Legends (Get it on)

Sat here, melting, drinking glass after glass of treated tap water in this weeks summer sun, thoughts roll back to hits from the past and that's what this short  entry is all about.

Its existence was met with some mirth at a certain music site where some patrons are incredibly elitist (you can only  like studio albums according to some and don't mention iTunes!) but it's a compilation with a difference for based upon a Time Life one, it makes a point of using the very best available sources so not only can I enjoy Schools Out that was (appropriately) a big hit during the summer vacation of '72 it also sounds terrific into the bargain. 

Ditto Manfred Mann Band's spirited version of the Springsteen song Blinded by the Light so by the time I'd past Freebird, not only was I hearing many of my favourite hits I was thinking back to those times.

I'm a sucker for a compilation well done just for that feeling - maybe you are too - and this is one I can recommend for the sound.

MH 17

I wish I didn't have cause to write this as this weeks entry wasn't planned and apologize in advance for being angry about the topic but here a few thoughts by me on it.
Although it's no justification for what happened, the area it was flying over was the subject of a civil war in effect and so it may not of wise of Malaysian Airways to fly over the area.
I also feel it is irresponsible in the extreme for at the very least for Russia to turn a 'blind eye' to allowing various advanced weapons to leave Russian territory to the Rebels as they require a lot of experience in field to use with  care. Many of us would go further and say outright they were allowed to leave and return to  Russian army depots (there is photographic evidence showing the direction from which they moved) and so called 'Cossack' units appear to be on the scene that were nothing to with Ukraines' own military.
To put it plainly, I put a lot of the blame for what happened with Russia and particularly President Putin's ambitions as the rocket launcher is certainly one of theirs and required a level of training simply not available to rebels in Ukraine by themselves and he knew that.
This appalling  incident was the foreseeable consequence of putting such weaponry in the hands of such groups to hide any too obvious involvement although all week we have read of the downing of Ukraine military planes with denials as ever of involvement. The widely copied but taken down tweets show clearly it a plane was spotted and lined up before they realized after launching what it was.
It's telling the blame was obtrusively widened as the consequence of the conflict they blame Ukraine's government of president over rather than saying categorically it wasn't anything to do with them.
 And now the rebels are not allowing the international aviation experts to do their job of inspecting thoroughly the scene for clues regarding the airplanes crash as well as questions remaining unanswered as to who may have the 'black box' and reports of evidence being removed and destroyed even. This is simply outrageous and must stop.
The monster Putin unleashed may have its biggest internal consequences yet.

Explosive entry

Charging up things isn't always that straightforward especially when they're not supplied with the required equipment and it's assumed you have your computer on most of the day to just plug in and leave.
But then you also might be away and not wishing to lug a laptop with you just for that.
Unfortunately quite a number of chargers you find on Amazon and other places aren't so much useless as beeping dangerous having exploded, caught fire and even electrocuted people while using them.

This one by FX Factory was on offer at W H Smiths and is RosH tested and CE approved featuring a regulator that sense when your device is charged and cuts off the charging so the battery isn't overcharged and the voltage doesn't rise suddenly.
I had one previously but it stopped worked without catching fire or anything scary like thta but thought it was time to get another.

Things that could be better

This week while it's raining I'll talk about a few things that annoy me.
Firefox: under the hood it is great and I was a noted proselytizer for in in the mid 2000's when many of us were hacked off with Internet Exploder 6 and 7 but why do you need to keep changing your mind over where to put ones bookmarks?  And what was wrong with that Orange tab on the top left that conveniently put browser functions like download and search history in one spot?
It seems to me you're trying to be Chrome  and while that isn't a bad browser I never felt at home it layout-wise.
That's one reason while on the old desktop I use Pale Moon as it's  a less fussed with lighter version of Firefox I can just get on with.
iTunes: The store is a bit clunky but I much prefer the downloads from it, not least the Mastered For iTunes sort for quality  but why is the ripping utility so slow at converting your cds that it's rare to get much above 6x the speed near the end of the session and often less so copying the cd takes over ten minutes? As crazy as it sounds it's quicker to buy and download the commercial download from the iTunes store complete with artwork. Plus at least when ripping to Aac (M4A) there are times when the version from the same source sounds better in the Store and I rather suspect they've not updated it compared to what they use commercially.
Certainly other programs such as dbPoweramp do a much quicker, accurate and more integrated job of this. Maybe it's corporate pride that prevents them from asking somebody to make a better version that  also does Flac (free lossless) that an increasing bumber of portable players can use.
Freeview: Britishers know all about this, the free to air via antenna tv service we've had since October 30, 2002 but while the idea is good, it suffers from a good number of 'placeholders' typically one hour behind versions of main channels just to keep the slot for the owners while capacity is limited. Platform regulation doesn't extend to such notions as having to use for new channels or lose your slot that might improve programming.
Another issue is HD programming where a number of secondary ITV channels and Channel five are only available via satellite based pay tv while the standard versions are on Freeview. Why should you have to a pay a monthly  premium to watch free commercial channels?

