In alt.home.repair, on Fri, 21 Aug 2020 03:19:09 -0400, Dan Espen
wrote:

Jim Joyce writes:

On Thu, 20 Aug 2020 22:36:26 -0400, Dan Espen wrote:

Jim Joyce writes:

If your radio has a standard Toyota CD changer port, you're probably
golden. It's a little more extreme, but you could also replace the whole
radio unit. Even basic models come with USB these days and swapping a radio
is easy. Check Crutchfield.com for info, not necessarily for buying.

Ah, USB charger. Don't need one of those, that's what the cigarette
lighter is for.

What? No, not a charger. I was talking about taking advantage of the fact
that many Toyota radios have a CD changer (not charger) port on the back of
the radio. You can see it in the Amazon photo I linked earlier. Scion was
part of Toyota, so I figured there was a chance that your radio also has a
CD changer port, but perhaps not.

Ah, I think someone else may have mentioned charging.
My radio has an embedded CD player but no changer feature.

I have an embedded CD player but I still have the changer port. It's
just a rectangular connector in the back.

I'll do some more searches and maybe even read the car manual to make
sure I"m getting this right.

I'd like to play music off a USB stick since I can get my entire music
collection on just one of them, but my Data CD MP3s work well enough.
I can fit 31 thin case CDs in my center console and door pockets, but
I don't need to carry all 31 of them at one time. Even when I was
driving to work every day it took me over a week to get tired of one
CD and switch to the next.

Right, I was also talking about being able to play music from a USB stick.

It's like when I had small tropical fish in a 6 ft long 60 gallon tank.
The fish would swim to one end of the tank, turn around and forget they
had been there already when they got to the other end. It was all new
to them.

Sounds like a simple, perhaps happy, life.

The fish never complained.

They really did look like they were exploring around the tank.
There aren't a lot of brain cells in the smaller ones.
They get a little smarter when you get to Cichlids.

I had that tank for over 20 years and specialized in creating
a view. I had all kinds of aquatic plants and very colorful
fish. I even had a species of snail that would clean the glass
but not overrun the tank.

I got the money to pay for the tank when a movie company paid me
to let them shoot scenes from the movie "7 Ups" in my house.

Cool.

micky writes:

In alt.home.repair, on Fri, 21 Aug 2020 03:35:42 -0400, Dan Espen
wrote:

micky writes:

In alt.home.repair, on Thu, 20 Aug 2020 20:47:06 -0400, Dan Espen
wrote:

....

My hearing IS bad. I don't hear high frequencies well in one ear.
I have the hardest time hearing movie audio even with hearing aids in.

I looked into hearing aids last winter.

Used to be hearing aids weren't covered by insurance.

Mine actually were and I see more and more insurers advertising
coverage.

I got a pair that fit entirely in the ear.
No one even knows when I have them on.

Women that speak softly in crowded rooms is another challenge.
I've been trying to pay attention to what I can't hear because the
hearing aids can be adjusted to compensate.

She told me about getting them adjusted after wearing them for a while.

Yep, it's a process.

Hopefully my next visit
will result in improvements.

But what really got me started is that I heard on the radio about one
particular brand which had a new? method for eliminating monopitch
tinnitus, and I thought I had that. The noise sounds like water running
in a pipe, and she called that a whoosh and said it's not monotone. So
there's no new advance for me.

I've had tinnitus a long time. I'm lucky it just sounds like crickets.
I don't notice it much now.

A hearing aid that helps? My first thought was that it's a scam.
They apparently work by making a masking sound. Still sounds like a
scam. I search for it on Google and all I see are ads for them. The
ads cite ground breaking research. Funny I don't see the research.
I'm going out on a limb and calling it a scam.

Then on the way home from the exam, that very day, NPR talked about Bose
HearPhones. They were 100 dollars off until new years day, which made
them 300 or 400, I forget, and I bought a pair. You would never find
them helpful because your hearing aids are so much better. So far,
I've only found them helpful at lectures, because I can make the sound
louder. And now because of the virus there are no more lectures for a
while. (they also have bluetooth and can work with cellphones like the
horse collar earbuds.) Maybe if my hearing were worse and I only had
500, they would be more valuable to me. And there is another brand about
the same price, made in Israel iirc, that has more features (like replay
the last 5 seconds!) that I didn't know about at the time, even though
they had been for sale for 2 years.

I paid about 6x the numbers you cite above. Or I should say my plan paid.

I've had a noise in one ear since I was 20 years old, or maybe since I
was 10. I didn't really notice it until I was 50+ and I went to Mammoth
Cave and they had a little thing where they asked everyone to be quiet
so we could all hear what quiet sounded like And that's when I really
noticed the sound in my left ear.

I heard crickets for years. I started to wonder why it would be snowing
outside but I was hearing crickets.

....

For my audio I wanted the master copy to be 100% lossless so that

I can certainly see that.

if I had to convert to some other format like MP3 I wouldn't be
in a situation of doing WAV-MP3-WAV-OGG and getting a mess.
I'm not worried about space. I started with gigabyte drives but
now I'm using Terrabyte SSDs. Lots and lots of space.

Wow. Amazing.

The DVDR came with a 160GB drive, which was pretty big in 2007, but I
found a comment online that I can use a 500GB drive. Maybe I can even
use bigger but 12 years ago the commenter probably hadn't tried that.

Here are the numbers from my backup USB stick. The directory is named
"mp3" but it's all flac:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdc1 233G 131G 102G 57% /back-mp3

So, a total of 130 Gig on a 256 Gig stick. Looks like 6310 tracks.

find /back-mp3 -type f | wc -l
6310

One last thing, she had me fill out a form, of course, to help decide
what I need, but the last page was only about how annoying the noise
was, phrased in 10 different ways, which I was to rate from 1 to 10 and
one was supposed to add up the 10 values and if the total was over 40,
60, I don't remember, that was bad. It was clear to me that 2 or 3 or
more people nationwide had tried to hurt or kill themselves because of
the noise and the audiologists were obliged to ask these questions
before they let a patient go home. (Once you use the word patient, you
have heightened responsibility.) .

Did you have to fill out a form like that?

I've mentioned tinnitus to the doctors but I haven't tried to get
any treatment. Most of the sites say there isn't any, and it doesn't
bother me much.

You and I should be happy, I guess, that we dont' have that bad a
problem.

Yes I can imagine how bad it could be. Running water and crickets are
sounds you might have to live with in nature. Like I said, it doesn't
bother me much. A whine or ringing sounds could be a lot worse.

--
Dan Espen

On Thu, 20 Aug 2020 20:09:45 -0400, micky
wrote:

In alt.home.repair, on Thu, 20 Aug 2020 19:39:02 -0400,
wrote:

On Thu, 20 Aug 2020 18:21:09 -0400, Dan Espen
wrote:

You know for under $15 there are things that plug into the cigarette
lighter that transmit to the radio.

Nope, didn't know that.

I have a couple I can send you but they are pretty flaky. If you are
in an area where there is a pretty wide band without any other FM
stations they seem to be OK. In an urban area with a crowded dial, not
so much.

In Baltimore, 90.5 is vacant. I think 90.3 and 90.7 are too, or at
least only have some small noises. . 90.1 is C-Span Radio, that most
car radios but only a few home radios can receive.

Also the range of those cigarette lighter things goes one or two**
notches above and below the FM band and my radios go that high and low,
even though I dont' think there are any FM stations that do.

**TWo notches on the gizmo, which goes up and down 0.1 mHz at a time.
That's one notch on the radio that goes 0.2 mHz at a time.

For one reason or another, for me the gizmo worked fine.

