Nav
What's this then?
I am a web hobbyist. This is my online home.
Unfinished since 2002.
I am a web hobbyist. This is my online home.
Posted on: March 30, 2008 - 5:54 pm
Had to rush through to Glasgow yesterday after a little birdie told me The Scuffers were supporting Hayseed Dixie. To my shame I’ve never seen Hayseed Dixie before, despite being told of their genius loads of times, so the chance to blag free tickets to see them was not to be missed.
I must admit I didn’t make it to the ABC until about 7:55 and therefore walked in on The Scuffers’ third or fourth song. But it was quite good to hear the band as I came up the stairs, and then walk in to the ABC’s large main hall, mobbed with people, and see them up on stage belting out their honky tonk blues like, well, the proper band they are. I grabbed a pint and pushed my way down to the dancefloor in time for The Last Dance, which is turning into a favourite of mine. While the venue was busy most people were crushed into the bar area at the back leaving plenty of space for dancing down the front. Not that I was dancing like, as I said, I was only on my first pint. But this was a Hayseed Dixie crowd, which is a mixture of Heavy Metal and Country fans (you can imagine), and they were enjoying waltzing away in traditional barn dance style (that is, no idea how to waltz so just spin each other around).
I had some idea what to expect with Hayseed Dixie but nothing can describe what these guys produce, it is pure rock and roll entertainment. The four of them, playing banjo, mandolin, acoustic guitar, violin and some kind of acoustic bass guitar between them, recreate classic metal and rock tunes, actually making them better than the originals. It has to be seen live.
Which brings me to a slight digression. Bands like this can’t really make much money from CD sales, they even made a joke about people downloading their songs, so the recordings are mainly a promotional tool for their live gigs. You can see from their touring schedule that they are rather busy. You would think this would be the standard for bands, but instead they focus on CD sales. If bands got a fair chunk of the income* for playing live then there might be less interest in the sales charts.
Back on the music, Loopallu, the festival Hayseed Dixie set up in Ullapool is on the 19th and 20th of September and may be my Festival of choice this year. No line up yet but tickets go on sale the 6th of October.
Songs:
Hayseed Dixie - You Shook Me All Night Long (AC/DC cover)
The Scuffers - The Last Dance
* The ABC was a sell out, that is a crowd of about 1600 people, most of whom were paying £14 a head. £22,000 from tickets alone. Not bad for one night.
Posted on: March 28, 2008 - 3:30 pm
This is part of a regular series of posts describing the woes of computing. I have a tendency to just dive in then forget all about it, so these posts act as reminders of everything I have done. Probably of little interest to anyone else other than those amused by the stumblings of an ignorant Linux newbie.
Since I already have a LAMP server set up with my laptop networked to it, I’m thinking it shouldn’t be too difficult to use it as the staging server, and use the laptop to work from. Having the two computers up and running is an annoyance and a waste of electricity, but can’t be bothered setting up Apache, PHP etc again, so this will do for a while at least.
I think all I have to do is change the ‘localhost’ host information on my laptop to make it consistent with the server.
Strictly speaking, I don’t think I should be using ‘localhost‘ at all since it is a reserved name that is supposed to refer to ‘My Computer’ but all my test configuration files use it. So shoot me.
This seems to be fairly simple to do in Ubuntu.
I’m now waiting what problems will be caused by having localhost not actually pointing to the local host. It’s a joy.
Posted on: March 23, 2008 - 6:44 pm
This is part of a regular series of posts and tutorials describing the woes of computing. While I hate working with computers, it is a necessary evil. I have a tendency to dive in and then a couple of years down the line, when I have to do it all again for whatever reason, I’ve forgotten how I got it working in the first place.
These posts act as reminders of everything I had to go through to get it working, but can also double as tutorials for others. Apologies if these alternate purposes cause rather schizophrenic results.
Disclaimer: I have no specialist knowledge or qualifications so do not trust anything I say. The most valuable content will probably be the links to other tutorials and documentation that I’ve used to figure stuff out. Comments from those with real expertise are welcome. I cannot guarantee that questions will be answered.
This is the first of a likely regular series of posts on the set up, configuring and general woes of having to use computers.
I’ve recently purchased a shiny new laptop running Ubuntu (currently 7.1 Gutsy Gibbon) from Dell. It almost worked out of the box, except the display was stretched to fit the wide screen. It was however fairly simple to fix that (except I forgot to document that). Apart from that the laptop has not been modified.
My old desktop has Windows XP and Kubuntu, which was my first experiment with Linux.
Having bought my new laptop, the first thing was to set up so I could transfer files from the old computer. While the old computer is about 4-5 years old and starting to wheeze a bit, it is still in good order. So I’m planning on keeping that up and running and using it as a backup, mainly for storing files. I may use it as a staging server, rather than setting up Apache on the laptop, dunno yet.
Therefore the first thing I needed was to be able to set up a connection between the two computers. They are both connected to the internet via a wireless router, so the physical connection is there. Just need to get them talking to each other first.
