As much as I love the cross-genreness of James Randi, veteran debunker of paranormal claims, taking on overpriced speaker cable audiophile bullshit, I think he may have misjudged the scenario. Michael Fremer and Pear Cable are calling him on his challenge. The thing is, unlike spoon benders and aural viewers, some people really are redonkeykong good at hearing infinitesimal differences in the quality of sound reproduction. At least when they’re using ultra-high-end reference systems, under carefully calculated listening conditions, and after some practice. And Fremer doesn’t necessarily have to prove that the $7000 audio cables sound better than some cheapo throw-away $100 monster cables, just that he can tell which is which. As far as I know, there is no quantitative standard of “danceable”.

I’ll be sad if Fremer wins, and Randi has to pony up the million. I doubt if JREF will be able to raise another million to replace it, and the million dollar challenge is the main tent pole in the carnival of weirdo-baiting that he has conducted for so long. If he loses it will be more than usually satisfying, these audio snobs are really annoying, and clutter the music equipment reviews with so much black magic elitist nonsense as to make the signal-to-noise ratio worse than readable. (This is why I’m a fanboy of PSB/Paul Barton, who has spent a career applying gasp basic research to making cheap speakers sound pretty good. My desk is graced by a prized pair of LR1 speakers I got used for a fraction of the cost of the cables that will fill in as “offbrand” when Fremer tries to do his trick).

There is a third option, which is Randi setting the “win” conditions so tightly as it to make it debatable whether or not the contest was held in good faith. If that happens people will believe what they want to believe and JREF will keep it’s million and everybody will be suspicious of everybody. I hope that doesn’t happen, but given the ambiguity around “proving” something like this — how many times out of how many trials does Fremer have to spot the fancy cables? On whose system? Does he get to practice? Does he get to rest his ears in between trials? — I kind of expect it will.

I love the cross-genreness of James Randi, veteran debunker of paranormal claims, taking on overpriced speaker cable audiophile bullshit.

My audio cables cost more than either my stereo receiver or my speakers but that’s because 1) my receiver and speakers are ebay-scavenged cheapos and 2) that was the cheapest the audio store would sell me speaker cables for. Jaysus.

I hardly bother with my unwieldy but much loved Grado sr60s anymore, since I picked up these little vmoda “remix” units. Pretentious sure, but they sound pretty damn good for the price. Nicely balanced across the spectrum and they can handle dynamics okay. No finely imaged sound stage or any stuff like that, but you can hear the pick-guard buzzing on that acoustic 6string at the same time as the singer sings and it all pops and hums along warmly enough for little pair of earbuds. I bought them for traveling this summer and I’m still using them now that I’m back in town and size isn’t such a big deal. Sokay. As with most consumer electronics, if you slut around on shopping.com for a while (and run whatever you find through resellerrattings.com lest you get burned) you can probably find them for less than MSRP.

And as for my first foray into quality headphones, the highly recommended Sony mdr ex81’s: blech. Uncomfortable, unwieldy, finnicky bits of plastik that sound clinical and bored even when jammed just-right into my tender canals. Like little robots singing songs they don’t like to me. Precise and detailed yes. Nice no. And if you ever lose the dumb little rubber ear cup flangey bits (which you will, if they don’t break off in your ears they will break off in your pocket) in Canada, Sony’s Canadian parts dealer will try and charge you $10 each for them, if you can find the parts number yourself since it’s not worth their time to look up, for a part the cost of which would require currency smaller than a penny to precisely quantify.

Finally, books so light you don’t have to burn them page-by-page as you read them on your AT hike?

The One-Laptop-Per-Child computers are going on sale to non-developing-country-children starting Christmas (maybe) for a few hundred bucks each. These are small, ruggedized, weather-sealed, open-software-driven boxes explicitly designed for mesh networking. Does this have implications for people looking to deploy sensor networks for ecological monitoring?

The machines will be priced well over production costs, as the sales are meant to subsidize the give-aways, but the price will still presumably benefit from the economies of scale embedded in the massive production runs they’ll be working with. Especially compared to the cost of building your own batches of custom sensor boxes.

The green-and-white, kid-friendly laptops that can be powered with hand cranks were designed for use by poor children in the world’s impoverished nations. They were designed to withstand severe weather common in areas of Asia, Africa and Latin America. They run on Linux software, feature a high- resolution display that can be read in direct sunlight and are known for their low power consumption, operating up to 12 hours on one battery charge.

Quag7 offers us this guide to:

Using an Apple IIe as a serial term with Gentoo Linux

I grew up on a Franklin Ace 1000, which I have since learned was a unlicensed clone of the Apple II+. I liked that machine, and I’m confident the Apple IIe would also be a capable terminal workstation. If you need it, Quag7 provides some additional motivation for taking on the project:

“At the end of the day, when the hookers are all asleep, the eight ball is gone, and the BATF has made a ghastly mistake and kicked in the door of the octogenarian Christian Scientist next door, you might be feeling a little out of sorts. This is a fun little project for those times, and one of the best things about it is that, in turning your mind toward matters retrocomputery and technical, you can stop adding to the odious list of sins and treachery that you’ve been compiling over the last 48 hours. As you reflect upon each and every atrocity against Man and God that you have committed (perhaps to your parish priest), you can make a mental note that it all stopped when you started screwing around with the null modem cable.”

I notice on the official Apple website for the new Intel Mac mini that there is a sidebar with a list of links to external mini-related sites. These include modding webpages which encourage you to de-and-reconstruct your mini to your own physical liking.

Apple prefaces the links with the text

But some adventurous Mac mini customers have taken it places Apple never imagined (or warrants). These links are purely for inspiration, not instruction.

Apple is notorious for their efforts towards top-down control of their products, including their computers. That makes them a leader rather than a outlier in an industry which is generally moving towards joining their “partner” music and movie industries in reframing ownership of a product as a temporary and revocable license to use it for certain specified tasks in certain specified locations at certain specified times. Playfully hinting that their mini is ripe for reconfiguration, if you don’t mind loosing the warranty, is a small but potent step in the other direction. They’re saying “you bought your mini, you can do what you want to it”. That’s a very different message.

And one of the links is to this sweet Millenium Falcon case-mod.