So, here we are again, with Yet Another “Back Again” Post – a kind of post that seems to be taking up a little too much space on this site. Anyhow, my dad bought himself a new box to function as server, which is great, because the old one was getting a bit slow. I hope I succeeded in migrating/restoring everything properly, if not, please let me know.
For my birthday, my dad got me a USB MIDI keyboard, which is awesome — especially if I want to use it with GarageBand, because MIDI on the Mac is soooo easy. One thing, though, is that I’d actually rather use it with LMMS and MuSe on my Ubuntu installation, but that seems to be rather difficult. It actually works fine with LMMS, but alas, LMMS does not seem to support SoundFonts and neither can I make (and play) an entire drum kit at once. I have to record each different sound individually — i.e. I have to record the tracks separatly, which is a pain, in my opinion.
So, MuSe and MIDI… It may just be me, but it seems I’ve tried every possible combination of settings and soft-synths, but still no cigar. I know that the keyboard is recognized, because — as I said — I can use it with LMMS, but MuSe just seems to make using MIDI really, really complicated, which is too bad. If anyone knows of any up-to-date documentation on the subject, please let me know, because what I’ve been digging up on google is ancient.
Anyways, I hope I don’t get too carried away with MIDI and totally lose the ability to keep it simple — don’t hesitate to let me know, if that happens. For now you’ll have to settle with my old tracks, until I’ve figured out how to work MIDI on Linux — or at least until I figure out how to make GarageBand obey my every command (hehe, yeah right… Like Apple would let me do that.) Alternatively, if Ardour make that native OS X port available soon and it has (some) MIDI editing capabilities, I might actually use that, because it absolutely rocks my boat.
Finally, if you have any tips or tricks (anything!) regarding MIDI on either Linux or OS X, please comment away (or email me). It’ll be greatly appreciated!
While the Medison Celebrity $150 laptop was obviously a good idea, it was — as some have noticed — very, very poorly executed. While debates on whether or not it’s actually at all possible to produce a laptop that cheap are still heated, I don’t think anyone disagrees that a $150 laptop would be nothing but great.
First of all when I boot, I get an message telling me that “No Updatable Devices Found”. I guess it happened after a system update, where the firmware for the device was to be updated, accurding to the Software Update program. I don’t use the drive that often, and I wouldn’t know if it did update it or not anyway. But this almost meaning less message annoys me, since it kind of shouts to my facethat the Playmoile OS doesn’t work as “Boom” as it says in the glitter adds.
While the first problem properly is a minor issue easy to solve, did I know how. This one is really odd. It concerns Firefox (Ff) and the OS X window manager, and is here parted in two issues. First; the Ff window reaches into top menu bar area. Either on top or underneath. In the picture it’s underneath. It was dragged into that area, but afterwards I can’t drag or click the bits of the Ff window that is in the menu bar area. Say it was on top and in a similar position as in this picture, then clicking the green radio-button to max the Ff window would instead unfold the Edit menu.
The other odd part is that Ff occupies the dashboard area. So when I enter the dashboard, it’s like Ff didn’t care and stay on top. Both of these two odd issues don’t happen all the time, I have to add, which makes it even more odd.
In a recent article on Slashdot is given yet another reason — actually two reasons — to not use MSN (not even just the Microsoft client, but the entire protocol). Apparently Microsoft is aware that malicious URLs can be sent through MSN, so they figured they’d better block some of them. Actually, they’re blocking the sub-strings, which means that .scr will catch not only http://example.com/file.scr but also http://example.com/my.screenshot.png and everything else containing the string .scr. The blocking is done server-side, so it doesn’t matter if you use the official Microsoft MSN client or Pidgin (The IM Client Formerly Known as Gaim), Adium or whatever’s available out there.
Now, what’s really retarded is that each and every TinyURL still gets through just fine (but probably not for long now) and now Microsoft has to play catch-up to maintain that list of blocked sub-strings. This is really, really stupid, because the poor end-user will never know why their link to http://cutesie.example.com/pics.php isn’t sent — just that it’s not. And most people will probably never see the list and know which words they can’t use, hence confusion. Besides, the fact that Microsoft choose to “solve” problems in this way instead of fixing the vulnerabilities in their software, just makes me wonder how common this practice is to them and how many other problems they’ve “fixed” in a similar manner.