I purchased a refurbished Sansa C240 v2 MP3 player several years ago to listen to podcasts and FM radio. I'm addicted to NPR, but that's another posting (as I write this I'm listening to Blue Collar on WCBE). The Sansa is a light, compact hardware package, complete with a micro SD card slot. Nice. The only apparent disadvantage is the lack of a replaceable, standard (AA, AAA) battery which means I can't pop in a spare when the battery dies.
Eventually, I grew dissatisfied with it. The firmware just didn't work as well as I would have hoped. It had a tendency to lock up and become unresponsive. Recovery required running it until the battery discharged completely; the on/off switch would not switch. I eventually set it aside to gather dust in my "projects" box.
Earlier this week I stumbled across Rockbox, an open source media program that replaces the firmware. I already considered my Sansa a domino tile ("brick" seemed much too big for the unit), so I had little to lose by installing Rockbox on it. Rockbox supports several dozen different models of media players including the Sansa c200 v2 series, well almost. The RB website considers the c200 v2 series firmware unstable, but the major complaint seems to be reduced battery life, although I can't find a direct battery comparison. My experience has been that Rockbox is much more stable than the original firmware.
Rockbox comes with a GUI installer, so I connected the unit to my netbook running Debian Linux using its USB cable and fired up the installer. It completed the installation in a few short minutes (it may have been less than one!). The installer has versions for Windows, Mac and Linux computers.
I fired up the Sansa, and, lo and behold, it worked! I'm still learning all of the features, but even with a few hours of playing with it, Rockbox provides much more capabilities than the original firmware and seems to be much more stable. It plays the normal MP3, Windows Media Audio, WAV, FLAC, Ogg/Vorbis, and many other formats. It can record from the embedded microphone or FM broadcasts using one of four recording formats (WavePack, WAV, AIFF, or MP3), allowing you to select the type of recording to fit memory and sampling accuracy needs.
It also provides plugin applications including a calendar, stopwatch, light (display set to all white), calculator, spell checker and many others, including games. The FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) application displays the real-time frequency curve of the audio track being played. Very impressive for a small device.
All-in-all, a very impressive project that has made my Sansa C240 v2 a decent device again. The Systems/Credits lists 579 contributors to Rockbox. My thanks to each of you.
Sunday, January 9, 2011
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Food, Inc. The movie
If you’ve been reading Fast Food Nation, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food and other books and articles about our industrial food system, you will actually learn very little from the new movie Food, Inc.
This movie excels, though, at putting faces to the stories, and providing a visual context to the words in the books and articles. You get to peer inside the factory chicken farms and watch how the chicken chasers box up the birds for their final trip, then see Carole Morison, the farmer, picking up the dead chickens left over in the deserted chicken house.
Meet Moe Parr, being sued by Monsanto for encouraging farmers to clean a portion of their crops so they can replant it as seeds next year. Monsanto alleges that Moe encourages other farmers to fringe on their patents. Moments later the film makers list national policy makers with close connections to Monsanto and other large corporate food interests.
Meet Barbara Kowalcyk, whose son died due to food contamination as she visits lawmakers trying to convince them to pass Kevin’s Law, named for her son. Congress has yet to pass it.
This film could be just a diatribe against large food companies, but we’re introduced to Joel Salatin, a Virginia farmer that shows how our food system could be. It provides a powerful counterpoint to the massive systems put in place to provide us “food”. Joel is an interesting character. I heard him speak at the Community Farm Alliance annual meeting in Louisville a couple of years ago. This film let me visit his farm and get a glimpse of his form of agriculture. Simplicity is the keyword. He has developed an intensive agricultural system using the cattle, hogs and chickens and their interactions to maximize his farm’s productivity. His cattle get fresh pasture every day, so they have clean coats when they go to slaughter, thus minimize the possibility of contaminating the meat. The film shows a segment of a traditional beef processor using a high-tech system which infuses the hamburger with ammonia to kill the microbial contaminants (the plant manager indicates their system is used in 70% of hamburger sold in this country, with 90% in a few years). Joel has little need of these systems.
