previously known as [cold][wet][durham], [dirty][grimy][london],[busy][shiny][toon],[frantic][crowded][south]
Fuck monkey and chuff weasils - I’ve just seen the lineup for Portishead curating ATP, and it’s just amazing, and completely sold out. I’d have bought 7 bed villa and worked out how to pay for it later, but even they have gone.
Anybody got a spare ticket? Will exchange for anything you want. Anything.
editted: It would appear the situation is somewhat unclear, so I pulled my original post. I have re-opened it because people seem to have found it and been 404′d into confusion. I offer no judgement, make no calls, I just hope it all works out ok.
original post:
My many and various vanilla friends, don’t click on these links, they will only scare you.
A love modblog.bmezine.com, I’m a bme memeber, and a devotee to zentastic, Shannon Larratt’s personal blog. Shannon and I are polar oposites in the world, we really are, but his love and devotion to his daughter really shine through in his posts and photos, and he is somebody who really really does inspire me virtually every day.
There have been some rumblings on the interweb about whats going on over in Canada, and this post from Warren Ellis scared me a bit, especially as the original post on modblog has since been deleted (if indeed it was there - I assum it was - but I didn’t see it). Anyway, I went to log into iam.bmezine.com today for the first time in ages (IAM is the personal networky bit of BME) and got the following message ”
Recently, many ugly rumors and innuendos have been spreading across the Internet regarding the fate of BMEzine, BMEvideo, IAM and Modblog, as well as the state of our personal relationship. Allow me to address the two issues separately.First, I wish to assure you that BMEzine, BMEvideo, and Modblog are fine and will continue to be so. While we have experienced some technical difficulties with IAM as of late, we expect those to be resolved in short order. Your personal content is perfectly safe, and will not be lost. Some user accounts appear to have been deleted but please don’t worry as we have a complete back up of the site from Wednesday September 19th, 2007 on a machine that is not affected by this outage. Those of you experiencing difficulty accessing the site will be fully credited for your down time. I wish to assure you that Shannon and Myself will continue in our respective roles at BMEzine as long as we both desire and I will strive to ensure its healthy future.
BMEshop is entirely unrelated to this matter and is accepting and shipping orders just as they normally do.
Shannon is currently updating BodyTwo during this unscheduled outage. Shannon’s desired contact email address is snowrail@gmail.com.
Regarding personal matters, I feel sad that any issues regarding my relationship with my husband have been made public. I know you understand that there is a fine line between public and personal personas, a line that often blurs, especially in the “he said, she said” world of the Internet. Please respect our wishes to keep our personal lives just that…personal, while we work through this trying time.
Our mutual wish is that you continue to enjoy BMEzine and its family of sites. Please know that we value your contributions and the community at large.
Thank you for your patience and understanding.
Best regards,
Rachel Larratt
BMEzine.com”
Shannon has a post about the situation here over at bodyTwo, where he seems to be maintaining a blog thats a bit like modblog. I hope all goes well, it’s a rubbish way to spend a birthday.
A good start - get arseholed on a plane, start smoking, fight and then live off scraps of left over food and have to get a charity to pay for you to get home because you’re skint and nobody in the UK will lend you the cash. Well done Stephen Robinson, for looking like a twat.
Whilst looking at houses online I came across this gem of easily misinturpetable legal wording:
“PERSONAL INTEREST VENDOR: We are required under the Estate Agent Act 1979 and Provision of Information Regulations 1991 to point out that the client we are acting for on the sale of this property is a ‘Connected Person’ as defined by that Act. ”
Connected Person? Like somebody who “knows people”, people who’ll break your knees if needed?
He does not fear the health and safety Nazis!
He is a geek and proud!
He makes and burns things!
His Secret Life of Machines remains my favorite ever peice of TV.
Whom else could say “The ‘wind’ is spouting fire to start the windmill going. The sails formed a giant catherine wheel. Note the rocket powered pets below the telegraph poles. The windmill opened out during the 10 minute show to reveal a tiny living room with me and Andy Plant dressed as Barbie and Ken. We fed the rocket propelled pets, which shot in from the sides, and then everything caught fire, including the working TV set.”
