DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

So, I feel like a shill for Office Depot, but I really think this is a great promotion. Office Depot is solving two problems for me at once: they’re recycling my used inkjet cartridges, and they’re giving me free printer paper.

Hmm, is it safe to assume Office Depot is really recycling these cartridges? I hope so.

Update, 2007-02-06: Never mind; Office Depot’s inkjet cartridge recycling program has begun to suck.

Tags: recycling, inkjet, officedepot
posted to channel: Conservation
updated: 2007-02-07 06:15:23

I now know way more than I ever thought I would about chopping and sectioning a 1956 Studebaker pickup truck, courtesy the instructional DVD my brother made with metalworking expert Ron Covell.

Who knew there’s such a thing as welding geeks?

(Yes, this is the same brother that built my custom longboard foot pedals, and my Camaro.)

Tags: covell, metalworking, chopping, sectioning, custom, studebaker
posted to channel: Automotive
updated: 2006-04-02 16:36:24

I need more input channels. My DAW, a Digidesign 002-Rack, has 4 mic pres, 4 line ins, and a bunch of digital inputs I’ve never tried to use because I had no other digital gear.

I’ve been able to maximize the inputs on the 002 via an external analog mixing board, a Mackie 1604, which has 16 of Mackie’s VLZ Pro mic pre’s. In a nutshell, I can use the mixer to combine multiple mics into fewer channels, e.g.: mic 4 toms individually via the Mackie, mix them to stereo, and therefore only consume two of the 8 analog inputs on the 002-Rack. I can effectively mic my kit this way, e.g.: two kick mics (mixed to mono), two snare mics, hi-hat, stereo overheads, stereo room mics. Or: kick, snare, hi-hat, stereo overheads, stereo toms, mono room mic.

Both these approaches, and their varations, are adequate. But for better control, and more options at mixdown, I’d rather capture two kick mics, two snare mics, individual tom mics, plus all the other stereo stuff, and maybe a mic in the stairwell too. You know how it goes.

There are a number of new products that are designed with me in mind: lots of mic pre’s, digital output. After surveying the market I narrowed my choices to two:

• Mackie Onyx 800R
• Focusrite Octopre LE

Feature-wise, they’re very similar:

 +------------+------+------+--------+----------+--------+--------+--------------+
 |                   | Line | Direct | Line     | Phase  | High   |   Phantom    |
 |            | Pres | Ins  |  Ins   | Outs     |Reverse | Pass   |    Power     |
 +------------+------+------+--------+----------+--------+--------+--------------+
 |  Onyx 800R |  8   |  2/8 |   2    | Via DB25 |   8    |   8    |    Indiv.    |
 | Octopre LE |  8   |   8  |   2    |    8     |   1    |   8    | All or none  |
 +------------+------+------+--------+----------+--------+--------+--------------+
 +------------+-------+-------+-----------+-----------+-------+-------+--------------+----------+
 |            |  Word Clock   |           |   Sample  | ADAT Lightpipe| AES/EBU/SPDIF| Mid/Side |
 |            |  In   |  Out  | Bit Depth |   Rates   |  In   |  Out  |    Outputs   |  Decoder |
 +------------+-------+-------+-----------+-----------+-------+-------+--------------+----------+
 |  Onyx 800R |  BNC  |  n/a  |   16/24   | Up to 192 |  n/a  |  Yes  |      Yes     |    Yes   |
 | Octopre LE |  BNC  |  BNC  |     24    |  44.1/48  |  Yes  |  Yes  |      n/a     |    n/a   |
 +------------+-------+-------+-----------+-----------+-------+-------+--------------+----------+

The main difference, according to both manufacturers, is the quality of the pre’s. Of course, both makers claim their pre’s are superior. But that’s always the case.

The price difference is nontrivial — the 800R streets for $1000, whereas the Octopre costs $800 (including the ADAT card).

