I approve of this Gareth Pugh fellow.
19 Comments
Tags: art, fashion, firstperson, the future, toys
Current Music: The Veils -- More Heat than Light ♬
plumbery
Dear Lazyweb, I am having an issue with a series of tubes. 
I have crappy water pressure in my shower. However, the sinks in my bathroom and kitchen have no such problem. The sinks have the fury of a geyser, compared to the anemic mist the shower puts out. My high-tech measuring methodology is this: in any of my sinks, I can fill up a pint glass in about 1.7 seconds, with either hot or cold water. However, if I use either the bathtub faucet or the shower (with the shower head removed, so it's just a bare pipe) this takes about 8.2 seconds.
So the water is there, it just ain't making it to the shower. The sink looks like this, and the valve in the shower looks like this:
They appear to both be fed by the same 1/2" flex-tubing. The two screw-valves on either side of the shower valve assembly are turned all the way up.
I had a plumber come out and he said that he could replace the shower valve assembly (which would require turning off the water to the whole building, knocking out the wall, and re-tiling), but that it likely wouldn't make any difference, so I should just live with it. He seems to suspect that all such valves are standardized at a "crappy water pressure" setting, and replacing it would leave me exactly where I am now.
I can't see any markings on the thing in the wall that would let me research what its flow is actually rated to be, so that I could compare it with potential replacements.
Any thoughts?
Update: I took out the flow regulator that was hiding behind the big screw thingy that is 2nd from the right in the right picture above (it's the smaller part pictured to the right, here), and now I get 1.7 second flow from both the tub faucet and the showerhead pipe! Unfortunately my shower head still retards that down to around 4 seconds, so it's time to find a better one of those...
Update 2: I spoke too soon. It seems that taking out the flow regulator increased the flow of cold water but not of hot water, so after taking that out the shower was slightly-warm at best, never hot. So apparently I get to choose between good water pressure and hot water.
The hot water valve on the left doesn't open as far as the cold water valve on the right does (one turn versus two), so maybe that's the problem. But replacing that would definitely require opening up the wall and de-soldering the pipes.
normalizing audio volume on movies
The last time I asked this I didn't get any practical answers, but that was a year ago, so I might as well ask again:
Dear Lazyweb,
How do I normalize the audio volume of a bunch of MOV and MP4 files?
The "Sound Check" option in iTunes works passably well for MP3 files, but doesn't do anything for videos. This makes it annoying to use a playlist full of music videos as a source of ambient entertainment, since the volume fluctuates wildly.
I think that a solution involving manually pulling the audio out of the movie files, normalizing it as a WAV, and re-inserting it into the movie is probably doomed to synchronization errors. So let's not.
I have tried using the "Get Info / Options / Volume Adjustment" slider manually on a few videos, but that is far too manual and annoying to do for all of them. Perhaps an approach would be to compute the volume boost desired of each movie, then set whatever ID3 tag corresponds to that slider? Or failing that, do it with Applescript?
Update: I kinda got something working with Applescript here. It fails if any video requires a volume increase of more than 100% (~6dB), but I only have a few videos of which that is true.
Tags: computers, firstperson, lazyweb, mac, music
Current Music: Cabaret Voltaire -- Big Funk ♬
Helmet Cam Avalanche Survival Video
This is one of the scariest things I've ever seen. Especially the weird choking noises that the audio turns in to just after burial. Apparently David Lynch does foley in hell.
Scene missing! A video in this post has disappeared. If you know of an accessible version of this video (search), please mail me so that I can update this post.
Fruit Bat Fellatio.
Oral sex is widely used in human foreplay, but rarely documented in other animals. [...] Female bats often lick their mate's penis during dorsoventral copulation. The female lowers her head to lick the shaft or the base of the male's penis but does not lick the glans penis which has already penetrated the vagina. Males never withdrew their penis when it was licked by the mating partner. A positive relationship exists between the length of time that the female licked the male's penis during copulation and the duration of copulation. Furthermore, mating pairs spent significantly more time in copulation if the female licked her mate's penis than if fellatio was absent. Males also show postcopulatory genital grooming after intromission. At present, we do not know why genital licking occurs, and we present four non-mutually exclusive hypotheses that may explain the function of fellatio in C. sphinx.
Tags: mpegs, perversions, vampires
Current Music: The Manichean -- Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven ♬
Big Daddy
My favorite part about Bioshock is how it functions as an innoculation for the virus known as Objectivism. What group is most suspeptible to that disease? Fourteen year old boys. Who's the target audience of most video games? Exactly. So now there will be an entire generation of guys encountering Objectivism for the first time, and they will already have the necessary antibodies. "Oh, Ayn Rand? Right, I remember that, the ruined, drowning city full of junkies and mutants."
Some people never recover.
Craigslist: lawyers gone wild
"I submit this brief in support of why we TOTALLY should get it on. - w4m"
You & Me Doing It v. You & Me Not Doing It (2009)
Using that IRAC method we've been learning about, a compelling brief on why we should hump each other's brains out.
FACTS:
[...]
DNA Lounge: Wherein the hearing video is discovered.
Apparently the video of the hearing is, in fact, online, but it's a complete pain in the ass to get to it unless you run Windows. It's here, via the City Operations & Neighborhood Services Committee page on SFGTV. Unfortunately, their embedded video doesn't play on MacOS or Linux, because apparently the San Francisco city government thinks that it is OK to require you to tithe money to Microsoft before you are able to watch video of your government in action. Why don't they just upload all this crap to Youtube so that it would work on any operating system? Who knows.
Anyway, if you want to watch this video on a Mac, you have to install VLC and open this URL in it. The Entertainment Commission part of the hearing starts quite far in, at around 3:24:00. Public testimony begins at 3:44:00.
If anyone manages to download this thing and upload it to Youtube, please let me know.
The transcript of the closed captioning is here, but it's full of hilarious errors that make it largely incomprehensible. Search for "Recess until 1:00 P.M." for the beginning of the EC hearing.
