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beta capsule
Thursday, July 11 2019
Since March or so, the only "news" I've been allowing myself (aside from incidental exposure via the Late Show with Stephen Colbert)
has been my Facebook feed and whatever articles are posted on Gizmodo.com or BoingBoing.net. The news there is mostly related to technology and other nerdy interests. I'm a gadget nerd and like HBO's Game of Thrones, but I have no interest in zombies, Star Trek, Star Wars, superheroes, martial arts, role-playing games, videogames, fantasy novels, or comic books. Part of my lack of interest in nerdy media probably has something to do with the fact that my childhood household didn't have a television in my formative years (from the mid-1970s until the Fall of 1983, when I saved up my lunch money to buy the cheapest possible Samsung black and white television to use as a monitor for my VIC-20 computer). There was a period in my early childhood when there was a television, which was still present when Nixon boarded a helicopter to abandon the White House in 1974 (which I remember watching on that television). I seem to also remember watching the Fall of Saigon, which happened April 30th, 1975. During those formative years, I actually was left with a few memories of television shows that haunt me to this day, including The Six Million Dollar Man and a weird Japanese sci-fi superhero program called Ultraman. Regarding the former, my illusions about the quality of that show were forever dashed when I re-watched an episode I'd seen as a little kid sometime in the early 2000s. It was the one featuring a rampaging Russian rover designed to explore Venus that is accidentally deployed on Earth. As for Ultraman, that show seemed to vanish permanently from our culture along with that old black and white television. Occasionally I'd ask people if they'd heard of it, and they'd say they hadn't. But I remember it being so influential on my childhood play (and that of my brother) that we used to have our own makeshift "beta capsules," a technology that can transform a normal-looking humanoid into a giant alien superhero. Today, though, in an article on Gizmodo, there was finally an article about Ultraman, the one superhero I have any nostalgic interest in. The interest, to the extent there is any, is pure nostalgia. Reading about Ultraman on Wikipedia, it doesn't sound like anything that would interest the adult me. Oddly, there was no mention of the "beta capsule," in the Wikipedia article, causing me to wonder if perhaps I was mentally merging-in features from some unrelated show. But no, though I haven't thought much about beta capsules in 45 years, that memory is correct.
I'd just ordered mixed vegetables in garlic sauce with white rice at the Golden Wok in Red Hook when I happened to notice Gretchen trying to reach me via Facebook private messages. It seems she'd scheduled the Prius for a tire rotation today, but, it being Thursday, I'd taken the Prius to work. Fortunately, we use Van Kleeck's Tire for all our tire needs (they're so much less shady and incompetent than Mavis Discount Tire, which we used before we knew any better), and it would be a relatively short drive across the Hudson to drop the car off there and then drive back to work in the Subaru. I sat on the north end of Van Kleeck's, where the building provided a generous slice of shade from the hot July sun, and I ate my Chinese food while I waited for Gretchen to arrive. Gretchen being Gretchen, she'd arranged to have lunch with Sarah the Vegan at Bread Alone while her car was being worked on, and I could've joined them for that, but I didn't want to get sucked into that vortex in the middle of a workday. I was there long enough to say hello to Sarah when she arrived and to also check out her new (to her) car. Her old Toyota Matrix was totalled after hitting a deer, so now she's driving a Subaru Impreza. She said it cost her $13 thousand, and I seem to remember it also being from the 2013 model year. That might sound like bad luck to you, but it was the only car she could find that didn't turn out to have been in an accident.
Back at the house after work, I continued tinkering with my speakerbot. I wanted to add some new features to its web page, particularly demo links for all the audio files (so they can be sampled on the client device before being deployed through the megaphone), support for hierarchical file-system browsing, somewhat better user interface (including the use of icons to represent files, folders, and functions), and, if I was ambitious, support for recording audio directly from the browser (using the client's microphone) and saving it on the speakerbot for subsequent reuse. I'd drunk some kratom tea and was feeling inspired, so I cranked through all but that last item in record time, using icons I'd downloaded as a collection from Bittorrent. As for the recording of audio, I nearly got that to work too, at least in Firefox. The problem was that when I used Javascript to ship the recorded .wav file to the backend (encoded in Base64), it somehow got garbled (something I could see by comparing audio files generated in Javascript with those put in a directory on the speakerbot). The garbled file acted like a .wav file (and had all the appropriate headers, beginning with "RIFF"), but it just sounded like noise. It sounded less like radio static than the surface of a very scratched record. I couldn't hear any audio signal in that noise at all. Obviously, I will have to work on this some more (or try some other sound library than Recorder.js).
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?190711 feedback
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