Even though my good tape decks are broken at the moment I have started on the software to transfer my techno and house mix tapes to the computer. I have written the software before in C++. It basically waits for a sound on the input and then writes the music to a file until it notices a long quiet section at the end of the tape and stops writing. The software was using threads and used the lame lib to do on the fly mp3 encoding, to make it even quicker to digitize tape. It also notified the user of any buffer underflows and clipped samples. ...

First my nice 32" LCD TV broke, which is annoying. But the TV is easily replaceable, it just takes some money. At the moment I am just using an old 21" CRT TV monitor instead, because it is no good to work on any more. But now my beloved Sony TC-KA6ES tape deck broke. It was the best tape deck Sony ever produced. A three motor, three head and Dolby B/C/S monster with manual tape calibration and a weight of half a ton. ...

I progressed a step further in my quest to upgrade my computer systems at home from the outdated and unusable ones I am have at the moment. My workstation is way to slow and has a broken CRT and I have nothing portable at all. Thursday before the phpconference I bought a Eee PC 901 (Linux version of course). As I am planning to get a proper desktop computer with a big screen for my home desk, I just needed something to take to conferences, on trips and maybe sometimes into town. I also use it at home to browse the web, when I don’t want to sit on my desk. ...

I tried a new restaurant for lunch today to expand the current set of choices. (not everything on there is good) It is called green&wich, located at C/Villaroel and Gran Via, they don’t seem to have a website yet. The location is nice, the space is open to the busy street, the design is minimal and the chairs and tables are a bit wobbly. They have two menus. I went for the 7.90 one, which gives you a salad, a sandwich, drink and a coffee. I had a rocket, tomato and parmesan salad, which was soggy but still had hard stems in it. A pretty awful combination. The “asia” sandwich was ok, but not much better than the packaged ones you get in the supermarket. Barcelona really does need a Pret-A-Manger to show the locals what fresh a sandwich looks like. I had a cortado for coffee, which still contained coffee powder. ...

As I recently started learning Python one of the things I noticed which I didn’t like is the class syntax. So I wrote some minimal hello world programs in the languages I recently used to show the difference: C++ hello.cc #include <iostream> class Hello { private: char *value; public: Hello(char *newvalue) { value = newvalue; } void hello() { std::cout << this->value; } }; int main() { Hello hello("hello\n"); hello.hello(); } I like the C++ syntax, it is the language which introduced me to OOP and it clearly states what bits are what without too wordy syntax. ...