tallpaul

Tall Paul Oldham's ephemeral wibblings

First clips from my Veho VCC-003

I got a Veho VCC-003 Muvi Micro DV Camcorder from Beth for Christmas. It's a tiny little camera which films 640x480 at 25fps AVI onto a micro SD card. Battery life is quoted as "up to three hours", but for that you invest in a 4GB card (it comes with a 2GB card). Anyway here's the first two clips I've taken with it, the first on Christmas Day, the second today.

(download)

(download)
The image quality is pretty impressive. Shame about the noise on the audio, but you can still hear me clearly on the first clip.

Disabling Thunderbird 3 Archives

As this has caused me some grief and the solution is less than obvious I thought I'd put a brief note here so Google can pick it up.

The issue is that Thunderbird 3.x has a new archive feature which you can't turn off. It allows you to archive a highlighted email by pressing a single key, which appears to default to "A". When you press "A" the highlighted email is moved to a folder "Archives/YYYY" where YYYY is the current year.

Now the problem with this, and you'll see people complaining about it all over the Web so it's not just me, is that if you don't use this feature but you accidentally press "A" your email disappears and you're left scratching your head wondering where it went.

There is a solution however and it comes in two parts:

  1. Install the add on Message Archive Options and then in the preferences for the add on set Granuality (sic) to "Single Folder". This removes the "YYYY" feature, so when you press "A" mail is now moved to the folder "Archives". Also check one of the Key Modifiers for Archive Option: 'A' +
  2. Go to "Edit|Preferences" and in "Advanced" under the "General" tab click on "Config Editor..." and search for "archive_folder" using the filter. You should find you get one or more entries for "mail.identity.idN.archive_folder" with N being a number starting with 1. Modify each of them to remove the "/Archives" from the end of the string value.

The consequence of the above is that you haven't actually disabled the archives feature, instead you've told Thunderbird that you have to do something you're rather less likely to press than "A" on its own but if you do manage to press "Ctrl-A" or whatever modifier you selected it should archive the email ... back to your inbox. So essentially it becomes a no-op most of the time and at worst it at least moves it to a folder where you're likely to find it.

It's a horrible cludge, but it does seem to work.

 

Broccoli

(download)

It's a standing joke in our house that I'm not the world's biggest fan of broccoli and today I heard it mentioned on "Old Harry's Game" on BBC 7 so I did this edit. The setting is Hell and main speaker is Mordecai, who was one of the writers of the Old Testament. This is a somewhat edited version of a much longer original, which you can find on iPlayer for the next week or so.

The Story of Milton

I have been working for some time on typing into the village web site the text of "The Story of Milton, or Middleton, Cambridgeshire, From Early Times" by KP Humphries which he wrote in 1962 and sold to villagers for two shilling and sixpence (12.5p).

I finished last night (it's now online here) and needed to proof read it for transcription errors. I was going to get Beth to help me, but then I had inspiration and installed espeak on my PC. It took only a few seconds to convert the 24KB of text to speech and then I just played it back to myself while I read the original. And yes, I'd made some errors which I've fixed.

But I thought you might like to hear what espeak produces. This is with its "English RP" voice and it's converted from the original WAV to MP3 with lame. You'll notice it occasionally speaks numbers out of context e.g. "was published two a full length work", that's because there are footnotes in the original text i.e. "was published²: a full length work".

(download)

I don't think it's too bad, certainly acceptable for what I was using it for. And you can alter the speed of speaking, the pitch and the accent (in theory at least, although in truth "West Midlands", "Scottish", "West Indian" et al all sound like Stephen Hawkins). But for something which can churn through that much text (nine full pages of typescript) in under ten seconds on my PC that's pretty impressive.