I love the work being done by the crew at Guerrilla Gardening. In a world of red tape, beurocracy (spelling?), and health and safety, surely planting up waste ground and “social spaces” is a great thing? The planting that goes on in social spaces is generally terrible. If I see another greying bank of scrubby bushes, untended and unloved. Get out there are replace them with something interesting!
Somebody I’m working with is fasting, not because of his religion, but because his flatmate is fasting and he’s showing him support. As part of his fasting, he is only eating biscuits and fruit during the day, and a sandwich at lunch.
I posted a while ago about my proposed storage strategy. Well, I’m three days into trying it out, and I’m about to go off travelling around for a bit so I thought I’d throw a bit of quickie review.
I bought a Synology 407e with 4×250Gb SATA drives in it. RAID5 formatted when I got it, it worked right out of the box as a samba shared space of about 700Gb all told once formatted and the OS installed.
I plugged my music usb drive into it, and it mounted it up. The web interface would have been ok to copy the files over but I managed to get a telnet session up and running on it using the instructions here and a bit of hackery. The root password is the same as your admin password once you’ve actually got a connection.
100GB of mp3s copied into place, I turned on the iTunes server from the web front end and … nothing. No idea what was going on but telnetting to the Cube on port 3689 got a responce, so mt-daapt had fired up. I installed Rondevous Proxy on my iBook, pointed it to cube-ip-address:3689 and with a local proxy of myTunes.local and iTunes then picked it up. No idea why that didn’t work out of the box, but I suspect its something to do with my router as much as the Cube.
Next challege - streaming music over the internet. I fired up the “Internet Service” offered by the web front end. This is of course … Apache. Installing Zina was easiest done by expanding the zip on my iBook, tarring it up, uploading that via the front end, and untarring direct on the box via telnet.
Out fo the box I would have had to have copied all of my music from /music to /web/zina/music for it to find it. This was not good, so I removed /web/zina/music and replaced it with a symlink to /music, but this didn’t work. I had to edit php.ini (which is hidden under /usr/bin/syno/etc), adding /music to the open_basedir variable. Bit of security risk, but seems to work. I then replaced the symlink and Zina will fire up and find all my music (all be it badly as I’m running it from the file system and not parsing all the ID3 tags to a mySQL db).
Next challege - making sure every man and his dog can’t nick my music. Easiest done by editting the .htaccess in the /web/zina/ directory, adding information as reworked from javascriptkit.com and then editting the .htpasswd file (which is in another odd location under the syno user too). To get the md5 crypted password I used www.tools.dynamicdrive.com because the one I created on the iBook with openssl piped into md5 didn’t work, not sure why.
So now I have music available for streaming on my local subnet in the flat, and streaming over the internet to my work machine. Soon to come, media streaming for the films, and locking the whole thing down. Shame I can’t get sshd working at the moment - I hate using telnet. Also - a static dns address would be handy.
I was about to write a huge ranting post about shit awful design of modern day products after my evening of fighting with a flimsy and knackered dishwasher, but instead here is a link to a website about living in domed houses. They look wonderful, truly wonderful.
It breaks my heart when people come out with such complete rubbish as “Condoms are not sure because I know that there are two countries in Europe, they are making condoms with the virus on purpose” (Archbishop Chimoio). HIV will ravage and rape your entire flock is you preach such complete tosh. Interestingly though “Archbishop Chimoio told our reporter that abstention, not condoms, was the best way to fight HIV/Aids”, which is a round about way is an excellent message.
Either don’t fuck about (or prefereably don’t fuck), or use condoms. It’s not rocket science, and if I hear one more person telling me that sex with a condom on is rubbish, I’ll break their face (or point out that they are probably shit in bed if thats is really the case).
With their existing customer base, who are used to using their payment system and front end, I can’t imagine Amazon can go wring with serving up DRM free mp3s which you can then use on any device (and backup etc etc).
I wonder who’s tunes they are serving up, and what the payback for artists and labels is like?
Elitism is alive and well
One of the perks of my job is that just occasionally I get to travel first class on the British Train network. This afford plenty of opportunities for a spot of people watching.
