Thu, 27 Jan 2005

So my Squeezebox arrived. Absolutely outstanding. Nicely packaged, good printed documentation, little extras like batteries for the remote and nice quality phono cable.

My wife thinks it lacks a little something compared to my CD player, but for every bit of extra depth or punch I get off CD, I find an equal or greater amount of harshness. With my hifi setup and now my Squeezebox receiving my 192kb mp3s, I have a nice balance of quality and convenience. Of course, my ears are not as good as hers. I think I've had a spot of tinnitus since I was little. I can remember thinking that our solid state TV was "noisy" in my right ear. I must have been under 10, maybe about 9. TVs can be noisy, but not in only one ear generally.

I particularly like the server software feature where it finds iTunes playlists and integrates them into the selection even via the remote. I made a playlist called "Back to Mine" after the CD series (I have the Orb and Orbital Back To Mine compilations). Right now it's playing "To The Unknown Man" by Vangelis, which is soothing my jangled nerves (bad day at work).

posted at: 22:19 | path: /music | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 24 Jan 2005

I'm getting pretty excited by the developments going on in the invite-only OpenSolaris pilot. I can't discuss factual details, and besides that stuff can change pretty quickly. What I can say is that I am now convinced that Sun really means to do this, and means to do it well.

Solaris has been a part of my life for 10 years now, as well as many friends of mine. It's a life-changing event for me to be invited into the community that designs and develops it.

But it's not just a fondness for past glories here, Solaris 10 is creating an unparalleled buzz greater than any previous release, and it's simply a thrill to connect with the people taking the Unix state-of-the-art to new levels. Whether it's security (Solaris 10 privileges), virtualisation (Solaris 10 zones), file systems (ZFS), whole-system tracing (DTrace), service management (SMF), or just hot cpus and scalable systems, Sun is saying it loud and proud. We do Unix. Bring it on. I just hope I can contribute.

posted at: 22:05 | path: /solaris | permanent link to this entry

Sun, 23 Jan 2005

I'm nearly organised in the lounge. Soon there will be only a small selection of favourite CDs, and only as many as can easily fit in the drawers. All other music will be put away, and most of it will also be on-line on a hard drive somewhere in the basement. I'm trying to make myself rip even cds I'm not THAT fond of. If I don't put them into MP3 format, there's even less chance I'll make the effort. Some of my CDs should probably just be discarded. If I'm honest, my Candlemass Live CD doesn't see the light of day very often.

I think Netflix should start a new service, Netdiscs. They send you a bunch of envelopes and you dispatch all surplus CDs. They wait until someone else buys them and credit your account, which is good for buying other CDs that other people dispensed with.

I know, I can see the flaw immediately - buy CDs, rip them to hard disk, send them to Netflix and eventually get some other used CDs and rip them too. Net result, less new CD purchases. The thing is, since this is hard to stop already, it would be interested to see how the record companies could squash it. I'm sure plenty of people simply rip and resell CDs to allow themselves access to more new titles without paying full price for every one.

I'm probably a bit old-fashioned, but I have nearly every CD I've ever bought. A few have gotten lost, but I tend to eventually give in and buy such titles again. In fact nothing highlights how essential it is for me to hear an old CD, or at least one or two favourite tracks therein, than the feeling I've lost the CD. "Oh ... no ... I seem to have lost Rust in Peace by Megadeth... must ... hear ... Hangar 18". Next thing you know I buy it again, full price in Border's, only to listen to it 1.5 times, rip it and consign it to the bottom drawer. But at least I know I _could_ listen it ... if I wanted to.

posted at: 21:06 | path: /music | permanent link to this entry

As usual, a spot of googling works wonder for software issues. Dan Slagel's iMovie FAQ explains how to extract the audio from the video clips in iMovie. Doing this solved the audio sync issues for me. I wish I knew why.

Reimporting my footage from scratch in iMovie HD and re-editing the DVD solved the bad menus issue, so I finally made a DVD. Actually I made about seven copies, which takes about half the day. Roll on 8X and faster drives (maybe my next laptop, or perhaps I will eventually make good on my promise to get a Powermac G5 one day).

The burn to disc image option is useful for checking a DVD. After making two useless coasters, I started to use this feature. You end up with a .IMG file on the desktop, which the OS X DVD player happily plays. You can also burn this file to DVD, but doing so makes a DVD with one file on it - the .IMG file. It doesn't make a playable disc. I presume this is because of the royalty issue

In my opinion, Apple needs to end this policy. You cannot get iDVD free any more. Either you buy a new Mac and get the software pre-installed, or you buy iLife. Either way, Apple could extract the DVD royalty payment for the right to burn DVDs in such a way that they didn't have to lock iDVD to Superdrive.