Note: Last month at least two people were killed and 41 injured explosion at Con Agra's meat processing plant that manufactures Slim Jims. The news story makes it sound like ammonia was involved in the explosion. I have been wondering why a meat plant would need large quantities of ammonia.
We also see the culture clash when Wal-Mart representatives meet a small dairy farmer on her farm in Vermont.
All in all, a great film about our industrial food system and why we should be asking questions.
This movie excels, though, at putting faces to the stories, and providing a visual context to the words in the books and articles. You get to peer inside the factory chicken farms and watch how the chicken chasers box up the birds for their final trip, then see Carole Morison, the farmer, picking up the dead chickens left over in the deserted chicken house.
Meet Moe Parr, being sued by Monsanto for encouraging farmers to clean a portion of their crops so they can replant it as seeds next year. Monsanto alleges that Moe encourages other farmers to fringe on their patents. Moments later the film makers list national policy makers with close connections to Monsanto and other large corporate food interests.
Meet Barbara Kowalcyk, whose son died due to food contamination as she visits lawmakers trying to convince them to pass Kevin’s Law, named for her son. Congress has yet to pass it.
This film could be just a diatribe against large food companies, but we’re introduced to Joel Salatin, a Virginia farmer that shows how our food system could be. It provides a powerful counterpoint to the massive systems put in place to provide us “food”. Joel is an interesting character. I heard him speak at the Community Farm Alliance annual meeting in Louisville a couple of years ago. This film let me visit his farm and get a glimpse of his form of agriculture. Simplicity is the keyword. He has developed an intensive agricultural system using the cattle, hogs and chickens and their interactions to maximize his farm’s productivity. His cattle get fresh pasture every day, so they have clean coats when they go to slaughter, thus minimize the possibility of contaminating the meat. The film shows a segment of a traditional beef processor using a high-tech system which infuses the hamburger with ammonia to kill the microbial contaminants (the plant manager indicates their system is used in 70% of hamburger sold in this country, with 90% in a few years). Joel has little need of these systems.
Note: Last month at least two people were killed and 41 injured explosion at Con Agra's meat processing plant that manufactures Slim Jims. The news story makes it sound like ammonia was involved in the explosion. I have been wondering why a meat plant would need large quantities of ammonia.
We also see the culture clash when Wal-Mart representatives meet a small dairy farmer on her farm in Vermont.
All in all, a great film about our industrial food system and why we should be asking questions.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
The Dublin Community Market - Week 1
I attended the inaugural week of the Dublin Ohio Community Market this evening. I had read an article about it in our local paper but I wasn't sure what to expect especilly since this was to be the initial week. I have been to some farmer's markets where there are a handful of vendors plying some pretty poor goods. I found about a dozen vendors with some very nice fresh produce. More about that in a minute.
I've been trying find a convenient farmers market to attend but without much luck. For one, many farmers markets have their biggest sessions on Saturday mornings, but I'm usually out riding my bike to the Dutch Kitchen with friends, so Saturday mornings don't work too well. I also ride my bicycle to work most days, so weekday evening farmers markets across town don't work too well either. This one works out since it's only about a mile from my office and I can ride my bike to it! Bingo! We have a winner.
I did not count the number of vendors, but there seemed to be about a dozen, mostly produce, but with two flower vendors, one meat vendor and one dairy. I found some of the sweetest peas I've ever tasted and bought a pound. They do not have edible pods, so I have to shell them, but it's worth it. Or maybe I've gotten too used to the supermarket variety of peas. I also purchased some greens from a young woman who grows six acres of produce while the rest of her family produce bushels of corn, wheat and soybeans. She sounds like the family rebel. Go girl go!
Another vendor had "peach" tomatoes, that is the tomatoes are yellow and have a fuzzy skin, similar to a peach. They're very sweet, but all tomato on the inside.
I have been buying Snowville Creamery milk since the local Kroger started to carry it last year, so I was pleased to see them at the market. Growing up on a dairy farm, I know firsthand the hard work needed to get a gallon of milk from a field of grass to a milk truck. Anyone who chooses to raise a herd of natural, grass-fed cows, milk them, and put together a producing dairy has my support. When the lady at the booth said the milk in the carton came from a cow this morning, I was instantly sold. At $3.00 a half gallon, it seems expensive compared to the milk in supermarket plastic bottles, but you just can't buy milk this fresh or good or non-homogenized anywhere else around here. Again, an easy sell for me.
