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10:00 – "Evolution" of singers (Britney Spears going weird, Tony Bennett hasn't changed!) learning langauges (German, Japanese, Mandarin… Perl!), software feature review (iTunes 7 cover art downloading) and Paulaner on why Germans are always on time!
Recorded in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5. Attribution: Ruben Schade.
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10:00 – High school memories in Singapore (international schools, maths classes in year 7, Clever Trevor Stanton!), The Sims 2 downloads review (alex_stanton1983’s wickedly realistic trees), user box obsession on my Wikipedia user page and Limber Timber!
Recorded in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5. Attribution: Ruben Schade.
With my ongoing efforts to learn about BSD (as opposed to Linux) and adapt it for use as a low cost workstation OS (which I have been very impressed with so far!), I've been using Parallels Desktop on my MacBook Pro to test various releases, including the flag, the DragonFly and the Pufferfish which as far as I can tell so far work flawlessly and just as fast as they do on a regular PC, which I guess is largely what the latest Intel macs are ;).
Been having some issues running FreeBSD 6.1 and the FreeBSD 6.2 release candidates though which is a real bummer :(. Upon booting FreeBSD from either a full CD ISO image, from the Boot ISO image or even from the hard disk (virtual machines I had set up in the 1970 build of Parallels previously) I receive the same string of errors:
Again this seems to be isolated to the FreeBSD (and the FreeBSD based PC-BSD distro) 6.x series on the Parallels 3036 Beta build. The official 1970 release still works fine.
Fortunately after a few minutes looking around the Parallels Forum many others have had the same problem, so it's not just my machine stuffing up. Then again, had the error been on my machine I could have fixed it I guess.
Parallels Forum postings:
Hope Parallels addresses this issues ASAP; in the meantime I'll have to stick with build 1970. Bummer :(
parallels,
parallels desktop,
parallels build 3036,
parallels 3036,
parallels build 1970,
parallels 1970,
3036,
1970,
freebsd,
pc-bsd,
pcbsd,
bsd,
virtualisation,
virtualization,
vm,
With my ongoing efforts to learn about BSD (as opposed to Linux) and adapt it for use as a low cost workstation OS (which I have been very impressed with so far!), I've been using Parallels Desktop on my MacBook Pro to test various releases, including the flag, the DragonFly and the Pufferfish which as far as I can tell so far work flawlessly and just as fast as they do on a regular PC, which I guess is largely what the latest Intel macs are ;).
Been having some issues running FreeBSD 6.1 and the FreeBSD 6.2 release candidates though which is a real bummer :(. Upon booting FreeBSD from either a full CD ISO image, from the Boot ISO image or even from the hard disk (virtual machines I had set up in the 1970 build of Parallels previously) I receive the same string of errors:
Again this seems to be isolated to the FreeBSD (and the FreeBSD based PC-BSD distro) 6.x series on the Parallels 3036 Beta build. The official 1970 release still works fine.
Fortunately after a few minutes looking around the Parallels Forum many others have had the same problem, so it's not just my machine stuffing up. Then again, had the error been on my machine I could have fixed it I guess.
Parallels Forum postings:
Hope Parallels addresses this issues ASAP; in the meantime I'll have to stick with build 1970. Bummer :(
parallels,
parallels desktop,
parallels build 3036,
parallels 3036,
parallels build 1970,
3036,
1970,
freebsd,
pc-bsd,
pcbsd,
bsd,
virtualisation,
virtualization,
vm
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35:00 – Show is back after two week work hiatus, "live" Christmas audio excursion (Raffles City Starbucks in Singapore, live studio audience, drinking coffee downtown at 11:00pm!) possible wicked new job in Singapore (but going up against graduates, youthful optimism), Wireless@SG (Singapore being first country with nation-wide WiFi), Rubenerd Rant (useless Flash in web pages), informal Software Review (7Zip's wicked contextual menus), New Zealand bidness, family Christmas traditions (nice smelling pine trees (technical name of course), Bing Crosby, Age of Empires II!), from the Rubenerd Forum (Surrealist's Christmas photos in Scotland, scones, shortbread!!!) and Keith Olbermann on why you need a sense of humour!
Recorded in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5. Attribution: Ruben Schade.
I have a fair amount of MP3 and AAC music files; last checks in iTunes and Songbird claimed that I had a total of 49.80GB of music (not including videos in iTunes), most ripped as 192kb/s, though as of late I've started ripping at 320kb/s to future proof myself a bit. Still, the vast majoraty is ripped at 192kb/s which, while miles better quality than the more widespread and generic 128kb/s.
For the most part this works fine, but occasionaly when I'm at home and not limited to my iPod I pop in a Michael Franks CD and listen with some decent desktop speakers: the audio quality difference is really noticable.
As Peter Cook said "…well it's a long introduction for rather a short [story]!" ;).
Anyway so with this whole Microsoft Zune thing going on, I thought I'd take a look at the Creative Zen (which I think is miles ahead of Microsoft and getting "closer" to the iPod with each release, and is from Singapore so it has to be good!), but what I found instead was even more interesting: the SG$139.00 Creative Xmod.
