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

Chris Morgan's Scribbling and Scratching

Mon, 17 Jan 2005