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It must the technology breakdown season or something: after the amp blew a capacitor, both our ancient TV and the less ancient Freeview box started to go on the blink. The Freeview box was crashing and needed to be rebooted and retuned several times a week, always — as luck would have it — just as some programme we wanted to catch from the beginning was starting. When I was a kid, we used to have to turn our old black and white set on a few minutes early to let it ‘warm up’, so this didn’t feel like great progress. The TV was also having picture and sound problems, which pretty much covers all the critical elements necessary for a satisfying TV-watching experience.

So we bit the bullet and joined the 21st Century by buying a widescreen LCD TV which was in a sale. After living with a 20 inch 4:3 format CRT screen for so many years, the 32 inch 16:9 TV seems gigantic. No more do we have to squint at the narrow strip of slightly fuzzy picture when sitting more than a couple of metres away. It has made the whole TV, DVD or EyeTV recording-watching process much more enjoyable now that we can actually see the visual details properly and hear the dialogue and sound effects clearly.

The radical change in the quality of our viewing experience (and the earlier improvement in our listening setup with the new amp) prompted me to rearrange the living room. The room isn’t large, so rearranging the furniture is a bit like a slightly frustrating game of Tetris, but I think the new arrangement works better. We used to have the sofa at one side of the living room and quite close to the TV because of the size of the screen. This meant that we were at an awkward angle to it, and had the speakers on the other side of the room, at right angles to the TV. Now that we can sit a healthy distance from the screen and still see it, we could put the sofa across the end of the room, facing the TV. That also meant that I had space to move the speakers either side of the TV, so that we can supplement the TV’s speakers with the floorstanders — it’s poor-man’s surround sound, but it definitely adds to the experience. Also, since the speakers are firing down the long axis of the room instead of the short axis, it works better with the acoustics of the room.

The expression of Cleo (our cat) the first time she walked into the rearranged room was priceless. She looked at where the sofa used to be and did the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a double-take in a cat. Then she looked at me with a “What the hell’s going on? Where’s all my stuff?” look for a bit, before settling a bit grumpily on the sofa in its new position.

While watching House the other day, I was thinking again about the different accents in English-speaking countries. There seems to be a weird non-symmetrical effect in how easy people in one English-speaking country seem to find it to recognise the native accent of another English-speaking country.

For example, Hugh Laurie seems to me to be able to produce quite a convincing American accent (note that my point here is about how easy it is to recognise an accent, not reproduce it, which is much harder). However, as a British-English speaker, it’s perhaps not surprising if I can’t pick up the subtleties of an American-English accent. But many American viewers find his accent very authentic, and are often amazed to find out he’s British. There’s a running gag in Flight of the Conchords about Americans thinking Bret and Jemaine are British rather than New Zealanders. When I went to the States, many people I met thought I was Australian.

It doesn’t seem to by a symmetrical effect. Dick Van Dyke’s wincingly bad Cockney accent in Mary Poppins set a new benchmark for bad accents, but even American actors with reasonably good mimicry skills can be detected¹. Adam Monroe did a pretty good British accent as Takezo Kensei in Heroes, but I could tell immediately that he was not a native British-English speaker before I knew what his nationality was. Other American-English speaking actors who have attempted British-English accents (like Gwyneth Paltrow), have often been quite convincing, but their accent is still detectable to British-English speakers as non-native. Meanwhile, many Australian actors use British-English or American-English accents, and I can’t tell that they are not native speakers.

Note that I’m honestly not getting at Americans here. British people have similar troubles telling a Canadian accent from an American one, or an Australian accent from a New Zealand one. I have particular trouble telling South Africans from New Zealanders, unless the accents are fairly extreme, or the person says particular words (“six” being a handy diagnostic feature). I’m just wondering why — even between pairs of accents — there’s a non-symmetrical effect in how easy either party finds it to recognise the accent of the other. Is it a matter of exposure to the accent? We certainly get a lot of American TV, films and music in Britain. Or is it because we have a wider range of native accents in Britain (I’m not even sure if this is true), so our ears are more highly tuned to detecting differences? It could even be something to do with the time of divergence of the accents from the ancestral stock.

I don’t know what the answer is, but I’m intrigued by the problem.

¹ I’d be interested to know if his accent sounds reasonably authentic to an American-English speaker, though. ↑

As regular readers will know, my nom de keyboard of ‘bsag’ and the title of this blog both refer to the look which comes over someone’s face (usually male) when I exhibit signs of knowing something about technical matters (see my About page for more details).

