What is the natural heir to that Kodachrome moment?
That instagram moment?
Heaven help us if it is.
Image by tonyhall under this creative commons licence
Modern Moments
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Monthly Archives: October 2011
Alas Alac Lossless
My hearing is less than perfect but for those that can hear the difference lossless digital audio formats offer the means of storing sound recordings whilst preserving as much of the original without resorting to the kind of heavy compression and lossy methods of mp3′s,MP4,WMA and the like.
Apple have just open sourced their Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) which has allowed audio purists to store their recordings in a lossless way for playback on iPods and similar Apple portable devices. ALAC is particularly suited to playback on low power devices so there is now a possibility that it could arrive on non Apple devices.
The best known lossless audio format is probably FLAC which is also open source but can only be used on Apple devices via a third party firmware hack called Rockbox.
Related articles
- Apple’s Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) Now Open Source (apple.slashdot.org)
- Lossless music goes High Street (go.theregister.com)
Smart Growth And New Urbanism
I was interested to hear a statistic on the news that despite rising population levels we could all fit into one mega city. In fact that would be more sustainable. That seems to be what new urbanism is making a case for. The hard part is obviously just doing it…together.
Status
A small slice of vintage Peel #keepingitpeel
Status
WiFi networks of note today include CaptPancake, McMinge & (predictably unsecured) LL Cool J
The Divided Brain
FocusWriter
I’ve recently installed FocusWriter, a distraction free writing tool, on the compy. I’ve used a few online equivalents but thought I’d have something available for full offline use. It works well (on Ubuntu 11.10) and is available for Unix, Windows and Mac and features text, rtf and basic .odt file support. You can even set the sound of typing to accompany your keystrokes should such a retro ambiance improve your writing productivity.
