O'Reilly Digital Media

Related link: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/6397

After reading my blog “Maximizing
Mini MIDI Keyboards,” a reader wrote in with an intriguing (and slightly
scary) challenge:

I used to have a small keyboard that I affixed to a board (with velcro)
that was attached to a 360-degree camera tripod attachment. The whole thing
was attached to the dashboard in my car so that I could learn songs off the
radio or CDs as I drove to work. I think it was a [RadioShack/Casio] Concertmate.
It was only about 18" long, but [had] good sounds (for what it was).

Of course, it died on me and that model isn’t made anymore. I have
searched the web for hours looking for something equivalent. Everything is too
big. Perhaps the closest is the roll up keyboard [here
and here],
but I need something sturdy and not so long. I can only reach so far from
the driver’s seat.

I know, I’m crazy to play while I drive (I play my harmonicas anyway)
but don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it. Who might make such
a thing? If the answer is “no one,” then what’s the lightest
MIDI controller and smallest sound module? (I won’t even get into whether
I could play that kind of rig through the car stereo while at the same time
listening to a CD.) My kids think I’m crazy (and dangerous) but a man’s
gotta do….

My first thought was that maybe he should velcro his hands to the
steering wheel instead of goofing around with a keyboard while driving, but
the bigger question persists: What’s the best-sounding ultraportable keyboard
with built-in speakers?

The Yamaha
CBXK1XG (below) comes to mind. When I worked at Keyboard magazine,
I borrowed one from another editor to goof around with one day when the power
went out temporarily. But the CBXK1XG lists for a whopping $499. I think that’s
because its internal synthesizer is quite good-sounding, although you wouldn’t hear that
through the tiny onboard speakers. It also uses minikeys; it wasn’t clear from
the reader’s letter whether that would be a problem.

A better approach would be to buy a used keyboard. Searching
eBay for Casiotone or Concertmate keyboards under $20 brings up numerous models. Using a MIDI controller and sound module seems awkward, especially
because, as the reader notes, you’d need to add powered speakers or a mixer
as well. And I definitely wouldn’t want the guy in the next car to be grappling with that while driving.

So, what’s the best-sounding ultraportable keyboard with built-in speakers?

Related link: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/7903

This is Part 3 of a series on abuse of the IP Relay service for the deaf and speech-impaired. Here are links to the other installments: Part 1, Part 2, Part 4.

Do The Companies Care?

Many IP Relay operators posting on Nigerian Scams criticize their employers for not doing enough to control abusive IP Relay calls. Some charge that the relay providers have an interest in keeping call volume high, since they are paid about $1.31 out of the Telecommunications Relay Service Fund for each minute of call time. According to Clear-Conscience:

“They want them to continue… A supervisor told me that if we hang up on scam calls, we’re hanging up on money. Another supervisor said he has morals too, but he doesn’t wear them on his sleeve.”

Clear-Conscience works for MCI, but operators for other relay providers make similar accusations. They say providers don’t do enough to block calls from foreign IP addresses (relay calls are required to originate from the US), don’t do enough to warn the general public, and are overly harsh with operators who try to call attention to illegitimate calls–including summarily firing those who interfere with such calls.

The relay companies, though, say such complaints are ill-informed.

For a start, says MCI spokesperson Natasha Haubold, providers can’t simply choose to ignore the law: “Federal law prohibits [operators] from interfering with a call in any way… It’s like a phone tap–when you and I are having a phone conversation, there isn’t a third party listening. So they have to act as if they’re not there. If they didn’t, it would be like an unauthorized phone tap”

Haubold says the legal prohibition on interference extends even to flagging calls that appear suspicious, since that would put the operator in the role of an active eavesdropper; complaints must come from affected parties, such as businesses that have been paid with an invalid credit card. But, she says, MCI’s response to such complaints is aggressive: “MCI will take immediate corrective action and notify the authorities if necessary. We will identify IP addresses and block them if they have been used in a fraudulent way.” Haubold says MCI engineers have been able to cut the incidence of unwanted relay calls to a low percentage of the daily total.

Those comments are echoed by spokespeople for ATT and Sprint. Sprint’s Debra Peterson describes the complaints of the relay operators as anecdotal, and adds that they are hard to assess, since many of the operators who complain are anonymous (posters on Nigerian Scams use pseudonyms for fear of being fired). She says Sprint tries to warn businesses to be on guard, but prefers not to publicize the risk more widely, as that might encourage even more scammers and pranksters. Sprint sent a tip sheet to businesses last year; the Illinois Pharmacists Association stores a PDF copy here, and see “Sprint’s Tips”, below. The FCC also has issued advisories, such as this PDF.

In response to the charge that relay providers like the revenue they reap from abusive calls, Peterson says that “any sort of fraud really hurts a valuable service”, and points out that in the context of Sprint’s annual revenues (nearly $27 billion last year), the income from IP Relay “is not something that would make or break” the company.

StopRelayAbuse.com’s Lisa Markkula is unsatisfied by these explanations. She charges that the release of business advisories and the blocking of IP addresses are both ineffectual. She points out that many if not most people are still unaware of the risk and that it’s all too easy to use free or cheap IP-masking software. Markkula features a chart on her web site showing the rapid rise in relay minutes and linking it to what she roughly estimates as $25 to $40 million dollars spent on bogus relay calls in a recent six month period. She speculates (though with limited evidence) that some of that money may be going to terrorists:

“Early on, Internet Relay was flooded with calls to Pakistan, a well-known hub of terrorist activity. Eventually this problem was solved when Internet Relay providers stopped placing calls to numbers outside the U.S. and its territories. In his book Blood from Stones, The Secret Financial Network of Terror, author and former West Africa bureau chief for The Washington Post Douglas Farah describes petty scams similar to those run through Relay.”

Sprint’s Tips

From Sprint’s “Tip Sheet For Businesses Using Internet Relay”:

“Businesses should taken caution when they receive the following types of requests through a relay call to prevent from becoming a potential victim of this type of scam:

The caller wants products fast (”can you ship it today?”)

Multiple units ordered and asked for in “pieces” (1000 t-shirts is “1000 pieces”)

Lack of knowledge of the product

Lack of questions about the product

Not concerned about price

Poor grammar or spelling is used

Uses American names in reverse (last name as first, first as last)

Repeatedly calls via Relay to rush the order

Refuses to wire money directly to you

Often poses as a religious or charitable organization”

Return To Article

To be continued. Next time: What Can Be Done? After the last installment is posted, you’ll be able to find the completed series at my O’Reilly author’s page, under the O’Reilly Weblogs heading.

Related link: http://www.hackaday.com/entry/1234000687060851/

I mentioned this on my blog for the book yesterday, but yesterday morning, my step-by-step walk through of the PSP firmware 2.0 to 1.5 downgrade process appeared on hackaday, and then later in the day was mentioned on G4’s Attack of the Show. I missed the show, but heard about it from friends later. If anyone has a screen grab of the mention, let me know. Even if I don’t ever track one down, it’s still pretty cool.

However, the coolest thing about all this is the downgrade exploit itself, so I thought I would follow up on my how-to with a short discussion here of how (it seems) to work.

A tiff file is placed in the /PSP/PHOTO/ folder on the Memory Stick, which when accessed via the PSP’s interface causes a buffer overflow, whereby a bit of code is executed that changes the system info of the PSP. On restart, the PSP is fooled into thinking that it is running version 1.0 of the firmware. It isn’t. It still is running 2.0, but when you go to System Information pane on your PSP it will say it is running 1.0. More importantly, when you try to run the 1.5 Firmware Update, the program that checks to make sure that you need the update also is fooled by this simple substitution of 1.0 for 2.0. It suddenly thinks “Oh this is a 1.0 PSP so I should allow this updater to run.” The updater then runs and errors out and freezes at 99%. Force the PSP to restart by holding the power for a little over 10 seconds and when it boots back up you’re suddenly running 1.5 and the whole wide world of homebrew is open to you. Now for the bit of warning: this is a firmware operation, so keep in mind that as with any firmware update, a loss of power during installation could turn your PSP swiftly into a very attractively designed doorstop.

