Die Sony, Die!

"Sony: please die. Please, please, in the name of all that is free and good and right, please just leave us alone and die."

So cries 'Anonymous' one of many posters on forums looking for answers on how to transfer their precious Mini Disc (MD) recordings to their PC while retaining their digital integrity.

The sad fact is, and my beef with Sony is, that you can't. And despite users petitions to Sony, it seems you never will.

In 2003 I bought a Sony MD with that intention. I plunked down £230 under the misinformation that this was possible when I wanted to record interviews for a documentary I was making and edit them on my PC. Sony had launched the 'Net MD' extension of their widely adopted MD format which promised transfer between the MD and the PC with something called Sonic Stage and the USB or optical cable provided. Their commercials said it was so, the salesman in Tottenham Court Road told me it was so.

They all lied to me. It appears many other people had that impression too which Sony did little to disabuse them of. Some wrote to the Guardian in their confusion when they found they couldn't do this: "I have bought a Sony Net MD Walkman to record audio on location and transfer digitally to a PC for editing. Sony's SonicStage 1.5 gives a fail message on attempting transfer of the sound file to the PC. Short of dubbing in real time, is there any other way of digitally transferring such a sound file, please? "

And so it goes on for thousands of posts in hundreds of forums.

It seems entirely logical doesn't it? You offer the ability to record digitally onto magneto optical disks and include in the box software that says transfer between MD and PC, so you would think it was capable of MD to PC wouldn't you? But the sad fact is that this software only enables PC to MD and NOT THE OTHER WAY ROUND.

It's not possible. Not now. Maybe not ever. What a waste of time and money for all of us. Offer an inexpensive way to make recordings with exceptional fidelity with whole host of really useful features such as marking tracks on the fly and then lead the user up a dead-end street in their work-flow.

The dreadful Sonic Stage interface facilitates 'check in' and 'check out' of songs on a PC into the MD. You could put a music CD in your PC and transfer it with all its song title information to your MD at high speed and excellent fidelity to take your music with you. What wasn't clear was that was all it did. The MD check-out feature wasn't a transfer. It just deleted the song from your MD and uncovered the original file languishing on your PC. So, if you had backed anything up to your MD and then lost your PC, you were basically stuffed.

You can record from your MD to a PC or other media via the analog line out in real time (yawn) but you will notice a drop in quality with increased hiss and loss of depth. If it is possible to transfer data at high speed in one direction, why on earth can't you go the other? Oh, because Sony, which owns movie studios and record companies, didn't want anyone with an MD to copy CDs onto their MD, then transfer their MD recording to CD burners or something else. Not even if you created that music, interviews, lectures, wildlife recordings in the first place?

Cheers Sony. You were on on the cusp of something great but your pettyness gave the whole digital recording market to the iPod once they woke up to it.

Another forum poster promises: "I'm going to start carrying my NetMD in my pocket for the off-chance I see some Sony exec somewhere - I'm gonna beam that sucker right their head.... that is if I don't chuck it into a lake, river or wall before that."

Eight years later, everywhere you look geeks are still crying; "All I do is cry cry cry. Silly me. I recorded a bunch of my live dj mixes and live recordings...about one years worth, before I even tried to do the MD > PC transfer. So I guess returning my MD is not an option. What a big waste of time and money... "It's a Sony."

I trawled the net for any recent updates and I couldn't find anything. A clever programmer has come up with Win NMD that enables you to extract file titles when you record from your MD but it's still a real-time analogue process unless you get into serious dosh for broadcast equipment (which the true pirate is going to have anyway).

'Anonymous' put my feelings succinctly; "It began in 2001, before the war on terror, when we were innocent and optimistic, when we believed that this new century could be a time of change-for-the-better. Five years later, and thanks to the cynicism of Sony, our simple dreams of a better and easier life have been shattered. Thank you Sony. Thanks for being part of the problem. "

Found things

olmsted.jpg
Originally uploaded by pixlink

Ahh, the mysteries of life. Many are found in 'Found' magazine. http://www.foundmagazine.com/


I bought a wedding album in a thrift store in Los Angeles in 1991. It's titled 'Candid Studies of the Olmsted-Dougherty wedding by the Curtis Studios' in hand-painted calligraphy on the cover (who can do that now?)

Judging from the cars and the clothes, it could be 1940 ~ 1950 in California probably, the church is Mission style, the reception looks to be at a smart country club or mansion. Most of the people look well off and there's loads of stunning dames and handsome guys, some are in uniform.

I paid the LA Times £50 to search for a wedding announcement but they didn't find it. The photographer Edward S. Curtis traded as 'The Curtis Studio' from the Biltmore Hotel, Los Angeles. Could this be by one of his employees or successors? Curtis himself would have been in his 70's or 80's by then.

If this family is yours, please get in touch. The one above is one of many and the last photo in the album below is of the photographer with his Speed Graphic. I think the person with him is a photographer too, that looks suspiciously like a 5x4 slide in his pocket.






















