felt I was up to the task.

When they arrived at my doorstep, I had to endure a small disappointment. It weren't only the height and the width of the ear pads that were important. It appeared, the size of the edge that had to be inserted also was a parameter, and those of the ones I had ordered were too broad.

To the right the original damaged ear pad, to the left its replacement.

No matter how hard I tried, there was no way I could fit them around the cups. It felt just like I was trying to put a tyre around a bicycle wheel that was too big for it. So I went online again and tried to compare edge sizes of what I found. None had them listed, nor did I have an official statement how broad they had to be. I ordered a second pair that at least looked right and hoped for the best.

When they arrived, it took me all of three minutes to put both of them on my ear cups.

Shiny new ear pads for, hopefully, another seven years of Bach and other music.

I have not the faintest idea if these new ear pads are of the same quality as the ones that originally came with my headphones. I don't hear any difference, so at least the little sheet at the back that lets through the sound is similar. They do feel a little different around the eras, but that's because they're new. Seven years from now, I'll know.

August 01, 2024

When I say that writing feels meditative to me, I mean that there are always a lot of things going on that take up brain space, or energy if you will, and putting them to paper, however electronically, transfers some of that energy consumption to the paper as well. Below is the list of things competing for attention in my brain at this moment.

Another book

I seem to have started writing a second book. I catch myself writing scenes and inventing characters and motivations and trying to think of ways to integrate those and what else I could use. This is worrying. Writing a book is fun, but the monthly empty transaction summaries from Kindle Direct Publishing seem to be designed to discourage writing any further books, or anything at all.

Astrophotography

Even more worrying, both for my health and my finances, is that I seem to be getting back into astrophotography. As an unmistakably direct and very not abstract result of the climate catastrophe that has been upon us since the late 19th century, we've had autumn in this country since last September, as made apparent by storms and rain and perpetual cloudiness. Since I was very little, I could always tell people which bright star was in fact Jupiter or Venus, these days I need to look up the freaking moon phase on my phone. So I do have a clue why I clicked yes on that invitation to an all-weekend star party in the south-west of Belgium. Let's hope we'll have skies as clear as during the pandemic.

It means that I've already bought a new DSLR (second hand) for two reasons: it is a full frame camera, which means its sensor has the same size as original 35mm film, and, secondly, it has live view, which means that I can focus using the screen instead of having to look through the ocular. Stars being hugely out of focus was one of my two big problems last time I attempted this, so this should help with that. I also bought a red dot finder to help with the other problem: all previous attempts at taking night sky pictures failed because I could never align my setup with Polaris. This alignment is necessary for the setup to compensate for the Earth's movement while taking long exposures. With my other scope, I have excellent experience pointing it to stars using one of those devices, so that should help too. Of course, now I need a bigger counterweight, so this is quickly (again) becoming a money sink. Also, I'm unsure what late night observation sessions will do to my insomnia. The new camera seems to be talking to Indi/Ekos, but not flawlessly, so I'll have to look into that.

Quartet

About two months ago, while on the train back from Utrecht to Amsterdam, I was talking with a friend who was occupying the seat next to me. Both her and I had spent the day rehearsing Kurt Weill's second symphony, and I was telling her I was thinking about finding people to form a string quartet but was feeling insecure about it, which was why I hadn't done that earlier. Years ago, I used to play in quartets and other small ensembles all the time and I really miss doing that. She said she was up to it as well, so we reached out to two others, and last Thursday we were rehearsing already for the third time. I find this is taking up quite a lot of brain space because it is so much fun, I really want this is to succeed. How I would define success, I haven't a clue.

Observations

Not all that takes up energy and/or brain space is bad. Energy in the emotional sense is an odd concept. Energy is something you need a sufficient amount of to spend. As soon as it is spent, you can't go on doing whatever's consuming the energy. A car will stop going if it runs out of gas. The fact that I found three people to make music with regularly is typically seen as something to get energy from. But because it's still early days, I'm worried one or two of them will realise it's not for them, which takes energy. There are more things I didn't even mention, like, for example, how much fun my kids have with each other and how I am deeply disappointed with my profession, but can't switch jobs.

I could divide these into positive energy delivering thoughts and negative energy taking thoughts, but since both types keep going on, they'd either have to balance each other out or the whole energy metaphor in this context is not that useful. I find the concept of "brain space" much more useful because it really feels like these things are competing for attention in my head. Only when making a list of them, like above, I realise I'm forgetting one or two. This is consistent with the idea that committing thoughts to "paper" will move the space taking part to said paper. This is useful because while I'm writing this, I should be doing other things, and I'm starting to realise why I'm not.

