Category Archives: General

Star-Shaped Discs

I purchased a Sony PlayStation 3 recently. I thoroughly read the accompanying manual on a train ride and a particular detail caught this optical media aficionado’s eye:


Sony PlayStation 3 manual -- disc shape notice

Wait… what? Star-shaped discs? Heart-shaped ones as well? Are those real? How would those even work? I know about 80 cm discs that fit in the smaller groove of a CD tray. I also know about the business card-shaped CD’s; I even have a few games that were published on such a form factor (for example). But a star has points. And a heart? How?

A brief bit of Googling for “star shaped disc” leads me directly to the Wikipedia article on shaped CDs, which happens to showcase a heart-shaped CD. But how would a star-shaped disc work? That (typically) has 5 points. Where would the circular track go, the one that holds data? I figure there could be sort of a fat star, a circle with 5 points. This turns out to be the correct idea as this disc manufacturing page indicates.


star-shaped-cd

Check out the page and see the oddest shape– the house CD.

The Freezing Point of Brussels Sprout Soda

In the interest of using the internet to facilitate original scientific research, I am publishing the results of my inadvertent experiment regarding the relative freezing points of various novelty sodas.


Jones holiday soda

Revenge of the White Elephant
At a white elephant gift exchange a few years ago, I received a re-gifted set of novelty holiday-themed sodas created by the Jones Soda Company. They created several of these over the years. This one had pumpkin pie, cranberry, wild herb stuffing, turkey and gravy, and — sigh — Brussels sprout flavors. I never got around (or got up the courage) to sample them and they have languished in my bachelor refrigerator ever since. The reason for the “bachelor” qualifier is that it stays fairly empty and I generally keep a pretty good mental inventory of its contents. Imagine my surprise when I noticed a strange, light green liquid on the bottom.

It smelled strange but I figured it was coming from a plastic container containing a friend’s homemade pickles. I removed the pickles from the equation and cleaned up the liquid. Later on, I noticed some more liquid had collected. The inside bulb is burned out (remember, bachelor fridge) so it’s a bit dark inside. However, I eventually spied a shard of clear glass.


Jones brussels sprout soda bottle, broken

Results
So it seems that the Brussels sprout soda had frozen and expanded until the glass bottle could no longer contain the block. That explains the sound of crashing glass I recall hearing the night before which emanated in the general vicinity of the kitchen.

The bottle was in pretty bad shape but much of the soda was still frozen inside what remained of the bottle. That it must have been gradually melting explains why there was more fluid sometime after the initial cleanup. I immediately, but gingerly, removed the other 4 bottles for fear that they might be ready to burst as well. But none of the 4 showed any sign of freezing.

What to conclude? Either the brussels sprout soda has a significantly higher freezing point than the other 4 flavors and was adversely affected during a freak temperature drop; or the Brussels sprout soda was situated in a colder section of the refrigerator. It’s also possible that all of them were affected by the temperature event but the others didn’t make it to the breaking point before the event reversed.

Impact
I can theorize about it all day. But in the end, I need to clean it up. How does this pertain to multimedia hacking? Well, I was going to add long-overdue test cases to FATE tonight, but that may have to wait. Fortunately, I was at the end of a shopping cycle and all I had to toss were some soda-saturated bananas. I’m keeping the butter since I don’t think it was affected, much. To any coworkers reading: if my cookies taste vaguely of Brussels sprouts over the next month, then, well… I happen to know that’s the closest some of you will come to consuming a vegetable all month.

And I never got to taste the Brussels sprout soda. Actually, that’s the part about this episode that bothers me the least.

Eee PC And Chrome

I complain about a lot of software on this blog. But I wanted to take this opportunity to praise some software for once– Easy Peasy and Google Chrome. I’ve had some ups and downs with my Eee PC 701 netbook— great unit but the vendor-supplied Linux distribution was severely lacking. I auditioned some netbook-tailored distros last year and found one that worked reasonably well while being a bit rough around the edges — Ubuntu-Eee. One notable problem I experienced a few weeks after I installed it was that the wireless network driver quit working (though to be fair, I understand that was a greater problem due to an Ubuntu update around the same time).


Eee PC 701 running Easy Peasy and Google Chrome

These days, Ubuntu-Eee has been renamed Easy Peasy. I was finally sufficiently motivated to try installing it when enough other things on my existing Ubuntu-Eee distro had broken. Essentially all the problems that troubled me in its predecessor distro have vanished– wireless works again (though I still can’t seem to toggle it), all the sound controls work, even the hibernation works which impressed me greatly (even if I never use it).

Pertaining to web browsers, I have traditionally been satisfied with Firefox. Sure, it has been growing large in recent times, but what software hasn’t? It’s the price of software progress and all. However, I took this opportunity to try out Google Chrome which I never thought I would have reason to care about. I am roundly impressed with its speed and responsiveness. Seriously, this browser might even be lean enough for the guru to consider using on a regular basis.

I’m pleased that I can forgo a replacement for this classic Eee PC netbook for the foreseeable future.

Renoise XRNS

A little piece of me died today when I read of the existence of XRNS, a music tracker format that uses XML. A music tracker format that uses XML! Can you imagine? If you can’t, Google for “filetype:xrns” to find plenty of samples.

[xml]
< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>


4
1
false
4
96
123
3
true

36
68
67
47

Untitled
By Somebody




[/xml]
And on it goes. It’s difficult to articulate why this feels so heretical. It’s like those old MOD/tracker formats were designed to be so pure, so efficient. This completely destroys that. Now your playback engine has to carry the baggage of a full XML parsing library.

There are elements of the FFmpeg development team that would enjoy seeing the program grow to be able to handle all the various tracker-type formats (myself included, obviously). It’s not going to be pretty when XRNS collides with FFmpeg.

Addendum: Share the love over on the Renoise forums.