Sat, 22 Jan 2005

Ignoring the missing audio for the first 1 1/2 tracks, I've been working on a DVD of the gig.

I mail-ordered iLife '05 a few days ago, and transferred the footage to iMovie, and edited it into shape roughly. I'm still hoping to see a CD from the Lime Spider to provide better audio, but so far it hasn't arrived.

The iLife box arrived last night, so I figured I'd install it first, then do a DVD and make use of all the great new features. Boy was I wrong.

Firstly I was excited to hear about the new archiving option so you can save the complete project. Unfortunately it didn't work, it wouldn't fit on a DVD. Pretty disappointing, seeing as I only have 1/2 hour of footage and am using standard Apple templates. I can't use an external dual-layer burner because of the stupid iDVD burning restriction

So I exported my film from iMovie to iDVD, knocked it into shape using the "Full Frame 1" template and kicked off a burn.

Unfortunately, the resulting DVD wouldn't play on my Sony DVD player, nor on my laptop, the menus would crash the player, the video would eventually get stuck, and the audio was not in sync.

So far I have tried a different template from the 5.0 list - still no good, tried an older, simpler template, and tried exporting to an image file (.IMG) instead of wasting another blank DVD. Still rubbish... the video and audio do not sync up.

I sent some "feedback" aka bug report to Apple complaining about this, and in the meanwhile, I think I will have to try reimporting the raw footage into the updated iMovie (iMovie HD). My assumption is that the bug is some glitch when importing a project from an older version of iMovie and then exporting it to iDVD5.

Mon, 17 Jan 2005

My friend Leon from work (home page) came over for some of my chili con carne, a glass of wine and some hardware hacking.

The iMac seems unrepairable. The monitor does not light up, the internal VGA connector puts out no signal, the cd-rom drive does not seem to get any power. So we can't get it to actually DO anything.

Leon got the case off, the motherboard out etc, and after reseatin everything still no joy. We know the motherboard gets power, because it has a green LED on it which lights up. We also tested the hard drive in a PC and it does spin up and has some HFS partitions on it. We even found a readme.txt which explains "why can't I see my files" which apparently is something to do with HFS Extended format.

Secondly the metal shielding inside the case between the plastic underside and the motherboard looks like a rather good Cylon helmet for Halloween. Yes, pictures are required, and they will be provided.

The evening was also livened up by me trying to show Leon some of the good bits of Lord of the Rings. I chose the Prologue, the bridge of Khazad-Dum and the assault on Minas Tirith, including the Mumakil, Legolas' single-handed Mumakil takedown, the fight between Eowyn and the Witch-King, and of course Grond! I think it got his attention...

posted at: 23:08 | path: /rescue | permanent link to this entry

My last project was an "MTV video" for Made Out Of Babies (see my moob blog). I used iMovie and it was like torture. I was trying to sync studio sound to live footage and iMovie is inadequate.

No problem though, firstly iMovie is great at the price. Secondly, Apple ofers an affordable next rung on the ladder in the form of Final Cut Express which is $300. Not cheap, but once you have run into the limits of iMovie, and spent an even and formed a headache from its poor suport of fine adjustments, it seems to make sense.

So I bought FCE and had a go. The next project is a couple more gig DVDs (which only involves trimming footage which has both audio and video), and after a few evenings and some readings of the manual, I've come to the conclusion I'd rather go back to iMovie.

FCE doesn't control my camera (Sony DCR-TRV70), it doesn't have any obvious iDVD integration, it seems to get horribly slow once you apply any filters (filters being one of the selling points) and it's a huge and complex program. I don't actually think I made a mistake, but it's going to take a while to learn, and I will probably need a serious computer to use it properly. For example, my latest footage (from http://www.thelimespider.com/) needs to be gamma corrected. So I install a filter and try some editing. Now my cursor is flickering the entire time. Everything is slow. The preview window refuses to show anything, and instead says "unrendered". iMovie is clearly better for a film-making pleb like me.

posted at: 23:07 | path: /movie-making | permanent link to this entry

I like having a real hifi with a cd player, decent amp, decent speakers etc. I've even still got my turn table hooked up. However, my CD collection is getting completely out of control. Having a young daughter also adds to the havoc in the living room. Anything left lying around (like a cd case) is fair game for abuse, including being stepped on or perhaps chewed a bit.