I wonder how long before Sony comes out with firmware 2.01 and tries to throw another roadblock in the way. I’m more optimistic about everything they throw in the path of homebrew eventually being overrun by the great group of hackers out there chipping diligently away at the code to keep things open.

Do you do PSP homebrew? If so, what are your favorite bits and pieces? I like PSPChess, myself…

Related link: http://tpemble.urfbownd.net/itunes.php

The album cover images in iTunes are just 170 pixels wide, but higer-resolution versions are hidden away on Apple’s site. A fellow named Tristan figured out how to retrieve these 600-pixel-wide images and wrote a PHP-based Web page to do it. (Thanks to Hack a Day for the tip.)

To grab the big images,

1. Click the little gray arrow next to the album’s name in iTunes. The window will switch to the Music Store view.
2. Right-click the 170-pixel cover image that shows up and select “Copy iTunes Music Store URL” from the pop-up menu.
3. Go to Tristan’s iTunes Art page, paste the URL into the box, and click the submit button. (Here’s one to try: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?playlistId=37516)

Below the search box, you’ll now see two new URLs, one for the small image and one for the large one. They differ in just the last few characters—170×170-99.jpg vs. 600×600-100.jpg.

I’m trying to figure out how the script maps the album URL to the image URL. I tried entering a bogus value for the playlistId variable and got an error page with some URLs, but couldn’t make much sense of them. Any ideas?

As for what to do with high-res art-on-demand, here’s a bit of inspiration.

Yeah, I know 600px isn’t truly high-res, but it should allow some interesting tricks. So how does the mapping work?

Related link: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000AA305M/

Cheapskate that I am, I run the Eudora e-mail client in Sponsored mode, which means it plops a small ad onto the corner of my screen, changing it every hour or so. Once in a while, the image is interesting enough to click. Today I ended up on the Amazon page for the new David Gray album Life in Slow Motion.

The customer reviews were striking. Although most customers gave the CD five stars, a significant number gave it just one star, solely due to the intrusive copy-protection on the CD. What these customers discovered was that the CD was loaded with software that prevented them from copying the tracks to their computers and transferring them to their MP3 players. The only indication of that restriction is a tiny black dot near the bottom right of the CD cover:

If you happen to click on the CD cover image, a larger version pops up, revealing a bit more detail:

As near as I can tell, it says, “Content Protected. See Reverse For Features.” (Features!?) But the back of the box isn’t shown on the Amazon page.

Another recent album, Foo Fighters’ In Your Honor, does have the identification tag “[CONTENT/COPY-PROTECTED CD]” right next to the title on its Amazon page. (Indeed, I found that page because it’s the #1 Google hit for “content protected CD.”) Clicking a link in the Product Details section pops up the following vague explanation:

This product limits your ability to make multiple digital copies of its content, and you will not be able to play this disc or make copies onto devices not listed as compatible. [I failed to find a list, by the way.] Content/copy protected CDs should allow limited burning, as well as ripping into secure Windows Media Audio formats for playback with most compatible media players and portable devices. In rare cases, these CDs may not be compatible with computer CD-ROM players, DVD players, game consoles, or car CD stereos, and often are not transferable to other formats like MP3.

The spotlight customer review below that had a better explanation:

You cannot rip tracks from the CD. When Windows starts to auto-run the CD, it quickly installs a hidden driver on your machine that is used to garble the sound of CDs protected by this technology. So now my computer is “infected” with this driver. More research pointed me to a hidden driver on my machine called SbcpHid. Go into the Windows device manager, find it, stop it. Now you can rip.

While there was a sticker on the front of the CD, I found this to be very sneaky. The driver is not marked with any company name or details. The timestamp was manually adjusted so you couldn’t tell that this was installed today. This sounds like most of the spyware that we are all trying to rid our computers of.

More than 300 other potential customers found that (1-star) review helpful—and it didn’t even talk about the music. A subsequent reviewer lauds the music but states, “I will NEVER buy another [CD] with this ‘copy protection’ on it….NEVER. I don’t care if Led Zeppelin is reincarnated and puts out a new CD, if it had this ‘crap’ on it, I would not buy it.”

How sad that the very people who could be an album’s best ambassadors are turning their energy to complaining about the product, devising workarounds, and driving down the album’s ratings. You may have heard about a member of the band Switchfoot recently posting—on his record company’s site—a list of hacks to bypass the copy-protection on the band’s latest CD. The entire thread has been removed, but you can read the cached Google version here, itself a pointed comment on the battle to control information.

To date, I think I’ve bought only one copy-protected music file, and that was mostly to try the service. (And as I describe here, I immediately converted the file to a non-protected format so I could use it the way I wanted.) So I dunno. Perhaps songs should come with intriguing little ads instead of copy protection?

How would the ideal copy protection work?

Related link: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/7903

This is Part 2 of a series on abuse of the IP Relay service for the deaf and speech-impaired. Here are links to the other installments: Part 1, Part 3, Part 4.

The Pranks

While scam calls appear largely to originate overseas, prank calls often come from Americans, especially adolescent males, and including fans and associates of Howard Stern. Pranksters will often use IP Relay to phone a friend in the same room with them, and then make the operator repeat explicit, homophobic or racist comments, as in the following, taken from a transcript stored at StopRelayAbuse.com:

HEY DANTE. I”M USING IP RELAY BUT THIS GIRL IS A BITCH. THE OPERATOR. I THINK SHE IS ADDICTED TO SEX TOO. I BET SHE WANTS TO F*** MY HUGE D***…

Howard Stern plays recordings of prank Relay calls on his show. This is from a summary of the June 20, 2005 episode (see “Stuck In Your Head?”):

“…[Howard] then played a new prank call featuring Sal and Richard’s newest favorite discovery–the Internet Relay Operator. In this call, the guys used recorded clips of [KKK member and frequent Stern guest] Daniel Carver, which you can imagine were a bit racy, but the operator kept up with them…”

Operators Rebel

But no matter how obvious it is that a call is illegitimate, a relay operator is usually not allowed to do anything about it. Throughout the call, he or she is supposed to act as an entirely neutral presence, like just another switch or wire in the circuit. That’s because IP Relay is intended to provide “functional equivalence”, as laid out in FCC regulations mandated by the Americans with Disabilities Act (See “IP Relay Rules”, below). That means that making a phone call should be as convenient–and as private–for someone with a disability as it is for those without. Operators are therefore forbidden to take any role in a phone call beyond facilitating it.

This works well for legitimate users, who want to know they can trust operators simply to relay their words accurately. But some operators find it unbearable to stay in their machine-like role no matter what they have to repeat. A group of them are so angry about having to participate in fraudulent or prank calls that they have become online vigilantes. On a web forum called Nigerian Scams Using IP Relay, relay operators trade tips about how to stop or even bust the scammers, even though such efforts are disallowed by their employers and by federal law. As one Nigerian Scams poster puts it:

“I never signed on for this, none of us did… I am exposing as many fraud calls as I can, I will continue to do my job to put an end to every one that comes through my computer, I will process all regular calls as they are meant to be, but every IP relay call is suspect in my book… I know that what I am doing and what all us are doing is far more valuable than sitting by and doing nothing…”

Posters on Nigerian Scams use aliases for fear of losing their jobs. “Clear-Conscience”, one of the site’s founders, contributes this tip among many others:

“Got a call that I wasn’t sure about then found out it had to do with a flight to you-know-where. Didn’t have a whole lot of information from the call…at least not enough to make a decent report. So, I got on relay and called the sugar mamma back. She thought I was the perp the whole time and gave me all the information I asked for. Reported to the credit card company and the airline… In the last week, my reports have saved well over 10,000 dollars in fraudulent activity…”

“Sugar mamma” refers to a US-based intermediary helping an overseas perpetrator. According to operators–as well as the FBI–some of these accomplices are recruited through online dating services, where scammers troll the chat rooms. Often the accomplices are themselves dupes, unaware that they are assisting in fraud.

IP Relay Rules

The following are excerpts from the FCC regulations covering IP Relay calls:

(2) Confidentiality and conversation content.

