These DIY '50s style AI videos seem to have come on leaps and bounds over the last few months - previously you'd get a couple of seconds of glitchy animation but now you get proper 3D aware movement and perspective changes.

It's only a matter of time before entire movies get made out of AI. Give them a script, get a first video draft, tell the AI what you want to tweak or change, rinse, repeat, feature film.

My R30 gig took place in Manchester, 20 years ago today. It was my first Rush gig since 1988, unless I'm mistaken - they'd given the UK a miss on their various tours for many years.

I've never remembered that night as one of my best Rush gigs, but it was pretty good. I do remember becoming excited and emotional during the 'R30 Overture' piece that opened the show.

It was Neil's birthday (he'd be 72 today) and a birthday cake was wheeled on for him just before the encore.

But I also remember that day as the first time I met anyone from TNMS, and quite a lot of the usual contributors were at the Moon Under Water pub for a meet before the gig. Andy Field subsequently authored a thread on the site expressing his surprise that I was a "normal bloke".

I also met a young lady there whom I had a long-distance relationship with for a year or so, perhaps some will remember "Sary", who was a frequent TNMS contributor at the time. It was her birthday as well! In hindsight it was destined not to last very long, but I do remember her very fondly. And I got to go to Helsinki a couple of times.

Can't quite believe it's been 20 years. I wrote about my visit to Manchester here, not long after the gig:

http://www.jamesgibbon.com/manchester/

The site will be down for about 20 minutes, apologies for any inconvenience.

EDIT all done, thanks

I have an audiobook downloaded from somewhere a few years ago. It's in MP3 format but originally transferred from a cassette, and unfortunately it sounds like it's been de-noised a bit aggressively to remove tape hiss. I had a go at EQ-ing it with Audacity and that improved it, but I found an online AI speech enhancer tool here: https://podcast.adobe.com/enhance

.. and that did a brilliant job. It's intended mainly to remove background noise and that wasn't what I needed here. But it did a great job of making the speech on the recording sound more natural. The first 17 seconds or so here is a clip of the original audio, and is followed by the enhanced version of the same clip.

Free to use, but you're limited to 30 minutes of audio in one go unless you pay (don't know what it costs).

I've just checked the Sunday opening times for the EnormoTesco four miles away, and it seems they have "elderly hours" on a Sunday morning from 9-10AM for people in their 60s and over. The store opens for everyone else at 10AM.

As far as I can tell I can get round a supermarket as easily as I could when I was in my 20s, and since I have long arms and I'm over 6 feet tall, I can reach stuff on the top shelf more easily than most people of any age.

But I definitely am over 60, so technically I'm entitled. But should I take advantage of a service that's really intended for other people?

A film about Sven's life, career and cancer diagnosis was released on Amazon Prime on Friday, and 5 Live had an interview with the director on the same day. She was stil in touch with Sven and she did say that he was rather poorly at the moment, which did make me wonder how long he had left. But I hoped it would be a bit longer than this. Awful news.

https://www.aboutamazon.co.uk/news/entertainment/watch-the-trailer-for-sven

I have a filesystem, /mnt/tosh, that I want to transfer periodically to a backup over ssh using rsync.
It contains a subdir /mnt/tosh/vorbis that itself contains dirs that contain hard links, eg

glower /mnt/tosh/vorbis/yayas> ls -l
total 111872
-rw-rw-r-- 2 jg jg  9708988 Sep 30  2023 yayas001.mp3
-rw-rw-r-- 2 jg jg  9081135 Sep 30  2023 yayas002.mp3
-rw-rw-r-- 2 jg jg  9071545 Sep 30  2023 yayas003.mp3
-rw-rw-r-- 2 jg jg 11862262 Sep 30  2023 yayas004.mp3
-rw-rw-r-- 2 jg jg 21782906 Sep 30  2023 yayas005.mp3
-rw-rw-r-- 2 jg jg 16468352 Sep 30  2023 yayas006.mp3
-rw-rw-r-- 2 jg jg  7306102 Sep 30  2023 yayas007.mp3
-rw-rw-r-- 2 jg jg 10929144 Sep 30  2023 yayas008.mp3
-rw-rw-r-- 2 jg jg  8580986 Sep 30  2023 yayas009.mp3
-rw-rw-r-- 2 jg jg  9743549 Sep 30  2023 yayas010.mp3
glower /mnt/tosh/vorbis/yayas>
. but after doing this:
$ rsync -avH --delete -e ssh --max-alloc=100M  /mnt/tosh minako:/drobojoin