I had a classic example of BSAG earlier this week when I had to contact some heating engineers about our boiler. We’ve dealt with these particular people before, and they are great: they are nice guys, do good work and charge a reasonable price. However, they really don’t seem able to handle the fact that — while neither Mr. Bsag and I are experts on heating systems — I know a bit more about it than my husband. I started to explain what I thought the problem was, but they asked if they could speak to Mr. Bsag. I could have put my foot down, but since I’d dealt with them before (an experience very similar to those experienced by Arabella Weir’s ‘Invisible Woman’ character on the Fast Show), I knew that it was a losing battle.

So I handed the phone over, and we had a farcical exchange where the heating engineers would ask Mr. Bsag some technical question on the phone, he would ask me, I would answer, and he would tell the engineers what I’d just said. It worked out OK in the end, because they came and fixed the problem (which was indeed a faulty control board, as I’d thought), but it would have been a bit easier if they’d actually believed that I knew what I was talking about. Sigh.

I finally managed to get a new amplifier an Audiolab 8000a from ebay. I wired it up last night with my new speaker cables (The Chord Company Carnival Silver Screen) and I’ve been enjoying discovering our music collection again.

As I mentioned in an earlier comment, I’m pretty familiar with this Audiolab model, because my Dad had one for years. In fact, I’d even heard it with my current speakers, because they also used to belong to my Dad. What I wasn’t quite prepared for was how much my old amp must have been deteriorating over the last 6 months or so, because I was blown away by the quality of this amp. It gives an enormous amount of what we audiophiles call ‘wellie’ (a technical term, you understand). So much so that I had to dive for the volume control because I wasn’t prepared for what would come out of the speakers. The volume knob starts at about the 7 o’clock position, and 9 o’clock is more than enough to fill the room. The sound is gloriously transparent, so I can hear the wonderful warm quality of my Rega Planet CD player, as well as the totally different quality of the AR turntable. In short, all the sources sound different, which is just as it should be. The speaker cables probably need a little while to bed down, but I’m very happy with it.

I like a nicely balanced sound, but it is nice to hear properly weighty base again. When I was testing the system out yesterday, I played a few tracks from ‘Knives to the Treble’ by Burning Babylon via the SliMP3. A huge grin spread over my face, and I ran to get Mr. Bsag, dragging him into the living room. “Sit down here and feel the sofa vibrate!” It wasn’t overdone, just very, very deep.

I was quite excited about the prospect of Automator when it was introduced, because it offered the prospect of being able to write quick scripts to solve little workflow problems, without having to know much about AppleScript. I can code in a number of languages (not brilliantly, but enough to get by), but for some reason, I find AppleScript quite difficult. It looks enough like English that you’re lulled into thinking you know what you’re doing until you get tripped up by some odd syntax. Anyway, Automator allows you to cobble together pre-built building blocks, recorded actions, and little shell scripts (in Python, Perl or Ruby as well as bash and other common shells) so that you don’t need to write Applescripts if you don’t want to.

Despite this convenience, I haven’t used Automator quite as much as I’d thought I would, partly because applications like Butler lets you do a lot of things you might use Automator for, but in a more accessible way. However, there are occasions when a nicely crafted Automator workflow is very handy.

Mr. Bsag often has to send photographs or scans of his prints to galleries, and they often insist on a 300dpi TIFF. He stores these images in iPhoto, and while you can certainly export as TIFF, I haven’t found an easy way to change the DPI (though you can do it in Preview in Leopard). However, you can change the DPI property of an image using the commandline tool, sips, as well as lots of other handy things. But Mr. Bsag wouldn’t be comfortable with a commandline command, which would bring it back to me doing it for him, and I’m lazy. Enter Automator!

I made a quick workflow (see an image of the steps here) which gets the selected items in Finder, puts a dialog box to say what it is going to do an allow an escape, runs a Ruby script which calls a sips command on the arguments to change the DPI and convert to TIFF, then speaks a confirmation of how many files were converted. I made it into a Finder plug-in¹, so that Mr. Bsag could just export his chosen images from iPhoto to the desktop, select them, then use the contextual menu to run the script. It seems to work fine. For common tasks like this where you want to batch convert some files to a standard format, Automator is ideal.

