Philip Fibiger

Leonard posted a mix using mixwit and finally got me to go and make an account. The ability to search for pre-uploaded music rather than uploading it yourself is really nice, but it looks like they don’t cache any of it, so I have no idea how long the mixes will hang around. If they could borrow a page from Muxtape and cache the music on Amazon S3, it would really be a perfect service. Or at least cache all music for muxtapes that have been played in the last 30 days.

Regardless of how long it’ll hang around I put together a mix of stuff I’ve been listening to lately, either new(er) to me or re-found. Enjoy.

Wow. I can’t get over how young he looks here.

Tivo’s enabled “TivoToComeBack” (the opposite of TivoToGo) on the Series 3 for a couple of months now, but the only conversion guides I’d found ended up with standard def video on the Tivo. Following these instructions I was able to download a 720p sample video, convert it in VisualHub, and send it to my Tivo. Note that it has black bars because the film is a different resolution than my display.

My system for watching downloaded video is actually pretty neat (though prior to this it just handled SD content): Downloaded video are dropped into a folder which is a samba share on my headless mac mini, which is also my itunes/music server. An automator action watches the directory and when video files are dropped in, it fires up VisualHub and starts converting them to mpegs with the “tivo” set of options. When VH finishes the conversion, it drops the newly converted files into a second directory which is monitored by the Tivo Desktop software. So, I can just download a pile of content, drop it into a folder, and walk away. A few hours later (the mini is relatively old/slow) I have a bunch of content ready to play on the Tivo.

In LA I had built a wiki, ordered by dining category, of all the notable places I’d eaten and of information gleaned from chowhound about places I wanted to try. It was rewarding, a lot of people found it through google, but it was a pain to maintain. Wikis are even more fertile ground for link spammers than blog comments. In one instance a page was overwritten so many times that I lost the edit history and a ton of data.

I started the wiki for Orlando, but it’s suffering from the same problems. For now I’m going to try to replicate that functionality through Backpack. It won’t have the anyone-can-edit benefit of a wiki, but the truth is that I think the LA restaurant wiki was edited once by someone who wasn’t me and who wasn’t a spammer.Here’s the backpack-driven list of Orlando Restaurants. I’d love to hear suggestions if you’ve got any.

We’ve been doing a lot of minor renovation around the house, trying to make the place ours. Painting, replacing hardware, new appliances in the kitchen, that sort of thing. Our half bath downstairs was painted a nice color but in all other aspects it wasn’t at all our style. It had this ugly gold hardware on the sink, and the toilet paper holder and towel ring were gold and antiqued iron. The walls had “decorative” fleur-de-lys painted all over it. Emily painted over the decorative paint and I hit ebay for some new bathroom hardware.

The Kohler Fairfax faucet that I bought was really astounding. The old faucet I removed (which likely wasn’t that old, maybe 7-8 years?) hooked up the traditional way. Each handle and the faucet were attached separately with nuts, puttied in place, plumbed to the water supply with lengths of pex. The multi-part drain was epoxied together. Contrast that with the new faucet set:

A single piece drain that has a gasket built in and just screws tight (plumbers putty around the drain is the only place it’s required). Braided stainless supply lines that can fit a variable length run. The real beauty of the installation design is the way the faucet mounts to the sink itself. Instead of having to putty it down and then try to tighten it down from below, it has a rubber gasket and uses a toggle bolt to hold it tight. The toggle is guided up the bolt by a pair of plastic guides, literally all you do is fit the faucet in place (the toggle pops through the centerset hole) and then turn the hidden screw (in the drain plug control) until the toggle moves up flush with the bottom of the sink.

In the end removing the old faucet and cleaning up the old putty mess was the longest part of the process, actually installing the new set was a 10 minute job. A lot of home improvement technologies feel like they really haven’t changed in 50 years, It was a pleasant surprise to find out how easy Kohler had made this task.

Recorded originally for radio broadcast, these excellent quality mp3s of an entire Jonathan Richman show from 1984 in Lyon, France. Accompanied by his then-wife clapping and singing backup vocals, it’s a perfect representation of a Jonathan Richman performance.