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.

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

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.

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.

My question is this. Why, if they couldn’t do cross playform at beta launch, couldn’t they do a non-OS specific method? ABC.com offer all of their TV shows (well most) online, the next day, via the website, on most browsers, supplied using Flash. This means any OS, any time, no background services using up your bandwidth to transfer or receive files. Its just there to watch. I don’t see whats so bad about that?
Or even better, like Azureus, a Java application that will run on most systems?

I don’t see why they didn’t choose a better system for delivery really. If they’re only offering on-demand TV rental (don’t think they have shows for purchase yet. see later) why can’t it just be flash based?

Now of course this isn’t just the BBC. Channel 4′s 4oD service which seems to run the same P2P framework, is also single platform. They all use the same network, WMP encoded video files, which I’m not a fan of (having tried the 4oD service a bit)

The other problems is the lack of shows anyway. You can’t get the latest hot thing on the BBC, Heroes (already shown on Sci-Fi on Sky/Cable and in the USA) at all. You ca get the Heroes behind-the-scenes show, but not the real thing. They need to offer the best stuff to get it to be popular and work better (since its P2P).

The last point to make. There is a way to get around some of these problems, at least the half the platform specific stuff.
iTunes.
They offer TV in the US to purchase, the day after they’ve aired, they’re yours to keep, no background download services taking up your bandwidth, and they’re then at least available to a larger share of the population.

So thats my thoughts. Of course, rumors are that there are iTunes TV announcements Coming Soon so maybe we’ll see the Beeb and CH4 get on board then.

Now, alternatives. I’ve had a quick look at the BBC iPlayer forums and some points made about alternatives. There are obviously less than legal methods, the most popular being BitTorrents. Now, with this, you’ll probably get better quality, its still P2P in a sort, although it only runs when your applicaiton is running (be it BitTorret, BitComet, Azureus, or Transmisson or xTorrent for Mac) so keeps your bandwidth usage down. Its also better quality usually. Someone also complained about the horrible torrent sites, and banners and popups. Well, this isn’t 1999. It’s not like Jennifer Saunders on that Barclaycard advert. I use www.torrentz.com as a search engine, to find the file, then click one link to the torrent site, like Mininova, BTmon, or snarf-it, then one click to download. And if adverts are REALLY that difficult to stand, try something like TVShows for Mac OS X, or TED for Windows. Both of these will easily download torrents for your new TV shows regularly, without you seeing much, and start them downloading easily.

Its really not difficult to fund alternatives to some of this stuff. So please, BBC and Channel 4, wake up.

Tags: bbc, iplayer, torrents, ted, tvshows, macosx, bbctv, ondemand

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.

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

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

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.

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