(i) Except as authorized by section 705 of the Communications Act, 47 U.S.C. 605, CAs [Communications Assistants] are prohibited from disclosing the content of any relayed conversation regardless of content, and… from keeping records of the content of any conversation beyond the duration of a call, even if to do so would be inconsistent with state or local law…

(ii) CAs are prohibited from intentionally altering a relayed conversation and, to the extent that it is not inconsistent with federal, state or local law regarding use of telephone company facilities for illegal purposes, must relay all conversation verbatim unless the relay user specifically requests summarization, or if the user requests interpretation of an ASL [American Sign Language] call…

Return to Article

To be continued. Next time: Do The Companies Care? After the last installment is posted, you’ll be able to find the completed series at my O’Reilly author’s page, under the O’Reilly Weblogs heading.

This is Part 1 of a series on abuse of the IP Relay service for the deaf and speech-impaired. Here are links to the other installments: Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

Have you ever wondered how deaf people make a phone call? How they chat with a friend, order a pizza–or get hold of 911? At one time they had to find a hearing friend who could make the call for them, translating their sign language or written notes into speech for the person on the other end. Then came teletype (TTY) terminals, which allowed them to type their half of a conversation, while an operator served as the intermediary.

But for the past few years the Internet has been making the process cheaper, faster and easier. Using a system known as IP Relay, which is offered by ATT, MCI, Sprint and others, deaf people–and people with speech impediments–can connect via any web-ready computer, PDA or phone. A trained operator is still required, but it’s a huge improvement to be able to call from just about anywhere, as opposed to those few places where a TTY terminal might be found.

There’s just one problem: The system is under attack by scammers and pranksters, causing trouble for the people it’s designed to help, and costing American businesses and phone customers millions of dollars. It turns out that IP Relay provides a convenient way for its abusers to hide their identities, and it lets them make free long distance calls to boot. (See “How An IP Relay Call Works”, below.)

The Scams

Some IP Relay operators say they now spend much or most of their day unwillingly facilitating scam and prank calls coming in over the net. The scams usually involve purchases with fake or stolen credit cards or checks, and seem mostly to originate in Nigeria or other West African countries. They’re easy to spot because of non-idiomatic use of English and sloppy use of common relay abbreviations. One frustrated operator has taken to using an excerpt from one of these calls as a sig:

NEED SHIP TO MOTHER LESS HOME CAN GIVE ADDRESS GAGA

That’s from a call purportedly from an orphanage, or “mother less home”. The repeated “GA” is the abbreviation for “Go Ahead”, as in “It’s your turn to speak.”

An operator who goes by the alias “Clear-Conscience” told me about some of the scam purchase attempts to which he’s been a reluctant party:

“Pharmaceuticals, especially Centrum Silver… a lot of copies of My Life by Bill Clinton for some reason… guns, guitars, sex toys…. [and] lately one of the more disturbing trends is they’re ordering puppies, in bulk.”

Scammers hope to make money by reselling the merchandise. In some cases they offer “payment” for more than the asking price, with a request for the mark to send them the balance as a refund (an example of the 419 fraud, which is commonly committed via email and is named after the section of the Nigerian legal code that outlaws it).

When these frauds succeed, there are multiple victims. The vendor, of course, is out the value of the merchandise. A bank may be on the hook for a bad check it cleared. The operator has to live with knowing he or she assisted a crime, however unwillingly (and with little choice, as we’ll see). Legitimate relay callers may find that the system is busy because of all the bogus traffic, or they may get hung up on by businesses that have been burned before (although it’s illegal for a business to refuse to serve a deaf caller). And ultimately all Americans phone customers pay. That’s because IP Relay service is paid for by the Telecommunications Relay Service (TRS) Fund, which is supplied by a levy on phone bills.

Abuse of IP Relay has probably cost Americans many millions of dollars so far. There has been a surge in billed relay minutes since 2003, such that the TRS Fund’s administrator, the National Exchange Carrier Association (NECA), recommended a 43% funding increase to $413.3 million for the current fiscal year. That sum is used to cover other kinds of relay calls as well, such as Video Relay for users of sign language, but it appears likely that much of the extra traffic is illegitimate. According to Lisa Markkula, the founder of a site called StopRelayAbuse.com and herself a former relay operator, some operators estimate that between 25 and 80 per cent of the calls they handle on a given day are scams or pranks.

How An IP Relay Call Works

First, a caller browses to the web site of one of the companies offering the service, such as AT&T, Hamilton Telecommunications, MCI, Nordia-i711, Sorenson Media or Sprint. Let’s say you were to go to MCI’s site at ip-relay.com. If you clicked the link to make a call, you would see a prompt like this:

Pls enter any special instructions then the nbr to dial and hold for opr GA

After connecting you, the operator would say to the other party whatever you typed, and type for you whatever they said, using abbreviations such as GA (Go Ahead), QQ (Question mark), RO (Relay Operator), and SK (Stop Keying, i.e. “Hang up”). The call would be free for you, since it is paid for out of the Telecommunications Relay Service (TRS) Fund, which is supplied from levies on phone bills.

Since IP Relay is intended to be used only by deaf, hard of hearing or speech-impaired residents of the US, if you don’t fit that description you’re not allowed to use the system. But because of the very features that make IP Relay so useful for legitimate users, it would be hard to stop you.

Return to Article

To be continued… After the last installment is posted, you’ll be able to find the completed series at my O’Reilly author’s page, under the O’Reilly Weblogs heading.

You can just imagine the meeting.

“Boss, I have finished designing the Roland RC20XL Loopstation.”

“Hiro, you Idiot! You have created a machine that makes no sense! You designed a guitar player’s pedal effect with lots of knobs. In order to use things as basic as the “tap tempo” feature, the player has to save a phrase, and that means quit playing guitar in mid-song and get down on all fours…Aw, Jeez.”

“I’ll fix it, Boss. Don’t cry. What should I do?”

“OK, Hiro, we might not be sunk yet. Listen carefully. Add a stereo TRS quarter-inch jack to this design so that we can plug a dual footswitch into it. That way when the owner realizes that our design is idiotic, he might think it’s his fault for not having bought the accessory. He’ll buy the pedal, he’ll be able to mount the box high and hit the pedals with his feet, and we’ll make a couple of bucks to boot. This could just work…”

Two Weeks Later. Time to Ship Product.

“I did it, Boss! I added expandability that allows for optional pedals that sit on the floor while the rest of the box is up high. And guess what? I’ve got a surprise for you. The remote pedals serve completely different functions from the built in ones!!!”

“Um, so the thing is still unusable, it’s more confusing, and the user can now buy optional equipment to compound his misery.”

“Exactly!”

“Hiro, you’re fired, Man. And you’re out of the band, too.”

—————————————–

I have a new, um, “instrument” called The Big Rig, about which we might perhaps write more later, which features a brand new Roland Loopstation. But unlike Hiro, I solved my problem with a throttle cable from a lawnmower. Can Roland sell those?

The Loop Station. Note the cable attachment in the lower left of the photo.
The Lawnmower Cable Pedal

Maybe Hiro can get his job back…

OH, my God, I just searched for a photo of the Offending Hardware and found out…the same problem applies to an entire line of products!!!!

YIIIIIII!
Roland Twin Pedals

What problems have _you_ solved with a throttle cable?

A cry from a fellow composer arrived yesterday asking how to quickly adjust the gain level for over 10,000 audio files. Designers from all over recommended the usual applications — Peak, SoundForge, Waves, Barbabatch, Wavelab — as help to his predicament.

Fine recommendations, but this is a perfect job for Linux. A simple script, the bash shell and free Linux audio applications can fix him up nicely. (Those who don’t have a spare PC quit belly-aching. Linux doesn’t require the horsepower that Windows craves, so retrieve that old clunker you tossed last year and see my article Resurrect Your Old PC for Music—with Linux for the cost of a blank CD.)

Admittedly, this solution is a big yawn for *nix users, but you’d be surprised how many artists are still locked into GUI-land and don’t see the benefit of shells. Perhaps it’s not all their fault… maybe we’ve stopped passing on the tricks of past generations… take note old timers: pass on your treasures!