First Class travel by train not like first class air travel. The cost is roughly double, rather than five or six times the cost, and thus the comparable increase in luxury is not that as seen with airlines. I’ve never flown first class, but by all accounts is falls into the “super luxury” category of life and thus possibly the massive mark up is justified. I suspect however it (the mark up) is there to engender the “fear of standard” as described so eloquently in The Undercover Economist.
First class trains are another matter. If you have a full price, completely flexible, expensive enough to make your heart falter ticket, you may use the first class lounge in the station. There are nice seats, free tea and coffee which aren’t bad at all, and no station announcements to wake you from your slumber, resulting in a very restful 40 minutes kip, and a missed train. Thanks God you had that fully flexible ticket hey!
Once aboard the train (the one after the one you planned to get), the seats are a little nicer, and theres a it more leg room, and the free tea and coffee continues (though this time at greatly reduced quality in my opinion). The carriages are a bit quieter, generally screaming children free, and if you keep your ears open you get to pick up some wonderful titbit’s from big companies. This afternoon I could have noted down the major players on the client and service provider for a nice juicy front-page-of-the-tabloids government project, the money involved and what a bunch of fairly junior employees thought of their clients. I didn’t note it, I couldn’t be bothered. You are generally spared the ear achingly pathetic tinny tones of be-tracksuited yoof playing piss-poor happy hardcore “remixes” of 1980’s TV theme tunes, which is a blessing worth paying the ticket price for alone in my book. Many times I’ve been driven almost to psychotic rage when the dulcet tones of Nightrider (Screaming Ecstasy Remix featuring DJ Dust and MC Fuckwit) melds into the throbbing beat of Smashface and Fucknuts genre challenging bangin’ house rework of Bagpuss’s “Fiddlestick and flap noodles”. Christ Almighty, even making up these shitty track names makes me angry (and laugh).
So as my train now glides tiltingly (yes, this is being written on the train right now) down through the country, whom am I sharing this journey with? Well, across from me is a lady in her middle 30’s, sporting a knitted waistcoat over a loud spotted brown silk top, a vacant smile on her face, eyebuds wedged deep into her ears. Maybe she is enjoying a little happy hardcore, but she is gracious enough to not play it through her speakers.
The rest of the carriage look a little like me, all be it me three years ago (less jaded, better groomed, louder and not yet beaten into submission by SLAs, client requests and contracts) or a little older. The older group split wonderfully into two groups, those who have achieved for the day and at 5pm can unfurl the paper and attempt the crossword, and those who must be either under the cosh or chasing promotion because they’ve printed enough documents to highlight with pen for the journey.
There are a scattering of people who are joining me in the frantic typing and editing, mostly using Word from what I can see. I’ve gone for the full-screen old-school editor JDarkRoom which is have been evangelizing about for a little while. It’s unlikely anybody will read over my shoulder, but not impossible.
The train company are providing free wireless, which I shall make use off in a little while to post this. I wonder how secure people are being? My copy of Ethereal is playing up and I don’t have my Mac about me to have a noisy through the traffic, which is a shame. You’d be amazed at what other corporate juicy nuggets and gems of private information float about the airwaves.
Right - I’m off to make use of the loos, leaving all my valuables in plain sight, safe in the knowledge that they are extremely unlikely to be lifted in this atmosphere of genteel business casual. I’ll lock my keyboard though, you never know what sneaky bastards are about 
Radio silence for a few days, I’m off to learn things, the likes of which will never impress at cocktail parties nor Christmas tables.
As I have noted beofre, I really don’t like Microsoft Word. It does everything, badly. I’ve just written than last post about storage using JDarkRoom, saved it as plain text (6kb for 1000+ words) and normally would have then pasted it into Word to spell check it. Luckily remembered I’ve got ASpell install so I rightclicked it, sent to > ASpell, and a nice flat text box appears where it gives you the options for each word. 1,2,3,4,5,6 are words it thinks it might be, i is igore, r is replace, a is add and there were a few more. Total time to check, under a minute, and that was adding in words because I was new to it. Brilliant. Faster than Word, and as accurate. Out of interest I pulled the text into Word and saved it - 26kb.
