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One of the best vision-of-the-future movies ever made, Metropolis, has been newly restored. 25 minutes of missing footage has been recovered from a copy found in Argentina. I think I’ve seen three different versions of it over the years, including the somewhat notorious Giorgio Moroder version (which was weird, yes, although the music that Moroder himself wrote worked pretty well), and I will certainly see this one.

The official site is here and RetroThing has a good write-up here about the film and its various restorations.

Yeah, it’s been a week since I last posted something here. Sorry about that; it’s been a somewhat unusually full week. Maddy and Edwin caught a virus of some sort and have nasty sore throats. This meant a trip to the vet and a course of antibiotics–not because antibiotics do anything for viruses, but because they started to show signs of secondary, bacterial infections. Edwin is very good about taking his medicine, but Maddy isn’t. The upshot is that we have to trick her into taking it by crushing the pills and mixing them with something that she’ll eat greedily enough that she’ll ignore the taste and texture of the pill. (If you know what penicillin tastes like, you’ll understand the challenge.) Happily they seem to be through the worst of it now and in a few days they’ll be done with the antibiotics also.

I’ve also been working away on Audio Damage’s latest product. It will be finished Real Soon Now, barring any more unforeseen complications. For a change we’ve been deliberately vague about this product before its release but all will be unveiled soon.

Here are a couple of photos I took awhile ago and have been meaning to post. Our clematis went positively bonkers this year. It climbed over its trellis, hung more than halfway down the back side, and bloomed copiously. The red blossoms mixed in with the purple are from a newer one that we planted a few years ago.

We returned Raymond and Robbie, the recent feline additions to the household, to whence they came this afternoon. It turned out that Robbie and Edwin had irreconcilable differences, the nature of which will never be completely understood by the humans that know them. It became painfully clear that Robbie just wasn’t going to be happy here, and the happiness of the cat(s) is what counts in the end.

So, sadly, Raymond and Robbie are back with Sue and George. I’m sure that they’ll be happy in another house; they’re both great cats and we’ll miss ‘em.

I’ve run across a few videos demonstrating SMT soldering techniques. An online electronics shop called Curious Inventor has a nice collection of videos here which will show you how to solder SMD devices with relatively inexpensive tools. Their most recent video here shows how to drag-solder the pins of a 0.5mm pitch SOIC.

If you want to see how the pros do it, there’s a video here done by a certified instructor of soldering. It’s more of an advertisement than a tutorial, but if you watch closely you can pick up some pointers.

Having watched all of these, I’ve arrived at the conclusion that I probably need to use less solder and more flux than I have in the past. Eric Brombaugh (who pointed out the instructor’s videos to me) mentioned to me that he often doesn’t use solder at all when soldering ICs to PCBs that have been HASL plated. He finds that there is enough solder left from the plating to attach the leads.

The new cats in residence started exploring the house yesterday. I posted a dozen photos of them on my Flickr site here.

They’ve also met all of the other cats. Reactions have been fairly predictable. Tracie is currently trying to break the ice by showing them that they have common interests such as plastic things dangled on the end of a string. Raymond wants to play with everyone but the other guys aren’t quite ready for that and feel that some strutting and hissing must be done first. Edwin in particular is putting on the macho-kitty show; this is exactly what he did when Alfred arrived so we’re not at all surprised. It probably doesn’t help any that Tracie and I have a hard time not laughing at his posturing since he’s usually such an easy-going cat.

Alfred seems to be accepting the newcomers without much hesitation.

Madeline isn’t entirely sure what to think of the sudden doubling of the male population. I think she’ll warm up to them eventually. She had a bit of a shock when Robbie inadvertently cornered her on the kitchen sink so it may take a little while for them to become properly introduced.

The other day I said something to Chris about the software I was currently working on being “obstreperous” without entirely remembering what that word actually means. As he observed, it’s actually a rather apt term for DSP code in development. From Webster’s:

Function: adjective

Etymology: Latin obstreperus, from obstrepere to clamor against, from ob- against + strepere to make a noise

Date: circa 1600

1 : marked by unruly or aggressive noisiness : clamorous <obstreperous merriment>
2 : stubbornly resistant to control :unruly

The word came to mind again when some new code I was working on was both marked by unruly or aggressive noisiness and stubbornly resistant to control. Here’s what it sounded like–be warned that it’s kind of loud in places:

Obstreperous

Usually when I play something like this for Chris he asks whether we can preserve it and add it as a feature to the product. Beauty is in the ear of the beholder, so to speak. This is why I don’t particularly enjoy most music classified as glitch and other genres that deliberately exploit DSP artifacts: it tends to all sound like a bad day at work to me.

UPDATE: Chris mentioned this post on his blog here; some discussion has ensued. A couple of questions regarding reuse of this recording arose, so I hereby state that the above recording is made available under the Creative Commons license stated here.

Yes, it’s true: as of yesterday afternoon we have two new feline additions to the household. They’re brothers, about 15 months old, and their names are Robbie and Raymond. Here’s Raymond:

Raymond is smaller and younger than Robbie, although I imagine that the difference in their ages is measured in minutes since they’re from the same litter. Raymond is also much more rambunctious; he and Edwin will be a good match. Robbie is more reserved:

They’re currently secluded in the spare bedroom so that they can adjust gradually to us and the house before meeting the rest of the herd. I’ll post more photos and updates soon.

Robbie and Raymond come to us by way of Sue and George, a retired couple who have rescued cats from difficult circumstances for 20 years. Hats off to these folks for nurturing and relocating numerous cats in need.

If you happened to visit this site between around 5:00PM MST July 14 and 10:05AM today, you probably encountered an unhelpful “Internal Server Error” message. Sorry for any inconvenience or puzzlement. I was reconfiguring something on the server and inadvertently broke something essential. Naturally this happened shortly before some friends arrived for dinner, so I wasn’t able to address the problem until this morning. I’m still not exactly sure what I did wrong but I was able to restore the entire domain from an automatic backup. (Yes, there’s a little lesson there.)

Dear People Who Sell Me Stuff:

It’s okay for you to send me email about new products, sales, promotions, etc., particularly if I asked to be on your mailing list. However, once you send me one announcement of a sale or discount, it’s not okay to send me three to five more messages referencing the first announcement with Subject: lines like “In case you missed this!” I read it the first time, I promise. If I didn’t want to read your email I’d take myself off your list. I don’t need to be told again and again about the same thing, and I don’t need to be “reminded” about the impending cessation of the sale, discount, whatever. It’s annoying and, frankly, somewhat insulting.

Got it? Once is enough. Simple, eh?

kthxbai–

–Adam

We just returned from a long weekend in Wyoming. Tracie’s parents live in Ranchester, which is just slightly north of the middle of nowhere and about a six- or seven-hour drive from Boulder, depending on how much you press your luck while pressing the accelerator. We buzzed up and spent a leisurely few days taking in some of the local scenery and eating slightly too much. I put up a set of photos on my flickr site here.

Yes, we saw a moose. He was grazing not far from the road, up on one of the mountain passes near town. We also saw a number of deer, a few antelope (while en route), a beautiful sunset, and one owl.