5 Feb
Needless to say, I haven’t updated this jammy in a while. Godaddy charged me to keep it up though, so up it stays.
I’ve been doing the entertainment law blogger thing over at http://95years.com and spewing nonsense on twitter. Might try to take this badboy in a new direction in a few weeks, but in all likelihood I’ll get complacent and it’ll remain dormant.
STAY TUNED!
22 Jul
Richard Perez is a SF artist/illustrator. I first mentioned dude here but have been following his flickr photostream for a while now. Super duper fun and creative stuff getting churned out on a regular basis. He has a few prints up at his new shop, which I will be plunking down some cashish for shortly.
14 Jul
ArsTechnica has a piece today on Pandora’s support of the Performance Rights Act.
Radio has ramped up its opposition to the act, claiming that the act will cost thousands of jobs and millions in tax revenue. Somewhat ironically, the site also claims that the act will hurt music diversity on the radio.
Um…?
12 Jul
Threw together a little 8tracks retrospective of my favorite dancehall/roots/rocksteady covers of mj tunes.
2 Busy Signal Remixes, Some TOK, Tarrus Riley, Derrick Laro, Shinehead and Olly Buck to round things out. Enjoy
12 Jul
This is kinda sick. Going to Rio in November, but may have to rethink getting over to Sao Paolo if this is how they throw down.
Still trying to find a direct download.
23 Jun
Glocally Newark is a site I stumbled upon after reading an article over at the always-excellent daily newarker. The folks (folk?) over there are doing a stand up job reporting back on various cultural type things happening in Newark. So far there’s a pretty strong slant on the downtown side of things (as is to be expected, downtown Newark is where shit happens), but it seems like the site has nothing but potential.
Catch me over on the food posts making comments.
Here’s to their continued success
7 Jun
Apologies in advance for the long and seemingly offtopic post, but I’ve been trying to figure out this solution for many years and finally having done it makes me happy.
Now that the weather is starting to cooperate, I’ve been working on figuring out the best way to access my music library from poolside. I wanted to get it done without wasting any money on a unitasker media playback system like a squeezebox nor did I want to be stuck using apple’s stuff with an airport express. Here’s my setup.
Hardware:
Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver
3 Sets of rock speakers Snagged these for 25 bucks a pair a few weeks ago. Mega Score!
A/B Switches
Old Dell Inspiron Laptop
Logitech Harmony 880 Remote Control
Iphone
Software:
Songbird
Songbird Remote Pro Iphone App
NTFS Link
First step: Route everything through the receiver.
Easy enough. The onkyo badboy has a “zone 2″ option that allows me to play two different zones of speakers at the same time (because you know, the name isnt self explanatory), so the outdoor speakers were all connected to zone 2. I have an a/b switch that allows me to choose which speakers get music outside. Not much to explain there either. It’s a big yard so being able to turn off certain areas (like the ones close to the neighors) makes life easier. I added an activity to the harmony remote that allows me to control the volume level without having to be in the line-of-sight to the receiver. That’s kinda clutch.
Step two: Control the Library Remotely
I wiped the laptop a few weeks ago in order to make it work as a little media server. The music, is scattered across a bunch of other PCs, external hard drives, etc. across my house. I needed a program that would let me pull from all the different sources in order to manage the library, and one that had a suitable remote interface for the iphone. Itunes got knocked out real fast. It’s a evil monstrous resource hog and it doesn’t support watched folders and has issues with networked tracks and it doesn’t update the library when things are removed and… well fuck itunes. That’s enough.
The other two options, then, were media monkey and songbird. I’ve been using media monkey for a long time and love it to pieces. It’s far and away the easiest way to manage a big library across a network, so it was a solid and obvious choice from the outset. The only problem – the remote. iMonkey is a fully featured remote app for Media Monkey, but it’s frigging ghastly, expensive, and a pain in the ass to set up. I don’t want to have to run separate software on my computer in order to control my media player, and if I do, I don’t want to have to fiddle with ports and IP addresses and sundry every time I try to get it up and running. Sorry media monkey, I love you but for this one you lose.
That brings us to Songbird. I had fiddled with an early release of the program but was turned off when I couldn’t use it to manage my iPhone like i could with itunes and media monkey. For this, though, it’s more than perfect. The one thing I found tricky was getting it to watch multiple folders. In order to do this, I had to install NTFS Link and create a special folder on my desktop pc with NTFS junction points. What that does is trick songbird into thinking that every junction point is a subfolder in the main folder, and it then goes and watches and indexes every one of the folders. Sneaky!
Getting the remote app up and running was a breeze. Just a simple extension install within the program and I was on my way. The ui is beautiful, and it pulls info from mashtape to do photo slideshows and artist information along with album art et al. It’s a little tacky to have to pay $4 to control an open source application properly, but whatever. It is what it is. I’d also like to see search integrated into the app but whatever.
Now listening to my music outside is a breeze. If you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go out to my pool and sip a lemonade, read Brillat Savarin’s Physiology of Taste and listen to the new Fat Freddy’s Drop Album. I recommend you do the same. At your own pool, not mine.
6 May
Had to halt the music posts to talk about these crazy awesome ceramic sculptures I just stumbled across. Eva Funderburgh is a ceramic artists based in Seattle. I found her work yesterday after looking at her brother Dan’s house tour at design sponge. Great stuff. I can’t quite pinpoint what it reminds me of, but it feels sort of like a cross between something out of star wars, where the wild things are, and something that would have come out of the tar pits on Denver, the Last Dinosaur (how’s that for an awesome 80s pop culture reference?). Anyway check out more at her flickr site. More after the jump. Continue Reading
