Audio neepery (amateur, antagonistic and slightly deaf version)

[hirez]

Ha! Record player!

The replacement drive elt finally arrived from Germly, so I slung part (a) at assembly (b) and made the entire edifice suffer for its trouble by playing the first 7" out of the box. Which was, er, ELP.

Since the poor animal hadn't been run for a while, the lube on the trunnion shafts and grunge-wheel subframe had gone a bit sticky, but giving it some nice long records to warm up with seems to sorting it right out. Such is the wonder of modern technology, you can print out strobe discs for free off the internet in order to be sure about these things.

I would just like to pause for a moment to consider what's happened since the last time I dug out the vinyl properly, which would have been at Humblebee. Even then, I'd more or less migrated to CD because it was simpler to bung on 'Dummy' or 'Snivilisation' as a soundtrack to an evening of beer, hackery and getting wasted.

I have been able to find and download the user and service manuals for the record player, confirm that the drive-belt was likely past it's sell-by, order same from a posh hi-fi shop in Germany and become mildly narked that it took a week to arrive. The last time I listened to this LP (I am listening to a(n) LP!) - 'Give peace a dance III', a CND benefit compilation - the things that I knew were on the internet were the Usenet, various Sunsite FTP archives (src.doc.ic.ac.uk?) and maybe a demonstration 'home page' at the NCSA in IL. Wherever that was.

The unexpected thing is that vinyl really does sound 'better'.

The rather tiresome thing is that last.fm/audioscrobbler doesn't work.

The not-tiresome thing is that the brief hack with Cucumber and Watir-webdriver worked as advertised. Dunno that it'll lead anywhere, but it was right simple to lash up.

Comments

[blixa23.livejournal.com]

NCSA is in Champaign, Illinois, 2 hours southwest of Chicago. Pat could tell you where. :). Almost went to university there...

Ah, Mosaic...where have you gone? Oh wait, we know. And we wish it would go back.

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

Hurrah for fixing things. Err - what's that about cucumbers ?

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Isn't it.

Cucumber is mostly an 'agile' tool for writing tests and 'features' in something almost but not quite entirely unlike English. However, since you can hook a web-testing framework to the thing, it becomes very easy to bosh out static tests for websites. So you can quickly check that all the 'major' paths through the site still work after a deploy, for instance.

Or, more sensibly, as part of the Jenkins-run pre-deploy testing.

Not that that sort of thing became suddenly relevant over the weekend or anything. No.

[nemesis-to-go.livejournal.com]

I've got that 'Give Peace A Dance' complication - as a big value double CD package in an unfeasibly big box. I think this was some years before they worked out how to get two CDs in a standard-size jewel case. A vintage item in itself now!

[hirez.livejournal.com]

There are great wedges of material that was/should have been on one or other of the 'Funky Alternatives' compliations. Which were indeed an alternative to 'Funky' by being largely not.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

It's not old unless it's uk.ac

[bogwitch64.livejournal.com]

That scratching noise an LP makes always soothes. It brings back falling asleep to The Police (Outlandos de Amour) as a teen.