This Tape Timing Chart is approximate. Most reels will contain a bit more tape than indicated time implies, typically about 6%. The footage is actual.

These timings are for one program. There can be as many as four mono programs on one 1/4-inch tape.

This document discusses the speeds used for most analog magnetic tape recording.

See the tape timing chart to convert speeds and lengths into times.

Note throughout most of the rest of this document we are using the correct ISO form of in/s instead of i.p.s. which is the traditional way of stating "inches per second".

One of the challenges for good sound reinforcement or speech recording is keeping the speaker “on mic”. There are many ways of handling this, but some work better than others. Here are my favourites:

• If the room is quiet and you can do a proper setup, a pair of Sennheiser MKH-416 short shotgun mics, one for the interviewer and one for the interviewee, gives very natural and unselfconscious results.
• For larger groups, I’ve had good results with an Audio Technica AT-822 (or the phantom-powered AT-825) stereo microphone, but the actual voice quality of that mic is inferior to the MKH-416. The high-end is harsher, but, used at a greater distance that is often not as noticeable. The room needs to be very quiet for this to work well, however. This is currently my least favourite approach (of those listed).
• So far, some of the best pickup I have found is a headworn mic–the main subject of this post.

At our church, they had tried headworn mics from Shure and they really were uncomfortable. Whoever selected the units, selected dynamic units and they did not sound all that good. They were retired in favour of the Countryman E6 units (also available from Shure, although I prefer the direct-from-Countryman version with the 2mm cable for robustness).

The Countryman units were working reasonably well, but never seemed to stay in the same place. It was frustrating as it was causing a widely varying sound quality, so we decided to try a DPA 4066 headworn mic on our head priest. The results were outstanding. The unit is comfortable (no more sore ears), it stays put, and it sounds better!

It is no surprise that these are taking over the religious and theatre markets.

Creative works may not have intellectual property protections for a number of reasons. In most cases, the rights have expired or have been forfeited. Basically, no one holds the exclusive rights to these works, meaning that living artists today can sample and build off those works legally without asking anyone’s permission to do so.

That’s why the New York Public Library (NYPL) has been reviewing the U.S. Copyright Office’s official registration and renewals records for creative works whose copyrights haven’t been renewed, and have thus been overlooked as part of the public domain.

The books in question were published between 1923 and 1964, before changes to U.S. copyright law removed the requirement for rights holders to renew their copyrights. According to Greg Cram, associate general counsel and director of information policy at NYPL, an initial overview of books published in that period shows that around 65 to 75 percent of rights holders opted not to renew their copyrights.

But corporate mega-publishers want purchasing a book to be like renting a movie or streaming an album. //

Buying a book should be no different from buying an apple. When you buy an apple, the farmer can’t show up in your kitchen later and decide your time is up, and you’ve got to pay for it again. It’s yours forever—to eat, or paint in a still life, or cut up for a kid’s snack. And thanks to the first sale doctrine of copyright law, codified by Congress in 1909, the books on your shelves are yours forever, too, in exactly the same way your apple is; you’re free to read them (or not), loan them to friends, or sell them to a used bookshop, without restriction. Copyright law balances the public good—our collective right to access information—with the rights it grants to authors and inventors.

Publishers can’t demand more money for the paper books you’ve already bought, but the technology for copying and distributing books has evolved a lot since 1909. So four titanic corporate publishers are currently in court, insisting on the effective right to barge in and demand multiple, recurring payments for digital books–like they do for digital movies, music, and software–and they want to exercise that same power over the books in libraries.

This threat to the ownership of books is what makes the ongoing publishers’ lawsuit against the Internet Archive politically dangerous, and in an altogether different way from earlier challenges and amendments to copyright law. At a time of increasing book bannings and attacks on libraries, public schools and universities, it is not safe for democracy, or for our cultural posterity, to leave an “on/off” switch for library books in the hands of corporate publishers. //

As I’ve argued before, the lawsuit hinges on the question of whether ebooks are books, subject to the existing laws governing the sale of books, or whether the publishers can redefine ebooks as temporary, rental-only media–a new class of unownable goods, like streaming-only films from Disney or subscription-only software from Microsoft. But libraries must have the option to buy and own their books–all their books, including ebooks–and own them absolutely, like an apple. //

In the summer of 2020, Hachette, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, and Wiley accused the Internet Archive of “mass-scale copyright infringement” because of the way the Internet Archive’s Open Library loans its ebooks to patrons. Instead of renting their ebooks from publishers, the Internet Archive scans them from the paper books it owns, stores the paper originals, and loans each scan out to only one patron at a time, a common library practice known as Controlled Digital Lending (CDL). Following the reasoning of expert copyright lawyers and library scholars over the last twelve years, the Internet Archive, along with hundreds of other libraries and archival institutions, maintains that CDL is a fair and logical way to preserve traditional library practices for the digital world. //