¹ The documentation for Automator says that if you make a workflow a Finder plugin, you should remove the first ‘Get selected Finder items’ step. When I did this it acted as if nothing was selected. With the selected Finder items step in place, it counts each selected file twice. Weird. In the final plug-in, I hacked around this by simply dividing num by 2. ↑

I’ve been meaning to link to this article by Maciej Ceglowski for ages, but forgetting to do it. I love Maciej’s writing: he doesn’t post very frequently, but when he does, it’s really worth waiting for. He’s really funny (I laughed out loud several times while reading this piece), but he also has a wonderful way of evoking the feeling of a place, and making you feel as if you know the characters he writes about.

My favourite part, however, is right at the end:

Each week I brute force my way through a dance with these gracious partners, and each week they are quick to assure me it wasn’t nearly as much of a Calvary for them as it had been the week before. As one of them said to me sweetly after what I thought was a rare successfully-executed figure, “Don’t worry. Someday you will know what you are doing.”

I feel like that all the time — someday I will know what I am doing.

I’ve been having a problem with intermittent distortion from my amplifier (a Talk Electronics Storm 2) for a while. Early in the New Year, I thought I’d cracked it. But the problem with intermittent issues is that you change something, listen for a while, and think it’s fixed. You congratulate yourself on your ninja-level hi-fi problem diagnosing and repairing technique. Then a couple of days later, the problem is back, and you are forced to commit seppuku with a sharpened banana plug. Well, maybe not the last part…

The problem seemed to be confined to the left channel, so while my brother was visiting this weekend, we made a concerted effort to track the problem down. At first, we thought that swapping the speaker cables over transferred the problem to the right speaker, but with more experimentation, we worked out that it must be the amplifier itself. Opening up the case of the amp revealed the problem all too clearly, as you can see from the picture above.

Usually, it’s nearly impossible to find faults in circuit boards just by looking at them, but the strong smell of burning and wide distribution of thick black soot was easy to spot, even for a non-expert. It seems that one or more capacitors have blown in a rather terminal way.

My poor amp. Talk doesn’t make this model any more, but I’m going to send them an email and some photos anyway to see if there’s any chance a repair would be a) possible and b) economically feasible. If not, I’m having to shop for a new or second-hand amplifier. If any hi-fi enthusiasts out there can recommend a decent quality integrated amp for about the £200-300 mark (preferably with a phono stage), I’m open to suggestions!

Cycling home today, I had a storm-front behind me. Ahead, all was blue sky, sunshine and fluffy white clouds; behind, deep bruise-grey clouds and a fat rainbow. I was being soaked by the rain, while simultaneously feeling the sun warm my wet face. I felt as if I was pulling the storm-front along in my slipstream.

Of course, that wasn’t what was happening. I’m not (yet) egotistical enough or crazy enough¹ to believe that I control the weather. But sometimes, what a thing feels like is more interesting than what it actually is.

¹ Give me time… ↑

I had a wonderful balti with some friends from work yesterday evening, but I’m still recovering from the enormous quantities of naan we collectively consumed. The balti house we go to in Selly Oak is a brilliant, friendly, low-key place, and does gigantic ‘table’ naans with which to scoop up your balti. Before I’d seen one, I assumed that the name came from the fact that you could share it with your table, but I quickly realised that it is because it is the size of a table. The waiters carry it out on two plates held side by side, but it still hangs right over the edges like a delicious, steaming, edible tablecloth. We made the classic balti house error of thinking that we’d need two of these giants between 6 people, but they were so wonderful (particularly the coriander naan), that we ended up eating it all.

I’m a real balti convert. They are very easy-going, comforting places. They are generally small, very simply decorated and offer good, cheap food. Most don’t have an alcohol licence, but they are very happy for you to buy wine or beer from an off-licence and bring it in, and they don’t charge corkage. There are always hundreds of different baltis on the menu, but since they all follow the same balti template (meat/fish/vegetables/paneer in sauce) and come in the same iron pan, it feels very egalitarian. The dishes differ a bit in their spicing or components, and you can usually ask for other ingredients to be added if you like, but you can be pretty confident that you’ll enjoy what you get. And sharing a naan the size of a table is always fun.

Shop doors usually come in three basic flavours when it comes to opening them. You have your basic manually-operated doors, which can be difficult for people with physical disabilities, especially if the doors are large and heavy. Then you have fully-automatic doors, which usually slide or swing open when you trigger an infra-red proximity sensor or pressure pad, or press a button. More rarely, you come across a hybrid door which can be opened manually, but which also offers automatic opening via a button. All such doors I’ve come across before don’t offer any extra resistance if you open them manually.

