Un viaggio meraviglioso (e tecnico al limite della nausea) nella specifica dei CD audio. Per capire tutto, ma veramente tutto, e soprattutto poterli rippare come se non ci fosse mai stato un domani

Money quote: “The piano arrangement album 帰るべき城 by Altneuland was published in 2005. I discovered it in 2008 (probably on YouTube), downloaded the best copy I could find, and filed it away in the TODO list. Recent advances in international parcel forwarding technology let me buy a used copy last year, but when it arrived none of my CD drives could read track #3. This sort of thing is common when buying used CDs, especially if they need to transit a USPS international shipping center. I shelved it and kept on the lookout for another copy, which I located last month. It arrived on Friday, I immediately tried to rip it, and hit the exact same error. This didn’t seem to be an issue of wear or damage – the CD itself was probably defective from the factory.

I had three choices: accept an imperfect rip in my archives1, hope to find another copy some day that would rip successfully (unlikely), or somehow regenerate the original audio data from my corrupt copies. You already know which branch I took.”

https://john-millikin.com/%F0%9F%A4%94/why-i-ripped-the-same-cd-300-times

A quanto pare l’articolo più importante tra quelli che ho condiviso qui nel 2018 è quello sulla tecnica di Feynman per imparare qualsiasi cosa. Visto che ci siamo, lo ripropongo come lettura di Natale. Auguri!

Money quote: “There are two types of knowledge and most of us focus on the wrong one. The first type of knowledge focuses on knowing the name of something. The second focuses on knowing something. These are not the same thing. The famous Nobel winning physicist Richard Feynman understood the difference between knowing something and knowing the name of something and it’s one of the most important reasons for his success. In fact, he created a formula for learning that ensured he understood something better than everyone else.”

https://fs.blog/2012/04/learn-anything-faster-with-the-feynman-technique/

Il regalo di Natale del roaming nell'Unione Europea per il 2019 - Il mio articolo per Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/il-regalo-di-natale-del-roaming-nellunione-europea-per-il-2019/

Quando chiesero a Bill Joy (avete presente BSD Unix?) come aveva fatto a scrivere uno stack TCP/IP migliore di quello Unix standard, rispose che aveva letto la documentazione e scritto il codice. Sembra una risposta arrogante o scema, ma a quanto pare anche in un approccio a due passi c’è un sacco di gente che riesce a perdersene per strada almeno uno.

Money quote: “For better or worse, Requests for Comments (RFCs) are how we specify many protocols on the Internet. These documents are alternatively treated as holy texts by developers who parse them for hidden meanings, then shunned as irrelevant because they can’t be understood. This often leads to frustration and – more significantly – interoperability and security issues.

However, with some insight into how they’re constructed and published, it’s a bit easier to understand what you’re looking at. Here’s my take, informed from my experiences with HTTP and a few other things.”

https://www.mnot.net/blog/2018/07/31/read_rfc

«Oggi, Natale, è anche l'anniversario della morte del celebre scrittore e intellettuale Robert Walser. Walser scrisse, tra l'altro, il libro "La passeggiata". Morì d'improvviso mentre si faceva una passeggiata. Dal che ho concluso che il titolo del mio prossimo libro sarà "La modella di lingerie"» (R.R.Corsi, resident poet di Mostly, I Write)

Storia di Natale. Giornalista una volta, giornalista per sempre? Anche se guidi il furgoncino delle consegne di Amazon per vivere? Il racconto fatto a The Atlantic è tutto da leggere.

Money quote: “Let’s face it, when you’re a college-educated 57-year-old slinging parcels for a living, something in your life has not gone according to plan. That said, my moments of chagrin are far outnumbered by the upsides of the job, which include windfall connections with grateful strangers. There’s a certain novelty, after decades at a legacy media company—Time Inc.—in playing for the team that’s winning big, that’s not considered a dinosaur, even if that team is paying me $17 an hour (plus OT!). It’s been healthy for me, a fair-haired Anglo-Saxon with a Roman numeral in my name (John Austin Murphy III), to be a minority in my workplace, and in some of the neighborhoods where I deliver. As Amazon reaches maximum ubiquity in our lives (“Alexa, play Led Zeppelin”), as online shopping turns malls into mausoleums, it’s been illuminating to see exactly how a package makes the final leg of its journey”

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/what-its-like-to-deliver-packages-for-amazon/578986/

Mentre i giornalisti finiscono a consegnare pacchi per Amazon, prosegue l’utopia del road warrior e del telelavoro.

Money quote: “When you’re feeling down or stuck in a rut, it can be tempting to think about quitting your job, packing your bags, and going to someplace to snorkel with sea turtles on a journey of self-discovery. But not all of us have the financial means—or the desire—to blow up our lives full-stop. (Plus, even if you reach turtle nirvana, chances are you will eventually have to head home to replenish your funds.) Thankfully, in the age of wifi and international data plans, there’s a middle path: Taking your work on the road with you.“

https://qz.com/work/1494641/the-complete-guide-to-traveling-the-world-without-quitting-your-job/

Addio 3G: Taiwan spegne la rete UTMS - Il mio articolo per La Stampa

https://www.lastampa.it/2018/12/27/tecnologia/addio-g-taiwan-spegne-la-rete-utms-omJminSw8HEvnMoTAtRVJK/premium.html

Aerei e aeroporti, il piano della Cina per surclassare gli Stati Uniti - Il mio articolo per Wired

https://www.wired.it/economia/business/2018/12/26/cina-aerei-aeroporti/

GitHub supera i 100 milioni di repository - Il mio articolo per Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/github-supera-i-100-milioni-di-repository/

Abbiamo un problema. Anzi, abbiamo creato un problema.