Rearranging the deckchairs in Brussels

This week between the smoke from a USB port that needs replacing when I get a newer XP Pro machine and the soccer from Brazil comes today's post. Yip just think of the delights of posting in Pale Moon with something whose processors  are circa 2002 being updated to something like 2006 or 7!
One big deal politically has been the choice of European Union Commission President following the European Elections in May.
The British Prime Minister has made a lot of noise and invested much political capital around this for a number of reasons not least the thrashing his party and most of the others took by the anti EU Ukip party in said elections in the UK.
Another set of reasons revolve around how the Commissioner Elect is chosen which in the past was done by the individual Prime Ministers of each EU Country, each repesenting the electorate of each Country being drawn from the Governments so chosen.
It was decided this time around to allow a say for the European Parliament members in this but whereas you might of thought an advance was one member one vote in a secret ballot, instead it's been decided to award votes on the basis of the percentage of the  Europe wide bloc each party is aligned to has even though the choice of the commissioner didn't feature as an Manifesto item of each party and no approval was given on the usual understandings to it.
The other area is the favoured choice is seen as being an advocate for stronger powers for the commission and more inclined to remove powers from National Governments, which in a number countries - quite strongly in the UK - the electorate indicated they did not agree with.
Prime Minister Cameron contends that's a snub to the voters.
Personally I am inclined to agree as even those who do favour European Union membership did want reform of its systems and more respect for the role of Nation states within it.
The voting change does nothing to increase accountability between Commission,  EU Parliament, and Electorate and sends out the wrong message for those who do believe in membership.

A question of organizing

 A hot start to the weekend that saw England drop out of the World Cup sees me continuing on a bit from last weeks theme.
Normally you'd load music and and off your player depending on how much capacity the player has and what you normally listen to. For instance I keep on mine a collection of 'evergreens' I usually listen to on the internal memory to save having to reload every time and have used a card for loading odds and ends on such as new albums for immediate playback but the rigmarole around this does jar a bit.
See, I'm used to Cassette and MiniDisc walkman where you just grab a stash of tapes or discs already done and easily to find with labels from their storage containers to listen to with no need to fire up the computer, waiting for it to boot up and then connect the player to load stuff on and off.
Preloading cards on the face of seems a good idea but you do need a way of knowing what - and we could be looking at over 20 - albums are on what card which are typically the size of a small postage stamp.
I had discussed a few ideas with friends and one thought was plastic loose leaf inserts for SD cards you put in binders but while available in North America, the leading Stationery stores here in the UK such as Staples, Ryman and W H Smith don't stock them.

I did spy on Ebay this which while not perfect was promising, a small pouched zip up case with room for 22 full size SD cards which because the pouches are plastic could have a small paper label with a name or number attached you could use with a small pocket book, something else not requiring booting up!
You would have a sticker with say 2 on the pouch and maybe a genre statement  say "70's Rock".
The entry in the book would go like this:
2

Badfinger
(listed album by album)
P McCartney/Wings
McCartney
Ram
Wild Life
Red Rose Speedway
Band On The Run

and so on

This would make it easier to find the right card with the albums I want to listen to so I could just slot them in, waiting a few seconds for the player to index them to its' album list and be away without faffing about with the computer every time I want to go out.
For major artists you could have separate Artist Cards and this week I assembled a "Beatles in Stereo" card from what I consider to be the best sounding cds and I could easily make one for the Rolling Stones albums from the 60's to the early 80's as they live in my iTunes library just to slot in and play.
By my math, you could easily get 440 albums in that pouch which would be ideal and even If I were to get another surely 880 albums is more than enough!

Firmwear upgrade

You might recall sometime in 2010 I write about a portable music player, the Sansa Clip+, I bought cheaply from Amazon because of an interest in downloads I was starting to buy from stores such as 7Digital and wanting the means of listening to them away from the computer which back then was a behemoth of a Desktop.
Well, that player is still alive dispute what some doommongers said cos it wasn't a fashionable brand like Sony or heavens above an Apple although like them it contained a non-user replaceable battery.
It has had a couple of upgrades by Sansa one adding support for the rather geeky Ogg Vorbis audio format but in that time they hadn't done anything about adding support for other file formats such as Aac such as that used on the iTunes Store which was a much bigger thing for most people, but did add it to the later Clip Zip as standard but they've stopped doing upgrades for the Clip+.
I also experienced an issue with a few Flac (Free Lossless Audio Codec) files such as when playing Sgt Pepper where they would hang or crash the player so I was reading about what you might do about this when I read about an alterative software you can put on it called Rockbox you can get from Rockbox.org.
I decided given its' age it was worth trying this this so having the found the graphical user interface downloader followed the instructions - the only bit I found hard was finding from the Sansa official site a copy of the original software for  a .bin file to link Rockbox's software onto the official players directory.
It went in without any fuss.

The display now looks like this and it will also show the upcoming track as well track time.
It cured the Flac playable issues completely, added proper gapless replay so albums where one track segues into another don't pause even just a second.
Best of all it now can play Aac, Alac (Apple's own Lossless format) and other audio file formats native so I can play anything on one single player.
I set the database to automatically update every time using the manual drag and drop to the memory on your computer I alter the  contents just like the original software did.
I have noticed as well the sound quality seams to have noticeable improvements when it comes to stereo image and fine detail.
The radio gained more presets and the ability to label the stations where on the Clip Zip it used RDS to get this and display program and song playing which is nice but still the upgrade does make things better.
Was this worth doing? Yes because it improved on the capacities of a fine player at no expense and it does show how sadly products can be limited by the software released.