sound

Streaming audio from a Mac to another computer using VLC

Posted on by Dennis

VLC is a very popular program for playing pretty much any type of media under the sun. However, it has a lot of advanced functionality that many people may not know about. One of these is that VLC can send audio as a stream.

My particular case is that I have a wireless headphone set plugged in to my desktop computer in my living room. However, sometimes I would like to play some audio from my Mac laptop (which could be anywhere in my apartment).

I was already familiar with Icecast, a free audio streaming server, so I gave that a try first, but it was not a great experience with a delay of a few to several seconds. Instead, I found that VLC could get me down to just under 1 second of latency, which still isn’t great but is workable; at least the server setup wouldn’t be required simplifying things a bit.

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A visit to the Vancouver Art Gallery

Posted on by Dennis

Yesterday, for some odd reason, I woke up wanting to visit the Vancouver Art Gallery.  I haven’t been in that art gallery for probably more than 10-15 years.  When I was very young my mom used to have a membership and brought me on Sundays after church to participate in some kids art activities, but I haven’t been since then.

As it was Tuesday, I took advantage of the Art Gallery’s admission-by-donation time in the evening.  It’s the only day of the week that the Gallery is open late in the evening so I could visit after work.  Also, I wasn’t going to pay $24 to look around.  I was originally going to pay $5 to get in (really just wanting a quick look around not expecting to be interested too much), but the sign at the door suggested a $10 donation, so I went with that. Continue Reading

Cheerios and Lectures Don’t Mix

Posted on by Dennis

So I was in my economics lecture peacefully taking notes on an interesting lecture about oligopoly by Professor Gateman as some “delinquent” (as Gateman calls them) walks in late and finds a friend who happened to be sitting on one of the seats on my row and settles down beside the friend.  The latecomer is offered Cheerios from the friend and proceeds to munch and crunch on a small box of the cereal for the next half hour, not noticing how loud the crunching sound really was, not noticing how the other student sitting on the other side was covering his ear, not noticing a student a couple rows down looking up trying to figure out where that crunching was coming from.  Really, I wouldn’t mind if the consumption of the food does not produce sound, but *crunch* *crunch* *crunch* continuously during a lecture just annoys me.