These transmitters are very low power so any adjacent signal will step
on them. It isn't a huge deal but if you are anything close to a
purist the occasional signal dropout might make you nuts. It is more
apparent if you travel around where you get closer to other radio
markets.
I am also not sure how good the bandwidth is. I know lots of people
who won't even use 320KB MP3s because they think the sound is still
not up to snuff. I call them "Audiphools" because they also claim to
hear the oxygen in their speaker wires. They do make scammers rich.

On Thu, 20 Aug 2020 21:19:02 -0500, Jim Joyce
wrote:

On Thu, 20 Aug 2020 20:56:28 -0400, micky wrote:

In alt.home.repair, on Thu, 20 Aug 2020 19:16:45 -0400, Dan Espen
wrote:

Jim Joyce writes:

On Thu, 20 Aug 2020 17:05:34 -0400, micky wrote:

In alt.home.repair, on Thu, 20 Aug 2020 05:10:24 -0700 (PDT), bruce
bowser wrote:

The thing is, I never really bothered or let alone perfected recording with much CD burning or thumb drive use strictly for audio, at least. I have three thumb drives and they're all practically empty.

Unefortunately for me, my car radio plays only audio CDs, not MP3s etc.
and you can't get many songs on an audio CD.

Is your current car still a Toyota? One of the nice things about most
factory Toyota radios is that USB adapters are widely available, easy to
install, and not very expensive. Some of them plug into the CD changer port
on the back of the radio. That's the other nice thing about many Toyota
factory radios. They tend to have a CD changer port. When I added a USB
adapter to a 2002 Highlander it took only about an hour.

Back of the radio?

I just did some searches for my 2006 Scion Xb.
I don't see any indication that there is something
on the back of the radio for USB.

He's talkng about a CD changer port. Rectangular with 6, 8, or 10 or
so pins. See if you can find a CD changer that would work with the
radio and if there is one, there should be a port too.

I know I can connect a player to the AUX port.
I really like the CD controls on the steering wheel which I don't
imagine would work with AUX.

No, they woudln't work with AUX but if y ou have a changer port, they'd
probably work with a changer that plugged into it. But not with an
AUX/USB port that plugged into it. .

With the kind of adapter that I'm talking about, the steering wheel
controls work with USB thumb drives. I can't remember if they also worked
with devices plugged into the Aux port.

snip

The volume will work since you are still using the final amp of the
radio but if you have a player plugged into the aux port you are not
going to control that player from the steering wheel (change tracks
etc). If the radio can read USB, it is the player so the controls
should work.

This is based on dozens of rental cars over the years.

On Fri, 21 Aug 2020 03:35:42 -0400, Dan Espen
wrote:

micky writes:

In alt.home.repair, on Thu, 20 Aug 2020 20:47:06 -0400, Dan Espen
wrote:


Is that Roberta FLAC?

FLAC is the other completely lossless audio format.
If differs from WAV which is used on audio CDs in that it's compressed
and therefore smaller than WAV.

Most other audio formats introduce loss, if you convert back and forth
a few times eventually the audio will be a mes

That brings up another question. Other than youtube videos and some
news on the PC, just about everything I watch I record off the air on a
Philips DVDR. I use the lowest quality SuperLongPlaying, because I
don't care about the picture quality and it's always good enough, and I
can get more programs on the hard drive before it fills up.

But if I used a higher quality, would that make the sound better as well
as the picture? I only care about the sound.

On Law & Order and occasionally other stuff, I have a hard time
understanding because of the music, but surely the original was
understandable.. On some shows I can understand clearly, but every so
often a whole syllable is missing. I'll play it 3 times and it's
definitely missing. It's not that my hearing is getting bad. It's
too late to record that exact thing at higher quality, but in general,
if the picture is recorded at higher quality, will the sound be also
recorded at higher quality???

Because I can put in a bigger hard drive and have room for just as many
shows but at higher quality, 2 or 3 times the equivalent of feet per
minute.

I'm far from an expert but my understanding is that audio and video
are recorded as 2 independent things. They're in one file but the
encoding is separate. Note that the video might be 60 frames per second
but the audio might be 44khz.

My hearing IS bad. I don't hear high frequencies well in one ear.
I have the hardest time hearing movie audio even with hearing aids in.
Women that speak softly in crowded rooms is another challenge.
I've been trying to pay attention to what I can't hear because the
hearing aids can be adjusted to compensate. Hopefully my next visit
will result in improvements.

For my audio I wanted the master copy to be 100% lossless so that
if I had to convert to some other format like MP3 I wouldn't be
in a situation of doing WAV-MP3-WAV-OGG and getting a mess.
I'm not worried about space. I started with gigabyte drives but
now I'm using Terrabyte SSDs. Lots and lots of space.

If I am recording I use WAV for my master but these days I usually
just buy the MP3s. (Amazon or maybe the artist directly)
The Napster guy was right. When they make music easier to buy than
steal, people will buy it. I still do have plenty that was taken from
the ALT.BINARY.SOUNDS.MP3... newsgroups before that was true.
Usenet was the main reason why I was an early adopter of broadband
(2000 or so).
At 50 kbs it takes 10 minutes per song to download and most MP3s on
usenet in those days were 128kbs.

On Fri, 21 Aug 2020 04:20:01 -0400, micky
wrote:

I'm far from an expert but my understanding is that audio and video
are recorded as 2 independent things. They're in one file but the
encoding is separate. Note that the video might be 60 frames per second
but the audio might be 44khz.

I will continue to check, but it doesn't sound good for me. There is no
setting for sound quality.

The sound on TV really sucks. My PC in the living room has the line
out from the TV connected to line in and even on the primary HD
(broadcast) channels the sound is nothing to write home about. I
recorded a few songs from the Grammys for my wife and on a good sound
system they sucked. When I put them in the spectrum analyser of Sound
Forge, you could see the heavy compression. Older shows like Gunsmoke
and L&O were even worse. This is FM radio quality at best.
We ended up just buying the ones she really liked from Amazon in
320kbs MP3. Quick, easy and only a buck.

On Fri, 21 Aug 2020 03:19:09 -0400, Dan Espen wrote:

Jim Joyce writes:

On Thu, 20 Aug 2020 22:36:26 -0400, Dan Espen wrote:

Jim Joyce writes:

If your radio has a standard Toyota CD changer port, you're probably
golden. It's a little more extreme, but you could also replace the whole
radio unit. Even basic models come with USB these days and swapping a radio
is easy. Check Crutchfield.com for info, not necessarily for buying.

Ah, USB charger. Don't need one of those, that's what the cigarette
lighter is for.

What? No, not a charger. I was talking about taking advantage of the fact
that many Toyota radios have a CD changer (not charger) port on the back of
the radio. You can see it in the Amazon photo I linked earlier. Scion was
part of Toyota, so I figured there was a chance that your radio also has a
CD changer port, but perhaps not.

Ah, I think someone else may have mentioned charging.
My radio has an embedded CD player but no changer feature.
I'll do some more searches and maybe even read the car manual to make
sure I"m getting this right.

On the 2002 Highlander that I mentioned, it also had a CD player built in,
but apparently that radio supported an external 6-disc CD changer and
that's why it had the port on the back.

I remember being ready to dismiss USB options that used the CD changer port
because I didn't have a CD changer, but then I read on the ToyotaNation
forum that most Toyota factory radios from that era had the changer port.
It was just something that Toyota included, even on cars that never had a
changer option. I thought that was interesting, so I popped my radio out
and sure enough, there it was.

I'd like to play music off a USB stick since I can get my entire music
collection on just one of them, but my Data CD MP3s work well enough.
I can fit 31 thin case CDs in my center console and door pockets, but
I don't need to carry all 31 of them at one time. Even when I was
driving to work every day it took me over a week to get tired of one
CD and switch to the next.

Right, I was also talking about being able to play music from a USB stick.

It's like when I had small tropical fish in a 6 ft long 60 gallon tank.
The fish would swim to one end of the tank, turn around and forget they
had been there already when they got to the other end. It was all new
to them.