I also found a naturally raised whole chicken, some summer squash, and the best tasting strawberries I've had in a long time.
I make a rather colorful figure with my riding clothes as I like to be visible in traffic. I guess that's why the City of Dublin (I think) camera crew decided to interview me on tape. As you can tell from this posting, I'm pretty enthusiastic about having a farmer's market in town, so I let my enthusiasm show through. If I find a link to it on the web, I'll post it here.
After about forty-five minutes of shopping, I loaded my food into my bike panniers and headed off into the waning rush hour traffic. Tonight the bird is thawing out and I'll cook it tomorrow night.
Bon appetite!
I've been trying find a convenient farmers market to attend but without much luck. For one, many farmers markets have their biggest sessions on Saturday mornings, but I'm usually out riding my bike to the Dutch Kitchen with friends, so Saturday mornings don't work too well. I also ride my bicycle to work most days, so weekday evening farmers markets across town don't work too well either. This one works out since it's only about a mile from my office and I can ride my bike to it! Bingo! We have a winner.
I did not count the number of vendors, but there seemed to be about a dozen, mostly produce, but with two flower vendors, one meat vendor and one dairy. I found some of the sweetest peas I've ever tasted and bought a pound. They do not have edible pods, so I have to shell them, but it's worth it. Or maybe I've gotten too used to the supermarket variety of peas. I also purchased some greens from a young woman who grows six acres of produce while the rest of her family produce bushels of corn, wheat and soybeans. She sounds like the family rebel. Go girl go!
Another vendor had "peach" tomatoes, that is the tomatoes are yellow and have a fuzzy skin, similar to a peach. They're very sweet, but all tomato on the inside.
I have been buying Snowville Creamery milk since the local Kroger started to carry it last year, so I was pleased to see them at the market. Growing up on a dairy farm, I know firsthand the hard work needed to get a gallon of milk from a field of grass to a milk truck. Anyone who chooses to raise a herd of natural, grass-fed cows, milk them, and put together a producing dairy has my support. When the lady at the booth said the milk in the carton came from a cow this morning, I was instantly sold. At $3.00 a half gallon, it seems expensive compared to the milk in supermarket plastic bottles, but you just can't buy milk this fresh or good or non-homogenized anywhere else around here. Again, an easy sell for me.
I also found a naturally raised whole chicken, some summer squash, and the best tasting strawberries I've had in a long time.
I make a rather colorful figure with my riding clothes as I like to be visible in traffic. I guess that's why the City of Dublin (I think) camera crew decided to interview me on tape. As you can tell from this posting, I'm pretty enthusiastic about having a farmer's market in town, so I let my enthusiasm show through. If I find a link to it on the web, I'll post it here.
After about forty-five minutes of shopping, I loaded my food into my bike panniers and headed off into the waning rush hour traffic. Tonight the bird is thawing out and I'll cook it tomorrow night.
Bon appetite!
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Getting a lift from Lift
"Have you heard about Scala and Lift?" my friend Jim asked me a couple of weeks ago at lunch. He had mentioned Scala in earlier conversations, although I had not looked into the language. Earlier in the week I had been given a new assignment to put together a demo web application to manage server configuration information, so the timing of Jim's comments could not have been better.
I had considered what language/framework to use for the demo, but none of them in my toolbox had appealed to me. The general requirements for the webapp ran something like this: gather data from Linux servers, organize it, store it, and present it via a webapp. Gathering and organizing the data presented little difficulty; ssh and various commands such as 'cat /proc/cpuinfo', combined with a Perl program would work for this. Storing the data in a relational database would solve the storage requirement. That left presenting the data via a webapp.
I had two choices at my disposal, Perl and Java.