I'm finding spurious repeated hard link dotfiles on the target after it completes:
minako /drobojoin/tosh/vorbis/yayas> ls -la
total 224096
drwxrwxr-x   2 jg jg     4096 Jul 16 14:29 .
drwxrwxr-x 194 jg jg     4096 Aug 23 11:09 ..
-rw-rw-r--   3 jg jg  9708988 Sep 30  2023 yayas001.mp3
-rw-rw-r--   3 jg jg  9708988 Sep 30  2023 .yayas001.mp3.3008
-rw-rw-r--   3 jg jg  9081135 Sep 30  2023 yayas002.mp3
-rw-rw-r--   3 jg jg  9081135 Sep 30  2023 .yayas002.mp3.3008
-rw-rw-r--   3 jg jg  9071545 Sep 30  2023 yayas003.mp3
-rw-rw-r--   3 jg jg  9071545 Sep 30  2023 .yayas003.mp3.3008
-rw-rw-r--   3 jg jg 11862262 Sep 30  2023 yayas004.mp3
-rw-rw-r--   3 jg jg 11862262 Sep 30  2023 .yayas004.mp3.3008
-rw-rw-r--   3 jg jg 21782906 Sep 30  2023 yayas005.mp3
-rw-rw-r--   3 jg jg 21782906 Sep 30  2023 .yayas005.mp3.3008
-rw-rw-r--   3 jg jg 16468352 Sep 30  2023 yayas006.mp3
-rw-rw-r--   3 jg jg 16468352 Sep 30  2023 .yayas006.mp3.3008
-rw-rw-r--   3 jg jg  7306102 Sep 30  2023 yayas007.mp3
-rw-rw-r--   3 jg jg  7306102 Sep 30  2023 .yayas007.mp3.3008
-rw-rw-r--   3 jg jg 10929144 Sep 30  2023 yayas008.mp3
-rw-rw-r--   3 jg jg 10929144 Sep 30  2023 .yayas008.mp3.3008
-rw-rw-r--   3 jg jg  8580986 Sep 30  2023 yayas009.mp3
-rw-rw-r--   3 jg jg  8580986 Sep 30  2023 .yayas009.mp3.3008
-rw-rw-r--   3 jg jg  9743549 Sep 30  2023 yayas010.mp3
-rw-rw-r--   3 jg jg  9743549 Sep 30  2023 .yayas010.mp3.3008
minako /drobojoin/tosh/vorbis/yayas>
If I just transfer the vorbis dir in isolation, ie:

$ rsync -avH --delete -e ssh /mnt/tosh/vorbis minako:/drobojoin/tosh
I don't get the spurious files. So it seems to be related to the scale or complexity of the transfer. There's an easy workaround of course (ie to exclude vorbis from a first pass and transfer separately later). But I think it must be a bug. Annoying.

This is an interesting resource:

https://huggingface.co/spaces

.. access to loads of community-authored AI apps. Some of them are crap. Some of them don't work. Some of them are pretty good! Lots of image generation apps, story writers, some NSFW stuff.

Basically free but you get a limited number of goes unless you subscribe - I think. The site isn't brilliantly designed, it feels more like a developer's resource than a product.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/articles/clynkl7m02xo

Clear skies here hopefully so I'll go out and see if I can see a few late tonight.

.. we'll be down for about 25 minutes.

EDIT - all done

Like The Who and The Rolling Stones, Floyd are a band I've always liked, but I've never heard some of their albums. Actually I'm a lot more of a devotee of their classic period than I am of either of the other two bands.

So I thought I'd have a journey through their studio albums. I'm not going to do the post-Waters material, I consider them to be Pink Floyd records in name only. I've heard the first two of them. No wish to do that again.

So yesterday I had a listen to:

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn [August 1967]

I can't say I greatly enjoyed this. I like the mood, the atmosphere. It must have seemed exciting and other-worldly in the Summer of Love. The album mostly washed over me quite pleasantly, but it was never really engaging or involving.

I did really like Syd's spiky electric guitar - it reminded me of '90s Indie, especially Blur. I've just read that Graham Coxon is a fan, which doesn't surprise me at all. I think Graham's vocal style (I have his solo album Happiness in Magazines) owes something to Syd as well.

It's a shame that Syd couldn't have written a few catchy songs like Arnold Layne or See Emily Play for this album. There is one, the closing tune Bike. But so much of this record is experimental and improvised that it just didn't really grab me. It's very much of its time. It has bucketfuls of that very 1960s English whimsy and it sounds extremely dated, though that's part of its charm. Probably sounds great if you're off your head on LSD, but I wasn't.

Quite a touching tribute from Slowhand.

