natowelch

420smalander, my old roommate and friend, and ricalope have finally gotten fed up with their current landlord, and it appears to be a strong probability they will be moving into a new apartment in the same building as mine August 1st. Yay!

I navigated the post-fireworks crowds downtown this evening.

I found out last night exactly how little money I make. Over the past few months, I'd had the feeling my own cyclic poverty was something I actually had in common with my friends. Now i feel... unique.

I actually take something of a minor sense of pride in how poor I get away with being. My consumptive participation in this rapacious industrialized economy is squeezed to its limit, and I am still trying to reduce it. It gets more difficult, the lower one goes, but I expect that, and don't mind. I aspire to a kind of timeless, amaterialist vow of poverty with a long tradition, but my inspiration is not religious in nature.

The more efficient I can make my lifestyle, the less precaritized I am, because filling my consumption needs becomes that much more effortless.

I have felt for some time, however, that as my efforts to reduce have steadily paid off (so to speak), that I feel like an alien in a world that isn't with me. As I walk everywhere (I can seldom even afford to take the bus), I am passed by countless cars I don't drive, flirted with by countless advertisements for things I don't buy, greeted by countless people whose jobs I can't work. Even my friends, who know how I think and how little I earn, often invite me to buy goods and services "for cheap", even though I still can't afford even that price, because it either means substituting basic food or rent, or I really, actually, truly don't have five bucks on me. In a culture so fixated on earning and spending their way out of every problem, I feel like I don't belong here. I don't want to live here, but I have no idea where to go, except into an open source Internet that, unfortunately, doesn't accept atoms. Though I am no stranger to isolation (pun intended), I am curious where people with thoughts along these lines might be found - and where we might live. It is almost certainly somewhere else.

I don't want to give the impression that I'm complaining. I have a roof over my head, and few, small debts. I live this way partially by choice, which is more than you can say for most people in my situation.

I have become accustomed to not missing things I can't have. I have learned not to want things that cost too much. I am beginning to measure the value of things, not by their price tag, but by how they rank on my personal budget priority lists. If a thing can't bubble up to the top before other more important recurring expenses re-assert themselves, I stop caring about them - they don't exist. A affordable price becomes, ironically, the most valuable thing of all. Nothing will change the world if people poorer than I am can't get it. Your iPhone is worthless.

I measure the prices of things in hours. How much of my life is it worth losing to own this thing?

Expense is also partially driving changes in my diet, although food prices pale in comparison to rent (notably, the opposite was the case during the great depression. Food is cheap today, compared to housing and health care). I have been noticing that, when I come across more petty cash, I spend it on unhealthy, extravagant, convenient foods. Money is bad for me.

I feel good about what I am doing (It must be because I paid the rent on time this month. Can you tell? This isn't another panic post!). My sense of disenfranchisement and displacement is not blossoming into malaise or depression. It is a puzzle, a mystery, an enigma, a challenge. I'm getting the love I need to stay well. But I'm still wondering how love might be used to flourish, thrive, and become more than well. I don't know.

I hit a brick wall today when I discovered I couldn't mix mplayer's output across two outputs (one for fronts, one for monitoring).

So instead, I went back to review some old DJ software. Mixxx is starting to look much better. It was not hanging and crashing as much as the last time I tried it, and it's under active development. Apparently they are grabbing the attention of hardware controller vendors, who are releasing open source drivers. The beta version even has a scripting environment that looks fun.

BPMDJ also released a new version recently. I guess I'm not real excited about how the interface is put together, but the tempo analysis is top-notch, and using the "beatgraph" visualization to set cue points is a nice tool I've not seen elsewhere.

So after an email exchange with the author, I was able to decipher the binary format used by its index files, and wrote a php script (meh. it was fast, and I knew it) to parse the beat period, calculate the tempo, and use eyeD3 to insert it into the mp3 file's id3 tags. Mixxx, once it loads the file, will then pick the bpm out of that tag, and synchronize track playback based on that.

The beta version of Mixxx also saves cue points in it's library. I wonder if I could translate that to the id3 Event Timing Codes tag? That way all that data is stored in the file.

I suppose I'm about to find out whether the existing tools are useful enough that I won't be reinventing any wheels after all.

Also interesting in the Linux audio front is a recent review of Linux sound drivers, which speaks very highly of OSSv4. There's a widespread impression that OSSv3 was left behind for ALSA back in the day when the the original developer decided to close the source (a more than adequate reason). But since that time, 4front has re-released OSS version 4 under the GPL, giving it an opportunity for a second look. And it's very, very good-looking indeed, with latencies well below ALSA in most cases, backward-compatibility with all ancient applications that never switched to ALSA (indeed, often the problem is that apps don't support OSS), and non-blocking behavior now the default.

I will need to check this out soon.