Sounds like a simple, perhaps happy, life.

The fish never complained.

They really did look like they were exploring around the tank.
There aren't a lot of brain cells in the smaller ones.
They get a little smarter when you get to Cichlids.

I had that tank for over 20 years and specialized in creating
a view. I had all kinds of aquatic plants and very colorful
fish. I even had a species of snail that would clean the glass
but not overrun the tank.

I got the money to pay for the tank when a movie company paid me
to let them shoot scenes from the movie "7 Ups" in my house.

IMDB is having a hard time finding that movie. Do you know if it was
released?

On Fri, 21 Aug 2020 04:22:23 -0400, micky wrote:

In alt.home.repair, on Fri, 21 Aug 2020 00:59:47 -0500, Jim Joyce
wrote:

On Fri, 21 Aug 2020 00:40:00 -0400, micky wrote:

In alt.home.repair, on Thu, 20 Aug 2020 20:05:27 -0500, Jim Joyce
wrote:

I used something like this item on a 2002 Highlander.
https://www.amazon.com/Interface-Yom...dp/B0169MV538/

See, this is my problem:

Not Compatible with Factory Navigation System, which I have
1998-2002,Camry
1998-2003,Solara and I have a 2005 Solara

A Solara is much like a Camry, but I guess they used different radios
since the compatible Camry ended a year earlier.

They might have another version that does work but I looked 3 years ago.
I'll look again.... So far, they are all for Hondas.

I think you probably hit the nail on the head. With the factory Nav system
you probably can't do the USB adapter mod.

I really like the map and the GPS, but I will never use the navigation.
For one thing, I can't understand the instructions! And I wonder why
that interferes with the USB//AUX add-on.

For non-critical navigation, we use the Nav system in the car. It's
convenient because it turns down the music in the front speakers when it
wants to say something, while leaving the rear speakers as they were. It's
very handy because it's always available at the push of a button.

Our embedded Nav system has two big flaws, however. First, the map is a
static snapshot in time. We bought the car new in 2016, but the map doesn't
have things that were built in 2009, for example. I've asked on the forums
and people with newer maps have the same complaint - too many missing
items. Google Maps, OTOH, about two days after an IKEA was built near my
old neighborhood, Google Maps knew it was there and knew of all the new
streets they had put in to get there. They might have known even sooner,
but I didn't think to check.

Second, the embedded system has no real-time component, so it has no way of
telling us about accidents ahead, construction zones, radar traps, detours,
etc. For that reason alone, when we really care about navigation we use
Google Maps. It solves all of those problems. The only downside is that it
doesn't turn down the volume on the car stereo when it speaks, but that's
minor.

When you're on a road trip and you suddenly see a string of cars taking an
odd exit, it's pretty likely that there's a traffic slowdown ahead and
Google Maps is recommending a detour. It even tells you how much time
you'll save by taking the detour.

Did you see the story back in February of this year where a man put 99
phones in a kid's wagon and slowly pulled it down a deserted street? On
Google Maps, they turned the street red to show a traffic problem. Pretty
funny.

https://mashable.com/article/google-maps-99-phones/
Man says he caused fake traffic jams on Google Maps with 99 phones

Jim Joyce writes:

On Fri, 21 Aug 2020 03:19:09 -0400, Dan Espen wrote:

Jim Joyce writes:

On Thu, 20 Aug 2020 22:36:26 -0400, Dan Espen wrote:

Jim Joyce writes:

If your radio has a standard Toyota CD changer port, you're probably
golden. It's a little more extreme, but you could also replace the whole
radio unit. Even basic models come with USB these days and swapping a radio
is easy. Check Crutchfield.com for info, not necessarily for buying.

Ah, USB charger. Don't need one of those, that's what the cigarette
lighter is for.

What? No, not a charger. I was talking about taking advantage of the fact
that many Toyota radios have a CD changer (not charger) port on the back of
the radio. You can see it in the Amazon photo I linked earlier. Scion was
part of Toyota, so I figured there was a chance that your radio also has a
CD changer port, but perhaps not.

Ah, I think someone else may have mentioned charging.
My radio has an embedded CD player but no changer feature.
I'll do some more searches and maybe even read the car manual to make
sure I"m getting this right.

On the 2002 Highlander that I mentioned, it also had a CD player built in,
but apparently that radio supported an external 6-disc CD changer and
that's why it had the port on the back.

I remember being ready to dismiss USB options that used the CD changer port
because I didn't have a CD changer, but then I read on the ToyotaNation
forum that most Toyota factory radios from that era had the changer port.
It was just something that Toyota included, even on cars that never had a
changer option. I thought that was interesting, so I popped my radio out
and sure enough, there it was.

I'd like to play music off a USB stick since I can get my entire music
collection on just one of them, but my Data CD MP3s work well enough.
I can fit 31 thin case CDs in my center console and door pockets, but
I don't need to carry all 31 of them at one time. Even when I was
driving to work every day it took me over a week to get tired of one
CD and switch to the next.

Right, I was also talking about being able to play music from a USB stick.

It's like when I had small tropical fish in a 6 ft long 60 gallon tank.
The fish would swim to one end of the tank, turn around and forget they
had been there already when they got to the other end. It was all new
to them.

Sounds like a simple, perhaps happy, life.

The fish never complained.

They really did look like they were exploring around the tank.
There aren't a lot of brain cells in the smaller ones.
They get a little smarter when you get to Cichlids.

I had that tank for over 20 years and specialized in creating
a view. I had all kinds of aquatic plants and very colorful
fish. I even had a species of snail that would clean the glass
but not overrun the tank.

I got the money to pay for the tank when a movie company paid me
to let them shoot scenes from the movie "7 Ups" in my house.

IMDB is having a hard time finding that movie. Do you know if it was
released?

Of course it was released. It was one of the follow on movies to the
French Connection:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven-Ups

My wife was so exicted to hang out with Roy Scheider and the rest of the
cast. I was the only one home when the scout came by and I told him
sure. I told my wife they'd be coming by, she didn't believe me.
They were just towing cars off the block when I left for work.

I'm not sure why people go gaga when they meet famous people,
but my whole household was walking on air when I came back home.

My house was used in the "climactic scene" just outside
co-op city. They mention Erskine Place which is the street that they
built right through the middle of the house.

When I first lived there we would swim in an Eastchester River
tributart right across the street where they show the parking garage.

I got $150 for letting them use my house. I took their first offer.
My wife tells me all the neighbors attempted to extort the movie
company for money for using the streets. They didn't get anything.


--
Dan Espen

On Fri, 21 Aug 2020 00:52:42 -0400, micky posted for all of us to digest...

On Law & Order and occasionally other stuff, I have a hard time
understanding because of the music, but surely the original was
understandable.. On some shows I can understand clearly, but every so
often a whole syllable is missing. I'll play it 3 times and it's
definitely missing. It's not that my hearing is getting bad. It's
too late to record that exact thing at higher quality, but in general,
if the picture is recorded at higher quality, will the sound be also
recorded at higher quality???



I have also found that true. NBC & Law & Order are especially hard to hear
because of the background effects. Why they do it I have no idea, it sure
doesn't add anything to mood... Sometimes I just use closed caption but that is
distracting from the video.

--
Tekkie

In alt.home.repair, on Fri, 21 Aug 2020 14:01:37 -0400, Dan Espen
wrote:

Jim Joyce writes:

On Fri, 21 Aug 2020 03:19:09 -0400, Dan Espen wrote:

Jim Joyce writes:

On Thu, 20 Aug 2020 22:36:26 -0400, Dan Espen wrote:

Jim Joyce writes:

If your radio has a standard Toyota CD changer port, you're probably
golden. It's a little more extreme, but you could also replace the whole
radio unit. Even basic models come with USB these days and swapping a radio
is easy. Check Crutchfield.com for info, not necessarily for buying.