Apparently what this little device does from what I can tell from the site is it sits between your speakers and the audio out of your computer or music player and enriches the sound to regain some of the finer details of the music which would have been lost through lossy compression such as MP3 or AAC. Now I am a bit skeptical; anything that claims to improve audio quality from a low quality sourse sounds too much like turning lead into gold for me (if you get my alchemic drift!), but if it worked I would be impressed.
Has anyone had experience with this device? Sure it wouldn't be as good as a geniune CD or unscratched LP would be, but anything that makes existing compressed audio sound better would be a real plus for me.
And an even bigger question, would it make my voice sound better on the Rubenerd Show? :D
creative,
creative technology,
creative zen,
ipod,
apple ipod,
zen,
zen micro,
zune,
microsoft zune,
creative xmod,
xmod,
mp3,
aac,
lossy compression,
audio,
music
The Rubenerd Show audio episodes have been successfully moved over to the new web server as of a few minutes ago! This will mean a far more reliable show production schedule, no more interruptions, lost transfers and more reliable and zippy downloads. Mmm… zippy downloads!
As a comparison, with the old server it could take anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes to upload a 4.6MiB MP3 file, and there was no guarantee it would actually work when it finished the transfer (as many friendly people have pointed out on the Rubenerd Forum in the past!). Very often episodes could be delayed by several days because my host would just blatantly refuse to accept uploaded files, even if it was done through their "Web Upload" interface instead of FTP!
Now the entire process takes less that 2 minutes, and so far I have not experienced any upload dropouts or "stalls" as the Terminal FTP program likes to call them. I can also see iTunes and Juice Receiver downloading the files a lot faster now as well which is great news.
Tomorrow's episode, Episode 191 for Tuesday 12th December 2006 will be the first one to be released entirely on the new server. I just can't get over how fast and easy uploading is on this new server!
I'm also giving another serious look at using Ourmedia as a mirror site to prevent future troubles and to help people access the shows. Ourmedia is great because it lets you upload and share media files for free, and unlike Google Video, YouTube or PodShow and the like, it is based around the Internet Archives and is a non-profit organisation, so I feel far more comfortable using their servers to host my content without fear of it being used inappropriatly because of evil hidden clauses in licence agreements and so forth. Am I paranoid? Probably! But better safe than sorry.
Of course again if you have any problems or suggestions I love talking to people on the Rubenerd Forum, or you can just leave a comment on this blog post.
Thanks everyone for your patience and support over these last few weeks! :D
Cheers,
Ruben
EDIT: I have just been able to get internet access again. I've been called to Singapore for an emergency meeting with my employer and won't be back until Saturday. What's the point, I ask everyone here, of work when it interferes with your podcast?
rubenerd show,
the rubenerd show,
rubenerd,
ruben schade,
ftp,
uploading,
ourmedia,
podcasting,
new time radio
So I was sitting at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in KLCC enjoying an Americano and waiting for the credit card I punched in to work and give me WiFi access.
One small snag: neither HSBC Internet Banking or HSBC "Verified By VISA" work in Camino!
From what I can tell it isn't actually a fault in the browser, it's the bank selectively supporting only a few browsers and kicking out the others. For security reasons this may be a good thing: by supporting less browsers they can focus more on the security on those browsers. Still, according to Wikipedia they're net worth is in the trillions of dollars, so you would think they could afford to do a bit more cross compatibility work!
There are two ways around this problem. The most obvious way is to just use a different browser; the only one that I have got to work on a Mac is the OS X version of Mozilla Firefox.
The alternative for the more adventurous is to spoof your User Agent by using something like CamiTools to Firefox. Whether they're are any security implications with doing this I'm not sure; given both browsers use the same rendering engine and the only difference between the two is the way the browser is physically drawn in the OS, I would think it would be okay, but then again… damn it why can't they just support it officially? Grrrr.
verified by visa,
visa,
credit card,
hsbc,
banks,
online banking,
camino,
mac,
firefox,
mozilla firefox,
camitools
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10:00 – Christmas beverage review (Starbucks Toffee Nut Latte in Putrajaya) Christmas-themed Apple Dashboard widget reviews (Christmas Countdown, Festive Lights) and dashboard lights bringing Christmas spirit… aww!
Recorded in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5. Attribution: Ruben Schade.
If you have a first generation MacBook Pro and haven't run Software Update yet (yes, that would be me too!) you should run it right now not only to get Security Update 2006-007, but also the MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update 1.2:
This EFI Firmware Update fixes several Boot Camp, start up, and wake-from-sleep issues on MacBook Pro computers.
After the firmware update is successfully applied to your computer, your Boot ROM Version will be:
MBP11.0055.B08 (MacBook Pro 15 inch)
MBP12.0061.B03 (MacBook Pro 17 inch)
If you'd rather download directly, click on the links above to visit the download pages.
Personally I haven't had any of the aformentioned issues with Boot Camp, startup and wake-from-sleep modes, but I'll be applying anyway.
mbp,
macbook pro,
macbook,
apple,
efi,
firmware update,
apple,
software update
