I’ve spent a little more time with POD Farm, and I’m pleased with it. I got it via a free upgrade with my Line 6 Tone Port UX2. Most of my experience with guitar sound is from my Digitek 2101, which has a tube tube preamp followed by a digital signal processor. I would either record direct from the line outputs with it’s speaker simulator on, or run a solid-state power amp and mic the speaker.

With POD Farm includes amp, speaker cabinet, and room simulation (early reflections). In short, this gives you control over distortion (non-linear amplification) on both sides of the effects processing, allowing sounds that just aren’t possible with the 2101.

On the other hand, POD farm can’t match the flexibility and control of the 2101’s signal processing, which allows you to create completely novel effects. POD Farm’s effects are simulations of “classic” and popular discrete effects stomp boxes. What would be really cool is the ability to create your own models from scratch.

A minor annoyance with POD Farm is the blatant up-sell: it installs numerous patch (called “tones”) definitions that refer to device models you don’t own. This means that 70-80% of the factory presets you get can’t be played on a stock install of POD Farm. Fortunately, customized presets can be stored in directories on the file system, so as soon as I pick the factory presets I like, I can move them in my own directory and ditch the upsell/broken ones.

My Tone Port UX2 came in last night. I’m pretty impressed with it. The amp/cabinet modelling stuff is really cool; I’d never tried it before. It’s not going to replace my GSP 2101, but it’s great at its intended use: getting guitar tracks on to a computer.

I ran it with Garage Band – it pretty much clobbers my poor little Mini, the UI is pretty sluggish, but all the real-time stuff (getting the audio recorded without latency issues) works flawlessly.

Here’s a little sound test I did with a GarageBand drum loop and a couple of tracks of guitar:

quick test for Tone Port/Gear Box/Garage Band

Now for the hard part: I have to start writing.

Macintosh SE
Bought: 1987
Cost: $2,300 (with Student Discount, normally $2,900).
RAM: 1MB
CPU: 8MHz Motorola 68000
Storage: two 800 kB floppy drives

I bought my first computer just before going to grad. school in 1987. It was a dual-floppy Mac SE. I started programming by writing a Pascal program that was an N-body gravitational simulation of the solar system.

Macintosh Quadra 630
Bought: 1994
Cost: $1200 (?)
CPU: 33MHz Motorola 68040
RAM: 4 MB

My last Mac – the OS was getting ugly, and I couldn’t depend
on buying stuff that would work (MIDI interfaces, CDROMs, software).

Dell XPSR
Bought: 1998
Cost: $2,300
CPU: Intel Pentium 400MHz
Storage: SCSI 40 MB (?)

My first PC, purchased when I joined a start-up. It ran as my web-server up until 2003, first running Windows/IIS, then Windows/Apache, then Linux (RedHat 9).

Dell Dimension 8200
Bought: 2001
Cost: $2300
CPU: Intel 1.3 GHz
RAM 512 MB

This is the first PC I tried to do media on. I got an Audigy external box for the thing, plus a DVD burner. I switched this to Linux around 2005 (FC3?). I used it up until a couple of days ago.

Dell Inspiron 518
Bought: 2008
Cost: $330
CPU: Intel dual-core 2 GHz
RAM: 1GB
Storage: 250GB

My latest – significantly cheaper and quite a bit better. Fedora 9 is running nicely on it.

BTW – everytime I write a blog entry I hear Garrison Keller in my head talking about Lake Wobegon.

My Dell deskop I bought back in 2000 as developed a more disk problems. My last upgrade was a SATA controller card and a 250G drive. It’s the original drive (ATA) that’s dead. I could just get another drive, but given the low price of desktops, I’ve decided to pick up a new Dell.

My Inspiron 318 is $2000 cheaper than the last one. It’s pretty much Dell’s bottom-of-the-line, but the advantage of running Linux is that low-end machines work just fine. I’ll stick my 250G SATA drive in it and end up with 500G. It’s main use is going to be as a file server, so it should do that just fine.

In other gear news, I’ve been running Time Machine on my Mac Mini. The backups combined with my DV home video has filled that 250G external firewire drive, so I need more disk there too. It’s become clear that the days of using removable media for backups are behind us. From here on out, it’s going to be keeping multiple live copies of files on hard disks.

I’ve installed wordpress for iPhone on my ipod touch. Not that I think I’m going to write a lot from here, but you never know.

I’ve been reading a lot of postmortems on the battle for HD disk formats. The battle and most analysis miss the larger issues about how media content is packaged and sold.

It’s far from clear that digital downloads will eliminate disk rental or purchases. Media content producers and distributors are uncomfortable with having consumers own content, and tend to want to monitize each and every use. The larger issue isn’t HD-DVD vs. Blu Ray vs. downloads, but the whether or not consumers can own or rent content in a way that’s attractive to them.

Both competing HD disk formats added more intrusive DRM, and DRM interference in interconnects such has HDMI have made this an even larger problem. Blu Ray has already seen an incompatible spec revision, rendering some players obsolete. Blu Ray players run a virtual machine, which allows firmware to be updated as the specification changes, but also presents a tool for planned obsolescence, or even more intrusive DRM in the future, such as time-limited disks.

The DRM imposed on these disk formats further muddies the water. What does it mean to own a disk? Most consumers assume that if they own a disk, they can enjoy the content anytime, anywhere, on any device for the foreseeable future. Increasingly, media companies are not willing to sell content under these terms.

If media companies continue to cause fear and confusion in the marketplace they will continue to kill it. TV and movie viewing is already suffering loses to internet browsing, games, and such. The improved picture quality of HD does not have the pull to expand the market in the face of confusing and customer-hostile products and services.

I added this nifty plug-in/theme from iWPhone. So this blog should be a lot easier to read
via those fun little Apple gadgets.

All I need is to re-color it retro-hacker red and black.

My wife and I like the idea of doing a year book of photos at the end of each year. But,
we’ve missed the last few years, given our busy schedule, etc.

This year I decided to try using Apple’s service integrated with iPhoto to make a bound
book of pictures from the year. I just got it in the mail today, and I’m very happy with it.
The quality is really great, and the price was about $60 for a 56-page book with over
a hundred pictures in it.

My process was as follows:

- Review/reprocess pictures on my Linux box (GIMP with RAW plugin), producting jpegs
from RAW images, typically scaled down 1800×1200.
- Burn them to a DVD for backup and import into iPhoto on the Mac mini
- run iPhoto, which let’s you pick a book template, and drag pictures where you want them.
- click the handy “Buy” button.

Next time around, I think I’ll leave the jpegs at full resolution. I got in the habit of scaling them
for upload to my web gallery, but it’s probably better to preserve the resolution for the book.
The lower resolution is fine for when there are 2 or more pictures on an page, but the full-page
shots probably would have come out better at camera-native resolution (roughly 3000×2000).

Today, I moved my notebook (IBM/Leveno T42) up to Fedora 8. Thinks went very smoothly. The wireless network just worked; a first for this notebook. I’m still working on getting dual-headed displays working, but everything else is going great.

One thing I forgot about the desktop (Dell Dimension 8200) – I had to work around a hang as the machine tried to boot of the install DVD – (Here’s the Bug). The fix was to add the parameter “edd=skipmbr” to the kernel command line.

I ended up turning SELinux to “Permissive”, which is basically the same as “Off”, except it logs things it doesn’t like.

All in all, things went quite well. Both installs were complete disk wipes, and it’s been this simplest OS re-install I’ve had yet.