Ah, USB charger. Don't need one of those, that's what the cigarette
lighter is for.

What? No, not a charger. I was talking about taking advantage of the fact
that many Toyota radios have a CD changer (not charger) port on the back of
the radio. You can see it in the Amazon photo I linked earlier. Scion was
part of Toyota, so I figured there was a chance that your radio also has a
CD changer port, but perhaps not.

Ah, I think someone else may have mentioned charging.
My radio has an embedded CD player but no changer feature.
I'll do some more searches and maybe even read the car manual to make
sure I"m getting this right.

On the 2002 Highlander that I mentioned, it also had a CD player built in,
but apparently that radio supported an external 6-disc CD changer and
that's why it had the port on the back.

I remember being ready to dismiss USB options that used the CD changer port
because I didn't have a CD changer, but then I read on the ToyotaNation
forum that most Toyota factory radios from that era had the changer port.
It was just something that Toyota included, even on cars that never had a
changer option. I thought that was interesting, so I popped my radio out
and sure enough, there it was.

I'd like to play music off a USB stick since I can get my entire music
collection on just one of them, but my Data CD MP3s work well enough.
I can fit 31 thin case CDs in my center console and door pockets, but
I don't need to carry all 31 of them at one time. Even when I was
driving to work every day it took me over a week to get tired of one
CD and switch to the next.

Right, I was also talking about being able to play music from a USB stick.

It's like when I had small tropical fish in a 6 ft long 60 gallon tank.
The fish would swim to one end of the tank, turn around and forget they
had been there already when they got to the other end. It was all new
to them.

Sounds like a simple, perhaps happy, life.

The fish never complained.

They really did look like they were exploring around the tank.
There aren't a lot of brain cells in the smaller ones.
They get a little smarter when you get to Cichlids.

I had that tank for over 20 years and specialized in creating
a view. I had all kinds of aquatic plants and very colorful
fish. I even had a species of snail that would clean the glass
but not overrun the tank.

I got the money to pay for the tank when a movie company paid me
to let them shoot scenes from the movie "7 Ups" in my house.

IMDB is having a hard time finding that movie. Do you know if it was
released?

Of course it was released. It was one of the follow on movies to the
French Connection:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven-Ups

My wife was so exicted to hang out with Roy Scheider and the rest of the
cast. I was the only one home when the scout came by and I told him
sure. I told my wife they'd be coming by, she didn't believe me.
They were just towing cars off the block when I left for work.

I'm not sure why people go gaga when they meet famous people,
but my whole household was walking on air when I came back home.

My house was used in the "climactic scene" just outside
co-op city. They mention Erskine Place which is the street that they
built right through the middle of the house.

They built a street through the middle of your house?

When I first lived there we would swim in an Eastchester River
tributart right across the street where they show the parking garage.

The movie pretends there's a garage or google maps says there is one.

Did you move away becaue of the street through the middle of your house?

I got $150 for letting them use my house. I took their first offer.

If the street had guttters and sidewalks and manholes, that does seem
low. Did they remove the street when they left? Do any damage?

My wife tells me all the neighbors attempted to extort the movie
company for money for using the streets. They didn't get anything.

On Fri, 21 Aug 2020 12:26:02 -0500, Jim Joyce posted for all of us to digest...


On Fri, 21 Aug 2020 04:22:23 -0400, micky wrote:

In alt.home.repair, on Fri, 21 Aug 2020 00:59:47 -0500, Jim Joyce
wrote:

On Fri, 21 Aug 2020 00:40:00 -0400, micky wrote:

In alt.home.repair, on Thu, 20 Aug 2020 20:05:27 -0500, Jim Joyce
wrote:

I used something like this item on a 2002 Highlander.
https://www.amazon.com/Interface-Yom...dp/B0169MV538/

See, this is my problem:

Not Compatible with Factory Navigation System, which I have
1998-2002,Camry
1998-2003,Solara and I have a 2005 Solara

A Solara is much like a Camry, but I guess they used different radios
since the compatible Camry ended a year earlier.

They might have another version that does work but I looked 3 years ago.
I'll look again.... So far, they are all for Hondas.

I think you probably hit the nail on the head. With the factory Nav system
you probably can't do the USB adapter mod.

I really like the map and the GPS, but I will never use the navigation.
For one thing, I can't understand the instructions! And I wonder why
that interferes with the USB//AUX add-on.

For non-critical navigation, we use the Nav system in the car. It's
convenient because it turns down the music in the front speakers when it
wants to say something, while leaving the rear speakers as they were. It's
very handy because it's always available at the push of a button.

Our embedded Nav system has two big flaws, however. First, the map is a
static snapshot in time. We bought the car new in 2016, but the map doesn't
have things that were built in 2009, for example. I've asked on the forums
and people with newer maps have the same complaint - too many missing
items. Google Maps, OTOH, about two days after an IKEA was built near my
old neighborhood, Google Maps knew it was there and knew of all the new
streets they had put in to get there. They might have known even sooner,
but I didn't think to check.

Second, the embedded system has no real-time component, so it has no way of
telling us about accidents ahead, construction zones, radar traps, detours,
etc. For that reason alone, when we really care about navigation we use
Google Maps. It solves all of those problems. The only downside is that it
doesn't turn down the volume on the car stereo when it speaks, but that's
minor.

When you're on a road trip and you suddenly see a string of cars taking an
odd exit, it's pretty likely that there's a traffic slowdown ahead and
Google Maps is recommending a detour. It even tells you how much time
you'll save by taking the detour.

Did you see the story back in February of this year where a man put 99
phones in a kid's wagon and slowly pulled it down a deserted street? On
Google Maps, they turned the street red to show a traffic problem. Pretty
funny.

https://mashable.com/article/google-maps-99-phones/
Man says he caused fake traffic jams on Google Maps with 99 phones

I use Waze on my phone. Real time traffic, because it's reported real time by
the users. Need a system with Apple or Android. It does use data on your plan
but very little. I have found that OE nav is outdated or inept from the day the
vehicle was made from outdated data. Then *if* they come out with an update the
manufactures want to charge you for what is essentially outdated data. My one
dealer glommed me on to it. It cuts the music off when giving directions. As I
understand it you can use it through Bluetooth thru Apple but not Android where
a cable is required.

--
Tekkie

In alt.home.repair, on Fri, 21 Aug 2020 11:43:03 -0400,
wrote:

On Fri, 21 Aug 2020 04:20:01 -0400, micky
wrote:

I'm far from an expert but my understanding is that audio and video
are recorded as 2 independent things. They're in one file but the
encoding is separate. Note that the video might be 60 frames per second
but the audio might be 44khz.

I will continue to check, but it doesn't sound good for me. There is no
setting for sound quality.

The sound on TV really sucks. My PC in the living room has the line
out from the TV connected to line in and even on the primary HD
(broadcast) channels the sound is nothing to write home about. I

When I had a little tv in the bedroom, I had an external speaker that
improved the sound a lot. In the kitchen it was supposed to be a
temporary setup, but it's turned into years.

recorded a few songs from the Grammys for my wife and on a good sound
system they sucked. When I put them in the spectrum analyser of Sound
Forge, you could see the heavy compression. Older shows like Gunsmoke
and L&O were even worse.

L&O was the first tv show to bother me, because the music was too loud
for me to hear. I don't understand how someone with better hearing
could hear either. L&O ran from 1990 to 2010. Sometime during the
second half of that I noticed the music could be too loud

I think a lot of their problem is from their transferring back and
forth. How else could a whole syllable be missing?

And this is over the air tv. There is no compression for the
transmission because a simple tv has no way to decompress. Unlike a
cable box.

Did they compress it when they stored the show from 2000 to now?

This is FM radio quality at best.
We ended up just buying the ones she really liked from Amazon in
320kbs MP3. Quick, easy and only a buck.

