Re-centralised

Clay County Road Closures

City of Fargo Road Closures

Current Red River Level

As of 1:15pm today its 39.06 – 1997 crest was 39.6.

The snow is startin to come down – at times you cant see across the river:

Anyone who has talked to me for any amount of time knows I have, dare I say, fetish, for TiddlyWiki – and its more scalable brother ccTiddly. I was quite happy to see the big announcement in my inbox today: ccTiddly 1.8 finally released.

Download HERE

(copy pasta from the release email)

Anyone who has been following this release will know that it includes a great deal of new functionality:

* New plugin architecture allowing developers to extend and modify ccTiddly core functionality

* Plugins included in this release:

o RSS – generates an RSS feed for each workspace

o Skinny Tiddlers – experimental implementation of load-on-demand tiddlers

o FCKEditor – rich text editor

o OpenID – experimental OpenID implementation

o lifestream – as seen on http://simonmcmanus.com/

o TiddlyDocs – as seen on http://tiddlydocs.com/

o SEO – creates static HTML files for the benefit of search engines

* Improved proxy handling for importing from external servers

* Integration of TiddlyWiki core release 2.5.0 (including jQuery)

It also includes these bug fixes:

* Better notification on failed save.

There is also one known issue:

* Sometimes the server returns an error 409 when saving a tiddler (see http://trac.tiddlywiki.org/ticket/997 for more details). This does not happen very often, and I would really appreciate detailed bug reports if anyone does experience this problem.

Many thanks to Simon, and the whole ccTiddly team.

I’ll post a quick how to play with whitepages.com soon. For now, heres some interesting stats on my name(s):

Lets break it down a bit. First, hows about just levon:

Dang. Looks like Shamika beat me out.

interesting….Hows about just Kohoutek:

Ha. How about Eli?

Lets see what kind of popular last names go with Eli there are in NY and NJ:

Looks split Hispanic / Caribbean – Jewish: Rivera? Weiss? Cohen? Martinez?

My brother Dan is ranked #20 as far as first names go, but have a look at Geoff –

Singlehandedly beating out both Eli and I – wtf? Here I thought Levon and Eliezer were a bit more rare then Geoffery…

So, I’ve been putting in work on one of my projects, and in the course of said work I came across a wonderful cache of youtube videos.

Some of ya’ll may be familiar but the Whole Music Club has posted a bunch of videos from the series “Making Music”. They have a pretty interesting selection up (not exclusive to rap – for example Alan Sparhawk of Low). Something you ought to check out if you haven’t already.

There was a portion of Slug’s video that I found quite relevant – in the video below

“If i look at the last record that me and Anthony put out I’m like, man – the things that I’m talking about on that record, fatherhood, prescription drugs, what the hell is a 17 year old want to listen to that for.”

he waxes on his age as an artist at 35 (video is from 2007) – and asks what it is their doing that kids half his age find relevant. To be honest though, having met my fair share of “ZOMG Atmosphere is playing” people – I have often wondered the same thing Slug has – how in the world are they relevant to them? And If your one of them – can you buy the Rhymesayers Documentary so i can borrow it?

If anything it is a humorous reflection on getting old.

I have one of these:

that I temporarily inherited from a friend. The system I need to use it on is an XP64 machine. I dutifully go to the Turtle Beach site to look for drivers (as it wasn’t working) and low and behold:

Eh? Are you serious? What exactly does ‘proprietary’ mean in this context?

With that, I will leave you with this (no date on the file):

In the meantime, Turtle Beach, like many other peripherals manufacturers,

is just beginning its work on 64-bit driver support, as resources and

financial constraints permit. Please bear in mind that the current state of

the PC world is that the vast majority of computers for “casual home users”

will be running 32-bit Windows on 32-bit hardware, for some time to come.

Just as happened about over the last 10 years, the point of critical mass

will eventually be reached, and we’ll all begin the journey to a 64-bit

future. Just not right this instant.