The publishers’ objective had been to forbid the Open Library to loan any of their in-copyright books as ebooks. That was the explicit request in the original complaint. But not even this industry-friendly judge was willing to go that far; he sided with the Internet Archive’s interpretation of the decision instead. For now, the Open Library will have to stop loaning only those ebooks for which the publishers are offering their own “competing” ebooks for license. In other words, the order relies solely on the argument that the Open Library is harming the publishers’ revenues from ebooks, a distinction that seems to go to the heart of the dispute. //

The publishers shouldn’t be able to pick and choose the bits of copyright law they want to abide by; as we’ve noted, copyright law balances the public good with commercial rights. If publishers’ ebook revenues are protected by the extant provisions of copyright law protecting rights holders, then, presumably, readers and libraries should also be protected. The Internet Archive, and all libraries, should have the same protections under the first sale doctrine that have always allowed them to preserve and lend books to readers.

The bottom-line is that destroying the originals after digitizing them should not be taken lightly. Really think about the implications. Put yourself 10 - 20 years in the future and think about what the implications of your decision might be. Is destroying the originals a decision that you will regret (or that your successors will regret)?

Md5Checker is a free, faster, lightweight and easy-to-use tool to manage, calculate and verify MD5 checksum of multiple files/folders (Screenshots):

• Calculate and display MD5 checksum of multiple files at one time.
• Use MD5 checksum to fleetly verify whether files have been changed.
• Load, save, add, remove and update MD5 checksum conveniently.
• It is about 300 KB and does not require any installation (portable).

A New Year’s view of at-risk audio formats
2024-02-20
2015-01-11

This article was first written in January 2015, with minor revisions in 2018. The revisions made in 2024 are highlighted, like this line. The deletions are struck through.

There are many factors that affect the ability of people like us to digitize tapes for you, our clients.

One of the most difficult issues to balance is the physical space that different formats take up, the ongoing maintenance of these formats, and, to be brutally honest, their return on investment.

What we discovered is that some of the machines we were archiving for future use would not work when they were brought out of storage. Rubber parts, capacitors, and lubrication are probably the most prevalent causes of failure. We have said to clients more than once (with a wry smile), “Yes we can probably restore your tape, but first we need to restore a machine.”

Manufacturer and maintenance depot support for various formats is waning or fully discontinued. Parts are hard to come by, and good machinists with an interest in doing this are either non-existent or very expensive.

So, what formats are at risk:

The benefits of using a voltage audio transmission system in broadcast facilities is investigated. State of the art microphone preamplifier requirements and an ideal voltage system distribution amplifier are outlined. The application of the Peak Program Meter to the new systems and the modified installation at WABC-TV are covered.
Introduction

Over the years, many audio practices have been followed without anyone asking WHY? or IS THERE A BETTER WAY?

The [then (i.e. 1980)] present [but now deprecated] standard for Broadcast Audio Systems is EIA Standard RS 219 [1]. In light of the fact that the [then] current standard was published in 1959 (and this was merely a reaffirmation of an earlier standard), one might imagine that in relation to today's common audio practices, it is somewhat archaic.

One in five mail-in voters admitted to violating election laws in 2020, which should have disqualified their ballots. Further details are even worse. //

The Heartland Institute/Rasmussen survey, which was conducted from Nov. 30 to Dec. 6, asked likely voters who cast ballots in 2020 questions about fraudulent activities, without telling them such actions were a form of voter fraud. The results were stunning. One in five people who voted by mail admitted to engaging in at least one kind of potential voter fraud, seriously calling into question the security of widespread mail-in balloting.

For example, one question asked, “During the 2020 election, did you cast a mail-in ballot in a state where you were no longer a permanent resident?” Such an action nearly always constitutes fraud. Incredibly, 17 percent of voters said “yes.” //

It’s an incredibly important finding since that contest involved more mail-in ballots than any other election in U.S. history. Election officials report that of 159 million ballots cast in 2020, more than 68 million were submitted by mail, about 43 percent of the total. In addition, as the MIT Election Data and Science Lab noted, “the dramatic increase in the raw number of absentee ballots cast was accompanied by a significant decrease in the overall absentee rejection rate for the country: from 0.96 percent in 2016 to 0.79 percent in 2020.”

If the recent Heartland Institute/Rasmussen survey is accurate and one in five ballots were, in fact, fraudulent, that would suggest greater than 13 million ballots should not have been counted nationwide in 2020. That’s far more than the margin of victory for President Biden in the popular vote, about 7 million.

