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Hi, my name is Dan

Thursday, May 8th, 2008

So much since the last post…in Februrary?

Let’s see…well, first I got contacts, which I really like now, since I can actually see really well. I have decently severe keratoconus in my right eye, and I have hybrid hard/soft lenses that correct for the astigmatism caused therewith (Synergeyes KC…they work extremely well, even if I had quite a bit of trouble getting them in and out of my eye at first).

Then, I started going out with an amazing girl named Lydia, and we’re two months going strong, and she makes me really really ultra positively happy…

Then I almost got a macbook pro, but not really.

Then I am semi-employed by George’s, but I’ve yet to actually work a shift yet…

Then I was thinking of leaving Madonna and Child, but I’m still trying to decide…we’ll see where that goes.

Then I was accepted from the waitlist at Northeastern and today is the decision deadline but I honestly don’t think I’ll be going there.

Then today I am home listening to Duran Duran and Alanis Morisette after being with Adam and his check engine light flashing (misfire on cylinder two) and the car started running really rough and he had it towed.

Then the end.

Posted in Hardware, Music, Work | No Comments »

New Stuff

Sunday, February 3rd, 2008

So, a bit has happened since the last update from the Dan-front. For example, I’ve been accepted to RIC and UMass Dartmouth so far (waiting on all the others still).

And with this foray into the world of post-secondary education comes the ever-elusive need for a laptop: sure, I might be able to get by if I just brought fez with me to uni, but I need a laptop, and that’s that!

Well, here’s some background. I started out as an Amiga user. I dabbled with Macs in elementary school, but was forced into the PC world like most people. I tried to rebel by running Linux and FreeBSD, but I could never be as hip as those PowerBook-toting gods.

Until now.

Basically, I knew before the hunt even really started that I wanted a Mac. Yeah, I used to bitch and moan when the Intel transition started, but I guess I’ve accepted defeat. And things aren’t all bad, I guess. I’ve used my friend’s MacBook quite a bit for recording with Madonna and Child, and it just reinforced my beliefs that OSX is probably the overall best desktop OS the world has right now. Sure, it may not be the absolute finest technically, but it’s pretty, and you can run shitloads of proprietary apps that we all need (Photoshop, anyone?) and open-source Unix apps side by side. How cool is that?

Honestly, this is what I need. Trying to do anything music-related on Unix is almost an absolute disaster (FreeBSD is right out for this, linux makes things a little better but it’s no walk in the park). I think the guys at Apple have figured out the multimedia thing pretty decently, though, and using windows is right out for me anyway.

All I’ll need is a MIDI interface and a firewire audio interface and I’m golden. And that’s just the music side of things. As some of you know, I only run windows these days to use Photoshop, because I can’t stand the Gimp. Now I can stay in one OS and do everything I need to do.

So anyway, my friend Joel has a previous-generation Core2 Macbook Pro 15″. And he says he loves it. I am looking at this model because I have this giant phobia of buying a machine that has no way to access its internal bus (i.e. the lack of an ExpressCard/34 slot on the MacBook). Plus, the backlit keyboard is just plain snazzy. And since the padre has offered to buy a laptop as a combo birthday/graduation gift (contingent on me giving him fez, something I have no qualms with), it works out nicely (no more selling off synths!).

So there you have it.

Dan out.

Posted in FreeBSD, Graphics, Hardware, Music, Operating Systems, School, Software | No Comments »

Ardour and friends

Wednesday, June 20th, 2007

A concession is in order here:

Linux is better at audio than FreeBSD.

Sure, it sucks for everything else, but ALSA is some damn cool shit. Coupled with JACK and Ardour and any PC can be a pretty damned powerful DAW for next to nothing. Beats shelling out all the money for a Mac and decent DAW software (such as ProTools) when you’re unemployed like myself.

With this setup (and Hydrogen for drums) I was able to conceive, record, edit, and mix a D3ath D3sk song called “Aura” which, from what people tell me, is the best DD song to date (not saying much, of course…).

Now JACK itself, however, is some pretty cool shit. Case in point: my machine has two audio interfaces. One is the onboard AC97 audio which works perfectly, but the right channel on the line-in is shorted and hence unusable. Then I have a C-media chipset board which also works fine, except the line in generally sounds like complete and utter shit. The AC97′s is at least passable. Anyway, I wanted to use my ion as a hardware vocoder for the percussion track from hydrogen. I just patched hydrogen to the sound card outputting to the ion’s inputs, patched line in to ardour, and recorded. All done. It worked perfectly.

And school is done. But I still feel somewhat crappy. But that’s ok, I guess.

Dan out.

D3ath D3sk’s Aura

Posted in FreeBSD, Hardware, Music, Operating Systems, School, Software | No Comments »

Expression pedals

Thursday, February 22nd, 2007

Ok. So I need an expression pedal for my ion. Basically, this is a $0.50 potentiometer rigged to a pedal instead of a knob.

