And I invented it about 3 years ago.

1. Can be played solitaire for practice, or against one or more opponents.
2. Must be played on a stretch of road leading up to a toll booth plaza.
3. Vehicles can be driven at the driver’s choice of speed up until a designated number of feet (usually a particular roadside sign will be chosen) prior to the toll booth plaza, at which point the vehicle must be placed in neutral.
4. The vehicle can be steered at will, but any use of brakes or shifting out of neutral is an immediate disqualification, as is any vehicular contact with other vehicles, contestant or non-contestant, or pedestrians.
5. The object is to come to a gentle stop as close to an aisle of the toll plaza without emerging on the other side. Closest without going over wins.

Next game: Fast Food Forced Errors.

I just posted this for a friend, and I figured I’d share with you folks.

Night Train, from Part 2 of Phillip Glass’s Einstein On The Beach (1976) (23 MB, 20 minutes)

It’s just one synth and a male vocalist and a female vocalist singing numbers and solfège (until the choir kicks in 2/3 of the way through). It’s the structural fulcrum of the whole opera as far as I’m concerned.

As always, I do not post these music files to abet theft. Give the music a listen, and if you like it, buy it from a legitimate source. Whatever your thoughts on the morality of intellectual property, I post these files expecting you to abide by mine.

Friends sometimes make mistakes, do thoughtless things, hurt each other, etc.. Typical human stuff. And friends can forgive each other.

But there’s a certain attitude that some people take towards friendship that I think is unhelpful. It’s the same attitude embodied by a betrayed spouse who then considers themself* to have “a free pass” to cheat in retaliation: the idea that a wrong in a friendship is equivalent to a debt that can be balanced by wrongs running the other way.

Certainly, some relationships are like that. But what makes any friendship valuable is that it gives more to the participants than they would get on their own. If transgressions in friendship could just be canceled by equal and opposite transgressions, there would be no reason to prefer a friendship where both friends were loyal to one where both friends consistently betrayed each other 95% of the time.

Obviously, that’s not the case. But there’s a more subtle implication to that logic. If transgressions are not cancelable, that means slight transgressions need to be apologized for and forgiven, even when the transgressor is themself the victim of a more grievous failure at the hands of the other friend. 

Transgressions in friendships are damage, not debt. Even if one party has done twice the damage as the other, both are at fault, and both need to repair the damage they have caused.

*It occurs to me that this is the first time I can recall running into this particular bit of trouble trying to use my preferred gender-unspecific “they” as a possessive in a situation when I felt the proximity to “is” prevented me from using the standard plural “themselves”. Some sources consider “themself” to be vulgar, but at the moment, I found it preferable to reorganizing the sentence to avoid the collision of verb-number agreement and gender-unspecificity.

I sang “Good King Wenceslas” about two dozen times this Christmas season caroling with other singers from my choir.  It really is an excellent carol, and the singing prompted me to recall my reflections upon it from last year.

The final two lines of the carol, the ones that bug me, are just so out of sync with the rest of it: 

Therefore, Christian men, be sure, wealth or rank possessing, 

Ye who now will bless the poor, shall yourselves find blessing.

What the hell is John Mason Neale talking about? There are only three characters in the story: Wenceslas, his page, and the peasant. Who’s finding blessing? Wenceslas is blessing the poor I suppose, although it’s not the main focus of the narrative. And at any rate, he finds no blessing. The page is just following his master. And the peasant presumably finds blessing, but he didn’t bless the poor.

Before I knew the origin of the carol lyrics, I was almost convinced that this was an extant freestanding narrative of leadership and inspiration, with a non sequitur altruist moral grafted on the end by some Christian hack. But no, the carol was originally conceived in the form in which we know it today. Go figure.

Too bad. Such a good carol otherwise. I know! For next year, I’ll come up with a decent replacement ending! See you in twelve months, and have a Merry Christmas!

And I invented it about 15 years ago.

1. You and a friend each drive your own cars at the same time from a common origin to a common destination.
2. Drive alongside each other on a long two-lane stretch of road, highway, what have you, the point being that people can’t legally get around you.
3. Slow down to reach the speed limit.
4. The cars will start to pile up behind you, condensing to the point where the long line of cars in your wake becomes visible from a high altitude, in much the same way that the condensation of genes into chromosomes renders them visible under a light microscope. 
5. I guess the final step would be to have a friend in a helicopter or on a convenient hilltop document the phenomenon of gradual visibility through condensation, but as this “game” is more of a speculative endeavor (or more exactly a dumb thought experiment) than a real one, I’ve never really blah blah blah blah blah.