I own a lot of things digitally, and have a highly mobile lifestyle. My CD collection must be 500+, my DVD collection pushing a 100, and I average traveling 300 miles at either end of the week (give or take a hundred depending on where I am). I can pick up a handful of Cd’s and a couple of DVDs to see me through the week on a Sunday night, but when I end up being away for a longer period you get sick of the same 5 albums not to mention the jewel cases being destroyed, and the extra weight to lug about through airports, train stations and on my back.
The answer of course, was to digitize the lot, which I duly did over the course of about a month. CDEX tore through my CD collection (two desktops and a laptop working in parallel). DVDdecoder, acidrip and handbrake sorted out the DVDs gradually. In total the whole lot comes to nearly 300 gigs (no point ripping DVDs to low quality after all). Any new buys are then fed into the system as and when I get them, and now I’ve gone through the pain of the initial digitization, it’s easily managed.
Now this comes with two problems. Firstly, legality. I have bought every one of these items, either first hand or second hand, and I’m not distributing them, so I can’t see that I’m trying to rip people off. I’m just trying to watch/listen to stuff I own.
Secondly, and more importantly (in my book), is how do I store and transport all this stuff? When I went though the initial digitization hard-drives were pretty expensive. You can now get an external 500gig drive for under a hundred quid, so having two drives, one as a backup, is not difficult, but USB drives really really don’t take kindly to being lugged all over the country. I’ve lost one drive so far, and I imagine I’ll lose another fairly so as it’s making some horrible noises. USB also have the problem that it’s single computer only, and it would be very cool to have my music available to any of the computers on my network. Initially I bought an NSLU2 with the idea of hacking the firmware and installing an iTunes server. This would have been nice, but it was fatally flawed (for me). Firstly you need a spare USB hard-drive to use to hack it (install their OS, remount on another machine and thrash the shadow password file, remount and have root) and… it’s only USB 1.1 and thus indexing a 50,000 track mp3 collection is painfully slow, in fact, virtually impossible. Also - no movie streaming, only sharing by samba, which is not ideal.
So it looks like a NAS (network attached storage) device is the key. Out of desperation to get started, I bought A buffalo drive. You trials and tribulations with it are well documented on here.
I currently own 4 external hard drives. All USB2, I have an 80gb, 160gb, 250gb and a 500gb. The 500gb just about has a copy of everything on the other drives, and thus my total storage requirement is about 500Gb. At the moment if it wasn’t for the 500Gb backup, a single disk crash would loose my films, music or photos.
I need a setup which is resilient to single drive failure (well, preferably multi-drive failure but hey I’m not buying Netapp kit!). I’d like everything to be available everywhere via the Internet in a secure manner, but I’m willing to loose this. I’d like to have a couple of weeks of music and films with me portably because I end up working away form home in hotels quite a bit at times.
What I’m planning to have in there end it the following setup:
A Synology 407e cube, which will provide RAID5 across 4 SATA II drives (probably 250Gb each, total storage roughly 750GB). RAID gives me some fail-over at the cost of a about a quarter of the disk space. The 407e will also provide an iTunes server (locally) and media streaming for films, but luckily you can ssh to it securely over the net, so I should be able to use some ssh-tunnel magic to access to the music remotely. It has built in USB ports, so I can get the family machines sharing the printer over it too which is handy, and you can also backup it’s content across the USB to off-site it every so often and prevent a fire wiping out everything I own (though it would take out every other bloody thing I own!).
So that should cover all my on-site needs, but I still travel and would like some local content too (trains, planes and automobiles not having wireless access). At the moment a USB external drive is chunky, but brings with it a wedge of stuff, however it is also heavy and externally powered, making using it on trains etc difficult unless you carry a powerstip (ironically, I often do). I think what I’ve going to do it buy a bloody great USB flash pen. 4gb would be 2 films and 20 Cd’s (a film is roughly a gig, a CD roughly 100megs). This is a little more than I need for a week, not quite enough to 2 weeks, however if I had remote ssh access to the rest of the collection every so often because I was at work, I could top up. An 8 gb keyring would give me more than enough for 2 weeks however.
The total cost of this setup - it’s not cheap. The NAS would be 400 notes barebone. The 4 SATA 250GB drives, about another 120 quid. 50 quid should easily cover the USB pen, and I can reuse my 500GB and 250GB drives, leaving me 2 free smaller portable drive to flog/hold in reserve/ give away to family. Phew.