I'd occasionally see ads in the music press for John Mayall gigs in the '80s, or reviews of them and I'd think: why is he still performing at his age? Same with Alexis Korner of course, the other godfather of the British Blues. These days we think nothing of musicians performing in their 50s.

Found this almost upsetting. How can a person of this age have the Blues in him like this?

This was a very relaxing 25 minutes. As a bonus for watch nerds, the mechanic is wearing a Rolex Oysterquartz.

Back in 1992, my old pal Shaun Appleby and I, the Unix section leaders at Rolls-Royce and Associates at the time, were loaned a copy of a program called Aviator by Sun Microsystems, our hardware vendor. I've been going through old documents, and it turns out that I still have it.

This was a simple multi-user flight combat simulator that you could run on networked machines, so users could dogfight each other from different workstations. It had been commissioned by Sun as demonstration software for their very expensive workstations with GX graphics acceleration.

https://techmonitor.ai/technology/aviator_15_for_sun_networks_opens_up_graphics_workstation_games_market

Shaun and I got it working on a SPARCstation 2GX, a system that probably had 16 or 32MB of RAM. It would normally have cost about £25,000 I think (although the Ministry of Defence paid for it and probably got it cheaper) and the company didn't have many of those. We didn't get it working in multi-user mode because we only installed it on one machine but we had a blast flying around in an F18 one afternoon.



I would say that the graphics capability was somewhere between a PS1 and a PS2, but that was pretty impressive for 1991 when the software was released. The networking aspect was ahead of its time, and it used real satellite data for the terrain you flew over - the Hawaiian islands and San Francisco bay. You could already get crude flight sims for PCs but this was next level.

Despite that - the aircraft controls were extremely simple and there were no "missions". All you could do was fly around, and if someone else was logged in, you could shoot at them. But the intention was only to demonstrate the graphics performance of the hardware. It wouldn't have been a viable product in its own right. Clearly very few people would spend money on a game to run on a workstation costing five figures.

Someone has uploaded a few seconds of the game working here:

https://www.reddit.com/user/rmini/comments/yzlmxe/aviator_151_on_sunos_414_12/

Anyone been affected?

Haven't been affected by this personally, unless (perhaps) someone's tried to message or email me from an affected system and wasn't able to. If I was still working it wouldn't have given me much of a headache; I only supported Linux / Unix systems. I never used the Windows laptop I was provided with, I used my own Linux desktop. Some of the company's internal / externally provided services like mail and Teams might have been affected.

Went to Tesco this morning, all the checkouts were working.

Over the years I've occasionally happened upon a famous person by chance, as most of us have I'm sure. I started making a list a few weeks ago. Turns out there are loads of them, too many for one post (and my attention span) but I'll make a start and keep going (in no particular order). Most of them are from my time in London.

Post 'em if you got 'em!

In 1996 or 1997 I sat next to the woman who played 'Anna', Terry's girlfriend, in Brookside on the tube. She was reading a script. Looked up her name just now: Kazia Pelka. She was in Coronation Street as well apparently.

In 1996, I went to a go-karting event laid on by one of our vendors for the department I worked in, and the F1 racing driver Mika Salo was a speaker there. In October 2004 I saw him again when he walked past Sari and me on his way into Helsinki Vantaa Airport. Remember Sari? She was a frequent TNMS contributor for a couple of years in the noughties although she used the userame 'Sary'.

The Labour politician Paul Boateng, then a shadow home affairs spokesman, sat opposite me on the Northern Line in 1995. He eyed me slightly suspiciously on realising that I'd recognised him, perhaps sensing a degree of contempt which I had politely tried to disguise.

A few weeks before Christmas 2001 I saw Ed Bishop, UFO's 'Ed Straker', in the Tesco Metro at Covent Garden. As a diehard UFO fan since the age of 10, I went up to say hello to him, and say how much I'd enjoyed UFO. He was very gracious.

I saw Mike Oldfield at Heathrow Airport in the late '90s, looking a bit scruffy.

.. for about 20 mins.

[edit : all done]

In other news - I have created an X account for the site so that, just in case one of these goes bad and we go off the air for hours on end, you can check it for service status / updates. It is:

https://x.com/BetweenWheels

Please make a note - thanks. No need to sign up for X.

Strong start from Emma Raducanu on Monday and she's a set up in her second round match against Mertens.

Bit of a shock that the defending women's champion went out in the first round, but then she was unseeded last year I think. Interestingly no women's champoin has successfully defended her title since Serena managed it in 2016.

..and moved a couple of topics from the Science and Technology section in there. Hope everyone's OK with that.