I made a start at switching from CDs to MP3 back when I used to use Linux exclusively as my home desktop. I used Freeamp and Grip/Lame to build up a small collection of .MP3 files at 128kb/s and played them back on the computer speakers whilst working. Sounded really good for a while, but I didn't see it as a serious alternative to the hi-fi. It was a thrill to rip CDs at 4-5X normal speed on my original Athlon 750MHz system. Nevermind that it made enough noise to destroy all fine detail in the music, I was happy enough to just rock out as I hacked code.

Then one day after a system upgrade, KDE reset the volume to max, and it blew out the tweeter on one of my Logitech speakers when I played a CD. That was not too fun, especially since I didn't feel rich enough to replace them and Logitech's customer helpdesk website was unusable from Linux. I ended up with some cheaper, nastier speakers, and I eventually got a bit frustrated with the Linux song and dance - where did Freeamp go? Oh it's Zinf now. Ok, Zinf needs MusicBrainz, fine, I can do that. Oh crap, that has an M4 bug etc etc.

I may be a professional programmer, but when I start out to listen to music, and end up debugging someone elses M4 bug, the fun is starting to wear thin.

I also had an inkling that MP3s on a real hifi could be good. I bought a SliMP3 from Slim Devices Inc., together with a 100ft ethernet cable. It worked for a while, but my device was one of the original hand-soldered models, and it wasn't very reliable.

Fast-forward three years, I now prefer a Mac for music, and I've been converted by my iPod. MP3 at 192 kb/s is good enough for my ears, I can hardly notice the difference in headphones. Best of luck to the zinf, musicbrainz, grip, lame etc guys, but buy a Mac and Apple takes care of all of that for you, legally, and reliably. And my laptop does ripping at 10X speed on most discs, sometimes 12X. Awesome.

Best of all, Slim Devices kept going, building on the success of the SliMP3, and now sell a wireless version called the Squeezebox. So I just ordered one, and have spent most of today ripping more of my CDs. Current status 4697 songs, 26.60GB.

posted at: 23:06 | path: /music | permanent link to this entry

When it came to "Sir Duke", she smiled and jigged. So she's got good taste (is is a classic track), and enjoys one of her daddy's favourite songs. The thing is, she 18 months old

I used to play this song in a brass band. The horn breaks are quite hard to read, but if you understand the flow first and the notes second, it's much easier. It's really not that complicated a sequence if you played it without swing, but the swing is why you want to play it. I was playing solor tenor horn, but I still had to play the full "solo" line.

posted at: 23:03 | path: /music | permanent link to this entry

Sun, 09 Jan 2005

So the return drive went smoothly. Nothing much to report that you wouldn't expect - bad driving, especially speeding, lots of boring fairly flat countryside in Ohio and Western Pennsylvania, but much more interesting stuff further east. I think a weekends trip back to State College is called for. I particularly liked some parts of I80 between State College and the Poconos, I must look it up on the map to identify the stunning valleys and spectacular road pass cut through the sides of mountains.

The Poconos were still heavily iced this afternoon. Quite eery driving down a perfectly dry clean road with deep frozen trees bent over under their burden imploring the passers-by for help.

I managed to enter a typo strewn blog entry last night, but completely forgot about it this morning, which is why I mentioned not turning on the mic twice. Hmmm, drunken blogging, that is bound to get someone in trouble some day!

So was it worth driving a 900 mile round trip for a gig in Akron? Just for the gig, maybe not. Considering I filmed it, though, yes, I'm glad I did it. The fact I've been wanting to do a road trip in my car makes it all worthwhile. I'm not sure the footage will make a particularly good concert movie, but it's certainly going to be a record of the night, and I'm sure some of it will be reusble.

I have to mention my special McDonald's location algorithm. Leave the hotel, simply drive and take whatever random turns seem interesting, in most towns and cities, your chances are good of finding a Mickey D's. I found one in 5-7 minutes, at 10:58, so I beat the breakfast menu cut off. Two Egg McMuffins AND useful directions back to I76 had me feeling a whole lot better. The diet, as everyone says at this time of year, starts tomorrow.

The band? They're probably on stage again right now. I really hope they make it through this week.

posted at: 22:56 | path: /moob | permanent link to this entry

I stayed out with the band until 3 something. The gig didn't go too well. Matt has a cold and was a bit off his game, Brendan's guitar was cold and went out of tune frequently as it warmed up at the gig ... and I didn't turn the mic on for a couple of tracks - gah!. Still, the turnout was good and the crowd seemed to like it. I did get some footage from the front, and boy that place has a pounding PA.