As troubling as these findings are, however, additional questions in the Heartland Institute/Rasmussen survey suggest voter fraud and illegal voting may have been even worse than the one-in-five figure suggests. For instance, 8 percent of all respondents — not just those who voted by mail — said they were offered “pay” or “reward” in return for voting. //

Another survey conducted in March and April by the Heartland Institute and Rasmussen shows that 28 percent of likely voters now say they would commit at least one form of illegal voting during the 2024 election, “if given the opportunity.” Interestingly, respondents’ willingness to commit fraud was similar among Republicans, Democrats, and independents. //

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, just three states require notaries for mail-in ballots — Mississippi, Missouri, and Oklahoma. Only nine additional states mandate that a voter obtain one or more non-notary witness signatures when casting a ballot by mail. Most states require neither a witness nor a notary to verify signatures.

Lawmakers must ensure widespread voter fraud does not happen in future elections. That can only occur if mail-in voting systems are radically improved. Time is running out for legislators to fix these major threats to American self-government.

The Federalist asked NARA whether the pallets shipped by GSA included the documents that were later confiscated by Smith’s team during their raid of Mar-a-Lago, and NARA’s media staff responded that the agency had “no awareness about the contents of the materials on the pallets and had no involvement in the move project that is referenced in the GSA emails.”

“NARA was harassing Trump throughout 2021 for what they insisted were government records apparently WITHOUT contacting GSA to search dozens of boxes in their possession,” Kelly observed.

Under the new plan, however, all such habitats would be categorically off-limits as soon as it is discovered that the land is occupied by a listed species. Any potential impacts to endangered species habitats that are discovered in the course of site surveys (usually after millions of dollars have already been expended on the project application) would kill the project entirely.

The permitting risk, already prohibitive for many new projects, could put whole states beyond the reach of all but the most hardy (or foolish) developers. The solar energy areas under the new solar plan overlap substantially with areas containing multiple endangered and threatened species. This endangered species exclusion alone would eliminate virtually all new solar development in Utah, Nevada, and Arizona, which lead the nation in solar capacity per acre. //

Even for the 14% of BLM land left available for solar project development after all these exclusions, the new plan imposes onerous permitting requirements. These include some 600 mandatory design elements.

Some of these verge on the comical. BLM proposes a blanket prohibition on “grading” (leveling out land), which is indispensable for access roads, utility-scale batteries, transmission poles, and construction staging. The plan also prohibits development within 200 feet of ephemeral streams (those that come into existence, for example, after heavy rainfall, and then go away) and requires 75% residual vegetation around the development.

These requirements will be impossible to meet economically for many projects, and even where possible, would significantly expand the amount of land required per unit of electricity, thus defeating the goal of conservation. //

Most surprisingly, the new plan does not address any of the major problems that years of experience have revealed in the permitting process for solar and other energy projects on BLM land. On the contrary, it makes the permitting challenges even worse for existing projects applications, which are not “grandfathered” in any respect. Many solar project applications already in process will have to start over, and many of those applicants will prefer to cut their losses instead.

Many projects’ applications have been pending for years, and companies have already negotiated operational and power-purchase agreements of various kinds and would be bankrupted by having to start over.

This demonstrates a problem with heavily regulated sectors: Officials feel all too free to “move the goal posts” with little concern for the enormous losses they are causing developers and investors and little understanding that these are social losses that impact everybody.

For Americans to avoid a prolonged period of energy scarcity in the high-demand decade ahead, the nation will require a significant expansion in electricity generation. The bulk of that will need to come from nuclear and fossil sources, which are significantly more abundant, “energy dense,” and reliable than renewable sources like solar and wind. //

The new solar plan is being promoted as a partial solution, but even a brief review shows clearly that it will only make those problems worse. The plan is a clear sellout to left-wing environmentalists. And it shows that while those environmentalists hate fossil fuels, they don’t particularly love renewable energy—or energy of any kind.

They mean to save the planet for what they think is the planet’s sake, not for our sake. And if in the process they plunge the world into energy scarcity—a much grimmer fate than all the doomsday climate scenarios put together—in their minds, that’s just too bad for us.

Google is the internet librarian. Google leads all inquiries down the aisle that Google decides is best, and that is invariably and distinctly leftist aisles. Sure, you can eventually get to opposing opinions and relevant facts, but you have to work for it. //

When they look for information, they don’t read books; they Google. Politico, HuffPo, and Taylor Lorenz for example, are the end results. The search results tell them they live on a dying planet, that skin color trumps merit, and that gender has a spectrum. If contrary facts are presented to them, an inordinate number will scream and stick their fingers in their ears. A liberal niece of mine wrote something false online that she pulled off the internet. I corrected her, in private. Instead of correcting her mistake, she chose to “un-person” me. She hasn’t spoken to me in eight years. She went to Cal Berkley and majored in English. //

All cultures are not equal, and pretending that they are and instructing teachers to elevate all cultures to equal status makes a mockery of our own. One of the developers of Critical Race Theory does not belong in primary or secondary education. Critical thinking does.

