Wölfisch

My latest purchases, each highly recommended:

Kate Bush — Director's Cut

Released earlier this year, this album by Kate Bush contains new versions of older material. Not exactly a must have album, I only bought the MP3 version myself, and probably a bit disturbing for her hardcore fans. The sound appears to be a bit muffled at first, but the impression changes quickly to rather "earthy". It is quite interesting to listen to these alternative versions of old material. I like some better than the original recordings, for some songs I prefer the old versions. But it is never boring to hear how the artist interprets her own material with a distance of several years.

Kate Bush — 50 Words For Snow

This is her latest concept album. While Kate's previous regular album Aerial was like a summer breathe, 50 Words For Snow is about winter. While the sound again is earthy and warm, the songs give you little shivers. It's like sitting in a drafty cabin in front of the fire with a thick woolen blanket over the shoulders. Oh, and just listen to those wonderful obscure stories she tells!

Fox Amoore — Feel

I cannot recommend the music of Fox Amoore enough. He is a fantastic composer, pianist and arranger. His album Feel, purchased as the download version with bonus material, is his best to date. You can tell the music of Hans Zimmer has a great influence on his compositions, but every time you just start to realize the zimmeresque elements, Fox' songs turn into an entirely different direction. I bet he does that entirely on purpose. Anyway, if you like epic orchestral soundtrack music, you have to purchase this album.

Globus — Break From This World

Talking about epic, the second studio album of Immediate Music's side project Globus is just that. Very powerful, overboarding orchestral rock music with really depressive and bitter lyrics. While the music styles are more diverse than on their first album Epicon, which makes Break From This World a bit more fragmented, it is a concept album about violent conflicts in general and the Arab Spring in particular. A bit of a warning, though: the MP3 download version from Amazon comes without a booklet and thus you'll have to find the lyrics yourself. The physical CD is probably the better choice here.

Yesterday, my TV asked me:

For quality and improvement purposes, your usage statistics about the TV system and remote will be sent to the Sony server. It will exclude personal and individually identifiable information. Would you like to enable this setting?

At least they are asking, but it does leave a couple of questions:

• What exact information gets collected?
• What does Sony consider being "personal information"?
• How do they ensure that it is not "individually identifiable"?
• What exactly are those "improvement purposes"?
• Where exactly do they collect this information?
• How well is it secured, especially with Sony's less than stellar track record in this regard?
• How can I be sure that it's not collecting the data anyway regardless that I turned it off?

I guess the only way to answer the last question is to buy a managed network switch that lets me monitor traffic on specific ports...

Oh, and while I'm at it. If you are one of those who are dodging the TV licence fee ("Rundfunkgebühr" in Germany), you'd better not connect the TV to your network at all: That newfangled HbbTV thingy European public broadcasters are introducing apparently causes the TV to request the index for the online content each time you switch to such a channel. This doesn't mean much of course, unless your other network activity allows correlation between you or at least your household and your IP number.

I am paying the fee, of course, but I'm considering pulling the network cable anyway... This is the only way to be 100% sure that it cannot phone home. Even though I have to admit the online features are quite nifty, indeed.

This is of course an issue with all network connected appliances. But I'm not convinced that Sony understands privacy concerns at all. For example, their remote control application for Android phones sports ads and a recent version of it wanted access rights to the browser history of the phone. I declined that update and removed the app instead.

After being a loyal reader more than 20 years I finally canceled my subscription of the renowned weekly newspaper Die Zeit today. It's not that it has so much changed from the times Gerd Bucerius and Marion Dönhoff were in charge, or lacking distinguished authors nowadays. Granted, it is quite expensive just for the three or four articles per issue that I actually read, and only one that is really interesting to me. Sure, some authors are really annoying, but that's the whole point of this publication: start public debates. Yes, my generation is writing there now, but I know how we, as a generation, think. There is not much to learn for me. A lot of topics are repeating themselves over the years. But that's still not the reason.

I simply don't have the time anymore. I worked myself through seven old issues last week, not being able to remember what I just read. Reading it that way is a waste of time and somewhat disrespectful to the authors.

And with all breakups, I too will try to stay friends with her. Occasionally buying an issue, probably keeping the RSS feed. Even though it suffers the fate of the paper issue, just to a worse degree.

Most people these days call it Post Rock, but when I was young, we called it Kraut Rock. Or perhaps Progressive Rock. And besides, the music of the Japanese band Mono recently has evolved beyond this.