Our small local branch of Boots has just been fitted with this type of hybrid doors. However, if you try opening them manually, they are incredibly heavy, even if you are not disabled and reasonably fit. It feels as if the motor is actually acting against your muscles as you pull. Even worse, the button to open the door automatically is small and not easy to find quickly. I’m all in favour of making access to buildings easier for people with disabilities, but this system seems to disadvantage everybody. As you ineffectually haul on the door, you look like an idiotic weakling, but I don’t think I’ve seen anyone who can find the opening button without searching for it for 10 minutes. You get the feeling that Boots doesn’t actually want any customers in their shop, making their displays messy and inconveniencing their staff by wanting to buy things.

I got a bit tired of the tangle of USB cables under the shelf on which I place my laptop, so I decided to make myself some kind of sync station to tidy things up a bit. Being lazy, I wanted to get a container to house the USB hub and the bulk of the cables which wouldn’t require much modification. I spotted a ‘vanity box’ in one of my favourite shops — Muji — which looked as if it would be just the job. It’s a semi-translucent plastic box, with oval cut-outs at the side which act as handles, but also allowed me to route the cables through them without drilling or cutting any holes. I bought a lid to go with it, which has a handy lip on it, so that it stops my USB-connected items falling off the top.

I’ve got a Belkin USB hub inside, which I raised up on four cut up pieces of rubber (by which I mean eraser, North Americans!), as it gets very hot resting on the bottom. The semi-translucency of the box helpfully allows the LED lights on the hub to shine through, so I can tell if there’s any problems with a peripheral, but it hides the worst of the clutter. Also inside the box is the USB receiver for my Logitech S530 wireless keyboard and mouse — it seems to work fine like that. On top of the box, I placed a small USB card reader, and used bulldog clips to hold the cables in place. I’ve still got a few USB ports free on the hub, so I can always add a few more cables or peripherals in the future if I need to, but this serves my needs for now.

I’m pretty pleased with it — not bad for just over £5 for the materials. There are few notes attached to the image on Flickr if you want to know what’s what.

Yesterday, Mr. Bsag lost his wedding ring. He was working on the allotment and took the ring off because it was rubbing his finger when he was using the spade. Like the big idiot he is sometimes, he put the ring in the top pocket of his overalls which a) doesn’t fasten closed, and b) has a hole in the bottom, though to be fair, he didn’t know about b) until it was too late. The inevitable happened, and the ring must have dropped out of his pocket while he was spreading the huge load of horse manure we had delivered on to the beds. We went up to look for it, but it could be under several trailer loads of muck by now, so it was a fairly hopeless search.

I was surprised how upset I was by the loss of his ring. It’s only a piece of metal after all, and the fact that he doesn’t now have it in his possession or on his finger makes no difference to our relationship. But it still upset me. Our rings weren’t just picked off the trays of a jewellery shop, but were made to our own design by a lovely craftsman jeweller based in Birmingham. They weren’t expensive, but they were special and unique to us. At our wedding, I carried my grandmother’s wedding ring as my ‘something old’, and it had worn very thin over the years of her marriage. I wanted our rings to wear thin too, but now only mine will do so, and that makes me sad.

In folk tales and ballads, when this kind of thing happens, the years pass and the man catches a huge fish at sea, which he gets his servants to cook at a great feast. The woman then cuts open the belly of the fish, only to find the lost ring shining inside. Our allotment is a bit far from the sea for that, but my faith in the narrative imperative is such that I’m fairly confident that — some years from now — we’ll cut open a particularly prize specimen of a potato, which we have grown on our allotment, only to find the lost ring embedded in the flesh.

That, or we’ll have to make friends with someone who has a metal detector, but it doesn’t have quite the same ballady feel about it.

Some time ago, my brother lent me a spare turntable he had hanging around (a Project) so that we could play Mr. Bsag’s collection of vinyl and my rather smaller stash. However, we soon found out that at some point during its long storage, the turntable platter itself had developed a huge warp. This was so severe that it would scrape on the base of the turntable on each revolution, causing some problems with speed stability. Not to mention the fact that the warp resulted in warbling, wowing sound. I did manage to put my warped records out of phase with the warps in the platter to give an approximately level surface, but that didn’t work with flat records. Quite how a very heavy, solid cast-iron platter ended up getting warped, we couldn’t imagine, but there it was. We reckoned that our chances of unwarping it were negligible.