How to stop indoctrination? I’m not sure. I hovered over the final paragraph for quite some time. I still don’t know. We might be at the point of no return. I hope not. I hope we are, instead, at a crossroads. Florida is leading the way with pedagogy designed to teach, not indoctrinate. Facts do matter. There is no gender spectrum. Math is not racist. Palestine was never a country. Let’s get back to facts, and maybe we can save the country. //

The Original John Doe
8 hours ago
"How to stop indoctrination?"

You might as well ask how to Unbrainwash someone. If you Google that you will see that nearly every site says step one is to re move the stimulus that is causing the brainwashing. This mean you would have to remove every leftists cell phone or remove every leftist news agency. This is basically impossible.

Therefore an examination of history is in order. Every country that successfully brainwashes at least 50% of its population (The United States has accomplished this) either ends up becoming a socialist/communist country or devolves into civil war. Keep in mind that the United States has already brainwashed 100% of the population into accepting an UNELECTED president in the White House for 3 years, 3 months, 9 days and counting with ZERO consequences.

After the stolen 2024 election, we shall see if conservatives will let the country become a socialist/communist regime or if something else will transpire. //

Sargon of Cincinnati
2 hours ago
The great Thomas Sowell fears we are past the tipping point. You are not alone in your questioning of if this indoctrination can be stopped.

The Fourmilab Units Calculator is based upon the GNU Units utility. It supports expressions in the “Convert” and “To” fields in the same syntax as described in the GNU Units manual. If the To field is left blank, the definition of the unit in the Convert field will be shown in terms of fundamental units. Entering “?” in the To field shows all standard units with the same dimensions as the expression in the Convert field. A total of 3460 linear units, 109 nonlinear units, and 109 prefixes are defined.

Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven effort to produce a collection of high quality, carefully formatted, accessible, open source, and free public domain ebooks that meet or exceed the quality of commercially produced ebooks. The text and cover art in our ebooks is already believed to be in the U.S. public domain, and Standard Ebooks dedicates its own work to the public domain, thus releasing the entirety of each ebook file into the public domain. All the ebooks we produce are distributed free of cost and free of U.S. copyright restrictions.

Books On-Line

Anyway, when some champion of human liberty in a Che Guevara T-shirt and Mao jacket was haranguing his audience with claims like “A single Hiroshima bomb set off downtown would annihilate this university and all of us in the blink of an eye”, what better way to burnish one's Strangelovian credentials than to whip out a handy-dandy nuclear bomb computer slide rule, whip—slip—slide, and interrupt, “Naaah…fifteen kilotons at five miles? Surface burst? Why, that's only a quarter to a third of a pound per square inch overpressure—it'll probably break some window glass but that's about it.” Flipping the slide rule over, “The flash isn't even enough to cause sunburn, and the immediate radiation is next to nothing.” For some unfathomable reason, this never seemed to either carry the argument or suitably impress chicks. //

My nostalgia for this particular relic of the Cold War was such that I've had a project to produce an online edition on my to-do list for more than five years. Like many items on this embarrassingly long and all too infrequently shortened list of unrealised ambitions, it's something I half expected someone else to do long before I got to it. This would be perfectly fine with me—I undertake these projects because I want to see them done, and crossing off an item without the wear and tear of doing it myself couldn't make me happier. In fact, scanning (and possibly OCR-ing) The Effects of Nuclear Weapons was an item on my list before the fine folks at Princeton got the job done.

The Web edition of the nuclear bomb effects computer, however handy when you're online, isn't much use when operating under field conditions, in a post-Armageddon environment, or for settling thermonuclear bar bets. Fortunately, with a little time, patience, and access to a suitable printer and office supplies, you can assemble your own pocket slide rule computer, just like the original—no batteries or Internet connection required!

You'll need to be able to print graphics (ideally in colour) from images in PNG (Portable Network Graphics) format with a specified and consistent scale. The rotating discs of the bomb computer must be printed on clear plastic with white areas of the image left clear. Most printers can print transparencies intended for overhead projectors which are suitable for this purpose.

Farming with Dynamite

Fantasia Apocalyptica World Premiere
Composed 2012-2017 by Donald E. Knuth
Performed by Jan Overduin

The Biblical book of Revelation, also know as Apocalypse (Uncovering), is a mystical work that is filled with symbols. It consists chiefly of a dream that was recorded in the first century A.D. by Saint John the Divine. The dramatic events in this famous dream run the gamut of human emotions, as they highlight crucial aspects of life, death and spirituality.

During the 60s, Donald Knuth became fascinated with the ways in which the author of Revelations emphasized many different numbers (2, 3, 3.5, 4, 7, 12, 24...) and gave them symbolic significance. Knuth soon began to wonder about the possibility of creating a pleasing musical work that would incorporate Revelation's numbers and other mystical symbols in essentially their original order.