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British holiday photo

Posted in Personal on 27th July 2010

Just realised it’s nearly the end of July and I haven’t blogged yet. Surely something truly awful will happen if I don’t?

So what have I been up to? Firstly I’ve been on holiday with my family. Where did I go? Wales. Saundersfoot, near Tenby in south Pembrokeshire, to be precise. Here’s a photo, click it to make it bigger.

Holiday snaps on Twitpic

This photo pretty much sums up every day of that fortnight. Well, that and about a hundred hours of gaming on my phone, something I’ll refuse to indulge in whilst at home, normally.

So apart from getting drunk in Welsh taverns, what else have I done? I’ve been recording and mixing down demo recordings for post-rock band Former Miss Czechoslovakia, for who I also play lead guitar and sing lead vocals for, a very odd mix I know.

I also got a car, but because of ridiculous circumstances, I haven’t been able to drive it to work in the seven days that I’ve had it for. It’s currently sitting in a garage, while hopefully mechanics are working ten to the dozen fixing the steering and the boot-cap (the what?) so I can take it to another garage tonight and then they can give it a full service and a cam-belt change. I kind of know what that bit means.

So for the mean time I’m catching the trains and buses, listening to really bad music while I’m on them and trying to find time to get these bloody mixes down.

For now I’ll leave you with a link to a rather intriguing tweet of mine.

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I’d much rather eat iVomit

Posted in Media on 30th June 2010

EDITORS NOTE: Please read this post before referring me to a shrink.

It made me retch. I’m not even sure why I do it. It’s like checking your bank-balance after getting wrecked in town the night before (something I also did today).

What am I talking about? John Gruber. He’s a blogger apparently, which doesn’t shine him in the best light. I’m a blogger after all, but I can barely string a sentence together. So I see him more as a journalist/writer, because it makes him sound more like a writer. What I really want to say is, he’s good at writing, and he writes a blog.

He writes for his blog called Daring Fireball, which is mainly about Apple products. Anyone who knows me will know where this is going now.

He’s a self-confessed Apple zealot. I’m sure he get’s off most nights by stroking Apple logos and preying to a picture of Steve Jobs. He really loves it.

The other day he wrote a piece on the new iPhone, and how it has re-defined perfection, again. It reads like an up-market soft-core porn film. He is expressing his arousal with every word.

Now. I’ve recently signed up for a HTC Desire phone. No-one is hiding the fact that it’s an iPhone clone. On few occasions, I’ve even called it an iPhone when showing it to others. I then go home, find a razor, and add another slit to my wrists.

It’s amazing, but it’s fundamentally different. The concept is similar. You have a huge narrow screen and you touch it with your fingers to navigate through screens using menus and icons. It’s a simple idea. The difference is the approach. The software is open to all manufacturers to use and modify. Users can add their own applications to it. Of course, they’re not called applications anymore, because Steve Jobs has amended the OED and added a clause whereby if you use a mobile phone you have to call it an app. Because it’s trendy.

John Gruber is amazing at writing. The issue my stomach contents has is his absolute belief in all Apple products being beautiful and usable and without flaw. I’ll give him the first two, but there’s a shit-load wrong with that company. It’s attitude towards being exclusive sucks. I’m not sure if Steve Jobs has a complex because it’s products lack the market-share acquired by Microsoft based machines, or if he feels that Macs are unsung because kids want to use MSN on their laptops or they consider it broken, or if he was bullied as a child for being so water-tourtureingly irritating, or whatever. It hurts me, because it’s a belief that hates diversity. It lives in a world where everything has an Apple logo embedded. It’s like the Aryan race in electronics form. A hundred years from now we’ll be teaching kids about a holocaust where everything Microsoft or Linux or Android or unlucky enough to not be pre-fixed with the lowercase-letter “i” got obliterated because it wasn’t good enough, because it dared to be different.

Every time I hear about Apple suing companies for daring to stand up to the hype, or Steve Jobs bragging about an innovation that’s been doing the rounds for the best part of a decade but it wasn’t relevant then because it didn’t have an Apple sticker on it, or see someone on the train telling me how their existence beats mine because they have an iBag or an iSock, my stomach goes again. I just know with a chilling certainty that in a few years I’ll have to conform and be affiliated with the rest of them whilst pledging my allegiance to Mr Jobs or be stripped and gassed to death, then my body ejected into space with all the porn and Adobe Flash software boxes where we all belong.

So yes. Apple have amazing products. They’re beautiful and flawless if you don’t care about doing things the same way that Jobs preaches. I understand. I’m just scared. Plus I have a compulsion to spend my money on alcohol and take-aways, so at the end of the month when the next new “iPhone 6.5G LS mkIII” comes out I can’t afford to fork out another grand to pay to the Apple-tax man. A crime that will surely be punishable by instant decapitation this time next year.

So John, as much as you dis-prove every little point that people try to make against your deity, and do it so well, I hate you. I don’t care if you’re right. When I wake up in the morning, my HTC Desire, a piece of unique electronic/plastic hybrid that is truly mine, that I customised, where I chose how it works or which hand I can hold it in, gives me so much joy and happiness. You give me so much pain and hate by rubbing in my face how wrong I should be. You give me so much pain and hate, that I had to compose a pie-chart to vent it all out.