Buying what ones? What cost only a buck?

On Fri, 21 Aug 2020 16:35:12 -0400, micky wrote:

In alt.home.repair, on Fri, 21 Aug 2020 14:01:37 -0400, Dan Espen
wrote:

Jim Joyce writes:

On Fri, 21 Aug 2020 03:19:09 -0400, Dan Espen wrote:

Jim Joyce writes:

On Thu, 20 Aug 2020 22:36:26 -0400, Dan Espen wrote:

Jim Joyce writes:

If your radio has a standard Toyota CD changer port, you're probably
golden. It's a little more extreme, but you could also replace the whole
radio unit. Even basic models come with USB these days and swapping a radio
is easy. Check Crutchfield.com for info, not necessarily for buying.

Ah, USB charger. Don't need one of those, that's what the cigarette
lighter is for.

What? No, not a charger. I was talking about taking advantage of the fact
that many Toyota radios have a CD changer (not charger) port on the back of
the radio. You can see it in the Amazon photo I linked earlier. Scion was
part of Toyota, so I figured there was a chance that your radio also has a
CD changer port, but perhaps not.

Ah, I think someone else may have mentioned charging.
My radio has an embedded CD player but no changer feature.
I'll do some more searches and maybe even read the car manual to make
sure I"m getting this right.

On the 2002 Highlander that I mentioned, it also had a CD player built in,
but apparently that radio supported an external 6-disc CD changer and
that's why it had the port on the back.

I remember being ready to dismiss USB options that used the CD changer port
because I didn't have a CD changer, but then I read on the ToyotaNation
forum that most Toyota factory radios from that era had the changer port.
It was just something that Toyota included, even on cars that never had a
changer option. I thought that was interesting, so I popped my radio out
and sure enough, there it was.

I'd like to play music off a USB stick since I can get my entire music
collection on just one of them, but my Data CD MP3s work well enough.
I can fit 31 thin case CDs in my center console and door pockets, but
I don't need to carry all 31 of them at one time. Even when I was
driving to work every day it took me over a week to get tired of one
CD and switch to the next.

Right, I was also talking about being able to play music from a USB stick.

It's like when I had small tropical fish in a 6 ft long 60 gallon tank.
The fish would swim to one end of the tank, turn around and forget they
had been there already when they got to the other end. It was all new
to them.

Sounds like a simple, perhaps happy, life.

The fish never complained.

They really did look like they were exploring around the tank.
There aren't a lot of brain cells in the smaller ones.
They get a little smarter when you get to Cichlids.

I had that tank for over 20 years and specialized in creating
a view. I had all kinds of aquatic plants and very colorful
fish. I even had a species of snail that would clean the glass
but not overrun the tank.

I got the money to pay for the tank when a movie company paid me
to let them shoot scenes from the movie "7 Ups" in my house.

IMDB is having a hard time finding that movie. Do you know if it was
released?

Of course it was released. It was one of the follow on movies to the
French Connection:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven-Ups

My wife was so exicted to hang out with Roy Scheider and the rest of the
cast. I was the only one home when the scout came by and I told him
sure. I told my wife they'd be coming by, she didn't believe me.
They were just towing cars off the block when I left for work.

I'm not sure why people go gaga when they meet famous people,
but my whole household was walking on air when I came back home.

My house was used in the "climactic scene" just outside
co-op city. They mention Erskine Place which is the street that they
built right through the middle of the house.

They built a street through the middle of your house?

When I first lived there we would swim in an Eastchester River
tributart right across the street where they show the parking garage.

The movie pretends there's a garage or google maps says there is one.

Did you move away becaue of the street through the middle of your house?

I wonder if that house was the motivation for the Talking Heads song, with
lyrics that begin with "Our house, in the middle of our street."




I got $150 for letting them use my house. I took their first offer.

If the street had guttters and sidewalks and manholes, that does seem
low. Did they remove the street when they left? Do any damage?

My wife tells me all the neighbors attempted to extort the movie
company for money for using the streets. They didn't get anything.

In alt.home.repair, on Fri, 21 Aug 2020 11:08:41 -0400,
wrote:

I know lots of people
who won't even use 320KB MP3s because they think the sound is still
not up to snuff. I call them "Audiphools" because they also claim to
hear the oxygen in their speaker wires.

That oxygen thing is nonsense. It's the helium that makes the sound
good.

They do make scammers rich.

micky writes:

In alt.home.repair, on Fri, 21 Aug 2020 14:01:37 -0400, Dan Espen
wrote:

Jim Joyce writes:

On Fri, 21 Aug 2020 03:19:09 -0400, Dan Espen wrote:

Jim Joyce writes:

On Thu, 20 Aug 2020 22:36:26 -0400, Dan Espen wrote:

Jim Joyce writes:

If your radio has a standard Toyota CD changer port, you're probably
golden. It's a little more extreme, but you could also replace the whole
radio unit. Even basic models come with USB these days and swapping a radio
is easy. Check Crutchfield.com for info, not necessarily for buying.

Ah, USB charger. Don't need one of those, that's what the cigarette
lighter is for.

What? No, not a charger. I was talking about taking advantage of the fact
that many Toyota radios have a CD changer (not charger) port on the back of
the radio. You can see it in the Amazon photo I linked earlier. Scion was
part of Toyota, so I figured there was a chance that your radio also has a
CD changer port, but perhaps not.

Ah, I think someone else may have mentioned charging.
My radio has an embedded CD player but no changer feature.
I'll do some more searches and maybe even read the car manual to make
sure I"m getting this right.

On the 2002 Highlander that I mentioned, it also had a CD player built in,
but apparently that radio supported an external 6-disc CD changer and
that's why it had the port on the back.

I remember being ready to dismiss USB options that used the CD changer port
because I didn't have a CD changer, but then I read on the ToyotaNation
forum that most Toyota factory radios from that era had the changer port.
It was just something that Toyota included, even on cars that never had a
changer option. I thought that was interesting, so I popped my radio out
and sure enough, there it was.

I'd like to play music off a USB stick since I can get my entire music
collection on just one of them, but my Data CD MP3s work well enough.
I can fit 31 thin case CDs in my center console and door pockets, but
I don't need to carry all 31 of them at one time. Even when I was
driving to work every day it took me over a week to get tired of one
CD and switch to the next.

Right, I was also talking about being able to play music from a USB stick.

It's like when I had small tropical fish in a 6 ft long 60 gallon tank.
The fish would swim to one end of the tank, turn around and forget they
had been there already when they got to the other end. It was all new
to them.

Sounds like a simple, perhaps happy, life.

The fish never complained.

They really did look like they were exploring around the tank.
There aren't a lot of brain cells in the smaller ones.
They get a little smarter when you get to Cichlids.

I had that tank for over 20 years and specialized in creating
a view. I had all kinds of aquatic plants and very colorful
fish. I even had a species of snail that would clean the glass
but not overrun the tank.

I got the money to pay for the tank when a movie company paid me
to let them shoot scenes from the movie "7 Ups" in my house.

IMDB is having a hard time finding that movie. Do you know if it was
released?

Of course it was released. It was one of the follow on movies to the
French Connection:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven-Ups

My wife was so exicted to hang out with Roy Scheider and the rest of the
cast. I was the only one home when the scout came by and I told him
sure. I told my wife they'd be coming by, she didn't believe me.
They were just towing cars off the block when I left for work.

I'm not sure why people go gaga when they meet famous people,
but my whole household was walking on air when I came back home.

My house was used in the "climactic scene" just outside
co-op city. They mention Erskine Place which is the street that they
built right through the middle of the house.

They built a street through the middle of your house?

They sure did.

When I bought the house I already knew it had what they called a "sea
title". The house was where the city had a street planned years before
I bought it.