None of the feature differences seemed compelling. I love the idea of having a mid-side decoder (as on the 800R) because I’ve had issues with phase problems in stereo recording. However, I own only one figure-of-8 mic, a Beyer M-380, and it’s probably not suitable for the sorts of things I’d like to record via mid-side, e.g. my dulcimer.

I believe the Octopre is limited to 24-bit output, which I’d like to be able to use, but if my host or firewire drive can’t manage 13 channels @ 24 bit, I’d need to run at 16 bit. Or buy expensive new computer gear.

So, unable to decide, I bought one of each.

I’ve read positive reviews of both units, but I haven’t seen a head-to-head comparison, which is what I really wanted: sure, both pre’s sound great… but which sounds better?

Tune in for Part II…

Tags: octopre, 800r, daw, protools, shootout, onyx, mackie, focusrite
posted to channel: Music
updated: 2006-04-01 06:32:40

Turns out the source of my hardware problems was a bad stick of RAM — a ~$100 memory module cost me a couple days’ worth of time. Argh.

When the symptoms first started appearing, I had the idea to run memtest, but that requires burning a CD and booting from it — and I don’t have physical access to the machine. Sucks.

This was the beginning of the end:

Message from syslogd@nsb at Sun Mar 19 03:39:23 2006 ...
nsb kernel: journal commit I/O error

After that, the filesystem became read-only:

[root@nsb tmp]# cat /proc/mounts 
rootfs / rootfs rw 0 0
/dev/root / ext3 ro 0 0

which meant logging failed, inbound mail was lost or rejected, and all sorts of other badness.

There’s a fix for the read-only problem, but it didn’t work:

[root@nsb tmp]# mount -o remount,rw /
mount: block device /dev/md1 is write-protected, mounting read-only

The good news is that the Ops guys at the hosting facility transplanted the disk drives into a new host, allowing me to grab the files I didn’t have good backups of.

Anyway, if you read this after having searched Google for one of the error messages above, my advice is to make backups immediately, but be aware that they’ll probably be corrupt. Some component of your hardware is about to make an ugly exit, and it may take your data along for the ride.

Tags: hardware, failure, server, ram
posted to channel: Personal
updated: 2006-03-22 08:11:19

After spending a year considering how easy it would be to add tags to this journal software, I spent about 90 minutes actually adding tags to this journal software. See taglinks below.

It’s a pretty basic implementation; the editing interface allows me to add any number of keywords to each journal item. At the moment, the tags are rendered as links to Technorati, allowing readers to discover other blogs covering the same topic. In a couple weeks, or, honestly, about 14 months, I’ll add a local tag-search feature that allows easy browsing of all items with a particular tag (or tags).

In terms of functionality, there’s a bit of a collision with the existing categorization scheme I’ve been using for years. But this is a classic case of ontology vs. folksonomy — of top-down, prescriptive categorization versus free-form, infinite-number-of-buckets tagging. Smart money says the latter is superior for organizing large corpora.

My old categorization scheme isn’t exclusive — every journal item could appear in multiple categories. Categories are tags, really, although in my case not very interesting or descriptive ones (e.g. auto, misc, travel). Who would go to Technorati, search for blogs about “auto,” and click through to debris.com? According to my server logs, exactly nobody, despite my creative and occasionally insightful writing about the automotive industry.

So I can imagine one day replacing my categorization system, which by the way took a couple days’ worth of coding, what with the nested and hierarchical display and fancy editing interface that I’ve used all of about seven times. Once I’ve built a browse-by-tag feature, the categories will be pretty much useless. Such is evolution… that long list of category links in the right column is basically a digital appendix. Or, maybe, a male nipple.

Why now? Why add tags when I’m not even writing that often?

A couple reasons: One, because I’d like to join the distributed community Derek Powazek spoke about at Etech. Tighter integration with Technorati is a solid first step. Two, because I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the atomicity of information, and how to best collect and present many bits of related information in multiple contexts, and I needed more firsthand experience with tags. More on this later, but probably in another context.

Tags: tagging, technorati, community
posted to channel: Web
updated: 2006-03-21 08:06:11