Today I pulled the Dell out of Mothballs, put a PSU in it, and gave it a good going over. The goal here was to get a computer in working order for my my sons grandma. nothing fancy – XP Home, the usual odds and ends. I decided as there is an hour drive between here and where the computer was going to be, it would be prudent to install a copy of Ubuntu along side XP. It should make troubleshooting non-booting XP just a hair easier. I even went as far as to give her a custom GRUB splash screen

Here is a short video showing the computer booting. If your looking for a screen cast on how to do it…this isn’t it (because I didin’t have the presence of mind to tape it!)

Or, Right click save as…

There also is one with you doing a hero pose with the loaner laptop from the college…

It doesn’t seem that long ago I was banging out Low-Fi quasi-embarrassing sample based tunes with FLStudio 2 & 3 (note: It would have still been called FruityLoops at this point see- history) on my Pentium 2 with 128 MB of ram. Through the years I have slowly upgraded. Better Equipment. Better Computers. More Ram. More Hard drive. FLstudio. Well. Not so much FLstudio until this morning.

Eli and I were in the mood to make some music, and seeing as how this machine has multiple cores and oodles of ram – we politely passed over LMSS and went straight to FLStudio. Back then (and even today!) they were offering “lifetime upgrades”. The problem was that FLStudios System Requirements went up significantly every release, so I soon found myself hovering around 4.5 / 5.x. Anything more killed my computer at the time, and was honestly a bit excessive for my needs. So, I stopped following development. Imagine my surprise when I dutifly punched in flstudio.com and was greeted with a “Welcome to FLStudio 8” screen.

Crazy.

So we downloaded it (thankfully the installer hasn’t gotten bloated) and installed it. It ran great – even without a special Audio card. It even installed ASIO4ALL! Thank god. I don’t know how many people I helped in collab with lack-of-ASIO-problems.

But I digress.

Eli & I had a good jam session, and it hit me that this is a demo and I can’t save. Bummer. We exported to wav, and I began the hunt for my .reg with my login information. Thankfully i’m a packrat, and I found it pretty quickly. FLStudio used to have a convoluted registration / license system. It appears they have done away with it to something more intuitive. I went through the legacy user migration process (ha!) and everything went flawless. Downloaded my registration key, imported it and bish bash job done.

I just went from FLStudio 5 to FLStudio 8. Looks like the lifetime upgrade was for real!

Really though, If your into audio stuff its hard to go wrong with FLStudio. It can do it all From recording in and overdubs and digital multitracking (producer edition!) to Tracking MIDI, Exporting MIDI, VST, ReWire, and even be used as a VST itself inside your host (Like, Ableton Live or Vegas). If you buy 1 peice of kit, FLStudio Producer Edition would serve you well. And if your worried its just for Techno & Rap – fear not. It can do anything you want to: Eli & I’s creation today was a 3/4 Waltz!!

Oh, and it turns out now the FLStudio guys have an Affiliate program. Help Support this blog AND your musical interests by getting 10% off any order HERE! I bought it some 7 years ago and I am STILL getting updates! The price of 1 ProTools Update would get you lifetime FLStudio updates.

This walk down memory lane about FruityLoops in 2003!

I discovered Fruityloops on a CD-R I borrowed from a friends older brother. I had used Drum Machines and ReBrith 1.4** 24/7 prior to that so the layout and system was pretty familiar – except it ran on windows and I could finally use samples .

ReBirths repacking never worked for me.

Fruityloops opened up so much of the spectrum. I had already been building my vinyl collection – and even had a notebook where i kept things I wanted to use…when I finally could sample. I ditched the BSR turntable I had for the “broken” one of my Pops, found a stylus for it, and started to use it.

Yah, there was that issue with wow & flutter – as the belt was loose – but no bother. It’s sad – I can still remember the model number off the top of my head (Technics st-210 btw).

I raided my Vinyl Collection (and kept adding to it) armed with the shitty turntable, and a copy of Sound Forge 4. I used to have to render the loops out to use in ACID 1 (ha!) because at the time I coudnt record vocals into FLStudio. Oh, those were the days.

Lets look at some pictures of the FruityLoops\”Weedeater***” days:

I made some of my favorite things here. Yes thats a fan cooling the computer. And worth noting: I would eventually own that Technics 1200!

