Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: My Food Bag: is it any good?, in reply to Robby Hickman,
It was not as much fun as that sounds.
I'm picturing the scene in Zombieland where the hero confronts a zombie-clown (and he's terrified of clowns).
Edit: Oh shit, that just gave me a Saturday night flashback.
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Hard News: My Food Bag: is it any good?, in reply to Russell Brown,
It sounds like it would be fun for a week, but could start feeling like a job. I'm presuming a big part of the point is that everyone is simultaneously making the same stuff so there's a social element to it, where you all develop a shared experience, send tips around, post brag-shots (and fail shots). They want to build a community as much as a customer base.
It doesn't sound like bad value to me. That family meal is 5 adults, right? Or at least adults and teenagers. For me, that would end up meaning that around half of it got eaten as leftovers, so it's basically dinner and lunch for most of a week.
Just for comparison, though, I shopped last night for the family for all meals for a week, and the bill came in under $100. It's not the complete bill, some of the ingredients will be purchased fresh on the day, and the plan included hoovering up a bunch of stuff in the fridge into the crockpot for today (slow cooker is still my favourite time-poor method), and at the moment I've got capsicums, tomatoes, basil, chives, spring onions, chillis, beans, peas, 6 kinds of lettuce, coriander, marjoram, rosemary, sage, thyme, parsley, brussel sprouts, mustard, all for the taking in the garden.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Go Home DJ, in reply to Steve Barnes,
The 5.1 solution occurred to me. It's theoretically possible to do it, but my question is really about whether anyone actually has.
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Up Front: Card on the Table, in reply to ChrisW,
You, sir, have a great eye.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Go Home DJ, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Playing tunes at home is truly a different use case from DJing for an audience though. In the former case, you probably want automatic blends and sequencing, with the ability to easily cue anything up from an entire record collection.
In the latter, you wouldn't use an inferior tool. You'd use a traditional DJ setup, probably. So stuff in the middle kind of suffers from the "that's pretty cool, but it's not much use, really" factor. Like Droid DJ, which I described above. I could crank out some reasonable sounds, nicely beat and tempo matched, slowly up-tempo it, loop it, etc. If what I wanted to do at a party was sit around playing with my phone the entire time.
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I'm curious whether the Apple devices solved the key problem with effective DJing on a 'droid I ran into, which is that there aren't 4 channels for the sounds, so you can't do audio cueing on a headset. Do they have a solution for that, or are they stuck with visual or automatic beat matching from the waveform, or just forgetting about it and covering it all up with a rapid crossfade?
ETA: Or pre-marking the cut points, if you have the time.
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FWIW, my opinion on the best interface is that a turntable metaphor is a wasteful gimmick. It doesn't really act or feel like an actual turntable, having no weight, and potentially high input latency, it uses a lot of CPU cycles in a process that is already very hungry for them, and it wastes large amounts of precious screen real estate, very important on small devices. I'd rather have a good readable list of the tracks to play and some buttons that can easily be pushed than something that looks like a record taking up most of the screen, tiny little controls, and an unreadably small, or uselessly short list. But then again, it hardly matters - most of the time is going to be spent searching the music library anyway, so that main screen ends up being the least annoying thing.
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The most fully featured app I tried on the 'droid was Droid DJ, substantially better for anything tricky than anything else, other than a remote control of desktop app, none of which I tried. Mostly the difference was that it didn't crash or lock up. But the most actually useful app to me just did crossfading with a decent screen for track selection.
In other words, a media player, rather than actually DJing with beat matching, looping etc. In the end, Winamp does it, so I've gone back to that. The most important part of the app ends up being the way you search your music library. If that's poor, then you can't find the music you want to play. After you've found it and queued it up or made a playlist, the playback of it is pretty much done well by any kind of media player.
I wrote my own app to do this, too. It works, but computer programming ain't my bag no more.
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Up Front: Card on the Table, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Yes, I'm not really supporting Winston, though. Just wanted to comment on the generalization from foolish abuses of referenda to their overall worthlessness. I think there shouldn't be one, but for reasons specific to the actual one being proposed.
Also, for the record, w00t! Nearly there. If someone has asked me in 1984 whether I thought same sex marriage should be allowed, my answer would have been the same as today. Of fucking course, I wouldn't be a liberal if I thought anything different.
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Up Front: Card on the Table, in reply to Emma Hart,
The number of people who have changed their minds on this – here, in the US, in Britain, and Australia – in the last decade is mind-boggling.
Also, ten years worth of people from a less tolerant time dying and 10 years worth of people from more tolerant times growing up. Even if no one changed their minds, that would still have swung things substantially.
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