Yes, I'm late with my report of their concert on May, 25th in the Künstlerhaus (K4), organized by Musikverein Concerts, but I was just too busy. The concert wasn't really that well attended, perhaps 60 people in the audience, but taken into account that the location is rather small and poorly ventilated, it was just right. Not too empty, not too crowded. And the overall atmosphere was great (except for that idiot right of me trying to shove me away from where I stood, even though he had more than enough space, and I didn't, and the two assholes behind me chatting loudly during the whole concert.) A surprisingly young audience for this kind of music, mostly in their early twenties, and none of those emo type of posers. The musician playing before Mono was Dirk Serries, a very good guitarist who creates quite interesting soundscapes with his guitar, some effect devices, and a looper. I didn't thought it would work well as a live performance, but he proved me wrong. Yet, not quite my cup of tea, I have to admit.

And then Mono. A purely instrumental band with two guitarists, bass and drums. And heavy influences by Morricone, Beethoven, Russian folklore — not only due to Takaakira Goto playing the electric guitar with a tremolo reminding of a balalaika, but mainly due to what I perceive as typical central Asian harmonies — a bit of Mahler, Tchaikovsky, perhaps even Puccini, quite some early Kraftwerk (of course) and orchestral film music in general. The more you hear their music, the more you'll discover. And even though it is just guitars, bass and drums, a bit of glockenspiel and keyboards here and there, I wouldn't call it rock anymore. It is orchestral, symphonic, with generally quite complex drum patterns. Nothing of it sounds specifically Japanese, only if you listen very closely you'll find some chords that wouldn't be played that way in European or American music. And of course you can tell from the subject of their compositions. A common theme is the beauty and force of nature. From the first drops of rain to a heavy thunderstorm and then the sun comes out again: amazing how well instrumental music can transport the mood of changing weather across all cultural differences. Usually the songs start calm, on low sound level, with a sweet melody, develop an amazing crescendo, often ending in very complex soundscapes, but even with all that noise they never let lose of the melody. Within all that force there remains a hint of fragile beauty. Needless to say I'm a complete sucker for this trick. While this is a common theme of postrock, Mono add a certain complexity and variations to it so it never gets boring. And they like to break out of the pattern occasionally. Some of their compositions take a surprisingly different direction after a while.

The music of Mono works both ways: very intense music directly inducing emotions and pictures in your head, on the other hand something to analyze and think about.

But I want a software mixer. Pulseaudio to the rescue! Apart from the fact that the documentation of remap-sink leaves a bit to desire, ( this is fairly easy... )

And you know what I should have googled for to directly find the solution as outlined in this part of my little serial?

( Here's the answer: )

I cannot find any other tool that encodes AC3 to IEC958 than vlc and mplayer. Both are not suitable for the task for different reasons. One idea would be to modify the alsaplay (aplay) ALSA example application to do the encoding. But while researching the topic I asked myself: why couldn't just ALSA do it by itself? It's just wrapping AC3 into a bit stream, and the mplayer code for it looks fairly simple. Let's see how ALSA plugins are working anyway... So I downloaded the alsa-plugins source code and... WAIT, WHAT IS THAT?! There is a directory "a52". It contains exactly the module I was looking for. It does not encode an AC3 stream to an IEC958 transport stream, it creates the whole transport-encoded AC3 data from PCM data and writes it to the SPDIF device of the sound card. That's even more I asked for!
( So I compiled it and added the following to ~/.asoundrc: )
Very sweet, that works, without any race conditions, yet one drawback: the ALSA "dmix" software mixer works only on hardware devices. Of course you cannot dmix an AC3 stream, thus only one application at a time will be able to play sound on this device. How annoying. Especially when knotify starts a kdeinit4 process that keeps blocking the sound interface.

The upmix pipe is nice, but quite complex and limited to applications which have piped output. ( Maybe we can get the latency down and probably can get sox out of the mix... ) Okay, we might be able to catch most races eventually, but I'd very much prefer to avoid using vlc altogether.

How to construct a 2.1 signal from a stereo signal? We are going to encode it as AC3 ("Dolby Digital"), with the original stereo channels left and right mapped to front left and right, center and rear channels being muted, and bass getting the sum of half of the level of left and right channel. Strictly speaking, we should run the the bass signal through a low pass, but it is not necessary for my speaker system, as the active bass box has a built in low pass with an adjustable cutoff frequency.

