It’s Millie on the Atlantic coast. Wallace, Dan-O and I wound up in the surf on what is the hottest equinox day in years. You may notice other dogs in the background, this is an area of the beach set aside for that purpose. Millie likes the water but barely manages to stay above the larger waves when her fur gets wet. You try it when you are 82. That was it for the day, we came back here, baked a pie and watched Ocean’s Eleven.
Tor is back in the news. This is the outfit that anonymizes the path of Internet packets. I’ve warned people since day one that everything they do on line is scrutinized by somebody. It should be clear by now that this is an invasion of privacy and that the motives to snoop in this fashion are evil no matter who is doing it. Of the many businesses out there offering anonymizers, Tor is the best because it does not require you to identify yourself. That potentially incriminates you should a company have a future change of heart, buyout or Supreme Court subpoena.Remember what the police did when that little town in England tried, as promised, to destroy all the citizen’s DNA records after an early research project was finished. Also keep in mind that the police themselves use Tor when conducting warrantless searches, so that the party being investigated does not get tipped off the inquiries are all coming from the same source. Likewise with the FBI and CIA.
Still, I dislike Tor’s algorithm. It merely randomizes the path of your Internet packets so those who spy can’t see a path back to your computer. All they see is some proxy servers. The catch is, anyone who knows computers can tell you that computer random isn’t quite as random as real random. That is how a Finnish company was heavily fined recently for offering peer-to-peer file sharing. They were convicted of “assisting” copyright infringement. (Funny it is always the upstart Internet company that's picked on. They don't go after Xerox or Sony, and if that ain't "assisting" they can kiss my grits.)
I have great hopes from that Finnish company. You see, they finally realized that the real money on the Internet is going to come from making it private again. I predict they will write a program that will use every on-line computer as a packet scrambler. By joining up, you agree your computer can act as a relay for the messages of other members, making it impossible to trace anything. Servers will no longer be chokepoints to filter data from targeted IP addresses. The way it should be.
By mid-afternoon I have logged every possible copy combination on my equipment and none of them will work on a commercial Karaoke disk. The best I can do is get the audio to play back without the lyrics, almost as if I can rip the music, but not the lyric files. Do I need special software? I can produce wma files, but the lyrics disappear during the rip.
There is a small possibility that a special CD reader or burner is required, both to read the CDG disks and to burn them. My instinct says the laser does not care what it is burning, yet every burn failure today points to that very situation. Of course, every Karaoke person I called on my list to ask this question did not have any idea what I was talking about. This is why I am careful to point out many differences when people say they have done the same things as I. Have they now?
By scrounging spare parts, I got a full Karaoke show up and working in the front dining room. Check back soon for pictures. The Karaoke machine outputs line level, which requires a PA channel. Utilizing a spare microphone and the old movie speakers, even Wallace agreed the sound has potential. As soon as I get a flat screen and learn to copy, I’ll be looking for a show. Arnel called around 6:00 PM, he had been playing the Walkabout but was rained out just before we arrived. He is avidly following my progress since we will prove to be an excellent combination with the ability to put on a seven-hour show. He’s only playing Fridays for now.
[Author’s note: The motive for copying the CDs is to save weight. If you’ve ever seen a Karaoke operator lug in 600 CDs, you’ll know I cannot do that. On average, only three tunes per disk are of any use to me. I believe I can get all 1,800 tunes I will ever play onto less than 130 CDs. Do the math. Until I can find an app that burns and plays back to a hard drive or DVD, the only playback device I have is a CDG player.]
[Author's note 2015-06-21: in the end, because of the success of bingo and my learning how to sing, Karaoke became less important on every count. No sense investing in it and anyway, not that much later, somebody came along and outright gave me a Karaoke outfit. The keen-and-sharp witted will notice that I predicted the Dark Web in the fifth paragraph.]
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