I am wearing a blanket in the middle of summer. They kept the AC THAT COLD in there. When I would go outside to smoke, my glasses would fog up.

It used to get so hot up there. Not much material made, but lots of good times!

A heavyduty rig needs heavy duty cooling.

8” Radio Shack Sub!

You can see the old Shure Mixer, the Sansui, and the Actual DJ Mixer here. Oh, and my old SE30

My only monitor was an old Guitar Practice Amp (again).

Another setup in the livingroom. Fairly Ambitious!

This is how it was until I moved out.

I did get a sampler – Yamaha A3000 – and its a beast. I will write more about it later. It worked well with FLStudio though. (and theres that goddam RS drummachine!)

Part 2 we will go over FLstudio \ My New computer

——————–

** Yes. ReBirth without the 909. For Macintosh. I know.

*** The Pentium 2 was called the weedeater because the PSU fan failed, and at any point would get off ballance and go “BRRRRRRAAAAHHHHH” indefinatly…like someone running a weedeater. It was actually so loud it would often wake people up..who to make it stop, would have to go stick their hand inside the case and tap on the PSU fan to straighten it out. Real ghetto.

I’m not going to get into the wild world of Minimal Word Processing right now, but I did want to quickly outline how I got pyRoom to run for me on my XP machine.

Notes

- I was having a bear of a time installing it on XP64 / ActivePython

- My Xp machine is running XP Pro 32 Bit.

—

1. Install Python. download here

2. Install GTk for Windows – download here

2. Install pyCairo – download here

3. Install pygObject – download here

4. Install pyGTK – download here

5. Download the Windows Version of pyRoom – @launchpad – or here if your having problems (Like, getting the windows version from bzr, errors trying to extract (identical file/folder names causing it to grok on pyroom / pyroom (folder) among other things…)).

6. Double click on pyroom.py – if everything went OK it should start right up.

—-

You should be done!

The big question I’m sure your asking is “Why? Why bother downloading 30 odd MB of random things to make a 50k app run – especially when I could use something like DarkRoom, JDarkRoom, q10, etc…?”.

It is a very good question. See This thread for more of an idea of where I’m going with this. In the thread ref’d above – someone wants to be able to put small elements of markup in – to make either the export or import into another app more painless. To keep the formatting. the solution proposed is to run it through an external converter. Rather then tack on processors for txt’s, with pyRoom, you should be able to integrate a good way to dump that minimal markup into a format other applications can read and use easier – in my case yWriter…but more on that later.

Oh.

And yes, you could use word.

(Quick Tutorial)

1. Open Word

2. Press Alt. Then press V. Then press N.

3. Press Alt. Then press O. Then press K.

4. Select the color black

5. Press Alt. Then press O. Then press F.

6. Press Alt + C at the same time.

7. Select the color green.

8. Press Alt. Then press V. Then press U.

(and yes, I know its not all perfectly centered and everything like the others )

—–

Key Bindings for pyRoom

(from the wiki)

There are a few keys allowing you to perform a few useful commands:

*Control-H: Show help in a new buffer

*Control-I: Show buffer information

*Control-L: Toggle line number

*Control-N: Create a new buffer

*Control-O: Open a file in a new buffer

*Control-Q: Quit

*Control-S: Save current buffer

*Control-Shift-S: Save current buffer as

*Control-W: Close buffer and exit if it was the last buffer

*Control-Y: Redo last typing

*Control-Z: Undo last typing

*Control-Page Up: Switch to previous buffer

*Control-Page Down: Switch to next buffer

*Control-Plus: Increases font size

*Control-Minus: Decreases font size

There is an issue with XAMPP 1.7 with PDO. If you try to use something that requires it like Magneto this will become painfully relevant with Apache crashing miserably. The fix is to replace the libmysql.dll file in both the apache\bin and \php folders.

You can see the English repost here.

In a nutshell:

-Stop Apache & MySQL

-Download pgp 5.x win

-extract the new libmysql.dll

-copy it to apache\bin and \php and allow it to overwright

-restart Apache & MySQL

-Success.