Author: Dan

Were Robert Johnson’s recordings sped up?

A post over on Boing Boing (“The last mystery of the blues: were Robert Johnson’s recordings sped up?”) drove me right to my sound editor to see how Robert Johnson’s performances may have sounded different from his recordings. Here’s the result: Robert Johnson Speed Demo The audio is a 30 second clip of “Sweet Home… Continue reading Were Robert Johnson’s recordings sped up?

Delete Empty Folders

I recently found that I had a lot of empty folders in my MP3 folder after a wayward ripping session. So I whipped up this quick DOS one-liner to remove all empty folders. From a command prompt, just change to the folder containing all the empty folders and enter the following: FOR /f "tokens=*" %G… Continue reading Delete Empty Folders

XMPP vCard Python Script

Couldn’t find a script to update my Jabber/XMPP vCard photo (a/k/a avatar), so I wrote one. It requires xmpppy (a/k/a python-xmpp). It should work with gTalk, but I have not tested it. Credit to pastebin for some code snippets. Hope this saves someone some time and effort. #!/usr/bin/python ”’vcard.py – Update your XMPP vcard photo… Continue reading XMPP vCard Python Script

On Bootstrapping

On Friday, Dave Winer released a terrific thought-piece-of-a-podcast on how journalists need to learn about bootstraps. In his most recent podcast with NYU’s Jay Rosen, he and Jay discussed the topic, as well, but I want to focus on bootstrapping, the metaphor. Dave offered the well-worn phrase “haul yourself up by your bootstraps” as the… Continue reading On Bootstrapping