As a first attempt, let us just create such a signal. We're going to do this the Unix way: ( with pipes... )
Unfortunately, using the pipe as the output to VLC results in mplayer complaining about underruns frequently. Also, other applications don't even allow piping their audio output. But the approach is still good to play single files and experiment a bit without having to confuse the whole audio setup of the system.

I recently upgraded my set of speakers after my old Braun boxes finally reached their end of life. The "surrounds" of the speakers were degraded too far after almost 30 years. Given that the speaker system was from Braun's budget series of speakers (still relatively expensive at the time) it does not make sense to refurbish it. So I replaced the front speakers with a set of Nubert nuJubilee 35 (comparable to nuLine 32) speakers. If you are a fan of the 70th classic music sound like me: give Nubert speaker systems a try. At least the nuLine series is quite close to the sound of medium to large Brauns, though slightly more modern (i.e., more bass.)

The center, rear and bass speakers were from a Teufel Magnum E system, which barely worked well enough with the Braun speakers, but does not fit to the new speakers. The center was always far too small, so I replaced it with a nuLine WS-12. Could have a bit more bass, however as I can only mount the center hanging on a shelf and everything larger would be too heavy, this has to do. And it sounds great when watching movies! Alas, the sound of the bass box doesn't fit anymore, and the rears were also too limited, thus I ended up with two new rear speakers (nuLine DS-22) and a bass box (nuJubilee 35), completing the upgrade.

The new system sounds exactly the way I want it to sound. Probably way too dry for other people, but perfect for me. The only thing that buggers me is the AV receiver: With stereo signals, I can either have stereo output, but that won't feed the bass. Or I can have a Dolby ProLogic II upmix which does weird things. Luckily, the receiver can be configured to NOT send a sum signal to the center speaker in that mode, but it still has some phase shift and delay on the rears. This is usually okay for pop music, but I do not want to hear the trombone from almost-rear right when listening to an opera... I cannot get any analog line out signal from a digital source, either. Said opera recording, even though a digital production, was mastered with vinyl records in mind, so it doesn't have any frequencies low enough for the bass box to be needed, but I do have some recordings that would benefit from a 2.1 "upmix". Or even 4.1 with just the unmodified stereo signal sent to the rears.

Since I'm playing all recordings I own from a openSUSE 11.4 system via TOSLINK / SPDIF / IEC958, how about creating the upmix on the machine, encode it as AC3 and use SPDIF pass-through to send it to the AV receiver? Sounds simple, it even is, but information about how to do it is hard to find, unless you know that instead of googling for "alsa ac3", which gives you tons of information on how to split up a 5.1 signal to analog output, you have to google for... Nope, won't tell you yet. ;-)

I've turned off anonymous comments as ReCapture apparently is no hurdle for spam bots anymore. If you want to comment on my entries and don't have an account on LiveJournal or any of the other accepted OpenID providers yet: please register with one.

I bought a cheap sewing machine at Lidl (a German grocery chain) today for only 60 Euros. An independent test report said it's okay for the price, and indeed it is. It does sew neat straight seams. However, the manual is a bit confusing and if I hadn't learned how to use a sewing machine (well, at least the basics) on a quality machine ten times worth this one I would have been totally lost. Which leads me to the question who is the targeted user of this machine? Everyone from experienced hobbyist level on would rather spend some more money for a quality machine. A beginner would quickly despair and give up.

How does this relate to software? Well, for example: Cinelerra certainly is a great video editing software with all features a professional wishes for. And in the hands of a professional editor it is indeed very powerful. Yet, the pro will rather spend the money on Adobe Premiere CS or Sony Vegas and the like as those have a more consistent workflow. And the beginner will not be able to even edit a five minute video of yesterdays birthday party. Or, to a lesser degree, take a look at The Gimp. Same problem. Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom have a far better workflow, even though you can achieve the same results with The Gimp. Don't get me wrong, both The Gimp and Cinelerra are great tools. I'm exclusively using The Gimp to edit my photos, but it took quite long to learn to get the results I want (which are often just one or two mouse clicks in Photoshop.) Also, I'm currently using Cinelerra for my video editing as I plainly do not want to spend THAT much money on Premiere CS for my few projects. Yet, I know a lot of artists and observe how they work. They'd simply not get their work done in time being forced to follow sub-par workflows.

But software can evolve. Remember Blender from a couple of years ago before it became free software? You couldn't work with it. If you never had a second look at it, this is the time. Yes, the current 1.5 beta probably has some few issues. But I see one render artist after another moving away from their proprietary extremely expensive tools to Blender. Because it now has a consistent workflow and it has almost all features needed. And you know how this happened? Because they have a very active and innovative community of developers and users. Many of the developers are even users of Blender. In my opinion something this wonderful can only happen with Free and Open Source Software.

