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I spent Sunday afternoon playing with my new toy, a castoff laptop from bluepork. It's got a Pentium III processor running Windows 98!

Now you may well ask what on earth I was doing getting such an antiquated laptop. The answer is that it means I can retire luminiferous—until now, the only Windows machine (also Windows 98) I possessed—which I was only keeping for the purposes of viewing my Encyclopaedia Judaica and Encyclopaedia Britannica CD-ROMs. The new machine has a higher resolution screen than luminiferous, and doesn't suffer from luminiferous's many problems, including a graphics fault that means when it gets hot, rather than the screen staying still and the mouse pointer moving, it's the other way around. I can finally also now see the videos that come with the Judaica—luminiferous's evil twin^* would play the audio, but not the video.

* The same laptop, but running in Windows, not Linux.

One of the many odd things about luminiferous is that, in Linux, once it had gone from text mode into X-Window, it couldn't go back, and when I logged out or shut down, rather than seeing the shutdown messages you'd expect, I saw the following pyrotechnics (the moiré pattern is an artefact of my filming):

Weird, huh?

(As an aside, this post represents my first attempt to do video editing, my first attempt to embed a video, and my first upload to YouTube when I discovered embedding a video and getting it to work in Windows was way more effort than it was worth.)

The Apples

I already blogged about the funk band the Apples (התפוחים) I heard at Limmudfest:

"Mixing big band jazz, raw groove, scratching and samples, their explosive live experience will have you up and partying into the night". Their line up consisted of: percussion, double-bass, a large brass section—trumpet, trombone, saxophone and bass saxophone—and two DJs dressed in fluorescent yellow jumpsuits. I've never heard anything like it before, in terms of being a combination of scratching with a live horn section!

At the time, I thought it was a novelty idea, but wasn't really interested in listening to their distinctive style of music again. And then I went to the new Moishe House housewarming party, and someone (I'm guessing Daniel) had their track Bulgarians playing on the turntable (vinyl, noch!), and I thought, ooh I recognise that from Limmudfest, and enjoyed listening to it again. And then today I wanted to listen to it again to see whether it's worth buying the track (if I can), and ended up listening to all the tracks from that album they have on YouTube. At this rate, I'm going to end up getting the album...

The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul

I'm a little disappointed, actually, with the Radio 4 radio play of this. It wasn't as good as the adaptation of the first book: they took out all of the subtleties of the book and made them all overt. Mind you, it was sixteen years ago that I last read that book: I shall have to reread it now, whilst the radio play is still fresh in my mind.

I hope the radio play of The Salmon of Doubt is up to the standard of that of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency: I haven't read the book, as the impression I get is that it was highly incomplete at the time of Douglas Adams' death, and not by any means intended for public consumption; and I would regard it as somewhat disrespectful to read it as is. A radio play in which it has been fleshed out and tidied up, however, is a different matter. I hope they do it justice—and look forward to finding out.

Meanwhile, to keep us occupied until it broadcasts, I've discovered BBC 7 is airing I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue repeats.