I have returned to this music blog – I have been neglecting it an many of my other sites.  I follow the music industry quite closely – ans have fo a while.  So I have decided to relite this and other site to post issues that interest me in the online music scene.

I built this site more as a device and a test bed, but now that it has been index well in the music space, I have decided to do a redesign and change things around.

Stay tuned – I know people still visit this site. Time to start the fire.

Things are not looking good for Microsoft’s Vista, especially when it comes to listening to music and surfing the web at the same time. Slashdot Link.

It uses the microphone to detect echo from your head. This starts with the first approximation that your head is symmetrical, smooth, and round. If the echo shows any sign of left/rigth asymmetry, it brings in the next layer of feedback control by simulating a rotated ovoid head, and progressively brings in more features such as topological variations (nose, eyes, ears, open mouth). It is continually trying various time delays to make sure it isn’t confused by emenations from your own mouth, nose, or ears (tintinabulation).

Once it determines the maximum quality feedback parameters, it backs off various parameters to try to reduce the computational footprint. It keeps a record of these adjustments and periodically adds them back in temporarily to make sure the basic parameters are still valid. If any of these trials show the need, it will restart the complete feedback search cycle.

Where does the network figure in all this, you ask? Simple. All that I have described so far is reactive feedback. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, or more usefully, predicting how much feedback control is necessary can pay bigger dividends — more bang for the buck, so to speak — than reactive analysis. If it can tell what you are doing from packet analysis, it has a better chance of predicting your head position. It looks at HTML pages and tries to guess what content is shown, in order to know if it is likely to affect your head position, and then tries to guess where that content will show on the screen, in order to predict where your head will be.

Coupled with mouse and keyboard controls, this can lead to amazing sound quality from the piss-poor speakers found on most laptops, even simulating 5.1 speaker systems with just the two speakers found on most computers.

Now you know.

EMR or electromagnetic radiation is something that has been on my mind for years. Controversy around the health threats of EMR have raged for years. As an early adopter of cell phones back in the early nineties the heat generated by long term cell phone conversations got me to get a headset long before in became chic. Then there are those brain cancer clusters attributed the electrical substations, not to mention the controlling energy rays from alien visitors as well as the US Government. Now, for all those devotees of the foil hat had some empirical evidence from some graduate students at MIT.

So it was late last night when my brother in law asked if he could use my laptop to get on the Internet. I went down to the kitchen to oblige and I saw that he had his Mac keyboard on the the table. “Herb Tea, ” He explained “Lucy spilled the herb tea on the keyboard.”
He promptly logged on to the web and within 30 seconds had found exactly what he was looking for. “What a geek,’ he mumbled under his breath as he began dismantling the device. Just remarkable that this guy would have built such an in depth how to set of pages.
Hats Off to Byron Gracey of Canada.