They're back in Cleveland, so I guess Akron is history, I'm outta here asap. The weather is pretty dull. I need to get some serious miles done before it gets dark again. And first I need breakfast...

posted at: 10:32 | path: /moob | permanent link to this entry

Unfortunately, yours truly forgot to switch the mic on until half-way through their second song. Oh welk

They are staying in Cleveland, so I think this is nearly it for this strang of the blog. All that remains is a rather long drive back.

posted at: 03:08 | path: /moob | permanent link to this entry

Sat, 08 Jan 2005

Checked out the neighborhood of the hotel. So it started to snow. Some monster sized bars a few blocks down University Street, Harry Buffalo's, Bricco, Jillians are just some whose name I remember - some of these look like they could feed 300 people no problem. Also saw the local sports arena and a nearby ice rink. I guess this neighborhood would be jumping if it weren't off-season for college kids.

Checked out the Lime Spider - it's about 5 minutes walk - looks fairly small, which is fine by me. On the door is a press clipping which says the ownber prides himself on how he treats out of town bands. That's good, as MooB's gig last night fell through, I'm glad I didn't try to make that one.

posted at: 18:09 | path: /moob | permanent link to this entry

Arrived in Akron no problem at all. The Radisson has free wireless internet (have to get name and passsword from the front desk). So that's pretty handy.

Encountered fog, rain, ice, and saw a lot of frozen trees, many broken. Route 322 West from State College was great - superb views and swoopy roads.

The film on TNT right now is Deep Blue Sea. I manage to catch this film quite regularly. It's excellent - one of the most hilariously crappy Giant Brain Enhanced Man Eating Great White Sharks in floating deep sea research labs films I've ever seen.

However, when you have such excellent actor-chomping mayhem after the first hour or less, who can really complain. Samuel L.Jackson's exit is one of his best ever. There's no way he can die better in the final Star Wars films. Even George Lucas would send the scene back for further work - a fish flying out of the water, manouvering mid-air to angle his mouth properly to eat a standing man whole, and then whipping backwards into the water is just ... practically optimal trash.

A family at breakfast was staying in the hotel because power was out. They rang the power company and were told it should be back 10pm tomorrow night. They've got a little girl just about Lucy's age and one of them chased her around the dining room saying "I'm gonna getcha, I'm gonna getcha!" just like we do at home. This weekend is going to suck for them...

Off to Akron in a bit, and yes, breakfast was pretty good. Sausage and egg on english muffin, coffee, juice, cherry danish, coffee

weather : warmer than last night, just stopped raining, low-hanging clouds making it look gloomy and a bit mysterious. Checked the car out, this place has a tiny bit of a view, I'm looking forward to travelling in the day today.

posted at: 10:34 | path: /moob | permanent link to this entry

Brooklyn to State College was not too bad. Trees down under the freezing rain they had earlier over the Poconos, and I nearly ran out of gas in the middle of nowhere, otherwise not bad. Lots of state troopers. I kept my speed down to just about what the trucks do.

As expected, it was possible to get most of the way here without active navigation - Brooklyn Bridge, Holland Tunnel, 7S, 9W, I280, I80, look for State College. I'm hoping Akron is just as easy.

I am connected to the hotel's free ethernet lan and thence the internet. It didn't work until I issued an HTTP request which redirected me to a page about the hotels service. The thing is, it's free to guests, so once I clicked on "configure" which was listed as costing "$0" then a quick DHCP and I was up and running. Why not remove this step?

On the whole though, it's exactly what I want. I will go to the trouble of plugging in an ethernet cable to get on the internet, and maybe even futz about as described above, long before I'll pay for wifi. Wired ethernet uses way less power and mostly has a snappier response. WiFI is only that great in unstructured locations like a coffee shop or my living room. A hotel room, though, is nothing if not structured, at least in my price range.

Next : breakfast is served 7-10, ah yes, hotel buffet breakfast when you skipped dinner the night before. One of life's little pleasures.

posted at: 01:08 | path: /moob | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 06 Jan 2005

Wed, 05 Jan 2005

I finally finished watching the documentaries on the Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King Extended Edition DVD. The last two documentaries are by far the best on a personal and emotional level, closely followed by "Editorial: Completing the Trilogy"

The last two are "The End of All Things" and "The Passing of an Age" and as the names indicate, we are definitely on the home straight by this point. A lot of revealing interview footage shows how close the final film came to slipping its deadline. One crew member jokes that someone will be blow drying the prints before they are shipped to the premier, and more seriously, Peter Jackson is very much looking forward to the film's NZ premier because he "hasn't seen it yet".

