Archive for the 'news' category

New Toys

May 06 2008 Published by Dom under douglasfurs, news

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.

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Eleanor Mann – Congrats

Oct 28 2007 Published by Dom under news

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

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iPhone, Edge, and Fort Augustus

Sep 24 2007 Published by Dom under apple, life, news

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.

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BBC iDon’t-Player-very-well

Aug 14 2007 Published by Dom under apple, internet, news, tech

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.

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Band Recording: 6 April 2007

Apr 23 2007 Published by Dom under band, douglasfurs, news

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.

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