Rakim - what a poet. Who else could have come up with “Another enemy/Not even a friend of me”?

Now, why I like that, and I don’t like Richard Ashcroft, I couldn’t tell you. Especially since, even for, you know, back in the day, Eric B was a shite DJ. Sounds like he’s scratching with boxing gloves on, thinking about what to have for his tea and while his piles are playing him up.

Answers, as always, on a postcard.

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Warning: non-geeks should move along.

Odd, very odd. I’ve had real troubles with the server. My shiny Ubuntu Dapper installation failed fsck tests all over the shop, worrying me greatly. Yes, there are backups, but I’d rather not have the grief, thanks very much. There were corrupted files, not recovered by the journaling filesystem, and once I’d found those I knew the jig was up. Time for a bare metal restore - of sorts. Since the OS was limping along rather than completely dead, I saved what I could to another drive and then nuked the lot.

Now, I had to choose what to install. I could go for another Dapper installation, but I have the horrible feeling that this was software corruption. I could have been too close to the bleeding edge, given that it wasn’t just the vanilla version I had installed; there were lots of thing installed from the apt universe and multiverse. The thing is that I couldn’t see any evidence of hardware failure on the drive: smartmontools showed no current errors and none in the log, so what else is a boy to think? So, I’ve switched to an ultra-conservative setup, and much more minimal, too. Debian Sarge it is, with no frills - and by that I mean, no X at all, and as little extraneous guff as I can get away with.

It’s been a bit of a pain getting the data across from mysql 5 to 4, and PHP 5 to 4 too, but not all that much - which suggests, of course, that I wasn’t using enough of the new bells and whistles to justify the pain. So now, no more pain.

One thing’s worth explicitly noting here, in case somebody stumbles across this: fine, you can use mysqldump –compatible=mysql40, but it doesn’t seem to get the auto_increment fields right. I’m going to have to go through and check all of the table structures just to be sure.

On the plus side, I’m getting really good at installing various flavours of Linux - nipnap.toastboy.co.uk has been, variously: Corel, RedHat, Fedora Cores 2, 3 and 4, Ubuntu and now Debian. If you call that a plus. Ahem. I swear, I do make eye contact when I talk to people. Heck, I even wash regularly.

(Extra bonus prizes for guessing where the hostname “nipnap” came from…)

It’s was Friday afternoon, so there I was, catching up with my favourite newsfeeds on Google Reader. Via The Register, I ended up (oh, the humanity) at an article on the Daily Mail website about a new low-head water-powered generator. Clever, if it turns out to be viable: it’s claimed you get 70% efficiency from a very low-pressure water source. But of course, this being 2007, the site has a “comments” section. Now, Peter Beswick from Romsey has had a bit of a brainstorm. Great! I don’t have a stream near to my house, but no matter! I can just stick it on the mains water supply instead! Well, now. If that has a green motive behind it, then Peter is just a numpty. Where do you think the energy comes from to make the pressure in the water pipes? Of course, if it’s just a way of gypping the water company, then I’m all for it…

Well we went bowling just before Chrimbo, and we had a lovely time, thanks very much for asking. Only trouble was, I wore my extra-long jeans - the ones E swore made me look normal, and not a freak with short legs and a long body. Anyway, the jeans got caught under my snazzy, freshly-sanitized bowling shoe, and my delivery stride turned into a flamboyant, if unplanned, splits. Oh deary me. How I cursed as our companions laughed. A week and a half on, and I still have a lot of pain, right at the top of the hamstring. Ow.

Des the Dog has got troubles of his own, though. This morning during our walk he was being his usual eejot jumping about, when he pulled up with a yelp and refused to go any further. This is the second time this has happened, too. We went to the vets this evening and it looks like his hips are getting gimpy. Poor old sausage. Now he’s on 3 kinds of medication. Thank goodness for insurance.

It seems that the Bishop of Southwark has been dipping his toe in the water, seeing what all the fuss is about over binge drinking. There he was, toddling home after having a great time (apparently) at a function in Belgravia, when the next thing he knew he was sans wallet and mobile, with a nasty bump on the head. Naturally, for a man of the cloth, he assumed that he must have been mugged, and reported it to the Police. Now, after all, it seems he may just have had too many Bacardi Breezers…

Well, that wasn’t the most pleasant way to while away the time whilst ironing. Yes, I am a new(ish) man: the ironing’s my job. It’s the least I can do. (As always, there’s a comedy quote - Denzil in the sadly missed Absolutely: “No, Gwynned, the least I can do are nothing at all!”. Great site at Absolutely Andy - including a petition to get them to release a DVD - I’d buy that!)