We lived there, right on the water and next to a wild life preserve
for many idyllic years. I was in the Bronx but with no close by
neighbors and a beach right on the other side of the street. There were
miles of undeveloped land in all directions. The only people using the
beaches were the few people that lived there.

Eventually reality caught up with fantasy and they built co-op
city right up to my door step. They needed to put in a major bus stop
to eliminate the 1 mile walk to the subway. So they had to exercise
eminent domain and move us out. The dirt road I lived on is gone,
replaced by the 4 lanes of Erskine Place. By the time they took
the property I was glad to get out.

For years we never had to lock the doors. That changed shortly before I
left. It all turned out for the best, I got enough money to move where
I am now. It's not as nice as my place in the Bronx used to be, but
it's the best place I know of in today's world.

When I first lived there we would swim in an Eastchester River
tributary right across the street where they show the parking garage.

The movie pretends there's a garage or google maps says there is one.

Did you move away becaue of the street through the middle of your house?

There is a garage. A huge parking garage.
The land it's on used to be about 20 feet lower than it is in that
movie. Right next to my house was a river and on the other side
about a square mile of swamp land just a few inches above water level.
When they built co-op city, they came in with these huge pipes and pumps
and pumped sand/water onto the land for a few years. They raised
the land about 20 feet above high tide. An amazing piece of work.
That left my house in a hole. Not the best circumstance.
Since we moved out, they filled the hole and built a major road.
They offered to move our house out of the way, but I wanted to get
out of there by that time.

I got $150 for letting them use my house. I took their first offer.

If the street had guttters and sidewalks and manholes, that does seem
low. Did they remove the street when they left? Do any damage?

They obliterated and buried everything that was there.

Now I'm in Berkeley Heights New Jersey so everything has turned out
for the best.


--
Dan Espen

On Fri, 21 Aug 2020 16:36:49 -0400, Tekkie® wrote:


On Fri, 21 Aug 2020 12:26:02 -0500, Jim Joyce posted for all of us to digest...


On Fri, 21 Aug 2020 04:22:23 -0400, micky wrote:

In alt.home.repair, on Fri, 21 Aug 2020 00:59:47 -0500, Jim Joyce
wrote:

On Fri, 21 Aug 2020 00:40:00 -0400, micky wrote:

In alt.home.repair, on Thu, 20 Aug 2020 20:05:27 -0500, Jim Joyce
wrote:

I used something like this item on a 2002 Highlander.
https://www.amazon.com/Interface-Yom...dp/B0169MV538/

See, this is my problem:

Not Compatible with Factory Navigation System, which I have
1998-2002,Camry
1998-2003,Solara and I have a 2005 Solara

A Solara is much like a Camry, but I guess they used different radios
since the compatible Camry ended a year earlier.

They might have another version that does work but I looked 3 years ago.
I'll look again.... So far, they are all for Hondas.

I think you probably hit the nail on the head. With the factory Nav system
you probably can't do the USB adapter mod.

I really like the map and the GPS, but I will never use the navigation.
For one thing, I can't understand the instructions! And I wonder why
that interferes with the USB//AUX add-on.

For non-critical navigation, we use the Nav system in the car. It's
convenient because it turns down the music in the front speakers when it
wants to say something, while leaving the rear speakers as they were. It's
very handy because it's always available at the push of a button.

Our embedded Nav system has two big flaws, however. First, the map is a
static snapshot in time. We bought the car new in 2016, but the map doesn't
have things that were built in 2009, for example. I've asked on the forums
and people with newer maps have the same complaint - too many missing
items. Google Maps, OTOH, about two days after an IKEA was built near my
old neighborhood, Google Maps knew it was there and knew of all the new
streets they had put in to get there. They might have known even sooner,
but I didn't think to check.

Second, the embedded system has no real-time component, so it has no way of
telling us about accidents ahead, construction zones, radar traps, detours,
etc. For that reason alone, when we really care about navigation we use
Google Maps. It solves all of those problems. The only downside is that it
doesn't turn down the volume on the car stereo when it speaks, but that's
minor.

When you're on a road trip and you suddenly see a string of cars taking an
odd exit, it's pretty likely that there's a traffic slowdown ahead and
Google Maps is recommending a detour. It even tells you how much time
you'll save by taking the detour.

Did you see the story back in February of this year where a man put 99
phones in a kid's wagon and slowly pulled it down a deserted street? On
Google Maps, they turned the street red to show a traffic problem. Pretty
funny.

https://mashable.com/article/google-maps-99-phones/
Man says he caused fake traffic jams on Google Maps with 99 phones

I use Waze on my phone. Real time traffic, because it's reported real time by
the users.

I've tried Waze a few times but it's not polished like Google Maps, so I've
gone back to Google.

One of my vehicles has an in-dash touch screen display, but no nav system.
With that car I can use an app on my phone called Scout GPS Link. The phone
does all of the Nav work but the results are displayed on the touch screen.
Even that is too much trouble, though, so I go back to Google Maps in that
car, as well.

Need a system with Apple or Android. It does use data on your plan
but very little. I have found that OE nav is outdated or inept from the day the
vehicle was made from outdated data. Then *if* they come out with an update the
manufactures want to charge you for what is essentially outdated data. My one
dealer glommed me on to it. It cuts the music off when giving directions. As I
understand it you can use it through Bluetooth thru Apple but not Android where
a cable is required.

On Fri, 21 Aug 2020 16:52:20 -0400, micky wrote:

In alt.home.repair, on Fri, 21 Aug 2020 11:43:03 -0400,
wrote:

On Fri, 21 Aug 2020 04:20:01 -0400, micky
wrote:

I'm far from an expert but my understanding is that audio and video
are recorded as 2 independent things. They're in one file but the
encoding is separate. Note that the video might be 60 frames per second
but the audio might be 44khz.

I will continue to check, but it doesn't sound good for me. There is no
setting for sound quality.

The sound on TV really sucks. My PC in the living room has the line
out from the TV connected to line in and even on the primary HD
(broadcast) channels the sound is nothing to write home about. I

When I had a little tv in the bedroom, I had an external speaker that
improved the sound a lot. In the kitchen it was supposed to be a
temporary setup, but it's turned into years.

recorded a few songs from the Grammys for my wife and on a good sound
system they sucked. When I put them in the spectrum analyser of Sound
Forge, you could see the heavy compression. Older shows like Gunsmoke
and L&O were even worse.

L&O was the first tv show to bother me, because the music was too loud
for me to hear. I don't understand how someone with better hearing
could hear either. L&O ran from 1990 to 2010. Sometime during the
second half of that I noticed the music could be too loud

I think a lot of their problem is from their transferring back and
forth. How else could a whole syllable be missing?

And this is over the air tv. There is no compression for the
transmission because a simple tv has no way to decompress. Unlike a
cable box.

Did they compress it when they stored the show from 2000 to now?

This is FM radio quality at best.
We ended up just buying the ones she really liked from Amazon in
320kbs MP3. Quick, easy and only a buck.

Buying what ones? What cost only a buck?

He's talking about buying individual songs from Amazon for $1 each, in mp3
format.

micky writes:

In alt.home.repair, on Fri, 21 Aug 2020 11:43:03 -0400,
wrote:

On Fri, 21 Aug 2020 04:20:01 -0400, micky
wrote:

I'm far from an expert but my understanding is that audio and video
are recorded as 2 independent things. They're in one file but the
encoding is separate. Note that the video might be 60 frames per second
but the audio might be 44khz.

I will continue to check, but it doesn't sound good for me. There is no
setting for sound quality.

The sound on TV really sucks. My PC in the living room has the line
out from the TV connected to line in and even on the primary HD
(broadcast) channels the sound is nothing to write home about. I

When I had a little tv in the bedroom, I had an external speaker that
improved the sound a lot. In the kitchen it was supposed to be a
temporary setup, but it's turned into years.