I’ll use a slightly different example than the gain level adjustment, but it’s virtually the same for any audio process. Let’s say you want to change all your WAV files to 22k. Easy, write a script! There are many ways to accomplish the task, but I’ll use the sndfile-resample utility that uses the handy libsamplerate library:

sndfile-resample -to 22050 -c 0

Here’s the entire loop you can place in a bash script:

The script simply takes all the WAV files in one directory, sample-rate converts to 22k and places the converted files in another directory. What could be easier? (Obviously, this is a segment from a larger script — the $outputdirpath is a variable set earlier.)

There are plenty of ways to process audio in Linux and there are many good plugins at your disposal: EQs, limiters, filters, delay lines, flangers, etc. See plugin.org and LADSPA for a partial list.

Free? Yep, the other thing that Windows doesn’t have: FREEDOM. Linux is free and so are 99% of the audio applications for Linux — including all the package updates.

Speaking of free: Here’s an important update to my article on Fervent Software’s Studio To Go!. Fervent software is providing free package upgrades for all customers of version 1.0:

Here’s the scoop from Fervent:

*** FREE PACKAGE UPGRADES ***

For existing customers who have installed
Studio to Go! v1.0 we have made available free

upgrade packages for the major audio applications.
Log on to the Fervent website and look in the
registered user’s menu to find out more!

Now, what was that about no free lunch?

How do you render massive amounts of files?

Related link: http://www.nintendo.com/newsarticle?articleid=Uuo6JoTDkBzpp3yLzpJSxvJrvmUZJ6El&p…

There’s been a disconnect for a long long time in the world of computer music-making - the human interface to the box. If you’re a keyboard guy, MIDI is okay, but in the end, the kinds of expression you can get are still pretty limited.

Guitarists are used to all kinds of nuances (literally) at their fingertips - bending strings, palm muting, scratching strings, generating harmonics - but most of this is not translatable to the typical computer rig.

And anyway, both of these approaches are fine for entering music in the first place, but what about a human interface for mixing, or applying real-time parameters to a soft-synth, or screwing with EQ?

Typically, you’ve got a bunch of binary keys, and a not-very precise mouse to work with.

Nintendo has foist upon the world the Dimension videogame controller that works in thin air. Sensors track the motion of the hand-held device and gestures are fed back into the gaming system to control the action.

How long will it be before some enterprising hacker rips this sucker apart and hooks it up to a music machine? Not long, I’m hoping.

It’s so much easier to get emotional expression when you play something analog, whether it’s a bent guitar string, or a turnable dial, or a drumstick cracking a snare in different intensities. You need to have that connection to your body. Trying to approximate data changes that sketch emotion though a set of numbers, or a graphline on a computer interface is just so much harder, and typically not worth the effort.

How dumb is it to mix surround audio using a series of two dimensional, discrete controls?

I’d rather gently wave my hand, shape the sound, hear instant feedback, experiment - play the sound. Okay equipment hackers, I’m waiting.

What cool computer-music input devices have I missed?

Related link: http://www.bleep.com

I once asked an executive from Columbia House how the giant record club picked the 30-second audio previews it put online. He said the system would just start recording at 60 seconds into the audio file, because that’s where the chorus usually hits in a pop song. Add a little fade-in and fade-out, and you’re ready to rip the next tune.

The problem, of course, is that the hook of the song may not come between exactly 60 and 90 seconds. Or maybe there are multiple hooks. Or maybe it’s an extended ambient piece with no hooks. That’s a big reason why browsing online music stores is unsatisfying and uninformative. At least in a used-record store, you can “drop the needle” wherever you want.

That’s why I was excited to find Bleep. Not only does this online music store sell files in high-bitrate MP3 and lossless FLAC format—neither hobbled by DRM—it also uses a slick preview system. When you select a song, the embedded Flash player draws a waveform for the entire song and begins playing the first 30 seconds. Clicking anywhere in the waveform will play a new 30-second clip from that point. By looking for changes in the waveform, you can get an idea where the music itself changes, speeding the search for interesting parts. Here’s a screenshot:

And here’s a condensed version of the player, embedded in this blog with an iframe. Click the green triangle to start playback, then click elsewhere in the waveform to jump to that point:

Unfortunately, I didn’t find the rest of the Bleep site as easy to navigate as the player, but in that one area, I felt like I was calling the shots again.

Related link: http://www.chocopoolp.com/microbe/reference.html

Music is fun.



At least, that’s the rumour.

When you make music for a living, sometimes you can get caught up in the business of the thing and lose track of that. And anything that brings that unbridled sense of joy back to this cynical old audio guy is more than okay with me.

Chocopoolp has done this for me, with their little inexpensive app for the PalmOS, appropriately named “Microbe”.

Microbe is a 4-track 16-step-sequencer with two “synth” tracks (referred to in the documentation as “analog bass synthesizers”) and 8 simple sample players set up as 4 drum samples and 4 “extra” samples. It comes with TR808 and 909 samples but you can assign any sample you have loaded on your device or on an SD card attached to your device as the source sample.

There are 32 individual 16-step sequences that can be created, and then arranged and saved as a song. You can chain sequences together to get single sequences of longer than 16 steps if you so desire.

Each track has independently adjustable wave form (for the synth tracks), plus controls for cutoff freq, resonance, fmod, decay and volume - adjustable in real time for live performance interaction with your sequences.

There are even 3 effects busses, with real-time parameter control.

All of this on my phone. :) Talk about your multi-use device.

That’s the coolest thing for me - having all the fun of an old style sequencer in the palm of your hand. It brings back happy memories of many hours playing around with an Arp Axxe that was owned by a friend of mine. Pure fun. And now, no matter where I am - say, waiting in line at the bank - when the creativity strikes, I can capture that beat or that sequence with a few flicks of the stylus. Or I can just goof off for a while, enjoying the moment and the process of creating whenever the mood strikes me. Which I tend to do more often than not. Hey, it doesn’t all have to be art. :)

There is even a free trial available so you can play around with it for free. What more could you ask for?

Remember when we made music because it was FUN? “Microbe” will remind you of those happy days.

Have you tried it? Love it? Hate it? Share…

Related link: http://katrina.telascience.org/

Up-to-date maps and imagery are key to the rescue efforts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Armed with a handful of online mapping tools, plenty of enthusiasm and access to more data than most of us would know what to do with - a band of developers puts the data onto the web for all to see and use. It’s available in a variety of formats, including web pages, an Active X viewer and the open standard web mapping services.

It began with a set of 1,500 JPEG images of the storm’s aftermath from the US National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Norman Vine (University of New Hampshire, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and MapServer hacker) and Mark Lucas (L3-Titan) worked with NOAA to get access to the data so that the group could pull together some products, with the hope of having a useful product available quickly. Instant communication on the project was possible through Internet Relay Chat, bringing together several colleagues who helped support the project further.

Flown as high resolution digital aerial photography, the data was ready to be brought together into an image mosaic, but not without some heavy-duty preparation first. Vine, with some help from Garrett Potts (L3-Titan) prepared and mosaicked the data using the Open Source Software Image Map (OSSIM, pronounced “awesome”) toolset, which L3-Titan helps maintain. With some back-and-forth with the right people at NOAA, a useful product was brought together in half a day.

The information wouldn’t be much help if it remained as a dataset requiring an image processing package, so a set of web mapping interfaces were pulled together. John Graham, from San Diego State University’s Visualization Center, helped provide the massive amount of bandwidth and storage required to serve up the map images.

The maps were served up using a variety of methods prepared by Vine, Graham and others. An open standard’s-based Web Map Server (WMS) was prepared using the open source web mapping toolkit, MapServer. This allows you load the data directly into an application you have that supports that standard. The maps are also provided through an ESRI ArcIMS emulator using Twisted Python and MapServer MapScript.

A basic HTML/CGI interface was also prepared, allowing interactive viewing through a web browser. Chuck Stein, from GeoFusion, added their Active X-based viewer to the mix, providing some further ways of visualising the information.

Howard Butler, from Hobu.biz, also brought in the ability to do geocoding, based on the geocoder.us technology. Now, users can enter an address and see the imagery for that location.

Much more work has been done since the original incarnation, but the most basic web maps were up and running within 48 hours of receiving the imagery. More data and refinements are underway.