With all of us storing more and more things digitally, I can’t help but thing that most people are unlikely to shell out nearly 800 quid (once you’ve factored in everything and a bit more) to provide a terabyte of storage, but at the moment, a single drive failure (of a re-install of XP or Vista) would wipe out most peoples legitimate content (iTunes downloads for example) and family photos!
Yes, this got me very excited. Very. “In a couple of weeks the BBC World Service will be recording a dramatisation of ANANSI BOYS, starring Lenny Henry and Matt Lucas”
Lost from the net for a little big of timne, CatCam is back! Follow Mr Lee’s adventures.
Wow - trustedplaces.com has had an overhaul, and it’s looking pretty bloody brilliant. The front end is faster and slicker, the reviewing process is much nicer (the last one seemed to suffer a little for session slip), and they now have some nice new features (recommendations based on your profile, etc).
One thing I love is that they nominate (automatically or otherwise, I don’t know) local expert e.g. people who review stuff and know an area quite well. I am, allegedly, a local expert on The Toon. Brillaint. I’m really quite chuffed.
After many many hours of wasted time, numerous emails and some very rude phone calls, I have my money back from the piece of Buffalo kit I bought. They eventually sent me a product return notice, I took it into the place where I bought it, and they put the money back onto my creditcard. They then offered memy product return notice back, not really understanding what it was for I think.
So, I’ll never be buying Buffalo kit ever again. I’m sure its mostly fine, but the rudeness and contempt I was treated with when i was trying to be as polite as possible was shocking.
Buffalo staff at the call centre in Ireland, you have just cost your company money.
Just when I thought the music industry was getting the hang of the new economic models that are around, they come up with a totally moronic idea. Did they thing they were being innovative? Maybe. Did they think this would kill downloading? Possibly (though I imagine even the painfully optimistic realized this was unlikely). Did they repackage an outdated, superseded, unfair music distribution mechanism and hope we won’t notice quite how idiotic it is? Yes.
So, from the Sony who brought you rootkit loaded CD’s and the RIAA who keep suing people, I present: The Ringle!
Key features:
A CD single (circa 1994)
3 songs (ish. Most likely 1 A-side, 1 B side (effectively) and a remix I imagine)
A ringtone (how? DRM’d versions for each mobile phone type? An mp3 (unlikely)? An online service with some for of unique identifier (most likely).
A price of $6-$7! Thats £4 even with the fucking brilliant exchange rate.
Loons. You really thing this will work? have you noticed how well iTunes is doing, and that’s even with it’s DRM, lock-in, limited catalogue (ok, the catalogue is pretty extensive, but its got whole wedges missing), slight-overpricing. I know Apple make the most money out of this, but surely it wouldn’t be too terrible for you to band together, form some sort of alliance, exploit the Long Tail theory and charge a sensible amount, not rely on some crack-ass crazy local software (lets not mention what NBC wanted iTunes to include if they were to deal with them).
Why not decide to play nice, and as a result, be well through of? Gone are the days of advertising telling you what to buy. Gone. Completely. I don’t watch TV, I listen to the BBC and I have ad-block installed to destroy banner ads. If you want to sell me something, it needs to be a) great, good. b)accessible when and where I want it. I’m not buying a Sony piece of hardware just to play your songs. c)reasonably priced. I buy cd’s for a tenner when I’m at gigs because I loved the band and because I watch that tenner go into their pockets. I will not pay this in HMV, and I certainly won’t download it for that price when a hardrive crash will loose me the lot.
Think about what you want (money), and what I want (music) and what you don’t want (me downloading) and what I don’t want (no money, lack of choice, the feeling that the aetists maybe aren’t making any money out of this). In that sweat spot in the middle is where we shall all be happy. I’ll buy more music, possibly thus spending more money, not feeling the need to download it, and thus… you make more money! Free market economics at work gentlemen, its a wonderful thing. The harder you make it (DRM, prices, back catalogue, etc), the more incentive there is for me to not pay you, and don’t you dare say that I’m not a music lover because I’m not paying you, it’s a very long time since I spoke to anybody from a major label at a gig.
