Category: Tech

Low Fidelity, High Quality

Louis Armstrong and King OliverBack in December I mentioned the WGBH radio program The Jazz Decades, hosted by Ray Smith. This Sunday’s show featured some noteworthy restored 1920’s recordings that are of particular interest to Smith — King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, with Louis Armstrong.

Smith rhapsodizes at length during the twenty five minutes of the program that are on the audio player, recorded off of my computer’s FM tuner. I fiddled with the dipole antenna for a few moments at the beginning, as will be obvious if you listen.

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/APR07/JazzDecadesApr1-07.mp3]

Not being a musician myself, I appreciate these acoustic (non-electrical) recordings more for their historical and technical significance, but Smith’s infectious enthusiasm for the virtuosity of the performances is fun to hear. Note: At one point Smith refers to 1933 when he meant to say 1923.

The Horror of Scanning

Here are two scans of the same thing. Pretty picture, huh? Well, one of them is prettier than the other. See the difference? One image I scanned using the Windows Scanner Wizard, the other I did with the software that came with the scanner. The latter is the better-looking one. The difference is from setting the de-screening feature.

What’s On Netflix Now?

Monkey Business

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/MAR07/Groucho.mp3]

Can you believe that not only do I not own a copy of the Marx Brothers’ Monkey Business, I’ve never even seen it all the way through in a single sitting? Or even a single standing! I’m half an hour into it right now on Netflix Now and — d’oh! — it’s bedtime. Maybe I’ll have to watch it in a single sleeping.

Netflix Fix

Red Dwarf

The latest update to the Netflix Watch Now player seems to have fixed a problem it was having with correctly determining the available space on my C: drive. Of course, what it should really have is the ability to look for other drives. It would find my D: drive much more spacious.

Netflix has added episodes of Red Dwarf, a British sci-fi TV series my brother-in-law Jim turned me onto years ago. If Black Adder shows up online, then I’ll really be happy!

Tech Note

Spam comments have been flooding in lately, a dozen per whack, four or five times daily. It’s possible, while keeping up with them, I’ve accidentally deleted a comment or two. So I’ve enabled a very aggressive, intelligent spam filtering service. Experienced, sophisticated WordPress users praise this spam-stopper highly, so I’m hoping it kills all the bad stuff and leaves the good stuff.