The success and quick delivery of this project is thanks to several geospatial products. But, the more encouraging thing to see is how various organisations have been able to work together, in near real-time, to help bring critical information to a wide audience.

I thought this comment by Mark Lucas summed it well:

“More missions have been flown, data moved and mosaics generated. There are now many different types of data sets and over 5000 high resolution images geocoded and mosaicked online…Along the way members from NGA, NRO, USGS, NRL have been very supportive and interested. The site is now on the master list of resources for disaster response for Katrina and has briefed to decision makers within the various government agencies. It has been one of the finest collaborations between government, academia, research, and open source software developers that I have ever witnessed.”

I will be watching to see how well others can emulate the process to improve reaction to similar problems in the future. Good work guys!

Related link: http://hobu.biz/index_html/tyler_mitchell_podcast

A podcast about geospatial stuff, with me and your host Howard Butler:

“We discuss Open Source GIS (obviously), the Canadian government’s role in supporting OGC and Open Source tools, and the hurdles to data access in both the US and Canada.”

Be sure to hear Howard’s other geospatial-related podcasts: http://hobu.biz

Related link: http://www.spacemusic.nl

When is a button not a button? When I click on the RSS button above this article,* Firefox asks me where I want to download a file called “ ” (there’s just a blank space). Safari just redisplays the article teaser. The and buttons on other sites (which look even more like physical buttons) bring up the whole geeky-looking XML file in Firefox.

The correct action, I’ve learned, is to right-click (or Control-click) on the button, copy the RSS file location, and paste it into my aggregator program.

I thought about this unintuitive procedure recently when trying to tell someone how to subscribe to O’Reilly’s new Distributing the Future podcast, for which I wrote the theme music. In that case, the third step was to click the Advanced menu in iTunes, select “Subscribe to Podcast,” and paste the link into the little box that drops down.

Coincidentally, one of my favorite podcasts, Space Music, came up with a clever workaround. When you click the RSS button on the Space Music site, a JavaScript prompt opens up, with the URL selected, and tells you to copy the URL and paste it into your podcatching program.

Here’s an example of how it works:

<div align="center">
<a href="http://spacemusic.libsyn.com/rss" target="_blank"
onClick="prompt(’To subscribe to this podcast,
copy this link and paste it into your aggregator software
(e.g., iTunes or iPodder).’,
‘http://spacemusic.libsyn.com/rss’); return false;">
<img src="rss-btn.gif" width="36" height="14"
border="0" alt="Smart RSS Button" /></a>
</div>

Of course, “RSS” and “XML” are singularly unhelpful labels for a podcast feed button. At a minimum, I’d suggest “POD,” though “Podcast Link” would be better. But there must be a better way to fix a button that isn’t really a button.

*UPDATE, 2006-09-19: Our current blog layout uses text links instead of RSS buttons, but their behavior is the same.

Also, I just thought of a more compact way to make the RSS links: Simply move the JavaScript functions to an exernal file. The new link format then looks like this:

<a href="http://spacemusic.libsyn.com/rss" target="_blank" 
  onclick="RSSalert(this.href); return false;">[BUTTON]</a> 

And the external JavaScript looks like this:

function RSSalert(theURL) {
prompt('To subscribe to this podcast, copy this link and paste it into your aggregator software (e.g., iTunes or iPodder).', theURL);
}

Related link: http://www.psphacksthebook.com

Conrad over at Joystiq, just announced to the entire gaming world that I’ve been working on PSP Hacks all summer. I especially like his description:

So what can we expect to learn from this book? Well, knowing C.K., it’s pretty much assured that there will be some eccentric hacks included, since this is coming from the guy that created an eye gouging stand for the PSP out of an Ikea lamp. Some of the less dangerous tips will include how-tos on chatting in IRC with the PSP and using the PSP to read web comics, ebooks, and RSS feeds.

It’s not just a stand. It’s also a dock, as you can power the PSP while you watch. But I don’t really think it’s eye-gouging. I mean the base holds it very securely in place. ;-)

Anyway, stay tuned as I’ll start leaking a few previews from the book. We’ve got some great hacks!

People simply hate overloaded terms, and the term “Web 2.0″ clearly fits the overloaded bill. Then again, how else do you introduce a discussion on something that is real, emergent, exciting and — open. And do it in as few words as possible?



So what is Web 2.0? At the core, it is an applied web service model that blurs the line between software and service. It can do this because: 1) it is optimized for the 60 million broadband connections in place; 2) it can count upon an installed base of 300 million video-ready mobile and PC devices; and 3) Thanks to the AJAX meme, it can reliably assume the ubiquity of a really good browser experience.



So that answers the “HOW” side of the equation, but “WHY” now? Simply put, the emergence of the blogosphere has changed the equation. First off, its footprint has become really meaningful. At last count, according to Technorati, there are 16 million blogs in existence, growing 100K new blogs a day and generating a jaw-dropping 1.2 million new posts a day.



Second, the mainstreaming of RSS is enabling syndication and subscription systems that can intelligently process context-aware messages. Over time, these systems will become adept at handling rich content “payloads,” enabling further innovation. Slide is an early example of one such application, and I covered the RSS side of the Web 2.0 equation in an earlier post.



But the real shocker in all of this is that people really seem to enjoy generating lots of custom content and then sharing it on a broad scale, proving that the open source movement is not just some techie phenomena.



As a new class of photo and video cameras gain support for wi-fi based upload capabilities, this will remove a perceived hurdle to getting multimedia content online (a challenge that mobile devices happily avoid), fostering creation of some really compelling digital media services.



The Long Tail provides an excellent frame for understanding how all of this plays out in market terms, but let me say that knowing that a ready supply of rich content is going to be available to provide the “kindling wood” for igniting new application services removes a key risk item for would-be entrepreneurs.



Ponder this. Over the next 18 months, not only will the process of creating all sorts of application functions that run seamlessly between PC and mobile environments become more straightforward and require less heavy lifting on the part of the developer, but the tools for managing and sharing the output of these environments will improve markedly.



In my mind’s eye, I see a kind of Mad Libs style applet running in my browser. It supports visual, argument-based modeling of procedural workflows. These workflows are essentially IF-THEN-ELSE sequences, and their primary job is to automate the function of syndicating, finding, subscribing to, uploading, downloading, rendering and presenting rich information flows wherever and whenever I need them.



The mash-up part of this equation (as referenced in this post’s title), is the offspring of an environment where application developers see it in the own selfish interest to facilitate the creation of integrated, yet highly derivative application hybrids by third parties, something they do by providing rich public APIs to their user base.



Along those lines, the good news is that the “gorillas” of Web 1.0 — Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon and eBay (having just captured Skype — see “A different spin on eBay-Skype“) — all see it in their self-interest to expose broad swaths of their capabilities to developers for the creation of composite web services.



The reason they are doing this is simple. By de-coupling their secret sauce from the web site and enabling it to be propagated throughout the web they can cast a bigger aggregate footprint and more importantly, capture a greater percentage of consumer mindshare during the day.



As a result, beyond unleashing ever-richer API availability, expect to see growing libraries of widgets made available by these same vendors to simplify and expedite the process of instrumenting APIs (see “Yahoo’s Konfabulator buy and Yahoo APIs“). Once again, more examples of kindling wood to ensure that the Web 2.0 fire burns bright.



With a nod towards embracing open source as a good business strategy (in addition to a good human one), the goal of the remainder of this post is to try to figure out all of the obvious “jobs” that this new application services model can support.



As a good blog post called, “Stealth Start-ups Suck,” compellingly argues, with web service creation, the bar is low enough to just start building out the idea, learn as you go, and test out your thesis about why your creation matters in real-time.



My hope in writing this is that the straw man that follows can inspire you to have fun, test out some ideas you may be percolating and iterate from there. I have compiled a list of manageable content items that, while I attempted to make it exhaustive, realistically you have ideas in your own head that I haven’t contemplated and/or captured from others.



Think simple, systematic, and programmatically actionable:



1. Calendar items: include time based events, containing descriptions, locations of the event, mandatory and optional participants, needed resources, beginning and ending event times, reminder flags and any confirmation ID’s, as in the case of reservations.



