Stop Reading This And Get Outside Department

We had mandatory ergonomics training in between shows today. Two very nice ladies came by to tell us how to sit so we wouldn't get carpal tunnel and sue the channel. I feel much better now.

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!

Help-A-Thon II

We've set the time and date for the second annual Call For Help-A-Thon. We'll be doing it the day after Christmas, December 26 from 11a-11p Eastern (8a-8p Pacific). Last year Chris Pirillo went 18 hours, but there's no way these old bones could do that. Twelve hours will do fine, thank you. Cat, Sarah, and Kevin will be helping out. There will be lots of surprises, too. I know Alex Lindsay has agreed to do a Photoshop hour with me. More will follow, I'll fill you in as we book the show up. So set aside some time December 26 to join us for the Help-A-Thon. It's going to be even more fun than last time.

TMBG Day 4

Back to work on the TMBG answering machine. The clock is ticking down. John and John are going to be on the show on Tuesday, so it's now or never. I'm going to post my work notes, in case there's some interest. I'll turn them into an article for The Screen Savers web site that might be a little more readable. I imagine most of you will want to skip along to the next post, however. I have borrowed a "voice modem" from Roger. It's a Zoom Model 3049 - PC V.92 56K external modem with voice capabilities. I have no idea if vgetty will work with this thing at all, but I'm willing to give it a try. I've modified /etc/inittab as indicated in the (sparse) vgetty documentation to start vgetty on boot. I'm kind of guessing here but this seems to work:

S1:S3:respawn:/usr/local/sbin/vgetty modem

Checking the vgetty log file (/var/log/vgetty.modem - which is very helpful and complete) I see that indeed something is happening. Vgetty seems to be starting (amazing) and can even communicate with the modem. But I also see that I've put voice.conf, the vgetty configuration file, in the wrong spot. I'm moving it to the correct locale: /usr/local/sbin/mgetty+vgetty/. ... Still not seeing voice.conf. I'm chmod'ing it to 666 to give world r+w privileges. That worked. ... Now a new error message. There's no group "modem". So I'll create one. I'll make the root a member of modem. I think the system will always run as root anyway since there's no net access and no way to hack it. Done. Error message is gone. ... The log also tells me that the modem is a "generic Rockwell" voice modem. That's very encouraging, since vgetty supports the Rockwell chipset. The log says it's seeing the modem on /dev/modem and the config strings are going through. I'm getting an error however when vgetty tries to initialize the voice modem functions. Uh oh. Sure enough, the modem will not answer the phone. It sees it ringing - the AA light comes on - but it doesn't pick up. I'm thinking it has a proprietary voice interface. Wish I had a ZyXel lying around. ... While I'm pondering that problem, I'll start working on the scripts to convert the MP3s on the CD into the answering machine message. First I have to convert a TMBG MP3 into a form the voice modem understands (rmd) using the following programs, SoX, wavtopvf, and pvftormd. The last two come with vgetty, but I have to guess which rmd format to convert to. Probably Rockwell 8-bit, right? # convert to 16-bit wav at 11,025 bps (that's all wavtopvf understands) sox happy.mp3 -w -r 11025 happy.wav # converts to pvf, an intermediate format wavtopvf happy.wav happy.pvf # final conversion to modem audio format pvftormd -Rockwell 8 happy.pvf standard.rmd This all seems to work, but there's no way to verify it until I can get a voice modem that works with vgetty. I'm so close, but... that's enough for today. Time to trick or treat.