Postscript November 2011

According to members of Facebook group 'Hidden Los Angeles', this is the wedding album of Louise Olmstead and William Howard Dougherty. They were married on August 3, 1940 in Westwood Hills at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle. She was the daughter of Mr. & Mrs. Clarence Edward Olmstead of (New York, formerly of Los Angeles). He was the son of Mr. & Mrs. Frank Clarke of Pasadena. Engagement announced on in March 29, 1940 LA Times. Wedding announcement in the August 3, 1940 LA Times.

I should ask the LA Times for a refund if it was in there all along.

The BNP list

I've seen the BNP list. God bless America. Whilst the UK media remain cryptic about where it is available, US newspapers openly provided links.


What value to the debate can I add with this posting? Well, it seems that Suffolk has plenty of BNP supporters and by that list its numbers are concentrated in Ipswich, Lowestoft, Haverhill and none are recorded in Southwold and Aldeburgh but there are two in the Halesworth area. In my opinion, that apparently follows the economic advantage within these communities too.

I once interviewed Nick Griffin and had to go through a very tiresome interview with his spokesman to do so. I asked him about growing up in his former home of Halesworth and given his ties to the area, I'm not surprised that a BNP 'activist' is reputedly still living here.

I know there are also plenty of ultra-green and ultra-left political activists around these same towns and this need not concern our guardians of the peace. I doubt anyone will be torching cars in Suffolk because of politics.

Like Voltaire (supposedly), I don't agree with their politics myself but I must defend their freedom to engage in politics without fear of anything more than heckling.

Some bloggers suggested that the leak was orchestrated by the BNP to gain sympathy for the party to show it's not a bunch of skinheads. It appears now it was by disgruntled ex-members but Nick Griffin acknowledged there were some benefits to the party's reputation from it happening.

It's an invasion of privacy and as much as I support free speech, I can't support anyone having the right to steal such lists and put them on the internet but I think it's also well deserved poetic justice.

For years some people in the far right have maintained their own lists of 'enemies' on the internet. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3544095.stm The host domain of 'Redwatch' was registered to the National Front and you get into a quagmire of political history whether the NF is the same as the BNP.

I know people who are willing to document the activities of right-wing political parties are on them and have had to take security precautions ever since as a consequence of threats from that quarter.

I guess, in time, the results of any investigation will be buried under attention another story and the matter will blow over. Or not.

Please don’t print this posting

Did you know that one piece of office paper, for example 80gsm A4, uses 600ml water and creates 34g of CO2 and 2.4g landfill waste in its lifetime?

That figure is pretty hard to come by which is part of the problem.

My figures came from Australia and when I looked into others from the USA, the claim for another paper was for 8g carbon per letter sheet.

I suppose Australia has to import more of its wood pulp and it depends on where you're counting, whether at the mill or when delivered to the user as all those miles on trucks must make a difference and stuff like bond for letterheads must take more energy to make than plain copier paper.

Let's just go with the high figure for now as I hope to show it's not just the CO2 that matters. If each sheet of plain copier paper represents seven times its weight in carbon emissions, that means every 500 sheets of plain white paper is 17 kg of CO2.

Now add to that, that over its lifetime, the manufacture of a typical office printer and its consumables creates 110 kg of CO2 per year. A big photocopier/network printer creates vastly more but is hopefully more efficient per page.

The electricity used by a small office printer on standby (mine at least) emits at least another 200 kg CO2 per year.

In the USA the average office worker uses 10,000 sheets of paper per year.

Combined with envelopes, that could be a tonne (1000kg) of carbon emissions per worker, per year.

One of my employers has measured the carbon emissions from the office lighting and heating alone at 350 tonnes per year. They haven’t counted the paper use yet but we're going to and it could be very scary. Lots of organisations like ours admit in their public carbon reports that it is very hard to do this and depends wholly on the suppliers' estimates. Addendum: our main copier paper is Evolve Office 80gsm which is 100% recycled and the data from the mill (in Kent) says the CO2 emission in its production is 728kg per tonne. I reckon that's 3.64g per sheet but then there's the shipping to the warehouse and delivery too.

"But we use recycled paper in our copier and for all our literature" I hear the MD chime in. Not that they need to defend the organisation as it has just installed a biomass boiler and committed to a whole list of actions after a Carbon Trust audit. We didn't do that just for the brownie points, although there are some, but because it saves money. Large organisations are being required to establish their carbon baselines by 2012 so everyone's getting quite interested in carbon accounting now, at least I hope so. If they can find their carbon footprint now they'll know what kind of target reduction is possible and what it will cost when they are forced to act.

But when all that's done, where's the next round of carbon reduction going to come from? Then I think it's going to get really interesting. I think managers would rather install a fancy thermostat at twice the price of enforcing changes in employee behaviour because a thermostat doesn't complain when told what to do.

Using recycled paper is a good thing. Recycled paper saves trees but carbon is still emitted from the energy required to process it. A tonne of virgin pulp creates roughly 2.1 tonnes of CO2 emission. One tonne of recycled pulp causes 1.86 tonnes of CO2 emission. But everyone must cut consumption as well as recycle. Paper is the third greatest source of industrial carbon emissions.