Money quote: “Years of metrics-driven growth, lucrative manipulative systems, and unregulated platform marketplaces, have created an environment where it makes more sense to be fake online — to be disingenuous and cynical, to lie and cheat, to misrepresent and distort”

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/how-much-of-the-internet-is-fake.html

Voci dalla rete

Money quote: “son: mommy what’s a podcast?
me: well, dear, when a group of men love their opinions very much...”

È Natale, giusto un paio di giorni fa. Tempo di cosine luminose e sbriluccicanti. Ma cosa sono? Cos’è che luccica in realtà? Se lo chiede il NYTimes

Money quote: “What is glitter? The simplest answer is one that will leave you slightly unsatisfied, but at least with your confidence in comprehending basic physical properties intact. Glitter is made from glitter. Big glitter begets smaller glitter; smaller glitter gets everywhere, all glitter is impossible to remove; now never ask this question again.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/style/glitter-factory.html

In un'intervista a il Venerdì di Repubblica Tiziano Sclavi ha espresso giudizi piuttosto duri su Bonelli Editore e sul suo attuale rapporto con essa.

http://www.fumettologica.it/2018/12/tiziano-sclavi-bonelli-intervista/

Si avvicina la fine dell’anno. È il momento dei buoni propositi...

La scuola di New York è il punto di partenza per la fotografia in bianco e nero. Che deve essere pensata e ripensata, certamente. Ma nasce in bianco e nero già come intenzione.

Money quote: “These “influences, aesthetic assumptions, subjects and stylistic earmarks” spread out far beyond New York, but they are an understood set of qualities that have become the pinnacle of black and white photography. Because they had no choice, they mastered and defined the process of thinking and shooting for black and white. For anyone looking to do effective black and white, the answers are all in the photographs of those who reached the height of photojournalism in the era where black and white was how it was done”

https://medium.com/s/the-photographers-almanac/mastering-black-and-white-photography-2b723f794b59

Il 2018 di Apple, l'anno che ha cambiato tutto - il mio articolo per Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/il-2018-di-apple-un-anno-particolare/

L’intervista - molto bella - fatta dalla Paris Review ad Amos Oz un bel po’ di tempo fa, da rileggere per ricordare l’autore scomparso pochi giorni fa.

Money quote: “The novelist has no political aim but is concerned with truth, not facts. As I say in one of my essays, sometimes the worst enemy of truth is fact.”

https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1366/amos-oz-the-art-of-fiction-no-148-amos-oz

In un sito fatto molto bene che finalmente chiarisce in modo semplice parecchi punti riguardo le vicende e i capisaldi europei, la manovra di bilancio e le responsabilità di Bruxelles e dei singoli stati.

http://www.europeainfo.eu/le-manovre-economiche-degli-stati-membri-sono-responsabilita-di-bruxelles/

Dai tempi del liceo adoro Yukio Mishima e quel che ho letto di suo. Ma è oggi, con internet, che si potrebbe accedere a così tanto così facilmente. Peccato la mia età non sia più così fertile e ricettiva.

Money quote: “Mishima was a literary prodigy. With haiku, it also helped that his Japanese-language teacher in the Middle Division of the Peers School was Kurō Iwata. Iwata didn’t just encourage his students to write. After the war, he established his reputation as an authority on Edo haikai. He published, among other things, a large compilation of commentaries on all of Bashō’s hokku.

One of Mishima’s earliest haiku dates from when he was seven years old, and it reads:

おとうとがお手手ひろげてもみじかな

Otōto ga o-tete hirogete momiji kana

My younger brother spreads his palms, maple leaves

The “younger brother” here is Chiyuki, two years old at the time. He went on to become a diplomat, serving as ambassador to Morocco and Portugal”

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/10/26/my-younger-brother-spreads-his-palms-maple-leaves-yukio-mishimas-haiku/

Se il giorno del proprio compleanno è il giorno ideale per esplorare i propri sogni e le proprie fantasie, allora lo vorrei investire leggendo questo resconto della mente affascinante delle persone poliglotte, nel senso che parlano molte, molte lingue. Tipo una dozzina (11, al minimo) o più. Gente “linguisticamente molto funzionale”, insomma. Magari la mia è una neanche troppo nascosta (ma mai molto praticata) aspirazione.

Money quote: “Last May, Luis Miguel Rojas-Berscia, a doctoral candidate at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, in the Dutch city of Nijmegen, flew to Malta for a week to learn Maltese. He had a hefty grammar book in his backpack, but he didn’t plan to open it unless he had to. “We’ll do this as I would in the Amazon,” he told me, referring to his fieldwork as a linguist. Our plan was for me to observe how he went about learning a new language, starting with “hello” and “thank you.””

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/03/the-mystery-of-people-who-speak-dozens-of-languages