samedi 8 mars 2003

Ouangaladougou Wiser than occasionally he looks, Thomas refused to rise to Karin's bait and tweak the capital in his dateline when he reported on Fespaco 2003 during a busman's holiday to 'the land of incorruptible people'. Chicken! I'm sure some sub wouldn't have noticed. Apart from the Beeb, inevitably, and in, French, on RFI, African film events like this still get virtually zilch coverage on the Web. Much of the best regular black cinema news is to be found on US-based sites. 'tis a pity, if unsurprising. Thomas failed to come back with a noteworthy tan, equally unsurprising when the temperature was sometimes around 40°C (104°F). I await his travelogue with interest. A nice introduction to Burkina Faso, one of Africa's poorest and most intriguing countries, was put together by Peace Corps volunteer Cathy Seeley. One reason I bookmarked this was because it's also a good read for kids. I don't know what Ouagadougou means. 9:18:22 PM  link   your views? [] Of Pogue and Rogue Amoeba David Pogue this week triggered off yet more discussion, again at the NY Times, on the wrongs and rights of downloaded music with a multi-platform, mainly negative review of available legal download services: 'The Internet as Jukebox, at a Price.' At TS, meanwhile, Highmac was wondering about "recording streamed sound". Otherwise interpreted, he wanted to know if he could use his computer like a tape recorder for radio. Two recommendations came up: Streamripper at the Open Source software development site was one. I haven't tried it. Audio Hijack, the second at $16 with a 15-day trial period and this amusing icon, will "enhance the audio output of any Cocoa or Carbon application on your Mac", claim the makers, but more importantly to my ears, it "can record any audio being played through it to an AIFF file, for later playback." I've used it frequently with RealPlayer to save radio programmes. Very handy! Caution: direct download (Mac OS X, 2.1 MB) But those AIFF files can take up one heck of a lot of hard disk space, just like your average commercial 650MB CD for an hour or so of music. And what of getting Audio Hijack to behave even more like recorders, with a pause function and a timer? The Hijackers at rogue amoeba, as immodest as they are gifted, have thought of me and all the others who have yet to learn how to write scripts for such tasks. AH Pro does cost $30 (with a $14 discount for licensed AH users), but also offers now to record radio streams into MP3 format. Now there's a disk space-saver worth adding to the software wishlist. Here's hoping that what users choose to do with Audio Hijack doesn't send the rogue amoeba people, whose support and responsiveness to Mac OS upgrades is commendable, afoul of the industry and copyright hawks. 6:55:06 PM  link   your views? [] Breaking the ice The noise splintering ice can make is ear-shattering. "New evidence from a rapidly warming part of Antarctica suggests that ice can flow into the sea much more readily than had been predicted, perhaps leading to an accelerated rise in sea levels from global warming. "Many polar and ice experts said the new study, to be published today in the journal Science, suggested that seas might rise as much as several yards over the next several centuries. They called that prospect a slow-motion disaster, the cost of which — in lost shorelines, salt in water supplies, and damaged ecosystems — would be borne by many future generations." The teeny hassle with the New York Times site is the free registration obligation before proceeding to such articles, but that's swiftly done. Three or four years back, I read Antarctica, found it terrific! More, I'd imagine, on Kim Stanley Robinson, another day. When the climate's at the top of my 'worrywart list', I check in with the IPCC, whose Swiss-based site currently won't load, but GreenFacts is layperson-friendly! (Thanks to Heng Cheong-Leong at AppleMenu for the NYT article.) 4:11:43 PM  link   your views? []

nick b. 2007 do share, don't steal, please credit under artistic licence terms; contributing friends (pix, other work) retain their rights.