What do Mormons and the Furry Fandom have in common? Next to nothing. However, both face the same problem when it comes to answering ridicule: how to react appropriately and at the same time ask their own community to not engage in an embarrassing debate. Trey Parker and Matt Stone of Southpark fame wrote a satirical musical called Book or Mormon which will premier next month on New York Broadway. This is the official statement by the LDS Church. Quite brilliant, from a PR point of view: they do not take the bait, do not criticize the musical, don't say they're offended, don't try to justify themselves, they just state what's important to them. And, more directed at their own fellowship than at outsiders, they link to their general stance on media coverage, which remarkably well explains how to react on unfavorable reports and fiction without getting into a defensive position.

On the other hand, the comments on the Deseret News article show how futile it is to ask to just ignore a provocation.

Finally caught up on vacation reports. This entry is about Saturday, January 22nd.

The flight back was with United Airlines. Quite a rough ride the first 45 minutes, but uneventful afterwards. A couple of children on board, but all of them old enough to stay calm. I even had several hours of sleep. Arrival in Frankfurt on the apron, but we met again at the baggage claim. No damage to our luggage, no hassle with customs, and Laimika eagerly awaiting us at the arrival area to pick up the book he asked Lynard to bring from FC. Furvan's father showed up shortly after, Kayjay had to run to get his train, and Lynard and I shared the train until Würzburg, his home town. I arrived in Nuremberg an hour later, dead tired, but very satisfied with another great vacation.

Still catching up on vacation reports. This entry is about Friday, January 21st.

Kayjay found some information about World War II bunkers at the Pacific coast, so we went to see whether those can be visited. Unfortunately, the one near Gray Whale Cove is in the construction zone for the new CA-1 tunnel, no chance to park anywhere near it. Instead, we hit the nearby beach. Wow, those impressive waves! It almost felt like summer with sunshine and temperatures well above 20 °C. Swimming would had been too dangerous, but we spent quite a while enjoying the sun.



Since we didn't want to drive back to the city immediately, we took the short hike along the hills to Montara State Beach and back. Do we have some time left? Yes, we do! So I took the scenic detour via the CA-84 through the mountains. I have to admit, I only saw half of the great landscape as I had to concentrate on the very curvy and steep street, but: Wow. I didn't expect so much nature in such densely populated area.

Back at the hotel, we took the cable car to Fisherman's Wharf for some nice ice cream at Ghiradelli's and a short walk to Pier 39 afterwards.



The pan handlers got more aggressive this year. Lousy musicians demanding to get payed to STFU, annoying shoeshine boys, sellers of stolen jewelry... Not a very good trend that can be observed mainly on the Wharf and on Powell Street between Union Square and Market. But I digress. The Musee Mecanique was still open when we got there, and they even have some new exhibits. Always a nice place to waste some time and quarters.

And finally, we met with Furvan again, who went shopping on his own again, and had dinner at the other Lori's Diner on Powell Street. The rest of the night was spent packing our luggage, as this was the last day of our vacation.

Still catching up on vacation reports. This entry is about Thursday, January 20th.

This was my seventh trip to San Francisco, but the first time we actually managed to visit the Cartoon Art Museum on Mission Street, even though it was on our list every single year. The name is a bit misleading, it's more about political comic strips than about animation, but they show some real treasures, like an original Calvin & Hobbes painting. We
were lucky, their special exposition was about Warner Brothers cartoons and they had some really interesting roughs, cells and backgrounds from various WB artists on display. Comparing Maurice Noble's original watercolor backgrounds with what rushed digital "restoration" of the video transfers now running on TV made of it drives tears in my eyes. Let's hope that the paintings will survive at least another 60 years so coming generations of animation enthusiasts will be able to compare.

On the way to the museum we discovered the Yerba Buena Gardens with the Martin Luther King Jr memorial: an impressive water fountain in the form of a waterfall. "We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream." And like a mighty stream the waterfall sounds, indeed. The gardens are a relaxing, calm island in the middle of a busy and loud city.

We spent the rest of the afternoon strolling through China Town, but didn't find much to buy.

For dinner we went to the Walzwerk, an East German themed restaurant which I can highly recommend (as if this were necessary with the documentary about it almost continuously running on German TV). The food is excellent, they have Köstritzer beer on tap, and run by a really lovely German lady.