My employer hasn't measured the cost and volume of the paper it uses yet because that requires data entry from stacks of invoices by hand but it's working on getting it done. Maybe suppliers could help by formatting their invoices better to enable that?

Apart from the carbon issue, our paper use is a high priority because the cost of paper these days gives enough incentive. Although everyone wants to reduce the charity's carbon footprint, allocating resources to do that has to be considered mostly on a financial basis. Our new heating controls will cost £8000 to install and will save 30 tonnes of CO2 annually but businesses will only do such things - until there are carbon quotas - because the cost can be paid back in energy savings in 2.5 years.

My low-end guestimate puts providing my co-workers' paper and electricity and printers at around 6 pence a sheet. There's a handy bit of software by which you can log network printing and charge it to clients called Papercut* (and it's free for up to five users) which can count the paper and printers used and so you can count the carbon value of your printing.

If everyone where I work reduced their paper consumption by 1000 copies, I reckon the bottom line would be improved by enough to raise wages 1%. That's a pretty good incentive besides the carbon impact.

Saving paper saves the bottom line which also means for grant supported organisations like mine that jobs can be funded for longer. So save paper = save the planet = save your job.

Some habits that can reduce the waste of office paper:

• Learn how to use the network dialogue box to send jobs to the most efficient printer.
  
• Have another person check a big mail-merge document for typos before you hit print.
  
• Always check in your printer dialog box that you are printing only the pages you want. This especially applies to printing off stuff on the web or emails.


• Don’t print in colour unless there’s a very compelling reason.


• Use a printer with two or more feed trays and load once-used paper in one tray or keep a letter tray beside the printer for print 'boo boos' and load this paper in when printing drafts.


• Make sure you have a printer than accepts used paper without grumbling. If your printer can't, save your ‘boo boo’ paper to put in a printer that does.


• Try to keep waste paper (once printed both sides) out of recycling collection. Think of ways to reuse it. You can shred it and use it for packaging or put it in chicken coops or horse stables then add it to compost. You can also mix it with starch or PVA to make things like seedtrays, egg boxes or carnival costumes.

*note to Papercut: Wouldn't it be great if there was a widget in your printer dialogue box that popped up and said "you are about to emit .... kg of CO2. Do you really need to do this?"

Further reading:

Paper http://www.edf.org/papercalculator/

HP Printers http://www.hp.com/large/ipg/ecological-printing-solutions/carbon-footprint-calc.html

Xerox http://www.consulting.xerox.com/flash/thoughtleaders/suscalc/xeroxCalc.html

Papercut http://www.papercut.com/

A great explanation of the production cycle http://www.storyofstuff.com/

Suffolk & Celebrities

My little corner of Suffolk never seems to be out of the papers for very long. What with Gordon Brown lately spending his holidays in Wangford and Bernard Matthews in Holton getting bird flu.

Like the swallows returning to San Juan Capistrano, I don't consider spring to have really come until I see the first story of the year about the price of beach huts in Southwold.

I have developed a theory how this story is a perennial. It's because when journalists visit Suffolk at half-term with their families, they need an expedient excuse to claim some travel expenses so they file this story. Or they need something they can file quickly so they can fill their column and have more time with their families instead of digging (metaphorically) for something substantial. It's easy story to do, you only need look in the estate agent's shop window and there's no end of people willing to supply a quote for a plug. Cynical perhaps but then I've done it myself. Every time the story never fails to mention the celebrities that populate the area.

And lately, even though this autumn feels like its winter already, there's been no shortage of celebrity sightings. Just before bonfire night I saw Richard Curtis on his bike in Southwold High Street and walking along the seafront at Southwold, who should emerge from the grey mist but Will Self and his dogs.

These names aren't secrets, anyone could find these out on Google and no particular order, these are the celebrities most frequently associated with this part of north east Suffolk:

Paul Heiney & Libby Purves - Westleton
Peter Purves - Sibton
Bill Nighy & Diana Quick - Middleton (now apparently seperated)
Paul Greengrass - Walberswick
Emma Freud & Richard Curtis - Walberswick
Esther Freud & David Morrissey - Walberswick
Clement Freud & Jill Freud - Walberswick
P D James - Southwold
Geoffrey Palmer - Southwold
Bernard Hill - Southwold
Griff Rhys-Jones - Woodbridge
Terry Waite - Southwold
Ronald Blythe - Wormingford
Lex Shrapnel - Wattisfield
Ralph, Joseph & Martha Fiennes - Walpole

There are plenty more associated with Aldeburgh too.

Further afield

Claudia Schiffer & Matthew Vaughan - Shimpling
Bill Wyman - Shimpling
Louis De Bernieres - Bungay
Elizabeth Jane Howard - Bungay
Myleen Klass - Gorleston
Justin Hawkins, Dan Hawkins, Ed Graham (The Darkness) - Lowestoft
Charlie Simpson - Framlingham

Trevor Nunn was born in Ipswich but I don't know if he's ever come back.

Not living or second-homing in Suffolk (to my knowledge) but often seen:

Chris Evans & Billie Piper (together and individually)

Michael Palin

Will Self