It's the speakers on TVs that suck.
When they went digital the sound signal went digital too so it has none
of the distortion that's common with analog signals.

Put a sound bar on your TV and the sound will be excellent.
I think the problem is they can't build decent speakers into the flat
TV profile.

I often use my Kindle to go over the WIFI network to the music on
my Linux PC. Then have the Kindle make a bluetooth connection to the sound
bar. Excellent sound.


--
Dan Espen

On Fri, 21 Aug 2020 11:58:14 -0500, Jim Joyce
wrote:

On the 2002 Highlander that I mentioned, it also had a CD player built in,
but apparently that radio supported an external 6-disc CD changer and
that's why it had the port on the back.

I remember being ready to dismiss USB options that used the CD changer port
because I didn't have a CD changer, but then I read on the ToyotaNation
forum that most Toyota factory radios from that era had the changer port.
It was just something that Toyota included, even on cars that never had a
changer option. I thought that was interesting, so I popped my radio out
and sure enough, there it was.

My 97 Honda had a DIN port for a changer too but nobody on the Honda
user's group had successfully hacked it for an MP3 player before I
yanked it out and put the Blaupunkt in. Evidently there was some sort
of data handshake before it enabled the audio in. I suppose eventually
that got cracked but not before I gave up.

On Fri, 21 Aug 2020 11:58:14 -0500, Jim Joyce
wrote:

to let them shoot scenes from the movie "7 Ups" in my house.

IMDB is having a hard time finding that movie. Do you know if it was
released?

I am not shocked you couldn't find it but it is the top hit on a
search.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070672/

On Fri, 21 Aug 2020 18:41:01 -0400, wrote:

On Fri, 21 Aug 2020 11:58:14 -0500, Jim Joyce
wrote:

to let them shoot scenes from the movie "7 Ups" in my house.

IMDB is having a hard time finding that movie. Do you know if it was
released?

I am not shocked you couldn't find it but it is the top hit on a
search.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070672/

Like I mentioned earlier, I was misspelling the title. I searched IMDB for
"7 Ups". My mistake.

On Thursday, August 20, 2020 at 9:36:31 PM UTC-5, Dan Espen wrote:
Jim Joyce writes:

If your radio has a standard Toyota CD changer port, you're probably
golden. It's a little more extreme, but you could also replace the whole
radio unit. Even basic models come with USB these days and swapping a radio
is easy. Check Crutchfield.com for info, not necessarily for buying.
Ah, USB charger. Don't need one of those, that's what the cigarette
lighter is for.

I'd like to play music off a USB stick since I can get my entire music
collection on just one of them, but my Data CD MP3s work well enough.
I can fit 31 thin case CDs in my center console and door pockets, but
I don't need to carry all 31 of them at one time. Even when I was
driving to work every day it took me over a week to get tired of one
CD and switch to the next.

It's like when I had small tropical fish in a 6 ft long 60 gallon tank.
The fish would swim to one end of the tank, turn around and forget they
had been there already when they got to the other end. It was all new
to them.

--
Dan Espen

once, my chicken got real scared because a skunk got in her pen. She would not calm down. So i brought her in the house and put her on a table with her big clown feet and shut off the light. she snuggled down and started to bed down. I left the light off for a few minutes and then snapped it back on. She thought it was a brand new day and after the little nap, completely forgot about the skunk and went back out to graze.

Beaver feet are even more clown shoes than chicken feet are.

mk5000

As upset as I was, the videos also gave me confidence because I knew that their lies would never hold up under real questioning and the jury would see through it. --Eddie Gallagher

On Friday, August 21, 2020 at 6:33:47 AM UTC-5, Dan Espen wrote:
micky writes:

In alt.home.repair, on Fri, 21 Aug 2020 03:35:42 -0400, Dan Espen
wrote:

micky writes:

In alt.home.repair, on Thu, 20 Aug 2020 20:47:06 -0400, Dan Espen
wrote:
...
My hearing IS bad. I don't hear high frequencies well in one ear.
I have the hardest time hearing movie audio even with hearing aids in.

I looked into hearing aids last winter.
Used to be hearing aids weren't covered by insurance.

Mine actually were and I see more and more insurers advertising
coverage.

I got a pair that fit entirely in the ear.
No one even knows when I have them on.
Women that speak softly in crowded rooms is another challenge.
I've been trying to pay attention to what I can't hear because the
hearing aids can be adjusted to compensate.

She told me about getting them adjusted after wearing them for a while.
Yep, it's a process.
Hopefully my next visit
will result in improvements.

But what really got me started is that I heard on the radio about one
particular brand which had a new? method for eliminating monopitch
tinnitus, and I thought I had that. The noise sounds like water running
in a pipe, and she called that a whoosh and said it's not monotone. So
there's no new advance for me.
I've had tinnitus a long time. I'm lucky it just sounds like crickets.
I don't notice it much now.

A hearing aid that helps? My first thought was that it's a scam.
They apparently work by making a masking sound. Still sounds like a
scam. I search for it on Google and all I see are ads for them. The
ads cite ground breaking research. Funny I don't see the research.
I'm going out on a limb and calling it a scam.
Then on the way home from the exam, that very day, NPR talked about Bose
HearPhones. They were 100 dollars off until new years day, which made
them 300 or 400, I forget, and I bought a pair. You would never find
them helpful because your hearing aids are so much better. So far,
I've only found them helpful at lectures, because I can make the sound
louder. And now because of the virus there are no more lectures for a
while. (they also have bluetooth and can work with cellphones like the
horse collar earbuds.) Maybe if my hearing were worse and I only had
500, they would be more valuable to me. And there is another brand about
the same price, made in Israel iirc, that has more features (like replay
the last 5 seconds!) that I didn't know about at the time, even though
they had been for sale for 2 years.
I paid about 6x the numbers you cite above. Or I should say my plan paid.
I've had a noise in one ear since I was 20 years old, or maybe since I
was 10. I didn't really notice it until I was 50+ and I went to Mammoth
Cave and they had a little thing where they asked everyone to be quiet
so we could all hear what quiet sounded like And that's when I really
noticed the sound in my left ear.
I heard crickets for years. I started to wonder why it would be snowing
outside but I was hearing crickets.

...
For my audio I wanted the master copy to be 100% lossless so that

I can certainly see that.

if I had to convert to some other format like MP3 I wouldn't be
in a situation of doing WAV-MP3-WAV-OGG and getting a mess.
I'm not worried about space. I started with gigabyte drives but
now I'm using Terrabyte SSDs. Lots and lots of space.

Wow. Amazing.

The DVDR came with a 160GB drive, which was pretty big in 2007, but I
found a comment online that I can use a 500GB drive. Maybe I can even
use bigger but 12 years ago the commenter probably hadn't tried that.
Here are the numbers from my backup USB stick. The directory is named
"mp3" but it's all flac:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdc1 233G 131G 102G 57% /back-mp3

So, a total of 130 Gig on a 256 Gig stick. Looks like 6310 tracks.

find /back-mp3 -type f | wc -l
6310
One last thing, she had me fill out a form, of course, to help decide
what I need, but the last page was only about how annoying the noise
was, phrased in 10 different ways, which I was to rate from 1 to 10 and
one was supposed to add up the 10 values and if the total was over 40,
60, I don't remember, that was bad. It was clear to me that 2 or 3 or
more people nationwide had tried to hurt or kill themselves because of
the noise and the audiologists were obliged to ask these questions
before they let a patient go home. (Once you use the word patient, you
have heightened responsibility.) .

Did you have to fill out a form like that?
I've mentioned tinnitus to the doctors but I haven't tried to get
any treatment. Most of the sites say there isn't any, and it doesn't
bother me much.
You and I should be happy, I guess, that we dont' have that bad a
problem.
Yes I can imagine how bad it could be. Running water and crickets are
sounds you might have to live with in nature. Like I said, it doesn't
bother me much. A whine or ringing sounds could be a lot worse.