If a hadn’t already written a million words I’d continue to explain every point. But I can’t. For now, I’ve ran out of hate.

And to make things clear, I copied that idea from this wicked cool website. If I was Apple, I would call it an iChart and patent it and then sue that guy instead. And he would sue me back and the world would be full of hate.

Disclaimer: Not everyone with an iFinger or iHairbrush is a twat. Some folks that use them are genuinely nice and have human feelings that don’t represent the Borg collective mind. My girlfriend has an iLaptop, and she’s very nice :) .

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Tedious Ubuntu ritual every six months

Posted in Software on 16th June 2010

Yes, it’s only happens twice a year, and it isn’t strictly necessary. This last few weeks I’ve been upgrading Ubuntu (as in Linux) on the machines at home. Why? Because there is a bi-annual upgrade release cycle, meaning I’ll get all the latest software. Yeah…

My brothers machine is for mindless entertainment. There’s one in the garage that I use to record and mix demos for bands that I’m in. Sometimes I’ll build web-sites if I’ve got any personal work on, be it for cash or my own perverted projects. This machine only get’s updated once a year though, because I won’t use it during winter. There isn’t any heating in the garage and I live in England.

Here’s a little fact, I’ve named them after Pokémon. Not just because I’m sad or I have a compulsion to name inanimate objects, but because they need to be referenced as separate machines when I’m setting the network up. Okay, I’ll admit, it’s a pure geek indulgence. Please don’t judge me.

My brother’s machine took all of five-minutes to install, followed by about a month to configure. Without the exaggeration, that’s about 3 hours to install and two-days of back-and-forth headless-ness to get it to work the way I like it to be.

The garage machine was a different kettle of fish. On my brothers machine I install a desktop version of Ubuntu, because it’s a desktop computer. On the other one, a version called Ubuntu Studio, for reasons I won’t patronise you with. For a start my DVD disc didn’t work, so I tried to install the desktop version and upgrade. Stupidest decision ever. It took about a week of messing around for me to give up (I’m not even joking here). I’ll put a brief geek synopsis under the graphic explaining why.

I burnt another copy and it installed fine. I say fine, it wasn’t what I expected, because it was supposed to install a “real-time” version of Linux, not a “generic” version. Why do I need it to be real-time? Because I’m recording audio, and this has to happen first and fast when the computer does it’s thing. The machine isn’t allowed to mess around prioritising YouTube videos or Chris Moyles’ whining from Radio 1 on the BBC iPlayer. It needs to be focused on capturing and recording all the audio I pump into it without jittering and jolting, all because someone sent me a message on Facebook for example. So to sumarise, Linux generic: good for being kept entertained by The Sims; Linux real-time: good for recording without Facebook notification alerts ruining a take.

There’s a messy reason why the latest Lucid Lynx version of Ubuntu Studio doesn’t come in real-time. I’m not really sure what it is, but it’s something to with the release schedule of Ubuntu being out of sync with the guys that make the real-time kernel. Okay, this post has claimed too many geek points now…

So… I’ve spent a lot of time staring at a blue screen with a progress bar on it. Because it takes so long, I have to do things to keep me alive, like move away and eat and drink occasionally, and sometimes sleep. Occasionally I pop back to check on the progress. To call it tedious is being very kind. Words can’t express the joy when it all ends.

Ubuntu Alternate Install

So onto the geek list. I encountered a lot of problems. There are always niggles and the like that I can easily live without fixing. The issues were problematic. They either got side-stepped or conquered.

  1. I couldn’t upgrade the repos off of the DVD when I wanted to update Ubuntu with the ubuntustudio-desktop package. It wouldn’t happen. I ended up reluctantly downloading gigabytes of data I already had because it wanted to use the Internet.
  2. The drivers did work (I’m using nVidia). The monitor didn’t. I assume this is a problem with the drivers or the kernel. Windows was kind enough to lend be a raw EDID file, and I pointed X.org at that instead, thanks to the help of this Ubuntu Forums thread. Worked nicely.
  3. I still have to use Windows NDIS drivers and a tedious unnecessary tutorial demonstrating how to get my Broadcom wireless card working under the NDIS-wrapper. The tutorial is very good. Without it I don’t think I’d have ever gotten online with Ubuntu.
  4. Once I’d downloaded and installed ubuntustudio-desktop, ubuntustudio-audio and linux-rt I couldn’t get any of my audio applications, like Ardour and JACK, working. They crashed the entire desktop. It was infuriating.
  5. After wiping and starting again with another disc of Ubuntu Studio, I bricked it by trying to install the RT kernel. So I had to do it AGAIN!

I’m now left with Ubuntu Studio Lucid Lynx, without a real-time kernel, quite bare and not configured because I haven’t had enough counseling to take another shot at it. I’ve read around about low-latency kernels and the like with the latest version of Linux that apparently work. I may give these a go. But when I see things like “incompatible with nVidia” or “compile from source” I start cutting my wrists with razor blades.

Well, I’ve spent all my money this month and all my close friends are away on holiday. I need this machine working because I’ve got some demos to finish for a band. All I have to do now is take a deep breath, start again and get on with it. Okay, here goes…

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