Elijah Wood's reaction? "That's awesome!". True, but he does tend to say that about everything, except of course, if something is "fucking amazing".

Not to quibble though (I'm only kidding!), this was something I'd waited for a long time. I will probably scribble and scratch some more once I've rewatched the documentaries one more time. The first time through each disc I just like to bathe in it, not enable too many critical faculties.

For now though, I think the highest praise I can give this entire project is that, for me, there are really some scenes that are "better in the film than the book".

posted at: 22:43 | path: /tolkien | permanent link to this entry

I'm going to take a lot of gadgets with me, but probably wont use them all. The critical thing is not to run out of power or tapes during the gig, so I've ordered a big long-life battery for the video camera, a new battery for the Canon S40 digital still camera, and a bunch of tapes. Best place for a lot like that is B&H

I found an iMac on the street today. It's a 450mhz slot-loading dual firewire model in red. If it can be made to work, it's just what I've been looking for as an mp3 server. If I hook up my external firewire drive and get myself a Squeezebox I can banish most of my CDs to boxes and binders and use mp3s over my WiFi network. That's the goal.

When I first spotted this machine, it was sitting proudly on a big pile of trashbags. A doorman at a nearby building volunteered that it works but it just "needs a new case". That's a tall order for an iMac. He does have a point though, as the case is practically trashed (photos later), and the screen has obvious burn-in. My first investment in this project was a cab ride home. The driver gave me advice on fixing the case - apparently epoxy is best because it's strong and transparent.

Unfortunately after finally getting a power cable in, and hooking it up to a USB keyboard and mouse, the power button does nothing, zippo, nada.

I vaguely remembered the access hatch underneath, so I whipped it open and lo and behold, no RAM. So whoever broke the case knew enough to reclaim the ram. Luckily I had a 128MB stick of PC100 SDRAM which fit nicely. I tried it in both slots, but unfortunately, this is not the only problem. Power is still not flowing.

Another broken computer project - just what I needed, my wife is thrilled.

posted at: 21:55 | path: /rescue | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 04 Jan 2005

I'm friends with the band Made Out of Babies who are going on tour for the first time this week. There are some of my photos of the band on their photos page

I've been documenting their gigs here in NYC with some simple DVD movies I've made on my Powerbook, from footage I took with my Sony DCR-TRV70. This is a lot of fun(!), and I recently moved up to Final Cut Express when I started to find iMovie limiting.

I am still working on a first public release of some video footage, it takes time to get a useful amount of footage, and even longer for me to learn how to use it. In the meanwhile, however, here is a bit of related fun.

I've decided to try and catch a night of the tour also, so the current plan is to drive from Brooklyn, NY to Akron, Ohio this weekend to see them and film the gig.

If I rent a DVD from Blockbuster under their new much ballyhooed "no late fees" scheme, then if I happen to keep hold of the disc for a week (as I often do with Netflix, which I love) they will "automatically sell" me the disc.

If I want to own a DVD, it must be box fresh, I'm going to want artwork, both discs, vouchers etc. I want a disc that is fingerprint and scratch free.

Sun, 02 Jan 2005

I recently bought a CD by this name by Deutsche Grammophon which has a nice selection of organ classics - Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, Vidor's Toccata (Allegro) from Symphony No. 5 in F minor and so on.

It's nice to have these all collected together so I can start to put names against these famous pieces when I hear them.

[Aside : I'm a big fan of organ music, especially on a Really Serious Organ - living in Brooklyn as I do now, it's been a long time since I've had the chance to enjoy an Ian Tracey voluntary, but there is absolutely no substitute. If you are ever in Liverpool just before Christmas, take the opportunity to catch a Carol service at Liverpool Anglican Cathedral, he always plays something spectacular at the end, and you can walk up and stand between the two towering organ banks. It doesn't get much better than that.]

Warning! Hazardous Material Ahead!

Disclaimer :- The following could upset your wife, it could scare your pets, it could kill your house plants, and it will certainly strain your HiFi!

The big discovery for me on this CD was Apparition de L'Eglise Eternelle by Olivier Messiaen. It follows immediately after the Vidor piece mentioned above. The piece has a sort of arch structure - building from a quiet start to an epic, tooth-rattling climax and then fading away into the aether.

If you have a decent hifi, and a copy of this CD (and you should) try listening to these two tracks as follows :

If performed correctly, you should look a bit like Peter Murphy in those famous Maxell Ads - ok, maybe not the extremely gaunt cheeks.

Chris Morgan's Scribbling and Scratching