I’ve delivered simple, clear and easy-to-use services for 20 years, for startups, scaleups and government. I write about the nerdy bits here.
— @joahua
Just stumbled across this website, http://www.zimoblog.com/. It’s not audio, or even text-to-speech, but it’s a cool extension of blogging technology.
No idea what costs are involved, if any, and it looks like you need to use their proprietry service (at a glance only, I didn’t look too closely).
I bought a new 3.5mm to 1/4” adapter yesterday, because the old one had been abused to the extent that it wasn’t listenable if I were to move the cable on my headphones at all… a problem for music where headbanging is a requirement!
Yeaaah. Anyway. As you’d probably guessed from the title, I’m liking this new thing. There are so many potential points of failure in my audio setup at the minute, but it seems like (at least on this line) that was the only thing wrong with it. So bad were the connections, in fact, that it was actually increasing impedence across the circuit to a noticable extent (audibly, even when the connector was “working”). And this one does stereo without dropping out, so that’s nice.
I have no idea what I did to that last adapter, but it was seriously dead. It’s been relegated to my in-tray, which sits about 15cm high at the minute (no, not joking). That of course means that I’ll likely never see it again, as I haven’t scheduled myself a reminder to dispose of it.
Annnnd the modern essay is finished, for those who hadn’t guessed. I’m not happy with it, but screw it. Left another assessment too late. The only one of this batch I theoretically haven’t screwed up was one which required no study and was a gift. Haha, the irony is, I dropped that subject ;) I’m told I went well, but the rumour is yet to be confirmed with official sources, and I don’t care to myself, so thinking I got 28/30 is good enough for me. Those two marks are going to nag me, though…
No, I still have no idea what the maths test I may or may not be sitting tomorrow is. I think I am throughly screwed. I have first period in studyhall to work it out.
http://whirlpool.net.au/article.cfm?id=1304&show=replies
Oh. My. Goodness. That’s cheaper than my current plan, and better geared towards my bandwidth usage patterns!
And, at only $3 a GB if I go over, it doesn’t matter either way (well, not much).
Ahhh!! Dilema!!! iiNet are just on the brink of announcing more DSLAM rollouts, with semi-unlimited upload speeds… I guess I’ll wait for that list to be unveiled before trying to make any further decisions on this one.
What exists in Sydney in the way of consumer (i.e. not business) VoIP gateway services? And can you use fax over VoIP? I’m so ready to ditch the phone line and go over this entirely: currently, we’re paying $25 for line rental, and $60 for ADSL a month. I don’t know what we’re paying in calls, but it’d be enough.
This would be $0 in line rental, $45 for internet access, and some amount of telephony costs – if nothing else, we’d save massively interstate/long distance and international. Even if voice usage consumed large-ish amounts of bandwidth, I can’t see it using more than a GB per month (so, add $3 to telephony costs) — that’s based on the fact that if I stream a 192kbps stream for 8 and a half hours, it only uses about 900MB — and it’s safe to presume that VoIP won’t be anywhere near that sort of quality!
Meh, can’t think about it now… still got this stupid assessment unfinished, must keep working. More to post, but that actually requires thought, not just techno-babble, so it will come in a while…
**EDIT: ** More has been posted, and backdated to when it actually SHOULD have appeared. See article 106, “A feast for sore eyes” for more!
Just got around to installing GRI’s Anti-Virus software on the crappy Pentium box (running ’98, one of two remaining Windows computers in this household — and switches across on that one have been considered… more than a few times before). Twenty minutes later, it’s lost 14 separate viruses… hopefully this will mean that the stupid thing stops creating network storms whenever it is turned on and plugged in to everything else.
I really don’t see WHY viruses are created! My goodness! The creators don’t really stand to GAIN from it, and viruses aren’t (for the most part) actually THAT harmful — just bloody annoying and time consuming! Bleh. I have no idea exactly what any of those fourteen viruses did… there were some trojans in there, but it really had minimal impact, what with ipchains and NAT running on my Coyote box (that said, I don’t know how much longer I’ll stick with Coyote on that thing… starting to get itchy fingers, wanting to switch it over to Slack or Debian or something and run Samba and Apache, amongst other things, on it.)
Aside from that, I just finished the “product” I’m submitting for this next assessment task (business studies) — they’re only getting a paper manual, though, because source-code is more than I would ever trust that department with, regardless as to it’s actual value (in man hours or anything else: my IP (or clients IP, depending on how you look at it) is more valuable than any crappy assessment they can throw our way).
Hmm. I’m going to go and work like crazy for about an hour, so I’ve got time to get down to church this evening. Assessments are bad. Or rather, the importance I place on them is bad. Last weekend was pretty terrible… I ended up leaving after our bible study and before church last week, because of my complete lack of time management with that Extension task!
Back to business…
Unusual expression though the title of this post may seem (“A feast for sore eyes”), it does make quite a lot of sense once thought about. It is the amalgamation of the phrases “A sight for sore eyes” and “Feast your eyes on this” — the result of an attempted application of Australian/English-speaking colloquialisms by a foreigner.
Well, okay, not exactly a foreigner. An ex-pat of Australia… not even that! An Australian citizen whose work requires time spent away from this country in a semi-permanent setting. Yes. Something like that. Anyway, this man has been living in France for the past while (thirteen years? fourteen? I honestly can’t recall what he said…), working as a missionary there.
Whoa, hang on, Josh… Australia Christians are sending missionaries to France? But… isn’t France a country with Christian origins and stuff? Well… sort of. That doesn’t necessarily result in a significant number of people actually following Jesus, though. Much of France is either “culturally” religious (that is, they follow traditions without actually believing [in] the God or entity behind this), atheist, or Muslim.
Laws regarding separation of Church and State in France establish religion as a “private” thing, not to be shared (and certainly not taught) in the public sphere. That said, the Government in France is very supportive of the beliefs of the individual, which means that people (of any faith) cannot be persecuted for this.
So why, then, does our Church send people to France, if people are free to believe what they want? Surely, there are plenty of Christians in France if they can believe whatever they want?
Well, these missionaries are living and working in a city called Toulouse, which has three universities, and approximately 100,000 students. Toulouse is one of FOUR university cities in this region of France, and Owen Chadwick (the missionary) is the only staff-worker working with students in this area. So, one to a few hundred thousand students kind of ratio.
Yeah. So, this guy was speaking at my church (ESM) this evening, on a passage from a book in the New Testament called Ephesians. It was kind of odd, because this is the sort of passage which I’d normally glance at and then skip past… it looks fairly generic and boring.
http://www.biblegateway.com/cgi-bin/bible?language=english&passage=Eph+1%3A15-23&version=NIV is a link to the passage for anyone interested (Ephesians 1:15-23); it is a very exciting prayer, but I’d managed to completely miss this until it was presented tonight.
So what’s so exciting about it? It’s asking for “the Spirit of wisdom and revelation” — okay, so that means something has to be there to be revealed, that we don’t know about or aren’t aware of, right? The speaker likened us to being in a blackout, moving to the walls and feeling they were smooth. Hang on, we’re in a crumbly sandstone building! That’s not right! And if the walls were made from gold ingots, we wouldn’t know — it’s the same with Christians if God doesn’t reveal his riches to us.
And THAT is a good thing because…? What’s there that is so good, so worth knowing about? Back towards the start of Ephesians (Ephesians 1:3), the writer of this letter, Paul, says “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.”
EVERY blessing. So it’s not like a stack of gold piled around the walls. It’s much, much bigger. It’ll probably stay shiny for longer, too.