Still, all was not lost: in my hi-fi-mad family, there are practically always spare bits of kit hanging around in lofts or other storage spaces. My Dad happened to have an Acoustic Research EB101 turntable in his loft, which my Mum was only too happy to have removed from the loft, so I took that home from my visit this weekend.

I set it up yesterday after a bit of faffing around, so we are enjoying the sweet, analogue sound of vinyl again. The first problem was that my Dad had forgotten that he’d left a custom power plug on it (which fitted in a multi-socket he used to use), but that was an easy fix by swapping over the plug from the old turntable. The second snag was that the stylus didn’t actually reach the surface of the record. You don’t have to be a hi-fi buff to realise that you’re not going to end up with any music if the needle doesn’t touch the record. The problem was that the rest for the arm wasn’t properly height adjusted so that even when fully lowered, it didn’t release the arm. I had to call Dad to ask if there was some secret shipping screw which needed to be released, but in the end I found a little grub screw which did the job. I also couldn’t find the recommended downforce weight for the cartridge which was included (a Glanz), so I just swapped over the Ortofon OM10 I had on on the Project turntable.

The new (to me) turntable sounds pretty good. I listened to a album of Mr. Bsag’s that I hadn’t heard before — ‘Psychedelic Shack’ by The Temptations. It’s a terrific album, and absolutely the right thing to listen to on vinyl. I think I’m going to have to hit the second-hand vinyl shops again…

When we went away this weekend, we had to leave Cleo at a cattery for the first time. It would have been better if we could have asked our neighbours to come in and feed her for a couple of days, but for one reason or another, that wasn’t possible. Luckily, we have a wonderful cattery not far from us, run by very caring people, so we knew that she would be in excellent hands.

When we opened her carrying box in her new lodgings, she really didn’t want to come out. When she did, she walked into the run and immediately started hissing and growling at the cats in the neighbouring runs. One very portly black and white cat in the next run wandered over to her in a friendly way in response to this hostile greeting, which only made things worse. Cleo was not at all happy, and it was clear that she would have to be moved to calm her down, and also so that she didn’t kick off a huge riot among the other cats being boarded. This caused a huge amount of hassle as other cats had to be moved, runs cleaned and so on, but eventually she was housed in a run with opaque walls so that she couldn’t see any other cats.

She still wouldn’t come out of the travel box, but looked out of the window of the inner room at the peacocks and peahens strutting around outside and trembled like a leaf. I think she thought that these huge birds were going to kill her, and looked up at us with big, ‘take me home now, please’ eyes. We felt truly dreadful leaving her there, but we had no choice, and it was only for a couple of days. The problem is that you can’t explain to cats (or dogs) that they will be perfectly safe and comfortable and you’ll be back to collect them in two days. When the cat in question is rescued and has had a lot of traumatic upheaval in her life, you feel even worse.

She did eventually settle down, but was still lying on her bed inside her travel box when we came to pick her up — probably for maximum guilt-inducing effect. She seems pretty happy to be back on her own territory, and has been sniffing everything, rubbing up against every available surface (including us) rapturously, and purring like a mad thing.

Mr. Bsag and I spent the weekend with my parents and my brother to celebrate my parents’ Ruby Wedding Anniversary on Sunday (40 years, for those not fluent in the gemstone to years-married conversion). It was a quiet family do, but great fun, despite the weather doing its best to scupper carefully laid plans with bitter winds and snow.

My brother and I hatched a plot to make them a photo book (using iPhoto) of photographs from their wedding day and a selection of other shots from the 40 years since. Unfortunately, we had to let Dad in on the secret because he is the keeper of the family slide collection, and had to do an enormous amount of scanning and sorting before we put it together. But we made sure that the final selection and layout was a surprise.

It was a roaring success, and both my parents thought it was a lovely idea. Since some of the wedding photos were on slides, they hadn’t seen them for years, so it was wonderful to look at them again, and I’m really impressed with the quality of the book. All the images came out really well, and it looks very classy.

I might even order a copy for myself, but I’m definitely going to get enlargements of a wonderful shot from their wedding. It’s a colour shot of Mum and Dad in the back of the wedding car, looking gloriously happy and covered in confetti. I suspect that they were also pretty glad to be out of the cold, because their wedding day was also bitterly cold and windy, just like this Sunday.