Books I'm reading:

• Isaac Asimov, The complete robot
• J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (Dutch translation, to my 10-year-old son: he loves it)
• Paul Biegel, Haas (to my 8-year-old son, he loves anything by Paul Biegel)
• Sarah Jaffe, Work won't love you back
• Marten Toonder, Als dat maar goed gaat (for when I'm tired)

Games I'm playing:

• Black Cyclon (MSX2)
• Pioneer (PC)

Music I'm studying:

• Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony Nr. 9 in d minor, op. 125 “Ode an die Freude”
• Philip Glass, String Quartet nr. 3 “Mishima”
• Amy Beach, String Quartet, op. 89

Running in July:

• Runs: 6
• Total distance: 41.42 km
• Longest run: 16.99 km
• Fastest pace: 4:39 min/km

July 29, 2024

I love to run. I try to go running three times a week. It is fun, meditative, helps me sleep better, focus more and generally makes me feel better. So two times a week I do a short run and the third time I go for a longer one, mostly between 12 and 21 kilometres. My record is 31 kilometres. It took me 3:06:20, with an average pace of 5:52 min/km. I'm not a fast runner.

Not too far from my home, alongside the highway that circumvents my town, there is a green zone that is separated from the highway by a huge semi-transparent wall that blocks sound quite effectively. The green zone has children's playgrounds, school gardens and footpaths that are ideal for running, or walking dogs. In the middle of this green zone is a small canal, which also houses animals like birds and fish. Dogs don't cross them and, on one side of the canal, they are allowed to roam around freely. I think that is a good thing. These animals need to stretch their legs as much as I do, and I can go running on the other side of the canal, which is just as nice.

Part of my run. The blue fragment I was walking to try not to provoke or startle a dog that was not on a leash and whose owner appeared focused on their phone.

The problem is that when people walk their dogs on that side, they also let them go about freely. More often than I'd like, they (the dogs, not the owners) see me running and either start barking or, worse, start chasing me. I'm sure for many of them it's just for fun, but when they're right behind me, I can't see that. I've never actually been attacked, but it makes me apprehensive as well as annoyed with their owners, makes me lose focus and tempo and forget my technique, which can result in running injuries.

I don't consider myself afraid of dogs, but they are fast and have sharp teeth and even the most well-educated dog can, when triggered, forget its education and assault someone. Every year, 150,000 people (links to site in Dutch) in my country are bitten by a dog, a third of which need medical attention. Most of them are children. About 6.5% of all Dutch inhabitants are younger than 5 years, but 20% of people who died from dog bites between 1981 and 2006 were of that age. Children are usually bitten in their face, and 64% at or around their own home.

Another part of the same run.

What triggered this post, though, wasn't another unpleasant encounter with a dog. It was an article in Ars Technica called “Is having a pet good for you? The fuzzy science of pet ownership”. The article is about psychologist Hal Herzog, who is questioning numerous studies stating that pet ownership is good for your mental and physical health. It turns out the pet care industry has funded a lot of these studies. Other “studies often fail to find any robust link between pets and human well-being; some even find evidence of harm. Often, the studies simply can’t determine whether pets cause the observed effect or are simply correlated with it.”

I was surprised when learning this. With me as well as virtually any dog owner whom I've spoken to, the idea that living with pets has beneficial health effects seems unquestioned. Increased levels of oxytocins when petting an animal lowers cortisol levels, thereby diminishing stress. Pets are said to work against loneliness and can even prevent heart attacks. It is the research that arrives at these statements that Herzog writes about. When people who are otherwise inclined towards a stationary existence need to walk their dog three times a day, attributing health benefits to the dog is missing the point.

LOCA, a Dutch company that offers dog training, has a very informative and well-meant page called “My dog bit my child” (translation mine), where they explain the risk of dogs and small children. The article states that a “dog that bites out of pleasure or pain has no choice. He shows reflexive behaviour.” If a company whose business it is to help people train dogs admits that dogs' natural reflexes will surface, despite training, how can it be that every dog owner invariably claims their pet is harmless? The page concludes: “Unfortunately, there is no magic formula to prevent your child from being bitten by your dog. (...) Thinking that a normal dog would never bite a child or that they will take care of it themselves are recipes for accidents!” (translation mine)

The third time of that same run.

Again, I'm not afraid of dogs, but I find most dog owners are not aware of these facts. Dogs bite when playing, when startled or when provoked, situations easily created in an area where many trees block sight and where people like me go for exercise. Whenever I see a dog without a leash, I always stop running and start walking until I'm well past the dog and its owner, to continue my running there. Walking also twice calmed me down enough to ask the owner politely to put their dog on a leash. Both owers complained about the lack of signs indicating whether they had to. They were right, but you'd think a dog owner knows precisely where they can unleash their dog and where they can't.

Some helpful links:

• How to React if a Mean Dog Chases You (WikiHow)
• How To Stop Your Dog From Chasing Joggers
• A map indicating where in Amsterdam you can unleash your dog, and where not

July 25, 2024

The beige machine below is an Amiga.

An Amiga with a mouse

The Amiga (1986) was the computer that was arguably the best 16-bit home computing and gaming platform of the eighties, the computer that Andy Warhol arted on and that came with a multitasking GUI operating system. It also used a mouse, and so did its competition, the Atari ST and the Mac.

