I’ve been a hobbyist musician for a while now. I’ve decided that it’s time to redo things in my studio a bit, and so I’ve got some gear up for sale on eBay. The auctions end next week, so there’s plenty of time to get in cheap.
Lexicon Vortex effects processor
Music Quest 8PortSE MIDI interface with Windows XP drivers
E-mu ESI-4000 Turbo sampler (with Zip drive, CD-ROM drive and a collection of CD-ROMs).
Ensoniq DP/4+ effects processor (4 separate DSPs with some nice sounding effects)
Tascam PB-32B and Hosa PHB-184 1/4″ patch bays (two in one auction… lots of ports!)
BBE Sonic Maximizer effects processor
Music, Technology
For just $510 with a T-Mobile contract, you can “Buy a Apple iPhone”. Of course, once you get it and set it up, you’re likely to update to the latest iPhone software. At which point, del.icio.us came along, I thought it looked cool, but I really wanted to keep track of links I found interesting here, on Blue Sky On Mars. I would end up either with short blog posts that basically contain one link, or I would opt to not save the link at all. Somewhere along the way, though, del.icio.us had an update that allowed for automatic posting of the day’s links to your blog. This is great, because I get to centralize my interests here, but still use all of the del.icio.us tools.
As Twitter picked up steam early this year, I wasn’t sure what I would use it for or how it would fit into my little self-generated-content ecosystem. Now it seems like it has a logical place, just like del.icio.us does. Thanks to Loud Twitter, my tweets will get posted here every day. So, just like del.icio.us is a way to post links that I find interesting but don’t have lots to say about, Twitter is a way for me to post snippets or ideas that are interesting but don’t quite get to the level of a blog posting.
I like these tools that will actually post to my blog, rather than just appearing in a box off to the side. Once the post lands on my blog, it’s in my database and has become a part of history here at BSOM.
If you want to follow me on Twitter, my username is dangoor. I plan to stick mostly to tech, but will likely throw in some politics or entertainment bits from time to time. I will likely get other ideas about it as I start following other people there.
Gee, I guess I’m finally entering 2007 
Technology
Interesting news: Mac Rumors: Adobe Annouces H.264 Support in Flash
The reason I find this interesting is that most of the popular video sites have settled on Flash-based players as their standard user interface. From my experimentation, H.264 provides the best size/quality ratio that I’ve seen for screencasting, at least among codecs that are broadly supported. So, the addition of H.264 to Flash means that the Flash player can now be a good platform for lossy-encoded screencasts.
It’s worth noting that TechSmith’s Camtasia product already produces high-quality SWF Flash movies. Those movies are actually lossless and look fantastic, but they are bigger than a comparable H.264 movie.
Technology
For those who might be curious what I’ve been working on for the past year, check this out: ITPro: Reviews: EXCLUSIVE: Arbor Networks Peakflow X 3.7. 5 stars out of 6. Six star reviews seem a little strange, but I’m happy to see Peakflow X getting more additional positive press.
If you saw my release of TGWebServices in February, that work was done for the 3.7 release of Peakflow X.
Technology
One of my most enduringly popular blog entries is the one in which I call out for a Mac version of Camtasia, TechSmith’s exceedingly cool screencasting tool. If you search Google for “camtasia mac”, that posting is the top link. Troy Stein, Camtasia’s product manager, has been active in the conversation in the comments on that entry, and today clued me in to Jing Project: Visual conversation starts here. Mac or Windows.
Jing is an integrated screen capture and sharing tool and marks the first major foray in the Mac software for TechSmith that I’m aware of (they do have a Mac version of their codec, but that’s not the same as an actual app!). You’re limited to making 5 minute Flash movies (likely using TechSmith’s awesome lossless codec), but Jing is free and many screencasts are 5 minutes or less anyhow.
Of course, I still want to see Camtasia for the Mac, because of its great editing tools. But, it’s great to see TechSmith heading into the Mac market!
Technology
A few days ago, a bunch of present and former CareerSite employees got together in a farewell gathering for the company. The Ann Arbor News has a brief story: CareerSite moving out of state. I was the application development manager at CareerSite from late 2001 through Feb 2003. That was an, um, interesting time.
Technology
I want to use Google Calendar, because it has a nice UI and I can access it from everywhere. There is one small thing that keeps me from switching from iCal: “sticky” notifications. It’s not a complicated feature. When I reach the reminder time for an appointment, iCal will pop up a window that stays there until I dismiss it (either by closing it or by telling it to remind me again later). If my computer was sleeping, that window will pop up as soon as the computer wakes up again.
Google Notifier for the Mac can pop up reminders, but they only hang around for a few seconds, and I don’t think you’ll see a notification at all if your computers are off at the notification time. I might be able to fashion something in Apple Mail where it uses Growl to display a sticky notification for messages from Google Calendar. Unfortunately, though, Google Calendar doesn’t seem to have a way to send an email notification to any address other than my gmail address for a given appointment.And I had a really hard time figuring out where to send in a feature request to the people who maintain Notifier. So, we get a blog posting instead and a hope that the lazyweb will somehow come through.
Technology
Today, I learned about PassPack - Free Online Password Manager. PassPack appears to do everything right. The encryption/decryption happens in your browser, which means that the data simply cannot be decrypted by the people at PassPack or someone that gets ahold of PassPack’s data. They also offer a reasonable technique for dealing with phishers.
Fundamentally, though, there is still a risk with a service like this. If someone manages to get into PassPack’s servers, they can modify the software that gets sent to your browser so that it passes along your encryption key, which they can then use to decrypt your passwords at their leisure.
Granted, the people running PassPack are undoubtedly security concious. They’ll run their servers as securely as they can, keep up with patches, and would disconnect the boxes as soon as they see a sign of a potential breach. The risk is relatively minimal, but you still have to decide if it’s a chance you want to take.
Technology
LouderVoice seems interesting. The goal is to allow you to post reviews on your blog, but have them aggregated back in a meaningful way on the LouderVoice website. It sounds like a neat idea, and I’ll be interested to see how it feels.
By the way, they’re hiring and the site is based on TurboGears.
Technology, TurboGears