Guess how much one of these things retails for? You guessed it. $60. Sixty dollars for what amounts to a volume control and a pedal. Granted, there is a fair amount of aluminum around the whole thing, but c’mon!

So I figured, “I can do this myself!” Boy was I misinformed. I found a 5k pot in the basement and rigged it to the expression pedal jack using a TRS-RCA cable and some alligator test cables (don’t ask). Sure enough, it worked fine. Then I went back in the basement and found some wood. Except when I tried to figure out how to turn this into a working pedal, I gave up because I realised it wasn’t happening and if it did, it would come out looking like pure shit.

So now I need to just suck it up and get a nice Alesis F2 or something. In closing, I will leave you with a nice picture of my prototype.

Dan out, as usual.

The pedal.

Posted in Gadgets, Hardware, Music | No Comments »

amd64, dead babies, Charles Darwin

Friday, January 13th, 2006

I recently got the new drive (thanks Matt) and installed FreeBSD/amd64 on it. Suffice it to say that I’m not too impressed.

Firstly, compatibility on amd64 really needs improvement. I know work is currently being done on this, but it hasn’t been committed yet. But I can’t run opera (yet…), xnview, the nVidia binary driver (which is currently in the works, but they’re awaiting some “feature” that isn’t available in FreeBSD/amd64…personally I think it’s bullshit, but we’ll see), openoffice, and stuff crashes sporadically. So in short, this is a big showstopper, and is preventing me from doing a complete switch to amd64.

Also of note is that amd64 seems to use a little more RAM (for obvious reasons…sizeof(long) is now 64 bits).

There were also some small bugs in certain apps (that I fixed with only a few lines of code), namely because of the interchanging of int and long.

I’ll see how things pan out, but for now i386 is probably going to be my primary platform.

Also, I’ve heard quite my fair share of dead baby jokes these past couple of days. No, I’m not a necroinfantophile (that’s tounge-in-cheek, yay!).

And to end on a tragic note, someone fell to his demise after losing his grip while trying to ride the escalator handrail to the third floor at Providence Place. I just think it’s evolution doing its work, but that’s just me. Darwin awards, anyone?

Dan out.

Posted in FreeBSD, Hardware, Ranting, Software, Weird news | No Comments »

Attempted murder, among other things

Thursday, January 5th, 2006

Haven’t posted in a while. But now the RSS feed for this blog is valid (because it uses RFC822 dates). The changes aren’t in dbmv2 CVS yet, so stop complaining.

Anyways, it turns out that someone in my grade attempted to murder his brother with a baseball bat. How interesting.

So now I’m really into RPN. And I actually ordered parts for the new workstation. All I need now is the motherboard (A8V SE Deluxe). There is a reason why I don’t have it yet. Email me if you want to hear the whole thing.

And I have to figure out what to call this system. Mail me with your suggestions. Currently, “drwu”/”doctorwu” and “fez” are at the top of the list.

Oh, and Frank Zappa has taken over theamigan.net. I’m trying to stop him as we speak. He should surrender by Saturday or Sunday.

Dan out.

Posted in Hardware, Software, Weird news | No Comments »

New workstation

Wednesday, December 28th, 2005

Well, I ordered the parts for the new workstation. It is based on the ASUS A8V Deluxe motherboard, with an AMD Athlon64 3200+ CPU (Venice) running at 2GHz. The case, an i-star Nitro, is a full tower and looks really good. When it comes in and I finish building it, I will show you pictures.

I’m taking suggestions for the name of this new machine. “doctorwu” is the name I have in mind, but am not sure if it should be “drwu” or another name entirely. Another name I have in mind is “thefez,” or simply “fez” (guess which naming scheme those are from). Let me know what you think; I might listen.

In other news, I got really hungry, so I attempted to eat what was available within 3 metres of my computer chair. However, the problem is that all edible items are composed of at least 80% sugar, making their hunger-abating powers quite limited. However, I managed to procure both a slice of Muenster cheese and a slice of American cheese. These did a little to help with my hunger problem. However, I am still not satisfied.

I hope everyone had a good non-denominational festivity-like event time, and hopefully I will meet my goal of offending more people in 2006.

Dan out.

Posted in Food, Hardware | No Comments »

Macs with x86?

Tuesday, June 7th, 2005

‘Twas a lamentable day yesterday, as Jobs announced that Macs will now be using x86 instead of PPC. And here I was thinking that there still was a saving grace from suck-ass computers and CPUs, here in 2005.

I still have my 68k amiga here, at least. And maybe I can get to purchasing a Mac or two before they go crappy (and have DRM, to boot!)

Just remember, here in Intel country, 0x5a4f == 0x4f5a.

Businesses suck.

Posted in Hardware, Operating Systems, Ranting, Software | No Comments »

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