From 1986 onwards, a serious computer needed a mouse, so the 8-bitters got their mice as well, even though their owners would have to wait for three more decades for multitasking GUI operating systems. But anyone who has ever seen Douglas Englebart's Mother Of All Demos, knows that a single pointing device will simply not do.

Two mice connected to my Sony HB-F1XV MSX2+ computer

This is what must have gone through the heads of the people at Radarsoft (still in business) when they were crafting their 1987 game Breaker. They decided to have it support not just one but two mice, apart from the keyboard and both controllers.

Breaker's player and input control screen

Breaker for MSX2 is an endlessly upward scrolling mix between a breakout clone and a pinball machine that can be played with either one or two players. It is addictive, smooth and colourful (it uses 256 colour mode). It feels cheerful and sounds like a pinball machine. Breaker can be played using controllers and/or the keyboard, but should really be played using the mouse, and in case of two players, two mice. Indeed, since an MSX mouse connects to a joystick port, connecting two is just as straightforward as just one.

In Breaker's single-player mode, the player must use two bats to bounce a ball in the right direction to hit bricks that will vanish when hit, thereby clearing an upward path. The upper bat can be moved in all directions, while the lower one can only move left and right. In single-player mode, horizontal movements of both bats are in sync. Whenever the ball would move beyond the top of the screen, the screen scrolls upward. When the ball falls through the bottom of the screen, the player(s) lose(s) a ball. When the number of balls in reserve reaches zero, the game is over. The reason that mice work so well in this game is that the bats become mouse cursors.

Playing Breaker with two players

In two-player mode, the bats have different colours and can move independently, so player one can go left while player two goes right. The lower bat can still only move left and right. To keep the game interesting for both players, the bats switch position every few levels.

The game is quite straightforward. There are differently coloured blocks which deliver a varying number of points, blocks with arrows sending the ball into the pointed direction, blocks that shrink or grow the bats, or remove the top one for a minute, which is when you start losing balls fast. To get more balls, there are blocks decorated with a picture of a ball, each in one of four different colours. Hit all four of those before hitting one of the colours you already hit, and you get an extra ball.

It took some effort to get past this one.

Around and between the blocks are walls that look like they're made of stone or metal that are sometimes tricky to navigate around, especially when you have to get the ball into a small horizontal corridor. It's quite difficult to direct the ball to where you want it or away from where you don't. Breaker goes on continually from one level to the next without pause, except for the shortcuts that take a moment to transport you right to the next level. Depending on how the blocks are layed-out, it can be frantic at times, but lowering the upper bat usually also lowers the speed of the game.

Level numbers are two digits, but after level 99 you're not there yet. You just get a brand-new level 0. There is an end though, of sorts, right after a level that is particularly tricky, if not frustrating after some time, to get through. At some point, you just can't advance anymore because there's a wall and some text telling you so. I had a lot of fun playing Breaker with my ten-year-old son, who is steadily becoming faster than I am with this kind of game. I had hoped to have us both use a mouse, but the Philips one wasn't as precise as it once was, and he preferred a controller anyway. If you have a chance, play this together. It's fun.

Also, if you don't own an MSX computer (can happen to anyone, don't worry), you can play Breaker online here.

July 22, 2024

While I receive most of my bills and other correspondence from companies and governments electronically, some of them insist on sending paper. This is annoying. They invariably come in envelopes with a little plastic window for the address. This plastic has to be thrown away responsibly and separate from the envelope's paper. Also, the document itself needs to be thrown away as sustainably as possible. Many of them contain personal information about me or my family, so I have to shred them first, which uses electricity.

As if this isn't laborious enough, many of these documents are important to archive. I used to have a real filing cabinet, but more than a decade ago I decided I wasn't prepared to dedicate the space any more. So since then I've owned flatbed scanners. Until recently, I've depended on Xsane to scan the pages of each document into separate .png files and concatenate them into PDF-files using ImageMagick. Then I would check out the resulting file using Okular:

With the file open in Okular and my prompt back, I could give it a sensible name starting with, what else, an ISO-date, after which I would archive it in a directory with the sender's name on my personal archive over a simple ssh mount. Easy as pie, but apart from the again somewhat laborious scanning and converting, the resulting PDFs also had the problem that they were just pictures. They could not be read by tools like grep, so searching was impossible.

Skanpage scanning Philip Glass' second string quartet

Enter Skanpage. Skanpage is a much more modern application that integrates nicely with KDE. It has a friendly unified UI. Skanpage takes all the effort out of scanning, by allowing to scan all the pages and arrange them in a single document before saving it as PDF. Better yet, it offers to perform Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on the document, making them searchable by any tool I want.

Version 24.0.5, at least in the build I get with Arch's Pacman, seems to have a small bug where selecting a different directory to save the file to isn't immediately reflected in the UI, which is confusing. It doesn't seem to be a known issue, so I'll have to look into that.

Now all I need is a script to recursively go through directories of my existing PDFs, OCR'ing them and replacing the original files, I suppose.