Tag: audio

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The Maker Movement (Audio)

Web414 Matt Gauger and I talked about the The Maker Movement at the February 2011 Web414 Meeting. Here’s the audio in case you missed it.

Besides the history of the maker movement, and the modern-day rise of it, we talked about Hackerspaces and Makerspaces, how they may be similar or different, as well as some of the things that go on at a makerspace, and what type of people (and things) you might find at one. We also talked about our own place here in town, the Milwaukee Makerspace.

We really didn’t do a lot of planning for this talk, as we were filling in for someone with another topic who couldn’t make it, but I think that’s fine, and just goes to show that you really don’t need to prepare that much to speak at Web414, as long as you know the subject, and can speak intelligently about it (or fake it like we did) you’re good to go.

You can find the audio at Ourmedia or the Internet Archive, and you can download an MP3 of this talk.

Also, if you want to get all of the audio I publish automagically downloaded podcasting style, subscribe to the feed.

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iPod Review – Five Years Later

iPod

I got an iPod for Christmas in 2005. I’m going to review it now. Wait, 2005… Is that a typo!? No…

I’m still using the first iPod I ever got. My wife gave me the 5th generation 30GB iPod with video. And yes, I did review this iPod back in 2007. So what? I’m reviewing it again.

I love this iPod. I have not felt the urge to upgrade or replace it. It works as well as it did 5 years ago when I got it. The interface is simple and easy to use. It does one thing, and it does it well.

I use this iPod almost every day. At least, every day I drive. I’d guess that 98% of its usage is in my car as an audio player connected to my car stereo. I have no desire to get an iPod touch, as I actually think the interface would be much more difficult to use while driving. In my previous review I did mention something about this:

The iPod interface also requires you to look, or at least be able to feel around and guess where to push. Other players (with actual buttons) allow you to memorize where the buttons are and what they do. I could operate my Rio while driving and never take my eyes off the road. This seems to be a big concern with the iPhone as well, it will require visual attention to be able to use it.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been using the old iPod interface for so long, but I feel much more at ease using it to navigate for music playing than I do for my iPhone. It’s all spin and click, no typing or swiping.

I still on occasion have an issue with the iPod not turning off, but it happens seldom enough that it’s not really a bother. Battery life also seems a bit shorter than it used to be, but hey, it is 5 years old and has been used a lot. The battery does hold a charge, so that’s good. The only really bothersome thing is that at some point it got confused and started showing the wrong artwork for some of the files on it. So I’ll be listening to Sleep and it shows album cover art for Cat Power. I’ve gotten used to it. A restore might fix that, but I’ve never had the energy to do one.

I don’t need apps, or wifi, or a camera, or anything except a music player, so as long as it holds out, I’ll keep using the 5th generation 30GB iPod for my automotive audio needs.

(And yes, I do realize that by posting the sentence above, it will somehow cease to function within a matter of weeks. I’ll let you know when that happens.)

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BarCampMilwaukee: Progress

BarCampMilwaukee We’re about two months past BarCampMilwaukee5, and I stumbled across an old blog post of mine titled BarCampMilwaukee2: Ideas which was posted about two months before BarCampMilwaukee2 happened. I hope that made sense…

The post mentions a few things that we wanted to do at the time, and I’m happy to say we’ve (finally) accomplished a few of these things.

Kevin had the following suggestion:

Podcasts. There is no time of year better then when the SXSW podcast feed fires up again. I think video of the whole confab will be too intense and would require some people to be in production all day. That’s no fun. I was thinking of setting up audio recorders and running them non stop. Video of some more interesting visual sessions (read robots) would be neat. In fact, we should have a session room dedicated to video so were not schlepping stuff all over.