In order to use the iPhone Hotel Room Baby Monitor setup I described in part 1 in situations when you’re not behind a friendly router (such as in an actual hotel room), a little advance preparation is required. You’ll need a computer on your home network that you can leave on (or one that you already do) . That computer will need to be running an SSH server (sshd). You’ll also need to know the public IP address of your home network, that is, the IP address assigned by your ISP to your router that’s serving as your home’s internet gateway. Lastly, you’ll need to forward ports for both SSH and the audio stream from your router to your always-on computer. If you’ve got all of that, you’ll be able to establish a secure tunnel from your home to your laptop, and expose your audio stream to the internet, and thus to your iPhone.

As before, I’ll illustrate by using my own equipment, and leave it to you to adapt the instructions to your setup. 

I have a Mac Mini at home that I keep running all the time (set to never sleep or spin down the hard drives). In its System Preferences -> Sharing panel, I have enabled Remote Login, which runs sshd, the SSH server.

System Preferences, Sharing tab

This allows my Mac Mini to accept SSH connections using a valid username and password for this computer.

To connect to this computer from outside my home network, I’ll need to know how to reach my home network from the internet. You can find the IP address by checking your router’s administration utility (usually just a web page at its LAN address); typical names are “WAN address” or “Internet address”. Consult your router’s documentation for guidance here.  Mine is right on my router’s main dashboard page.

Locating your internet IP address

Now keep in mind that with most ISPs, unless you’re paying extra for a static IP address, this address will change periodically. We’re not talking that frequently, so if you check the address before you leave, you’ll probably be okay, but no promises. Alternatively, you can (and should) use a free service like the excellent DynDNS to track your dynamic IP, allowing you to use a consistent and easy-to-remember domain name (such as yourname.dyndns.org) instead of a periodically changing set of numbers. It doesn’t take much to get the service running, and it’ll simplify your life if you regularly need to access your home network from the road.

Now you know how to reach your home router, but how to get to your computers behind the router? This is accomplished through another feature of your router called port forwarding (or “enable applications” or some other term; again, check your documentation). You’ll need to forward TCP connections on port 22 to port 22 of the computer you always leave on, and TCP connections from port 8000 to port 8000 of the computer you always leave on. (You may choose to use different port configurations if it suits your needs; those to whom this applies don’t need me to tell them.)

With all of this preparatory work, the magic can happen when you’re on the road. Let’s say you’re out at your hotel room and want to launch the iPhone Hotel Room Baby Monitor. You have Nicecast running as described earlier. Now, open Terminal (in Applications/Utilities) and type the following to make the SSH connection and establish the tunnel from your home to your laptop:

ssh your_username@your_home_ip_address_or_domain_name -R 8000:localhost:8000

If you’ve never connected before, you’ll get a warning. Accept, then provide your password, and you’ll be treated to a command line prompt from your home computer. You won’t need that, so just minimize but don’t close that window (if you close it, the connection will be broken, and you’ll need to reconnect). The SSH server at your home is now dutifully passing all requests to listen to its own port 8000 to port 8000 of your laptop, which not coincidentally just happens to be where Nicecast will be providing the audio stream. And because your home router is also forwarding port 8000 requests to port 8000 of your home computer, pointing the Tuner application on your iPhone to your_home_ip_address_or_domain_name:8000 will play the audio stream generated from your laptop (by way of your home computer and router). Awesome!

Granted, there are a lot of parts here, and it might be daunting to a novice. But this is very useful stuff to know for a variety of potential uses with many other applications. And feel free to shoot me an email or leave a comment if you have a question. Also, you can test your setup while still at home, just to see if it’ll work before you’re outside of your home network and have no way of fixing it. Just make sure that when you test, you configure your router’s port forwarding for port 22 and port 8000 before you launch Nicecast. If you don’t, Nicecast may configure your router automatically, pointing 8000 right to your laptop, leaving out the other computer entirely. That’s convenient when at home, but that’s not how it’ll work when you’re on the road, so get that port forwarding configured as described above so it’ll be usable when away from home.

