New Toys

Tuesday, May 6th, 2008

Today I picked up my new bass amp - an Ashdown MAG300 C210 Combo. What does that mean? Its a 307W combo amp (amplifier and speaker cabinet) with 2 x 10″ speakers. And its lovely.

When I was looking at new amps, I had a few choices. First, do I get a split setup, i.e. a seperate amplifier head unit and speaker cabinets (cabs), or a combo, with the amp and cabs built into the same unit. There were really two differences. Firstly, with split setups, you have more flexibility to mix amps with cabs, so if you already have some, or prefer a particular brand of cabs, you can mix and match your units. The other difference is price. You’ll probably pay about another 20-30% more for split setups depending on what you choose.

For me, price was a big issue, so I went with the combo setup. I saw the Ashdown amps in PMT in Birmingham and after some reading online, decided that this was my choice of amp. So I went over there on wednesday last week and picked up this bad boy.

Of course this was not the best idea as I had a gig on Thursday at the Hare and Hounds so I had about 10 minutes to give it a try out the night before.

Anyway, the gig went well, the amp is lovely. I hope to get more time soon (see Redundancy) to play around with it. I can say that the compression and Sub-Harmonics settings do some damn good work on the sound.

If you wanna see this lush thing, check out my Unboxing photos on Flickr.

Tags: amp, ashdown, bass amp, c210t, cabs, mag300
Posted in douglasfurs, news | No Comments »

Eleanor Mann - Congrats

Sunday, October 28th, 2007

Just wanted to post my congratulations to Merlin and Madeline on the birth of Eleanor Flannery Mann, born October 27th, 2007.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/merlin/1784120995/

I’m not sure the Hipster PDA will work with children but you sure can try!

Barely a day old and already got her own URL

Tags: eleanormann, merlinmann
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iPhone, Edge, and Fort Augustus

Monday, September 24th, 2007

I managed to enjoy a week off last week as I spent the time in a lovely log cabin in Fort Augustus, Scotland [see Flickr]. While there, I managed to miss most of the excitement around the Apple event in London on tuesday. And the big news was the iPhone is coming to O2.
Now I’ve seen a fair bit of coverage since then, mostly bad mouthing the iPhone (or O2) an I have to weigh in.
Firstly, there are many points people keep missing.
1. £269 for a phone! Well its not just a phone. Its also a 8Gb iPod with widescreen video mode, it is a full internet browser, a PDA, a camera and of course a phone. So big deal. It costs more than the usual FREE that most UK phone buyers pay. Buts its more than that. A 8Gb iPod would set you back at least £180, and thats just a tiny screen, no decent video capability. So deal with it.
2. Its too expensive for most consumers. Are most consumers going to want an iPhone? Its price point puts it at the high end of the market, appealing to Mac lovers, iPod fanatics, and those on the bleeding edge. Nooone expects every Thomas, Richard or Harold to go and get one on launch day (9th November). Most consumers will either a) have a phone or b) not be that desperate to be on the front end to pay that much. Its like in the US. It cost more than most phones over there yet over 150k were sold in the first week alone!
3. EDGE? Why not 3G? Well I believe Steve’s justification being battery life. I have a 3G phone. When I’m online, the battery dies like a limp dear caught in the headlights of a very wide, fast moving truck. He said coverage is the other issue. While that is true in the US, its not so in the UK and europe. So people moan about the speed. So what is the difference? Well this:

3G - 50kbps (3g)
2.5G - 8-10kbps (EDGE)
2G - 5-8 kbps (GPRS)

I tested my N70 on www.dslreports.com/mspeed and got back 50kbits/sec, on full bars. So maybe its true, EDGE isn’t as good as 3G. But not every phone supports 3G. And not everyone is a heavy enough “mobile internet” user to even see the difference. I certainly don’t. That of course leads on to the internet. Its the FULL internet, not some hosed down version, where the alignment is awful, the photos don’t line up. But what about flash? Well my N70 doesn’t do flash. Nor does the N95, so what are you really losing? Nothing. And with the “unlimited” [via daringfireball.net] WiFi with The Cloud (which includes BT OpenZones so include loads of phoneboxes around the country) those full pages from NY Times or The Guardian will be there in no time.

So stop your moaning. If you don’t wanna spend £269 to have the most revolutionary phone in many years straight away, then go back to your Nokia 3210 and enjoy mono screens, 16bit sound, and no chance of the internet, youtube, google maps or this blog on your phone! Tell it to Fake Steve!