Ah yes… Audio! Kevin says “I was thinking of setting up audio recorders and running them non stop.” Well, we came pretty close on that one. The Convo Droid consists of a Zoom H2 Handy Portable Stereo Recorder with an 8GB SD card. It can easily record over 30 hours of high quality audio. I ran it pretty much non-stop during BarCampMadison3 and BarCampMilwaukee5. I captured a ton of audio. In fact, I probably still haven’t processed it all yet. (We need to define a process for BarCampMilwaukee6 to mark the beginning/end of a session, and do a better job of tagging the audio.) For BarCampMilwaukee5 we also had Gabe Wollenburg and Joshua Cowles capturing audio. Most of it showed up on the BarCampMilwaukee Blog (I also set up my own site to allow for automagic download “podcast style” see my audio tag for more info.)

Kevin also mentions video… a bit more resource intensive than audio, but still doable. For BarCampMadison3 I had two MiniDV video cameras, and a handful of blank tapes. I managed to capture a number of sessions, which you can find by browsing through the barcampmadison3 tag. I would have recorded more, but I ran out of tapes… I was able to do a lot of video capture at BarCampMadison3 because I wasn’t really involved in organizing or running it, so I was free to capture. For BarCampMilwaukee5, I was too involved in running things to deal with setting up cameras and swapping tapes.

If all goes as planned, we’ll have at least one room in Bucketworks wired up for quality audio/video capture at the push of a button before BarCampMilwaukee6 rolls around…

And if you’re wondering why we care so much about capturing and publishing the audio and video from BarCamp, it goes to the core of what the event is all about sharing knowledge, not just with the people at the event, but the people who couldn’t make it, or don’t know what BarCamp is yet. Share what you know… Learn what you don’t. :)

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Plan a BarCamp

BarCampMadison While waiting around for BarCampMadison3 to start, Matt Gauger and I started talking about how to plan a BarCamp. Luckily, the recorder was rolling to capture this incredibly insightful conversation.

And when I say “incredibly insightful conversation” what I really mean is File Under: Silly.

Also, listen carefully for a guest appearance by Ashe Dryden.

You can also download an MP3 file if you’d like. (And for our freedom loving friends, enjoy an Ogg file.)

Also, if you want to get all of the audio automagically downloaded podcasting style, subscribe to the feed. Why you would want to do this, I’m not really sure.

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Logic Express Migration

Logic Express

Over the years I’ve become a fan of Apple’s Logic Studio (which I use at work) and Logic Express (which I use for personal projects.) They’re both pretty powerful applications for audio engineering. We’ve done a lot of good stuff with these apps.

About a year ago I tried using Apple’s Migration Assistant to move a user to a new Mac. There was some failure, mainly involving Final Cut Studio. I ended up having to call Apple and finally talked to a guy who straightened it out (it was serial number issues) and pretty told me to AVOID using Migration Assistant for Apple’s Pro Apps (Final Cut Studio, Logic Studio, Aperture.) He told me it doesn’t work… usually due to how the installs bind to the hardware of the machine, or something like that.

I’ll ignore the fact that Apple’s Migration Assistant can’t deal with it’s own applications properly for now… I’ve got Logic Express to deal with…

I finally got Migration Assistant to work really well on my last Mac move. Everything seemed fine. All of my applications, settings, etc. appeared to be in working order. All except for Logic Express 9.

No matter what I did, I could not launch it under my normal user account. I tried reboots, a reinstall, and nothing, It just hung there. I tried another reboot and reinstall. Nothing. I created a new user account, and it launched fine. Tried the install under the new user account, and it seemed fine. Went back to my user account… no good. I tried trashing it and another install, and this time it didn’t even show up in the Applications folder! I found this Apple Support Article: Pro Applications: Entering serial number after migrating causes the application to stop responding and tried to trash /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.aelwriter.plist this didn’t work either. I was getting a little bit annoyed by now. I’ve been taking care of Macs professionally for 15 years, and this one had me a bit stumped. (And I wasn’t about to do a system reinstall!)

But finally… I fixed it! I ended up watching Console.app for a while when trying to launch Logic, and saw that it was trying to launch /usr/sbin/AELWriter which didn’t exist. I copied /usr/sbin/AELWriter to my new Mac from the original Mac I migrated from, and also copied /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.aelwriter.plist as well, and we were back in business. Logic Express launched, asked for a serial number, I provided it, and it’s running right now.

I don’t give up easily.