After a quick bit of googling, the consensus seemed to be NFS should be the way to go. You can read up on NFS at Wikipedia (if you understand it then you are way beyond me). It is also useful to get some background on networking in general.
Posted on: January 9, 2008 - 7:59 pm
Crooked is getting a fresh coat of paint if you wanna check it out.
And if you do like your Americana, and live in Edinburgh, Laura Veirs and Okervil River are playing Cabaret Voltaire on the 30th Jan and 3rd of Feb. And I’ve just noticed Nouvelle Vague are playing the Queens Hall on the 10th of February.
See when you combine Last.fm recommendations with Google Calendar — it’s what the interweb was made for. In fact I liked it so much I’ve put it on this very website for everyone to see. Okay, I know that an inline frame, and importing Google crappy code is against all rules - except it took a matter of minutes to do. I can improve on it later okay. Gah!
[If you were extremely fast you might have noticed that I just published this using a thing call ScribeFire — which I quite liked, it seems a lot smoother that when it was called Performancing — that then added it’s own link to the end of the post after I clicked the publish button saying: ‘Powered by ScribeFire.’ and linking to itself. Dastardly wee bastard I say. Plus when I checked the markup it had added in a load of <br/> tags. So back to writing all my code by hand I guess.]
Posted on: January 6, 2008 - 2:53 pm
Wow. Apparently Kangaroo farts do not contain methane. Methane being a greenhouse gas, and therefore not good for the environment, Australian scientists are planning on,well, ‘converting’ their sheep and cattle to a no-methane exhaust.
It is all to do with the bacteria. I wonder if that’s what all those ‘good bacteria’ adverts are about:
Yakult is a probiotic. What is a probiotic? Good bacteria that supplement the natural bacteria in your gut. It makes your farts less smelly and is good for the environment.
Via inhabit, via greenpeace.
Posted on: January 2, 2008 - 2:00 pm
The new BBC’s new iPlayer service has given me a chance to catch up on Still Game. 
The player itself worked okay, although the controls are a bit dodgy — the slider didn’t move and there is a button that I’m guessing is supposed to switch to full screen mode, but doesn’t. However the volume button does go up to 11, which is one more than everyone else (©This is Spın̈al Tap - 1984).
You still cannot download the content on anything other than Windows, and even if you do it will be crippled by DRM which presumably prevent playing after 7 days. This ain’t a huge problem, it’s not as if people will be making compilation DVDs given the quality, but this 7 day window is a step backwards from the idea that what the BBC make is publically owned.
Second problem is that the sports broadcasts — that is the stuff I’m most likely to want online — is still using the hoary old Real Player/Windows Media technology (while the cooking shows which have a nice flash based player). Hopefully they’ll catch up soon.
Posted on: December 19, 2007 - 9:18 pm
I know everyone does it, and very few people are interested but here is my Artists and Songs of the year, according to Last.fm. I think that makes it a bit more honest. I can’t pretend to be a huge fan of some trendy, indie band when I’ve really been listening to tosh all year.
| 1 | The Magnetic Fields | 139 |
| 2 | Nouvelle Vague | 133 |
| 3 | Radiohead | 126 |
| 4 | Sebadoh | 121 |
| 5 | Herman Düne | 120 |
| 5 | Micah P. Hinson | 120 |
| 7 | Bruce Springsteen | 118 |
| 8 | Johnny Cash | 112 |
| 9 | Belle and Sebastian | 100 |
| 10 | Bob Dylan | 92 |
So strangely The Magnetic Fields makes it to the top of the pile. I can’t say that I have been listening to them that much, but the fact their album has 69 bloody songs on it, which means they come up on the random rotation quite a lot (compared to other less prolific bands). All the rest make perfect sense except I thought Springsteen would be higher, considering I was listening to about 4 of his albums quite a lot this year (Nebraska, Magic, Seeger Sessions and some bootleg I downloaded somewhere).
| 1 | Iron & Wine – Such Great Heights | 14 |
| 1 | The Magnetic Fields – All My Little Words | 14 |
| 3 | The Scuffers – You’ve Got Troubles On Your Mind | 11 |
| 3 | The Scuffers – Dear Stranger | 11 |
| 5 | Bruce Springsteen – Atlantic City | 10 |
| 5 | The Scuffers – Those Lovesick Blues | 10 |
| 2 | Bruce Springsteen – Reason to Believe | 10 |
| 5 | The Scuffers – Goin’ With The Flow | 10 |
| 5 | Nouvelle Vague – Dance With Me | 10 |
| 5 | Micah P. Hinson – Little Boys Dream | 10 |
So perhaps the prettiest song makes it to the top of the pile. I was swithering over whether I preferred the Postal Service’s original version or this one by Iron & Wine, but the play count has spoken. Magnetic Fields isn’t such a surprise in this case, All My Little Words was the reason I bought the album (after hearing it on The Shield).
The problem with Last.fm is that it only records about half of my listening, so I should add that, if I could be arsed synching my iPod, Lily Allen, Malcolm Middleton, OK Go and Kate Nash would likely have made an appearance somewhere.
Cheers!