I had a cool idea the other night. My wife and I have been in hotels with the kids before, feeling trapped in the room once they’ve gone to bed. You’re stuck because you can’t leave them unmonitored, and you can’t make noise inside the room, because you’re in close quarters with a bunch of sleeping kids. Regular baby monitors are unlikely to have the range required to monitor your kiddies while you’re in the lounge down the hall. So what’s the answer? Turn your laptop into a streaming internet radio server and tune in with your iPhone.

I’ll describe how I put it together with the hardware and software I already owned, and you can probably modify the set-up to your own needs. On the laptop side, I used my 17″ MacBook Pro running the superb $40 Nicecast from Rogue Amoeba.  Nicecast takes an audio source of your choice, such as your laptop’s internal microphone, or an application such as iTunes, and will serve a live radio stream of that audio source. (Nicecast will also relay the audio to a dedicated streaming audio service such as Live365. I’m assuming that if you have or are willing to pay $10 a month for such an account, you probably know how to do this already.) Because we’re not looking for high fidelity here, dialing the bitrate down to 24Kbps on Nicecast’s “Quality” tab will conserve some bandwidth, making the stream more palatable for use over AT&T’s data network. It won’t kill you to conserve CPU as well.

Nicecast Quality tab

Pick “Audio Device” from the “Source” menu, 

Nicecast Source tab

mute the volume (laptop feedback won’t help a sleeping baby!), and click “Start Broadcast”. The on-air level monitor should be responsive to room sounds.

Nicecast main window

On the receiver side, I use my 3G iPhone and the app Tuner by Nullriver. Tuner can listen to a streamed mp3 source such as the one generated by Nicecast. In Tuner, tap the “Search” tab, then the “Open” button.

Tuner Open Stream pane

That’s where you’ll be able to enter the URL of the Nicecast stream (or technically a playlist file referencing the stream), which Nicecast helpfully provides on its “Share” tab.

Nicecast Share tab

Now under some circumstances, that might be all it takes to start listening to your laptop’s mic from anyplace in the world you can get a data connection on your iPhone. In particular, if your laptop is behind a router that provides UPnP or NAT-PMP, Nicecast will automatically configure it so that your stream will be exposed to the internet at the URL listed under “Internet” on the Share tab. But this is not likely to be the case if you’re on the road, using commercially provided internet access. Part 2 will discuss how to overcome this limitation.

Can’t wait to boot into OS9 on the rebuit iMac and install this baby…

I’m a man on a mission.  Or I guess multiple missions.  One is my very gently ramping up mission to save the world.  But I have another mission with a slightly tighter focus.

In 1995, The Residents and Voyager release a CD-ROM interactive “game” of sorts called Freak Show.  My friend Joe (who worked for Voyager although I’m not sure if he did at that time — it was through Joe’s Voyager connection that I got my hands on a LaserDisc player which allowed me to play a Japanese pressing of Disney’s “Song Of The South”) owned it and showed it to me one evening.  It was just the sort of creepily interesting presentation that tends to get under my skin.

I only saw it once or twice, but there was one part that I couldn’t forget, and haven’t forgotten for all these years since: A short musical phrase played in a loop of 5/4 time in Wanda the Worm Woman’s trailer.  You clicked on the candles in a candelabra to light them, and once all lit, a portrait on the wall smiled, the texture of the musical loop thickened, and a woman’s voice repeated with the loop “Watch me, watch me”.

I’ve found no reference to this tableau on the internet.  The phrase “Watch me watch me watch me” is part of the lyrics to the song about Wanda in the companion album, but that’s not what’s captured my imagination.  

So on to my mission.  I’ve got a working original Bondi-Blue iMac, the OS 8 install discs, and I’m still close with Joe and family.  Hopefully he still has the disc and it’ll play on that configuration (check out Freak Show’s requirements: “Macintosh - 25 MHz 68030 processor or better; System 7; 5,000K of available RAM; 13″ color monitor; CD-ROM drive (double-speed recommended)”).

Once it’s up and running, I almost hope to discover that I imagined the whole thing.  But I didn’t, I know I didn’t.  I’d like to record the audio I’ve referred to, and possibly find a way to take a few screen shots.  Then I’ll post these artifacts of forgotten technological beauty right here.  I hope you’ll enjoy it.