2. Product listings: these include things like product name, identification number (e.g., SKU) and a product photo, the manufacturer, product description, any categories that it is a member of, pricing, where to buy, etc. A logical container of multiple products is a wish list.



3. Business listings: include the name, address and phone number of the business, the type of business it is and key information about the business, such as hours of operation, menu (in case of a restaurant) and a photo/map. A logical container of multiple listings is a rolodex.



4. Classified listings: include products or services that are available for sale, including a description and photo of the offering, its condition, price, data and contact information on the seller, and whether it is available on an open ended basis, limited to supplies on hand or to the highest bidder (as in case of auction).



5. Property listings: include a description and photo of the property (e.g., number of bedrooms, baths, parking and noteworthy attributes), whether it is available for rent or purchase, the price and geographic area of the property, a map and contact information, as well as if/when an open house is scheduled.



6. Travel listings: typically these will include, but not be limited to, car rentals, hotel reservations and airplane flight booking functions. Parameters such as date(s) of service required, class of service desired and limiting attributes, like no smoking or non-stop are integral. Also, relevant is whether the individual is entitled to a discount based on coupon or group membership.



7. Job listings: includes a description of the position, the company, where the company is located, requirements of the position, the compensation package, how best to contact the company and whether communications with recruiters are encouraged.



8. People listings: whether oriented towards personal communications, such as dating, or professional networking, these listings can include data such as hobbies, skills and professional backround, education, age, marital status, geographic area, people in a trusted network, favorites (books, movies, music) and personal references.



9. Reviews and summaries: include written overviews of products, TV programs, movies, restaurants, etc. Summaries tend to be more objective in capturing the key qualitative and quantitative details of what is being written about, whereas reviews include a subjective component, ratings on one or more parameters, and in a community setting, aggregate (averaged) ratings.



10. Destinations: include maps and itineraries. Such items might logically include a list of key destinations, when they are to be visited, directions for getting from point A to point B, transportation options, such as mass transit, businesses and landmarks adjacent to a given destination and geo-coding tags that indicate the presence of members of a person’s trusted network in a given area.



11. News items: include full articles, news summaries, sports scores, schedules of TV programs, movie times, weather conditions, and stock prices. A logical container for a group of stocks is a portfolio.



12. Coupons: these can be instant coupons in the sense that you can print them out and walk into a physical store or go to a web site and take advantage of them immediately. They can also be cumulative coupons that kick in after multiple conditions are satisfied or triggered by a single event. In all cases, coupons should have source identifiers so that it is clear where the consumer found the coupon, and definitions of fulfillment options and expiration dates.



13. Advertisements: in the Web 2.0 world, ads are designed to offer more signal than noise. As a result, they are more descriptive in terms of what the offering is, who it is targeted at, what the specific benefits are to the customer and what discrete actions are available to them (e.g., request more information, view data sheet, buy now).



14. Polls: whether user defined and published or systematically managed and broadcast to an entire community of users, polls track, aggregate and demographically segment opinions on a given topic.



15. Content libraries: include pictures, music and video clips, captured web pages, saved blog posts and archived records, like receipts. Logical containers include photo albums, slide shows, specialized multimedia players and file folders.



16. Business-to-consumer communications: include structured, systematic interfaces for vendors to communicate with their customers, and vice-versa. One example of a logical realm where such communications are necessary is technical support, as simplifying the process of finding the latest versions of software updates associated with a given product, known bugs, workarounds and how-tos reduces support costs for both customer and vendors.



In closing, the goal of this post was to define the atmosphere that Web 2.0 applications will operate within, make some assertions about what the moving parts are and leave the reader to contemplate ways to create more than the sum of the parts value around such a model.



Some quickie takeaways for me personally are:



1. The blog creation process will evolve to enable consumers to create “structured” posts along the lines referenced above and systematically share them with like minds. Further, the elegant simplicity and openness of Craigslist suggests that this evolution need not place a heavy “usability tax” on the consumer.



2. To the extent that the consumer is now at the center of the equation, the process by which consumers write reviews or summaries to be published on a vendor’s site will change. The consumer, not the site, will own the review, and he/she will be able to centrally manage its message. This suggests support for either a “write once, publish anywhere” model or a structured carbon copy function.



3. Core comparison, customization, communication and spend/transaction functions, including “handoffs” between PC and mobile spaces will become embedded and invisible to the point that the notion of an on-demand computing model is a given.



4. Security is a REALLY big deal in this model, inasmuch as when information flows unbounded between applications and users, the potential for serious mayhem is huge.



So what the hell is Web 2.0? Let’s figure it out together.

Related link: http://www.podcastingnews.com/archives/2005/09/free_podcast_ki.html

It’s great to hear that three companies have lined up to offer podcasting kits to the victims of Katrina. This is what is meant by the citizen’s media. All of the major news outlets are trying to spin this storm. I can’t wait to hear directly from the people on the ground who were effected by the storm directly.

Do you have ideas about how we can use technology to help the victims of Katrina?

When I registered at Foo Camp I was handed this card that asked the usual stuff, name, company, what not. But it also asked me who my technology heroes were. Which is an interesting question that took me off guard. I didn’t give it a whole lot of thought at the time. I ended up writing Larry Wall and Dennis Ritchie. But in hindsight my real technology heroes are Dave Thomas and Rich Kilmer. Each for a very different reason.

First off, you should understand that I’m not into the bit shuffling thing. I’ve been in this game too long to get excited about syntactic sugar. I’m looking for stuff that fundamentally changes how we, as programmers, do what we do. And that could be bit twiddling, or it could be architectural or something change in process. And that’s why I love Dave Thomas. Not only is he a great guy who is fun to hang out with. But his books will alter how you think about what we do as programmers. The first book I read of his, The Pragmatic Programmer, changed my life. I had been living in a hell that only years of C++ can induce. And I read that book and it brought the passion back into my work and has lead to all of the code, books and articles that I have written since.

Dave’s Ruby pick-axe book was also an achievement. He caught the Ruby bug early on, knew that it needed documentation, and went after that. And in so doing he opened up Ruby to a much wider audience. But Dave’s shining achievement has been in his latest Ruby on Rails book. It’s both a technical achievement, and a summation of so much well researched information on web development best practices. And these aren’t B.S. best practices like you would find in some awful architecture book, I’m talking about real world stuff learned from developing applications for customers.

Rich Kilmer I admire for a totally different reason. I admire Rich because he is absolutely tireless in his work. I’ve met him a couple of times now and every single time he has something new to show that is well thought out and implemented. Now he is into Flash in a big way, and that’s cool. I mean, really, whatever he wants to do. Because it pushes the boundaries. And that’s what interests me nowadays. Don’t come to me with yet another persistence framework, or some new graphics API, unless it does something completely new and novel, or does it in a fundamentally different way.

For example, Rails. I had seen web technologies before that worked on the method level before. But nothing as clean as Rails. And that, combined with the dynamic object stuff and the code generation is a really powerful mix. In fact, I would say that Rails is one of those 100% projects. A project that is so clean and well done that you know that the guy behind it put absolutely everything he had into it.

Now that I think about it some more, this is really an excellent question. We all need heroes in our field. People that we look up to and want to be like. Not only technically, but as people.

Anyway, I’m really interested in who you might look at as a technology hero. And if you met them, what you would ask them.

At Foo Camp I had lunch at a table with Dave Thomas, Andy Hunt, Larry Wall and Martin Fowler. All of whom are heavy, heavy hitters. At one point a guy sat down next to me and asked me why we weren’t talking about Perl. And I gave him just a look as a response, like, why are you asking me? Ask Larry some Perl questions. I wasn’t going to because, frankly, it’s all been asked before.

Related link: http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/index.php

Searching for free sound samples online is a pain. Even when you find interesting stuff, it’s rarely clear whether it’s actually legitimate for use in music production. And until now, I knew of only one audio search engine that displayed waveforms of the sounds it found. With practice, you can often tell by looking at the waveform graphic whether the sound will be worth downloading to audition.

But now the Freesound Project, online since May, solves both of those sample-search problems. It displays waveforms, has a multi-parameter search engine, and licenses all of its sounds under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 license. That means you’re free to use the sounds, even in commercial music production, as long as you credit the source. You just can’t use them in advertising without obtaining permission from the source.

