Nov 30 2006
A History of the English Language by Albert C. Baugh & Thomas CableBaugh’s A History of the English Language is a supremely wonderful resource for learning about the origins and evolutions of English. Admittedly, it’s a…
Nov 29 2006
With very little fanfare, the popular lossless audio encoder known as FLAC seems to have been released in its new 1.1.3 version. There’s no news yet on Hydrogen Audio or on the main FLAC homepage, but a little bird clued me in to the existence of a finalized release on SourceForge.
Grab…
Nov 29 2006
This word is fascinating to me because it’s really just an alternate spelling of “errant,” which is a derivation of the Middle English word “erraunt,” borrowed from the present particle of the Old French errer, meaning “to travel.” It was brought into Anglo-French in the mid-14th century,…
Nov 28 2006
The Futurist by James P. OthmerI will freely admit that I read James Othmer’s The Futurist entirely because of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, whose fictional “black mathematician” John Kane is the quintessential futurist. When I saw a short review of…
Nov 24 2006
The “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing” edition.
Nov 22 2006
Today’s word makes more sense if one is aware of the ancient ideas of “humours,” or the bodily substances which affect mood and disposition (a study known as “physiology.” The Latin atra bilis, or “black bile,” is what caused melancholy or sadness which present…
Nov 21 2006
Lord of the Barnyard by Tristan EgolfThis book brings the total number of Tristan Egolf books read this year to 3—his entire catalog, actually, because he killed himself in 2005. His Kornwolf was the second book I read this year,…
Nov 21 2006
The open-source CD/DVD-ROM emulator for Windows has seen an incremental version increase which includes an updated STPD driver and which fixes a few bugs. Parts of the install process have also been revamped, for those of you who like to integrate the installation into a custom Windows disc with an…
Nov 20 2006
On the heels of my recent comparison of general-purpose data compressors, I bring you the results of far too much time spent hunched in front of a command line, calculating ratios.
The benchmark’s ostensible purpose, at least at first, was to compare four mainstream codecs—FLAC, Monkey’s Audio, WavPack, and OptimFROG—and see…