--
Dan Espen


I can hear soup cooking

mk5000

https://www.reddit.com/r/aww/comment..._name=ioss mf

On 08/21/2020 03:48 PM, micky wrote:
In alt.home.repair, on Fri, 21 Aug 2020 11:08:41 -0400,
wrote:

I know lots of people
who won't even use 320KB MP3s because they think the sound is still
not up to snuff. I call them "Audiphools" because they also claim to
hear the oxygen in their speaker wires.

That oxygen thing is nonsense. It's the helium that makes the sound
good.

It's fine, high quality dope that makes it sound good.

In alt.home.repair, on Fri, 21 Aug 2020 20:01:30 -0700 (PDT), marika
wrote:

On Thursday, August 20, 2020 at 9:36:31 PM UTC-5, Dan Espen wrote:
Jim Joyce writes:

If your radio has a standard Toyota CD changer port, you're probably
golden. It's a little more extreme, but you could also replace the whole
radio unit. Even basic models come with USB these days and swapping a radio
is easy. Check Crutchfield.com for info, not necessarily for buying.
Ah, USB charger. Don't need one of those, that's what the cigarette
lighter is for.

I'd like to play music off a USB stick since I can get my entire music
collection on just one of them, but my Data CD MP3s work well enough.
I can fit 31 thin case CDs in my center console and door pockets, but
I don't need to carry all 31 of them at one time. Even when I was
driving to work every day it took me over a week to get tired of one
CD and switch to the next.

It's like when I had small tropical fish in a 6 ft long 60 gallon tank.
The fish would swim to one end of the tank, turn around and forget they
had been there already when they got to the other end. It was all new
to them.

--
Dan Espen

once, my chicken got real scared because a skunk got in her pen. She would not calm down. So i brought her in the house and put her on a table with her big clown feet and shut off the light. she snuggled down and started to bed down. I left the light off for a few minutes and then snapped it back on. She thought it was a brand new day and after the little nap, completely forgot about the skunk and went back out to graze.

It must be like unplugging a digital device with a problem, then
plugging it back in.

Beaver feet are even more clown shoes than chicken feet are.

mk5000

As upset as I was, the videos also gave me confidence because I knew that their lies would never hold up under real questioning and the jury would see through it. --Eddie Gallagher

On Fri, 21 Aug 2020 21:48:58 -0500, Jim Joyce
wrote:

On Fri, 21 Aug 2020 18:41:01 -0400, wrote:

On Fri, 21 Aug 2020 11:58:14 -0500, Jim Joyce
wrote:

to let them shoot scenes from the movie "7 Ups" in my house.

IMDB is having a hard time finding that movie. Do you know if it was
released?

I am not shocked you couldn't find it but it is the top hit on a
search.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070672/

Like I mentioned earlier, I was misspelling the title. I searched IMDB for
"7 Ups". My mistake.

Duck Duck Go had no problem translating that. Some time the best way
to search a site is to use a real search engine, not the search on
that site.

"IMDB 7 ups" finds it on Duck.

On Fri, 21 Aug 2020 18:07:24 -0400, Dan Espen posted for all of us to digest...


It's the speakers on TVs that suck.
When they went digital the sound signal went digital too so it has none
of the distortion that's common with analog signals.

Put a sound bar on your TV and the sound will be excellent.
I think the problem is they can't build decent speakers into the flat
TV profile.


I agree TV speakers suck, I have a sound bar that improves it a little but when
one has a hearing deficit from birth there is only so much improvement that can
be made. My wife is also hard of hearing but can understand TV better than I
can. I ask her sometimes what is being said but it gets tiring... She does so
much for me now. She is the one that got me the sound bar so I can't just get
something better... Even if I knew what to buy. I think NBC was the one that
started this whole mish mash and other networks of NBC latched on and the other
big two are following.

I hate the though of hearing aids, they are overpriced and troublesome in use
and reliability.

--
Tekkie

On Friday, August 21, 2020 at 11:08:25 AM UTC-4, wrote:
On Thu, 20 Aug 2020 20:09:45 -0400, micky
wrote:
In alt.home.repair, on Thu, 20 Aug 2020 19:39:02 -0400,
wrote:

On Thu, 20 Aug 2020 18:21:09 -0400, Dan Espen
wrote:

You know for under $15 there are things that plug into the cigarette
lighter that transmit to the radio.

Nope, didn't know that.

I have a couple I can send you but they are pretty flaky. If you are
in an area where there is a pretty wide band without any other FM
stations they seem to be OK. In an urban area with a crowded dial, not
so much.

In Baltimore, 90.5 is vacant. I think 90.3 and 90.7 are too, or at
least only have some small noises. . 90.1 is C-Span Radio, that most
car radios but only a few home radios can receive.

Also the range of those cigarette lighter things goes one or two**
notches above and below the FM band and my radios go that high and low,
even though I dont' think there are any FM stations that do.

**TWo notches on the gizmo, which goes up and down 0.1 mHz at a time.
That's one notch on the radio that goes 0.2 mHz at a time.

For one reason or another, for me the gizmo worked fine.

These transmitters are very low power so any adjacent signal will step
on them.

When they are digital that normally isn't supposed to be a problem. Even with interference.

In alt.home.repair, on Sat, 22 Aug 2020 15:32:17 -0400,
wrote:

On Fri, 21 Aug 2020 21:48:58 -0500, Jim Joyce
wrote:

On Fri, 21 Aug 2020 18:41:01 -0400, wrote:

On Fri, 21 Aug 2020 11:58:14 -0500, Jim Joyce
wrote:

to let them shoot scenes from the movie "7 Ups" in my house.

IMDB is having a hard time finding that movie. Do you know if it was
released?

I am not shocked you couldn't find it but it is the top hit on a
search.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070672/

Like I mentioned earlier, I was misspelling the title. I searched IMDB for
"7 Ups". My mistake.

Duck Duck Go had no problem translating that. Some time the best way
to search a site is to use a real search engine, not the search on
that site.

Definitely true. I've found things with google inside websites that had
their own search box but didn't find anything. Most of those search
boxes seem only to search documents stored on the website (that I'm
never interested in) and not the text of webpages, but google searches
both.

"IMDB 7 ups" finds it on Duck.

On Sun, 23 Aug 2020 03:52:47 -0700 (PDT), bruce bowser
wrote:

On Friday, August 21, 2020 at 11:08:25 AM UTC-4, wrote:
On Thu, 20 Aug 2020 20:09:45 -0400, micky
wrote:
In alt.home.repair, on Thu, 20 Aug 2020 19:39:02 -0400,
wrote:

On Thu, 20 Aug 2020 18:21:09 -0400, Dan Espen
wrote:

You know for under $15 there are things that plug into the cigarette
lighter that transmit to the radio.

Nope, didn't know that.

I have a couple I can send you but they are pretty flaky. If you are
in an area where there is a pretty wide band without any other FM
stations they seem to be OK. In an urban area with a crowded dial, not
so much.

In Baltimore, 90.5 is vacant. I think 90.3 and 90.7 are too, or at
least only have some small noises. . 90.1 is C-Span Radio, that most
car radios but only a few home radios can receive.

Also the range of those cigarette lighter things goes one or two**
notches above and below the FM band and my radios go that high and low,
even though I dont' think there are any FM stations that do.

**TWo notches on the gizmo, which goes up and down 0.1 mHz at a time.
That's one notch on the radio that goes 0.2 mHz at a time.

For one reason or another, for me the gizmo worked fine.

These transmitters are very low power so any adjacent signal will step
on them.

When they are digital that normally isn't supposed to be a problem. Even with interference.

FM is still analog, just frequency modulated instead of amplitude
modulated.. Digital does make interference worse tho. Instead of a
little noise, the signal drops out completely until it can resync and
get back running.