More Further Legal Proceedings

As you recall from the first episode of this series, I received several kilos of paperwork from India about…  something.  The gist of it was — somebody had allegedly committed libel against somebody else, and they had put a law firm onto the case.

The law firm got it all firmly in hand, but neglected to tell me what to actually delete.  Details, details.  You can’t expect fine legal minds to concern themselves with details.

So today I got a new letter (by courier).  Not many kilos this time, though:

That’s not my email address

Excerpt of the letter from Mandal & Fox

Excerpt from the judge…

… continued

So apparently I was sued?  And I failed to appear?  As did everybody else?  But we were found guilty?  I don’t know.

Anyway, I guess I should just do the lawyers’ work for them, and search for the offending item myself.  Let’s see…

Ah, right.  Found it.  Seems legit to me.  But totally libellous.  Unless it’s true.

Anyway, I’m deleting.  The Indian court can’t possibly be wrong.

More Legal Proceedings

My boss got the letter below today.  As I don’t speak French, I’m not totally sure what it’s asking me to do, but I’ll assume that it wants me to remove the links in question.

The fascinating thing about this very geniune-looking (ahem) official letter is that it doesn’t mention who’s sending it.  Who is the person who’s complaining?  It’s just that single sheet of paper.

Weird.

Anyway, I see that it mentions “500 000 euros”, so I’m assuming that that’s how much I owe someone.  But who do I send it to?  I want to get on transferring the money right now, since I don’t want to accrue any interests.  Those interests can be killer!

Very Official-Looking Letter

Anyway, can somebody translate the French parts while I call the bank to see whether they know who I should send the money to?

Very Official-Looking Envelope

Music Distribution

The main issue when I moved to the new flat, oh, three-ish years ago? I think, was how to listen to music.

I want to be able to walk between rooms, listening to the same music.  This means that there has to be some kind of way to distribute music between the rooms.

I looked into various ready-made wireless systems like Sonos, but these all made The System the central point.  I don’t want that.  I want to be able to control the music in any way that I want to, which means from Emacs.

So I wanted (sort of) passive systems that would allow me to say “the volume in room X is Y”, and that would allow me to pause and skip the music from any room, while still tying into my own Emacs-based playing system.

The first element is the sound card.  I settled on a RME Multiface box.  It’s really a semiprofessional music routing card. It has a lot of inputs and a lot of outputs, and you can route any combinations of any inputs to any outputs, while controlling the volume.  You see how this would work for me: I’d just play a flac file, while having each room be one stereo output, and I’d set the volume per output.

RME Outputs

I now had all these outputs, but how would I get the music to the various rooms?  I first tried a couple of wireless systems.  They both had two problems: 1) There was a half-second latency, so if you heard sounds from different rooms, it sounded kinda psychadelic.  2) They didn’t work.  That is, they had frequent drop-outs, and made beastly noises while doing so.  I know, I know — nothing that’s wireless actually works.

My second idea was to try a powerline audio thing.  The bandwidth requirements for audio are pretty minuscule, so I thought there might be a chance that something like this would work.  But, as with the wireless systems, it 1) had a beastly latency and 2) didn’t work.  The drop-outs were even more brutal.

So: Wires it is.  I’d have to install wires between all the rooms to get music to them.  But what kind of wires?

That’s when I learned the magical word: balun. It means “balanced/unbalanced”, or something like that.  Basically, a balun is a device that takes an unbalanced signal (like RCA audio) and makes is balanced (or what we computer people call differential). 

Doing research over the intertubes I found a few companies selling this stuff.  The baluns are generally non-powered, and use cat5 cabling.  Like these babies:

Two Baluns
Cat5 Port

They are just perfect!  You just hook them up to your audio outputs, string some cat5 to a different room, plug another one in there, and plug the audio output into whatever amplifier/speakers you have there.

The sound quality is totally fine, too.  That is, I can’t hear anything obviously bad.  There’s bass, and there’s treble, and there’s the middle part.  Perfect!

The main problem is, of course, all the cabling.  That means a lot of these:

And some stretches off wall that look like this:

Cat5.  Wouldn’t bet on the e

Ok, some of those are Ethernet.

That’s a lot of hammering and drilling, but it’s totally worth it.  It just works 100%.  No drop-outs, no odd noises, no latency.  And the fi is so hi.

Wired is the new black.