Aye:

So anyway, the habit that has developed is that I iron while I listen to Forest games on the internet, but of course Sunday’s FA Cup game was on the telly. With our league position being everything, we really could do without the distraction of any kind of cup run. Really. I’d rather we threw the game and got on with the business of getting promoted. Failing that, a nice easy win would be OK, but a replay is just another chance for your best players to get injured and less preparation time for the real deal: the next league game. Still, sadly, Charlton will probably present too much of a challenge, even if we win on the 12th.

I got so frustrated, I broke the flippin’ iron.

Honestly, E, you’ll have to try harder than that.

Seriously.

Here I am trying to read about Perforce at midnight on a Friday night, while E watches telly. “Ooh look”, she says, “there’s Shane Ritchie in the background”.

Answers on a postcard as to who’s the sadder..

When I was last in the U.S. I picked up a Turtle Beach Audio Advantage Micro. It’s a little USB flash drive-sized audio output interface. It has a single 3.5mm jack socket which works either as an analogue electrical output, for headphones, or as an optical digital output. Snazzy. It was pretty cheap - can’t remember exactly how much, but little enough for me to think that if it delivers better quality than I already have on my laptop, which let’s face it isn’t hard, then it was worth it.

Now, if you’re going to get one of these, there are some things I found out the hard way:

1. When you plug it in, turn the volume way down. When they say it includes a more powerful than usual headphone amplifier, they ain’t kidding. I know laptop musicians and DJs use this gizmo as their headphone out for monitoring, and it’s really up to that job. Believe me, with reasonably sensitive headphones like my Etymotic ER4-Ps, you absolutely do not want a Windows alert sound in your earholes at full blast. It hurts.

2. Don’t install their driver. I know that sounds like an odd thing to suggest, but here’s the thing. Yes, if you install the supplied “aa_micro.exe”, you can play with the daft simulated surround sound gubbins, and faff about with the EQ, but if like me you’re only interested in good quality music playback, none of that matters a fig. More to the point, there’s a real problem with the noise floor when you have the driver installed. The quiet bits in any song, whether it’s mp3, flac or even uncompressed, will sound like cack. Now, Turtle Beach try to explain the lack of sound quality away, but I’m not buying it. Even when you have your sound levels adjusted properly (see point 3 below) it still has the really annoying small-amplitude artifacts. Luckily, Windows XP has a perfectly usable driver on hand - the device when you first plug it in is recognised as a “C-Media USB Audio” device. This driver works perfectly for straight stereo playback.

3. Get your volume levels in the right range. If you’ve been used to using the bog-standard audio output on your computer with most of the levels on maximum, you really need to change them. Like I said before, the Audio Advantage is very likely much, much louder so you’ll have to turn things down - but believe it or not, there’s a knack to that. If you just turn down the master volume, you’ll get the artifacts mentioned above in the quiet parts of the music. They’re much less obvious when the driver’s not installed, but they’re still there. Instead, I do something like this - open the Sounds and Audio Devices Control Panel, and hit Advanced in the Device volume panel:

Now you’ll see the mixer controls, where you can set individual levels for the different inputs to the sound card. Your mp3 player like iTunes, WinAmp or whatever plays back through the “Wave” channel. Normally these controls are just for balancing the different inputs when they’re too different to each other, but what you’ll use them for here is to reduce the overall level coming into the final mix, so that the master volume slider can be higher. Without setting the Wave input to about 60%, the Master slider literally had to be at only a few percent before the music was at a comfortable volume for me - and that leads to the nasty artifacts. So your settings should look something like this:

Finally, the volume level in your music player app should probably be around the 50% mark:

And now I’ve done all this, what do I think of the quality? It’s nothing short of superb. It took a lot of mucking about with settings to get it right, which is why I’m posting this, but once you’ve done all that experimenting, you are rewarded with much more detail and openness than I’ve ever heard out of a built-in sound card or even fairly expensive PCI add-on cards. The little USB gizmo and my Etymotics bring out all sorts of things I’ve not noticed before. Some of that’s great - details in the nuances of voices and instruments, layers in the mix and so on, and some of it’s bad: for the first time I can honestly say that I can hear a marked difference between 128kbps CBR mp3 (stuff I ripped years ago), r3mix VBR mp3 (what I switched to - joint stereo, averages about 180kbps and is much better) and FLAC (what I’m steadily re-ripping everything to right now - keeping Seagate in business via the consequent explosion in disk space I need)

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Their news coverage is great - the BBC can still be trusted to provide top quality reporting by talented reporters. When compared to other networks, it’s pretty unbiased, too.

What the hell is it, though, with their studio production? Did some editor pipe up at a meeting and say “What we need here is Look East, only worse. Cheesy links, amateurish shuffling between stories and at least one sound, lighting or camera snafu every 15 minutes.”