But because all site users (uploaders and downloaders) have to register, contacting the creator is simple. The database also keeps track of the specific files you download, so you can go back later if you need to negotiate usage rights for your jingle.

In addition to basic searches, you can also search for audio files that sound similar to or different from the current one. A forum lets users share recording tips and sample requests. And did I mention the cool preview interface? You see a colorized version of the waveform, along with Flash playback and looping buttons. Here is one result of my search for “forest”:

Because the search form takes a few moments to find, I’ve duplicated it here. Enter a word below to search for related sounds. The extended search form on the site provides many more options.

Where do you get your sounds?

Like many of you, both the long-term rise in gasoline prices and the recent spike supposedly caused by supply shortages have got me thinking about fuel economy.

I’ve been driving a Dodge Caravan for the last year. Not by choice, but because it gets better mileage than our Toyota Tundra, and I drive about 15 miles each way to work. It’s not that much driving, as things go, particularly for California.

We bought the van when we were working farmer’s markets and needed a second vehicle that could hold tables, a canopy, boxes of veggies, and buckets of cut flowers.

It’s a big, gas-guzzling, lousy handling beast. I don’t particularly like American cars, at least anything built since 1970, and driving the Caravan every day reminds me why: it doesn’t feel like it was designed to last.

Before we had the Caravan, my car was a 1994 Honda Civic sedan. I drove that car for 10 years. It never had any major problems. 7 years in, I had to replace the CV joints and the clutch. That’s not bad for a car with over 100,000 miles at the time. It got pretty decent gas mileage - in the mid to high 30s on long road trips, low 30s around town.

My wife hated it. The car was very low to the ground, and she always said “it’s like riding with your butt on the ground.” But even for a sedan, it cornered like a demon, you could turn around on a dime, and the dinky little 4-cylinder had some guts to it when it really needed to.

Now I’m seriously thinking about selling the Caravan and buying a more fuel-efficient car. I’d like a sedan again, maybe a wagon, if it drives decently. But aside from nice handling and fuel economy, I want to feel good about what I’m buying. For me, that means no American vehicles, and it gives me few options.

Unfortunately, since the state of California wussed out on mandating zero-emission vehicles, the electric car market has disappeared. For a few years, you could lease (but never buy) a few kinds of electric cars from major manufacturers: Toyota, Ford and others. Those cars are all discontinued now and good luck finding a used one.

Option 1: Hybrid gas-electric vehicles

Given that I want a sedan or wagon, am point-blank refusing to look at American models, and am concerned about fuel economy, this boils down to two options:

• Toyota Prius
• Honda Civic

Both of these purport to get mileage of at least 50MPG. Their electric-gas hybrid engines are of different designs. Both of them are insanely complicated to me, but you can’t argue with all the happy people who own them. Prius owners in particular are very happy with their cars.

One point is that the Prius is only available with automatic or continuously variable transmissions. The Honda can come with manual or automatic gears.

Obviously both of these vehicles burn regular gasoline.

Option 2: Diesel vehicles

Unlike Europe and Australia, where almost all of the cars sold come in diesel or gasoline engine options, we here in the US are screwed. Most diesel engines sold in the US are low-MPG, high torque, truck engines.

The only real option for diesel passenger cars in the US is Volkswagen. You can get their Golf, Jetta, Jetta Wagon and Passat all with turbocharged diesel engines.

The engine in the Golf and Jetta, paired with a manual transmission, gets somewheere in Mere between 42 and 49 miles per gallon.

I’m still trying to determine if you can actually buy a new diesel from Volkswagen in California. The nearest dealer to me is 2 hours away in Santa Rosa. There are certainly used models available, which I’m not opposed to.

The interesting thing for me with a diesel engine is that it gives me the option of burning biodiesel. I’ve found a local producer of 100% biodiesel here in Mendocino County. The cost right now is higher than petrochemical diesel, but it’s made entirely from renewable bio feedstock, and supposedly burns much cleaner than petro diesel.

I’m very attracted by the ability to basically flip a giant finger at the oil industry and drive a car that’s powered by american agriculture. If that isn’t patriotic, what is?

I haven’t yet test driven any of these cars. Again, the dealers are all 2 hours away so we’ll have to schedule a weekend trip to the auto dealers in Santa Rosa.

Anyone who owns these vehicles, or has an opinion on them, please drop me some comments.

Related link: http://www.spectrasonics.net/neworleans/

Musicians have been showing a special empathy with the tragedy in New Orleans, and not just because of the city’s rich musical history. After all, the heart of music is reaching out to other people, giving voice to the unspeakable.

Over at CD Baby.com, thousands of independent artists are donating 100 percent of their sales to the Red Cross to help the Katrina victims.

Today, Spectrasonics, one of the premier sound-library developers, announced an even closer tie-in, donating 100 percent of the sales of its New Orleans Strut drum-loop collection to Habitat for Humanity. Again, that’s sales, not profits. According to the company, every cent of the $25 price will go to the charity. The musical twist is that when you make a donation, you get 100MB of drum loops based on classic Mississippi and Louisiana styles, which Spectasonics hopes you’ll use to strengthen your connection with the area’s cultural history.

Admittedly, the companies get free advertising by running these events, but the charities could sure use the money, and it puts more music in the world. I’ve never met CD Baby founder Derek Sivers, but he seems like a stand-up guy. I’ve interviewed Spectrasonics founder Eric Persing at length—twice—so I know he is. Neither of those interviews is online, but there are some good ones linked here.

So I’m willing to hang up my cynic hat and take advantage of another chance to donate. Artfully.

Related link: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2005-09-11-web-charities_x.htm

Following my post on Jeff Jarvis’ Recovery 2.0 proposal comes this on how new charities are using the eBay model to match donors to needs. The full story is at usatoday.com:

“When Amy Krebs wanted to help victims of Hurricane Katrina, she went to the Web site of a group called Modest Needs, where people who had taken in displaced friends and relatives were posting requests for money to buy extra groceries, air mattresses and clothing…

Hurricane relief is the latest example of a trend in person-to-person philanthropy. Emerging charities have begun using techniques that eBay pioneered to let contributors find and finance small-scale projects. Like shoppers scouting for their favorite collectible on the Internet auction site, donors can search for particular philanthropic proposals that resonate with them.”

A list of web philanthropy sites is here.

Related link: http://www.hhb.co.uk/hhb/usa/news/fullstory.asp?ID=336

This device isn’t supposed to ship until 2006, but as a voice-recorder enthusiast, I’m already intrigued.

The HHB FlashMic merges a Sennheiser condenser microphone with a gigabyte of flash memory, creating what could be a terrific tool for broadcast journalists and podcasters.

It records at 16-bit, 48kHz resolution into WAV or MP2 files. (The MP2 format is popular in broadcast applications; it uses less data compression and processor power than MP3.) Each file is automatically time- and date-stamped, and a USB connector allows you to upload the files to a computer. There’s even a headphone jack.

The press release mentions a variety of other features, but the one that grabbed me was the ten-second pre-recording buffer. How many times have you missed a sound bite because you hit the red button too late? With the buffer, this mic will capture history. Which it may well do anyway.

What are you talking into these days?

Related link: http://www.buzzmachine.com/index.php/2005/09/05/recovery-20-a-call-to-convene/

I only groped towards this in my post Models Predicted Katrina Devastation. But publishing consultant Jeff Jarvis has already got specific proposals under way for using net technology to do much better next time. He calls on netizens to convene via a Meetup or in connection with Web 2.0 to put together Recovery 2.0:

“The goal is to be ready — God help us — for the next disaster so people can better use the internet — via any device — to better:

1. share information,
2. report and act on calls for help,
3. coordinate relief,
4. connect the missing,
5. provide connections for such necessities as housing and jobs,
6. match charitable assets to needs,
7. get people connected to this and the world sooner.