And where does my iPhone tale go? Well I’ll be queueing at the Bullring store for mine on iPhUK Day, for my EDGE loving, multi touching, widescreen ipod/phone/web browser/email client/camera/thing that will make people go “ooohhh can I play?” to which I’ll say…no.

Tags: 3g, daringfireball, edge, fakesteve, iphone, n95, o2, uk
Posted in apple, life, news | No Comments »

BBC iDon’t-Player-very-well

Tuesday, August 14th, 2007

There’s been some talk recently of the BBC iPlayer service, which allows you to watch BBC TV programming on demand.
There has also been a lot of outcry as using this service seems to be difficult indeed.
The current requirements are as follows:

Windows XP operating system *
Minimum 500Mb (RAM) memory
Internet Explorer 6 browser (or later)
Windows Media Player 10 (or later)
A video and sound card capable of playing high quality streamed or downloaded programmes
JavaScript, ActiveX and Cookies are all enabled
A high speed broadband internet connection

The first problems. XP - What about all those new PC owners with Vista? How exactly can’t it Vista support it when it should be backwards compatible?
IE6 - Firefox is a much better browser, and a large amount of people are using it nowadays.

Then there’s the Mac and Linux users. No supported way of running it. Why? The main reason is probably because it runs on Peer-to-peer networking (much like Limewire or Kazaa). So that means a desktop client, which means background services, which would need to be written from the ground up. There are a number of problems with this. Firstly, the lack of cross platform support. Surely if I’m a License payer I should be able to access these services without having to spend money on either a) a new windows PC (or should I say old as I need XP), or b) some sort of vitualisation method like Parallels, VMWare, or Virtual PC for non-intel Macs. Thats awful.

(more…)

Posted in apple, internet, news, tech | No Comments »

Band Recording: 6 April 2007

Monday, April 23rd, 2007

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while now, and finally decided to.

On 6 April 2007 (mark this in your DF journal) we stepped into the recording (dance) studio and did our first ever recording. Wanna know how hi-tech it was? We used mini-discs.

The way Rich Bitch works, they have a professional recording studio, where you can pay about £400 for 10 hours of studio time to get proper recordings. Or, you can hire the Dance studio for the standard price (£12.50ph) and record for free to your own minidiscs. So thats what we did. We booked our normal 2 hour slot  and went in armed with a few discs. You can ask the technicians to come and set your levels right and then start the recording. So we got the man in, did a run through of Russia, and let him adjust the sliders and dial and switches that make us sound just like U2. There is even a Bono slider for the vocals. Weird.

Anyway, we pretty much just went through the set a few times over, took a few takes to get it right but we did each song about 10 times so we came out with a good few trials.  The session went quite well. It was cool to play on a stage, with a full rig, and monitors, and the room was really cool too. Very hip (or whatever is the cool word the kids are using)

Anyway, recording was the easy part. Since we recorded to minidisc, the trouble next we getting it from MD to my laptop (I took charge of this fun task). I did some searching and found the only way was to do it through a line -in port and a 3.5mm mini-jack. So that meant recording in realtime. So I set the thing to record, hit play on the MD player, and buggered off for a while.

A bit later, I had 3 .wav files recorded in Audicity, that I could play with. I brought them into Logic Express and just used the cut tool to snip around takes of songs, then dragged them to a track for each song. This meant I could easily export all versions of one song in one go.

After tediously listening to the whole thing (almost 2 hours) I had split the tracks. They were then exported to wav files, and i used a open source program called Max to convert them to MP3’s, and finally, imported into iTunes and set the ID3 tags. Phew!

The only problems with all this is, the recording level was low so the songs are all really quiet (at least the raw tracks), and its all as one track, in mono, so can’t do any adjustment of each instrument. To be honest, I thought the bass should’ve been louder, and I didn’t like the sound much, and the guitars were a bit loud. So some tweaking needed.

Anyway, some of those tracks are now up on Virb, and if you really want, you can have the raw wav files, and can do some editing of your own. A challenge for any amateur music producers. See what you can do. email us at douglasfurs at googlemail dot com for info.

Posted in band, douglasfurs, news | No Comments »

24 hours alone

Wednesday, March 21st, 2007

So I saw this story on Diggnation the other week and am writing to support the campaign.

So, on 24 March (Saturday to make it a bit easier), its Shutdown Day. Turn off your computer, step away from the keyboard, put down that mouse, and take your eyes off the screen.

This campaign has two main objectives.
1. Save massive amounts of electricity by having so many PC’s turned off. It all goes to help global warming (and you can’t deny its happening. There’s snow and sunshine in the middle of March)
2. Get some rest! Go outside, enjoy the sun/snow/rain/other weather, see some friends, or family, do those DIY things you’ve been putting off, get some GTD’ing going, tidy things, or just spend time with the kids. The main thing is to spend your day without your computer, PDA, laptop, or other devices. Hell, even go somewhere without the GPS. Try an A to Z.

