Mighty fine music

[austin_dern]

A couple months ago a friend left me a pair of Apple ProSpeakers, those little softball-sized clear plastic globe kinds The catch is, the speaker plug doesn't fit into the iBook's speaker plug. spaceroo believes there's an adaptor I need to plug it in, and since I don't know where the one which presumably came with the speakers might be, I went to an Apple reseller in Funan to buy one. After getting past the thick cluster of people -- a bank set up a deal where signing up for some financial services gets one an iBook, and there were a lot of people milling around picking up their computers and looking for accessories -- I found a clerk. I started to say, ``I got, from a friend, a pair of ProSpeakers --''

He said, ``And you have an older iBook or PowerBook you want to connect them to? You need an adaptor ... '' and he dashed off from behind the counter to find it. I suppose I'm not the first to have this problem. A woman took his place behind the sales counter, and after he spent a few minutes looking he came around to the front of the counter, and asked the woman who'd taken his place where to find it. Somehow that dance entertains me.

They determined they were out of the adaptor I needed, and the adaptor was more expensive than I'm willing to pay. If you want to get more than about US$10 out of me for a piece of boring plastic, it has to be a lot of boring plastic. A thingy to go from a USB port to a speaker plug won't cut it. The first clerk noted all that was really needed was some re-wiring of the plugs and while they couldn't do it there, there were, surely, other places even in the mall where you could get the wires re-jiggered cheap. I wasn't expecting that sort of talk from a store clerk. I also think I'm going to re-search the apartment and office for the piece that's missing, which shows what a low level of tolerance I have for fiddling around with cables, or hiring other people to do it.

Thinking about the ThunderCats DVDs -- which I didn't buy, preferring instead the first season of Land of the Lost -- do you suppose Wil Wheaton thought Snarf was annoying? I liked Snarf, but then I also liked Wesley Crusher. Snarfer, though, everybody found annoying, so there's no sense wondering about him.

Trivia: When Frederick Henry Harvey (of ``Harvey Girls'' fame) died in 1901, he and the Santa Fe Railroad owned and operated 15 hotels, 47 restaurants, and 30 dining cars. Source: The Story of American Railroads, Stewart H Holbrook.

Currently Reading: The Second Trip, Robert Silverberg. 1972 and does it ever show; a synthetic personality replacing that of a mindwiped artistic genius criminal has boring sex until traces of the wiped mind re-emerge and the story spirals into internal dialogues. Alarmingly, I can think of someone I used to know who reminds me of the mindwiped genius/criminal.

Comments

[moonfires.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure there IS an adaptor for those speakers. The miniplug that those speakers use was designed to also carry power for the speakers as well as the audio signal. Even if you plugged them into the larger headphone jack, the sound quality might not be there as they are powered speakers.

[moonfires.livejournal.com]

It's a 2.5mm jack, and it's not analog audio either. It's a digital audio connection, per Apple docs, so just converting the size wouldn't work. The speakers are dependent on the DA hardware in the macs with the 2.5mm speaker jack to drive them.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it wouldn't be just converting the size of one thing to another, but there should be a connector to be made and I'm sure if Apple can charge a ridiculous amount for it, then somebody else charges ten bucks for a duplicate or a twisting or whatever of the cables to sell under-the-table.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

There does have to be an adapter, though; there's not much sense to having a speaker set that can't be plugged in to iBooks. Probably it plugs into the USB port rather than the speaker jack, but I can take that. I've got one of those USB hubs so my mouse and keyboard and all consume just the one port.

[moonfires.livejournal.com]

You're not thinking Apple. It makes perfect sense to have these speakers only work with certain machines.

I did find the adapter. It's not from Apple, it's from Griffin Technologies, with a US$40 retail. It has to act as an amplifier and power source, and draws power from the FireWire jack: http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/ifire/index.php.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, now, that's got to be the adapter the guy was talking about, and you can see how that's beyond the price I'm willing to pay for boring plastic.

Still, now I've got this set of ProSpeakers and those Harman/Kardon soundsticks with the huge glass torus that I've been using in the office; since they plug in to a USB port they could certainly be brought home, but they seem better suited to the office use -- mostly Internet radio listening -- than to home use -- occasional playing of a Europa Universalis or Railroad Tycoon-type game.

[reptilemammal.livejournal.com]

Snarf actually was my favorite character in TC as opposed to the rather irritating Ortho from He-Man. Snarf loyalty and love toward all the TC is what I really liked.
I think I liked Lion-O too but not particularly as the leader of the Thundercats just because he basically was a kid superfied and it was fun the interaction between Snarf and Lion-O. And who could forget Mumm-ra, i really liked many of his evil plans and was annoyed that he was always defated. So I think for the record...

Favorite main characters from Thundercats
1. Snarf
2. Mumm-ra
3. Lion-O
4. Panth-ro (I like gadgeteers)
5 & 6 Kat& Kit
7. Cheetar-A
8. And the rest...

[logan-pendan.livejournal.com]

... are here on Gilligan's Isle.

Couldn't help it.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Actually, Gilligan's Planet, in this case ...

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Hm, now ... I haven't thought much about how I'd order the ThunderCats in ages. Snarf, Lion-O, and Jaga, I suppose, would be my favorites, which is probably about how the producers wanted the show to turn out. Panthro seemed pretty cool but kind of distant in some way; I'm not sure how I'd pin that down to a specific feeling. Tigra they keep seeming to almost find a personality for, but then couldn't quite get it to stick.

Vultureman was kind of fun, over on the ``evil'' side of things.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Personally I liked Panthro, then Lion-O, then the rest in a sort of jumble. And I think Panthro did have a little bit of that aloofness. He had a nifty costume and paw-style nunchuks, so, decidedly my favorite.

--Chiaroscuro

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

'Course, he did also have those chest-strap spikes that projected out by some not exactly defined or quite fully credible means. I seem to remember some episode where the bad guy got control of them and got Panthro pretty well anchored to the ground by his own odd gear.

[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

There's gold in them thar hills, er, adapters! ;P

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Probably silver, if they're going for the audiophile snob market.

[dashingpooka.livejournal.com]

Griffin seems to be able to make a killing by getting in on the adapter market for hard-to-find pieces of plastic! They made a ADB to USB thingy for about the same price...

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Yeah, they do seem to do a lot of plastic sales, and I know I've bought something from them, but I don't remember what. I suppose it's a viable niche, although I do wonder how a person ends up building a company that does that. I mean, people don't grow up dreaming of someday making ADB-to-USB adapters when they grow up. Yet people do grow up that way. How does that happen?