There are many, many wonderful things happening, but they are happening — as is the [wont] of the distributed web — everywhere: See the more-than-50 places where the missing from Katrina can be found and more are being built as we read…. Dave Winer points us to efforts to create an open standard for a People Finder XML structure, which we need. And we need better ways to make all this discoverable and searchable…”

There’s more good stuff–it’s worth reading the whole post. I found it via Chris Nolan’s column at eWeek, also worth reading.

Related link: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20040902070807431

Forget the tired “smiley curve” or the all-faders-on-stun settings most people use on graphic EQs. After this music fan posted his “perfect” EQ curve for iTunes, a recording engineer made it even better by turning it upside down.

Equalization is a dangerous thing. How many times have you seen a stereo on which all the EQ sliders are maxed out or set to some random StairMaster hill contour?

I thought about that after seeing this “perfect” iTunes EQ setting, in which the contributor had boosted two bands by a shattering nine dB. One slider even went to 11!

Of course, unless you have tons of storage dedicated to your audio files, you’ve probably savaged most of the music in your library with data compression, so extreme measures may be called for to restore its luster. But I was gratified to see a follow-up post from a recording engineer who explained that EQ is best used as a sculpting tool—to cut rather than add. He then recreated the curve using negative offsets and an overall boost. Interesting stuff. I’m currently running some crunchy podcast music through it, and it does sound fresher.

If you’re a Mac user, you can even download a script on the site that sets the sliders for you. This article offers an overview of each slider’s musical function.

Are you a booster or a cutter?

Related link: http://www.thisspartanlife.com/

A friend sent me a link to This Spartan Life, saying, “This new blog concept is kinda funny. But the idea of interactivity (aside from gaming) in a virtual world is very neat.”

Not much to go on, so it took me a while to check out the link. What I found when I finally got there was amazing: a talk show filmed inside the Xbox game Halo. As the host and interviewee roam around the alien landscape in supercharged battle armor, making witty comments on the scenery, other players in the online world try to kill them! The host occasionally has to pause the (surprisingly deep) discussion to dispatch some clueless aggressor.

This is all accompanied by a proud soundtrack of 8-bit “chip tunes.” Wonderful stuff. And the next guest is Halo composer and sound designer Marty O’Donnell, whose insights are always entertaining. (I interviewed him for the game music chapter in my book, and thoroughly enjoyed it.) The only disappointment with the site is the metallic-sounding audio; the producers seem to have used all their bandwidth on the video.

Related link: http://news.com.com/Experts+New+Orleans+disaster+was+predicted/2100-1008_3-58462…

The failure of the New orleans levees was explicitly and repeatedly predicted. But failure to assign value to the information made it useless.

I’m not talking politics here, so please let’s not debate whether we like Bush or not. I’m talking about the fact that people are dead because the information was there but not acted on. From Reuters via CNET News:

“The scenario of a major hurricane hitting New Orleans was well anticipated, predicted and drilled around,” said Clare Rubin, an emergency management consultant who also teaches at the Institute for Crisis, Disaster and Risk Management at George Washington University.

Computer models developed at Louisiana State University and other institutions made detailed projections of what would happen if water flowed over the levees protecting the city or if they failed…

…In light of that, said disaster expert Bill Waugh of Georgia State University, “it’s inexplicable how unprepared for the flooding they were.”

In comments on Thursday, President Bush said, “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.”

But Louisiana State University engineer Joseph Suhayda and others have warned for years that defenses could fail. In 2002, the New Orleans Times-Picayune published a five-part series on “The Big One,” examining what might happen if they did.

It predicted that 200,000 people or more would be unwilling or unable to heed evacuation orders and that thousands would die. It also predicted that people would be housed in the Superdome, that aid workers would find it difficult to gain access to the city as roads became impassable, as well as many other of the consequences that actually unfolded after Katrina hit this week…

Information design expert Edward Tufte has been evangelizing for years about the implications of the Challenger disaster. The information about the failure of the O-rings was there, but in that case was presented poorly. This time the information was presented about as clearly, forcefully and convincingly as could be expected, but it was not valued. Although our imagery of policy-making derives from Greco-Roman ideals of solonic deliberation, actual policy-making has more in common with a bazaar than a seminar. Somehow we have to get better at assigning value to information. That’s what markets do. But the policy-making market is broken.

Is there a technical means of improving the assignment of value to information?

Related link: http://tinyurl.com/anv6k

I’ve written elsewhere about the FCC Katrina conference call: Community wireless groups, including FreeNetworks members, have begun to respond.

Can you help? If you’re an individual with experience setting up ad-hoc wireless nets, mesh networks, low-power
FM stations, VoIP systems, etc., and you are available to
volunteer your time and/or equipment resources in efforts
to restore communications in Katrina-hit areas, keep your
eye on cuwireless.net for updates later today.

Here is the FCC web page devoted to Katrina communications recovery efforts.

From a mailing list post this morning, Sascha Meinrath
from the CU Wireless Network writes:

As of a few minutes ago I got the go-ahead for deploying Community Wireless folks within the New Orleans area. We’ve
secured a base of operations and are working with Part-15
to get FEMA approval to operate in the emergency area.

Finally, in addition to people and equipment, we’re also going to need donations to help support the on-the-ground
Community Wireless team — here’s donation info if you’d like to help spread the word.

For some reason, I cannot get the O’Reilly blog software
to allow me to publish HTML code, without actually executing the code. See Xeni’s post at BoingBoing for the HTML code to generate a PayPal donation button on your website or blog.

Here’s a link you can send in email:

http://tinyurl.com/anv6k

Related link: http://www.apple.com/podcasting/

Apple fans everywhere are anticipating next week’s announcement (Sept. 7th). What will Apple announce? It could be any number of developments that have recently bubbled up, including the move to flash memory for the iPod mini, which would mean a much thinner, more reliable and less battery-sucking version of the mini, increased capacity for the mini and the shuffle, or possibly the video iPod, although I think that’s unlikely - I think that’s coming, but not likely to be announced next week. Apple recently changed the language in its iPod patent to include video as one of the files the iPod can download and play back. So video iPod is definitely coming (despite Steve Job’s announcement a couple of years ago that he wasn’t interested in doing that!). It makes sense though. Apple has essentially conquered the music service market; time for them to do the same with the video service market. Obviously a very different animal, however, so it will be interesting to see what their approach is.

But most likely, the announcement next week is primarily related to the new iPod/iTunes enabled Motorola phone with Cingular service. This phone will be able to download tunes from a wireless version of iTunes, or synch directly with your computer and iTunes to transfer mp3 files from your computer to the phone, much like you can do now with your iPod. Personally, I’m not interested in buying a phone like that (not yet, anyway :-) because I don’t really want phone and music in the same device. But given how attached so many people are to their cell phones as devices for talking, chatting, taking photos, playing games, etc., I anticipate that for a lot of people this will be big. And a big win for Apple. We’ll see!

Tags: ipod, apple

What new Apple products are you most eagerly anticipating in the future (real or imagined)?

Related link: http://www.rebirthmuseum.com/

Propellerhead’s classic “Rebirth” program retired yesterday. To celebrate, they’re GIVIN’ it away!!!

The ReBirth RB-338 simulates classic Roand synths: TB-303 Bass Line Synthesizer, TR808 and TR 909 Rhythm composers. These are considered “must-have” sounds for any dance-oriented musician.

It says here:

“On September 1, 2005, Propellerhead Software announced that the era of ReBirth had come to an end and created the ReBirth museum to commemorate its history. Visitors are welcome to tour the website, learn about its developers and community, and take home a special memento: ReBirth RB338 itself!”

That’s class. When I retire, I’m givin’ it away, too. So line up, Ladies.

ReBirth’s available as a disk image, which will run ReBirth as a stand-alone application the way God and The Swedes intended it to. Or if you own Propellorhead’s Reason, a very loveable program itself, you can get the ReBirth sounds as a ReFill. Basically, a file that Reason can use to turn it into an impersonation of an emulator of a synthesizer of a musical instrument, which is about as virtual as it gets, I think. I caught wind that you might need to use Version 3 of Reason for that to work, though.

Game musician friends of mine have confirmed that you don’t actually have to be a registered user of any Propellorhead products to make this download.

I’d wait a day or two, though, to get it. The disk image is huge, and downloads are prone to failure right now.

BOOM!!!