Behind the scenes

Here are a couple more videos - these are from tonight's show but from behind the scenes. First Patrick and Morgan get ready for a segment: Ready in 5... (27 seconds) This is at the end of the segment from the in-studio audience's point of view: Applause (15 seconds)

TechTV Themes

Thanks to Darryl Harris who sent me this lovely autumnal Screen Savers wallpaper. Click the thumbnail to get the full size image then save as wallpaper. Incidentally, we've posted high quality copies of the original on The Screen Savers web site. The TechTV wallpaper for PocketPC that Patrick showed you yesterday is available from PocketPC Themes. There's another one here. Thanks Foo Fighter! (Yes, Patrick did show my cell phone number on the air when he showed you the theme. Thanks for all the messages!)

Quicksilver

Patrick and I are having a blast, as usual, meeting fans at the Lenox Square Mall in Atlanta. We stayed four hours signing autographs with Michaela Pereira. I'm told we met 273 people. We usually get to more but we took our time today. We'll have to work a little faster tomorrow; we both have planes to catch so we'll be leaving at 3p sharp. Come early - they'll probably cut off the line by 2pm. I needed a little escapism after watching the Giants season end so suddenly this afternoon. Fortunately, Patrick and I had picked up copies of Neal Stephenson's newest book, Quicksilver, at the airport bookstore. We were both big fans of Snow Crash and Stephenson's last, Cryptonomicon, and couldn't wait to get our hands on this one. It's very good, but very different from Neal's previous works. It's definitely not sci-fi. So far it takes place in the time span between 1655 and 1713 and deals with the birth of modern science. We meet Ben Franklin and Isaac Newton as children and see the earliest days of the "Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts," already home to investigations of computing machinery and far in advance of its neighbor, Harvard College, whose dons are still stuck in the scholasticism of the Dark Ages. We also meet the author of the original Cryptonomicon. But that's only in the first hundred or so pages. I've still got 800 pages to go, and it's just the first book in the three-volume "Baroque Cycle," so who knows where we'll end up. So far it's a great read, though, and best of all... there wasn't any baseball in the 18th century.

Dork Farewell

It's good-bye to Megan Morrone on a very special Dork Tower. Megan, of course, has blogged all about her departure from TechTV. But don't worry - I'm planning to keep her very busy working on books and some other stuff. You haven't seen the last of her! Mwahahahhahha!

They Might Be Finished!

I've been working here and there on setting up a Linux based Dial-A-Song answering machine for They Might Be Giants. I promised it to them in April, really buckled down in October, and I'm finally (almost) done today. If you want to follow the saga read my previous posts explaining the project and detailing some of the issues. I did finally find a voice modem that works with vgetty - an old US Robotics external Voice/Fax/Data modem. After some trial and error I discovered that if I resampled the MP3s to 16-bit, 8Khz, mono sound files they'd work with the modem. It was such a thrill to dial up and hear a TMBG song on the other end. The basics of the shell script follow - minus the extensive error checking code. If an error occurs anywhere (no CD, can't read the disc, etc.), the script falls back to a default message stored on the hard drive. #! /bin/bash # ----------------------------------------------------------- # newsong - Leo Laporte, April-December 2003 # ----------------------------------------------------------- # this shell script is designed to be run hourly by cron # it pulls a random MP3 off a CD in drive, combines it with the # outgoing message (message.mp3) on the same disc, then # converts it to the appropriate RMD format and moves it # into the outgoing message directory for vgetty # # requires: # pickrandom - a perl script to pick a random song # SoX for the MP3 to WAV conversion # vgetty's PVF utilities to convert the WAV to RMD # # Written for They Might Be Giants Dial-A-Song # ----------------------------------------------------------- cd /var/spool/voice/work/ touch /var/spool/voice/work/startrun # mount CD mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom ls /mnt/cdrom/*.mp3 >/var/spool/voice/work/files # call an external perl script to select a random title from files tune=$(/var/spool/voice/work/pickrandom) echo "$tune" >currentsong.txt cp -f "$tune" tune.mp3 cp -f /mnt/cdrom/*message.mp3 message.mp3 # convert the MP3s to raw audio (signed, 16-bit, 8khz, mono)... sox -V tune.mp3 -s -w -r 8000 -c 1 tune.raw sox -V message.mp3 -s -w -r 8000 -c 1 message.raw # combine the raw files... cat message.raw >>tune.raw # convert to RMD via SoX and PVF tools... sox -V -s -w -r 8000 -c 1 tune.raw -s -w -r 8000 -c 1 standard.wav wavtopvf -16 standard.wav standard.pvf pvftormd US_Robotics 1 standard.pvf standard.rmd # copy converted file to messages directory... mv -f standard.rmd /var/spool/voice/messages/standard.rmd touch /var/spool/voice/work/endrun The little randomizing perl script: #!/usr/bin/perl # picks a random song from the file list my $tune; open(TUNES, "files") or die 1; srand; do { rand($.) < 1 && ($tune = $_) while ; } until $tune !=~ /message.mp3/i ; print $tune; exit 0; A cron job will run the script hourly. I've been running it every ten minutes for several days and it's been working without a hitch. (Here's a cool little cron feature I've not used before. If you define a MAILTO environment variable in the crontab, cron will mail the output of each job to that address every time it runs. I've added MAILTO=root to the crontab, and now I can use pine to check the results of each run. Very handy for checking up on problems after the fact. ) Since this is a headless machine I'm planning to add audio error messages using pre-recorded WAVs on the hard drive. That way John can tell how the thing is working just by turning up the speaker. We're ordering the parts and plan to build the machine this week. I'm going to put it in a small case with a Celeron, small hard drive, and 256MB RAM. It'll probably run SuSE Linux - my current favorite. Total cost well under $500. I'll set it up so that I can SSH into the box if something goes wrong, but it won't normally be connected to the network. John and John live in Brooklyn so Joshua Brentano and I are hoping to fly out and deliver this to them for Christmas. With any luck it will run without maintenance for years.