I like Perl for many small text processing jobs. It provides a tremendous number of ways to seriously mangle text. But it can trip you up since it doesn't do many checks until run-time. Thus you spend many hours debugging your application. In short, I like to use Perl for small programs, but I'm wary of using it when the scope can creep and the application grows beyond 'small'.
Java provides compile-time checks and people have used it for very large applications, but the frameworks with which to build web applications seem clunky to me. Modern IDEs ameliorate this clunkiness, but I have yet to get beyond emacs. There's probably another posting in here. So using Java did not encourage me either.
Enter Scala and Lift. Scala combines functional programming constructs with the mature Java object-oriented technology to provide the best of both worlds. It also includes XML in the language. It runs on the Java virtual machine and allows a programmer to use Java classes natively. Wow!
Lift provides a web application framework using Scala. It cleanly separates the underlying data model from the presentation so that you can change the appearance of your web pages without having to recode anything.
In two and a half weeks I have learned enough about Scala and Lift to complete the web application to the point where I can let others play with it. I've had several ideas for web applications over the years, but the amount of effort needed to realize them has discouraged me from starting them. With this new framework the effort should be much less. Check back in a couple of weeks on my progress.
www.scala-lang.org Scala, the language.
www.liftweb.net Lift, the web application framework.
I had considered what language/framework to use for the demo, but none of them in my toolbox had appealed to me. The general requirements for the webapp ran something like this: gather data from Linux servers, organize it, store it, and present it via a webapp. Gathering and organizing the data presented little difficulty; ssh and various commands such as 'cat /proc/cpuinfo', combined with a Perl program would work for this. Storing the data in a relational database would solve the storage requirement. That left presenting the data via a webapp.
I had two choices at my disposal, Perl and Java.
I like Perl for many small text processing jobs. It provides a tremendous number of ways to seriously mangle text. But it can trip you up since it doesn't do many checks until run-time. Thus you spend many hours debugging your application. In short, I like to use Perl for small programs, but I'm wary of using it when the scope can creep and the application grows beyond 'small'.
Java provides compile-time checks and people have used it for very large applications, but the frameworks with which to build web applications seem clunky to me. Modern IDEs ameliorate this clunkiness, but I have yet to get beyond emacs. There's probably another posting in here. So using Java did not encourage me either.
Enter Scala and Lift. Scala combines functional programming constructs with the mature Java object-oriented technology to provide the best of both worlds. It also includes XML in the language. It runs on the Java virtual machine and allows a programmer to use Java classes natively. Wow!
Lift provides a web application framework using Scala. It cleanly separates the underlying data model from the presentation so that you can change the appearance of your web pages without having to recode anything.
In two and a half weeks I have learned enough about Scala and Lift to complete the web application to the point where I can let others play with it. I've had several ideas for web applications over the years, but the amount of effort needed to realize them has discouraged me from starting them. With this new framework the effort should be much less. Check back in a couple of weeks on my progress.
Resources
www.scala-lang.org Scala, the language.
www.liftweb.net Lift, the web application framework.
Friday, December 19, 2008
Nano Car Wins Prize
Computerworld published an article today describing the latest nanotechnology, cars. James Tour, a chemistry professor at Rice University, won the Foresight Institute Feynman Prize for creating a nanocar, just 4 nm wide. It has rotating wheels and a working suspension. Read the complete article here.
The article has several interesting items including the fact that the car contains just 60 carbon atoms. The entire width of the "car" is 4 nanometers, which is about 10 times smaller than the features in Intel's latest microprocessors (45 nm). Professor Tour also indicated they did not see any point in patenting the technology because, "by the time it could be used to make money, the patents would be expired."
Interesting.
Computerworld published an article today describing the latest nanotechnology, cars. James Tour, a chemistry professor at Rice University, won the Foresight Institute Feynman Prize for creating a nanocar, just 4 nm wide. It has rotating wheels and a working suspension. Read the complete article here.
The article has several interesting items including the fact that the car contains just 60 carbon atoms. The entire width of the "car" is 4 nanometers, which is about 10 times smaller than the features in Intel's latest microprocessors (45 nm). Professor Tour also indicated they did not see any point in patenting the technology because, "by the time it could be used to make money, the patents would be expired."
Interesting.
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