I’ll be doing this, and I encourage you to as well. Add your name to the list, support this cause, and encourage your friends to as well.

Technorati Tags: Shutdown Day

Posted in internet, life, news | No Comments »

Great Mac Apps I use

Tuesday, March 6th, 2007

[digg=http://digg.com/apple/Great_Mac_Apps_Another_list]Thought I would do a list of various apps that I really like and later I will come back and talk a bit more about them.

1.Quicksilver -  GTD must have, and all round great app, even as a Spotlight replacement
2. Camino - Open source Web browser, Cocoa app so bit better than Firefox. I’m using it right now
3. Firefox - because Wordpress doesn’t play so well with Safari
4. VLC - best video player I found. Plays practically everything ever made. Ever.
5. Adium - Good multi-chat program, gTalk, MSN, AOL, Jabber, others. Cute duck icon
6. Burn - Open source CD burning software
7. AppDelete - Get rid of all those hiding bits of data for applications. Fast
8. Monolingual - Remove unwanted language packs. Free up tons of space (I gained 1.63Gb! Others report up to 4Gb)
9. Smultron - good little coding app. Strawberry logo too!
10. Transmission - Torrent app. Handy, easy to use.
11. Growl - onscreen notifications from many apps (Camino, Transmission, Adium, Skype, iStumbler, Cyberduck
12. Flip4Mac - WMV plugin for Mac. Never touch WMP again!
13. MenuMeters - system resource monitoring for the menu bar
14. Sidetrack - Scrolling for older laptops.
15. MAMP - Test out a local version of your website, with mySQL, PHP, and much more
16. GimmeSomeTune - iTunes plugin. Shows Growl notifications for songs, and gets lyrics
17. Missing Sync for Windows - sync your Windows Mobile device if you have one (I have a PDA for TomTom)
18. Democracy - subscribe to RSS feeds, video feeds, torrent feeds, automatically downloads recent
19. Microsoft Office - because sometimes you need to accommodate Windows users. And Apple has no spreadsheet program. Yet

Wow, that list was longer than I planned. I might have to do a few posts to cover all those off. I’ll update this later with links.

Updated: Thought of another one
20. Onxy - Great app for cleaning cache’s, temp files and folders, and keeping things working smoothly

Posted in apple, gtd, internet, life, macosx, news, tech | 6 Comments »

Power Cut in Birmingham

Saturday, December 16th, 2006

So I woke up this morning at about 6.40. However I didn’t know it was then because my clock wasn’t working which was strange. So I sat up, tried my lamp which didn’t work either. My girlfriend went to turn the bathroom light on and it didn’t work. So I checked the fuse box and it was all on. So I soon realised there must’ve been a powercut. It was pretty dark outside, and hard to tell if any lights were off since I don’t really look outside at night.

I stuck some clothes on and went down towards the front desk. Luckily, I ran into a woman only 2 floors down who told me the news. There had been a fire at a power station and had cut power to the entire city. It was possibly going to be out until the afternoon. I walked back to my apartment and got out a radio to see if there was anything being said about it when the power came back on (and with it running water).

The strangest thing is its now been about an hour since it came back on, and about 4 since it went off and I can’t seem to find any mention of it on the news or the internet. Why hasn’t this been reported? Surely someone has realised and thought it worthy of mentioning. I mean the power goes out to the second largest city in the UK and not even a whisper?

Well I claim to be the first (as far as I know) to report this. Its 8.13am. Power is back (obviously since I can get online) and the city is coming back into action.

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James Kim 1971-2006

Thursday, December 7th, 2006

I’ve been following this story since I saw it appear on Digg the other week. A news reporter from CNET was missing with his family after they were coming home from a holiday. The family were last seen at a diner near Roseburg before heading off on the last leg of their journey. Unfortunatly they never arrived and their family notified the police.

A search began and on Monday, the wife, Kati, and his two daughters were found by their car, after Kati waved an umbrella at a passing helicopter. The search then continued for James.

Unfortunately, he was found 11 days after heading off into the wilderness on wednesday 6th December. He hadn’t made it. The story of his braveness, his efforts to save his family, who were so important to his life, has rippled accross the internet. Stories and thanks have been pouring in, as well as messages for his wife and kids, Penelope and Sabine.

My thoughts go out to his family and friends who will surely miss him.

CNET - James Kim found deceased
CNET - Kati Kim and daugters found alive

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