It's been a couple of years since I visited the Exploratorium, and Kayjay and Lynard didn't know it at all, so this is where we spent the day. Furvan went shopping on his own, though. Lucky for him he doesn't know what he was missing. There are some similar museums around the world based on the same didactic concept, but the Exploratorium is still the best in my opinion. Countless physical experiments to try yourself, well constructed and explained. We entered at half past ten in the morning and got thrown out after only twenty minutes — when they were closing at five in the afternoon. I believe that's one of the few experiments without a proper description: the difference between your sense of time and the actual time spent at the museum.



We picked up Furvan at Fisherman's Wharf afterwards and spent an hour at Marina Green, observing the most beautiful moonrise over the bay. And finally we drove to Berkeley where we met Morani and Shimaron for dinner at the T-Rex grill in Berkeley. Excellent food, excellent beer and an excellent chat with the two. Thanks for the dinner!

Tuesday, we're among the last few furries checking out of the Fairmont. Packing the car, heading for San Francisco. Breakfast at Starbucks somewhere near San Mateo, Furvan shopping for fursuit building materials at a sports store, then a small detour to Coyote Point County Park, visiting the small animal park.



Afterwards, grocery run as we were out of drinks, and filling up gas, as the tank was almost empty. Then check in at the Hotel Bijou and dinner at Lori's Diner on Powell Street.

The year's Further Confusion was a pleasant surprise after last year. Granted, I didn't expect anything at all this time — too many regulars were not able to attend, mostly those who were important contributors to FC's unique atmosphere. They were dearly missed, indeed. I heard several voices blaming the Fairmont for lack of atmosphere, but it's the guests that make a convention, not the hotel. In fact I only had few issues with the hotel, mostly with the slow bar service, which on Sunday ignored us completely. The majority of the hotel staff was very lovely, at least to us. But even with many of our friends missing, something was back: the FC spirit. A bit weak, but definitely there.

Thanks to FC being on the MLK weekend, the ice rink between the hotel and the museum was a great attraction for fursuiters. Alas, near impossible to photograph as the rink was quite elevated from the floor with a high fence.



The stage shows were entertaining again, even though doing the robot at dance contests is getting old after the third act in row. The ad-lib segment between the masquerade and the results of the jury was probably too long again and too childish, but the masquerade had some very nice costumes on stage again. While FC:Unleashed was a bit short, I liked the acts (and for once agreed to the jury decision). Reciting, no: acting beatnik poetry on the stage of a fantasy convention is certainly original, watching such a perfect performance totally unexpected.

Even the fursuit destruction derby, excuse me: the Critterlympics were funny as hell, mainly due to several participants trying to sabotage the event.

The SIGs were mostly uninteresting to me, except spottacus' serval presentation. He brought some really nice cats, like this handsome serval:



Many thanks to the Sainte Claire hotel for providing the conference room!

And of course there was a lot of fursuit action in and around the hotel, and some great interaction with the locals.



I missed nearly all dances as I was too tired at the end of the days. The dead dog party was quite nice at the beginning, but after a while DJs who never look up from their CD decks took over, playing rather unbearable music. The fursuiters fled to the hotel lobby, and we were having a lot of fun there instead.

So much was going on during the last days of our vacation! Whenever I had the time to update this journal (which was seldom enough) there wasn't a stable Internet connection or I just was too tired to write coherently.

Now that I'm back in Germany I'll hopefully be able to write the reports on Further Confusion and what we did around San Francisco Bay. Today was spent catching up on two weeks of e-mails at the office, a grocery run, and sorting the tech stuff purchased during the trip and washing clothes. I so want to go back to the City by the Bay and the ocean and trade the wet German winter with California early spring weather.

Carrizo Plain National Monument had been on our list for a couple of years, but we always had to skip it due to weather or time constraints. Not this time. Against the recommendation of the GPS navigation we took the south entrance. The unpaved stretches of the road were in fact in a better state than most city streets in San Diego. The vegetation is unique, the park is heaven for bird watchers. Located exactly on the San Andreas fault, there is also a bit of an uneasy feeling involved. Located in the north of the park, Soda Lake is a good point for watching shorebirds. If you visit at the correct time of year, unlike us.



Well, so we only were able to see a few herons and plovers that can be watched all year.

We skipped CA-1 as there is no point in driving through Big Sur in the dark, and proceeded directly to San Jose, heading for Further Confusion.