If you were to believe the portrayal made by the mainstream media, you would come away thinking that all hackers are bent, malicious cyber punks who have nothing better to do than make your day hell. Such individuals do exist, but on a very small scale when compared to the rest of the pool of people you could consider a hacker.
May 17th, 2012, posted by david_steinlage
About 5 or so months ago I signed up for Spotify. For those of you who haven’t heard of Spotify it’s like the Netflix of music. It’s an online music streaming service that has a massive catalog of music available to stream on demand. If you pay for their premium service for $9.99 a month you can stream their entire catalog to any mobile device instantly. You can also create custom playlists that automatically sync to every device you access the account with and you can also make any playlist or track available for offline play. This means that songs are downloaded from their catalog and stored locally which is a big help for those who have a smart phone but don’t always have reliable bandwidth available through their cellular carrier.
What I like about Spotify: Their catalog really is pretty large and far reaching and you can listen to any track from it instantly without commercial interruption (if you’re a paying member). The PC/Mac client software you use has an easy to use “Similar Artists” feature which is handy for finding music that falls right in line with an artist you are already listening to. Also from a musicians perspective there is something to be said here about their business model. Every artists who has music on Spotify get paid a small bit of money every time their track is listening to. I believe it’s something around 2 cents per play. It’s also something that actually stands to deter people away from pirating music because $9.99 is a fair price to pay for access to such a massive catalog that you can play any track from instantly, without waiting for something to download.
What I don’t like about Spotify: Their catalog doesn’t have everything (but that’s not necessarily their fault). You will likely discover at least one CD from a favorite artist of yours that is conspicuously missing from the catalog that are not available for streaming due to contractual agreements made in the past that did not foresee such streaming services being a possibility down the road. I also don’t like the lack of an ability to apply the “Shuffle All” option against all the playlists you might add, though the next best thing that you can do with create one mega-list of songs and just shuffle all that… but putting that list together would be tedious and a little redundant. I also think it would be nice if they had some kind of radio station type feature, similar to Pandora, where you just say “Play me some new, random music in this genre.” This is one thing I’ve always liked about Pandora or any radio station where perhaps the best way to discover new music is to blindly wander into it.
May 17th, 2012, posted by david_steinlage
This came across reddit.com yesterday and I thought it was too good not to pass along.
May 17th, 2012, posted by david_steinlage
So Ubuntu Linux 11.04 came out a few days ago and being the eager beaver with nothing much to do by myself on afternoon at a hotel in Texas, I decided to upgrade my laptop from 10.10 to 11.04… and it surprisingly went through from beginning to end without a hitch. This laptop, by the way, is a Compaq 6715b and I got it for quite a steal off of eBay about three years ago. Anyway, I have two other systems (a desktop and a server of sorts) that failed on their upgrades for different reasons and at different stages.
In order to figure out the cause and best solution for each of these problems, I’m going to have to take a lot of time to break the problem apart and engage with the Ubuntu Forums perhaps and maybe even have to experiment with thing (to quote Cave Johnson of Portal 2) “to throw science at the wall and see what sticks.” Unfortunately both of these machines are productions machines, and lately (due to my music production software requirements) I’ve been running Windows a lot more often. Windows is unaffected by the problems I’m having, which would be the case on the Server machine too if Windows were even present (it is not), and because Windows is still running I’m easily able to boot it, download a fresh copy of Ubuntu 11.04 and burn a fresh CD at 4x speed with my fingers crossed.
What I’m about to do is reinstall the entire operating system from the CD, replacing the old one and all the software that was installed with a fresh installation that’s far less prone to failure WITHOUT having to backup the user data and move it out of the way because I’ve already set it aside on it’s own partition. That’s what this guide is going to be focusing on: Manual Partitioning.
May 17th, 2012, posted by david_steinlage
Since the days of being a young toddler music has played a big role in my life. I grew up with a piano in the house, tried and hated taking lessons, very occasionally would mess around with audio editing software and record little things with a cheap radio shack microphone but I didn’t really sit down and start to take recording music seriously until about the later half of 2009 when I was living in Iraq as a civilian contractor. The isolation and limited Internet access made it easier to concentrate on other hobbies. So I started messing around with Propellerhead Reason with the determination to learn how to use it. I bought and shipped myself an Axiom 25 keyboard and began work on songs that would later become Highway of Heroes and Magic Show. I’ve done what I can to keep the ball rolling, slowly but surely.
It didn’t take very long to get the hang of how things worked and for all of 2010 I continued to study tutorial videos, books, watched interviews with experienced engineers who talked about tricks they pull in the studio and I’ve come to feel pretty comfortable with understanding the fundamentals. The basics involve common types of sound equipment and tools used in studio production; stuff like controlling dynamics with compression (as well as knowing when and how to use side-chain or parallel compression), EQ, building complex effects from scratch, tweaking synth presets to reshape the sound to something specific, use of things like arps, CV splitters, sequencers and so on. Reason and the official tutorial videos on YouTube served as a great platform for learning. A year after returning home and working on all this stuff something happened that I did not expect.
Early in 2011 a favorite band of mine (Younger Brother) decided to release a new album of theirs on a site called PledgeMusic. The way it usually works is a band will create a fund drive to raise a certain amount of money to pay for the production of their next release (a portion of which goes to a charity) by selling things like limited edition lyric sheets, signed copies of the album, VIP passes to any show you could make it to, extremely limited lithograph prints signed by the photographer (in this case Storm Thorgerson, best known for his Pink Floyd cover art) and, not lastly, a few seats to participate in a studio workshop with the primary members of the band, Simon Posford and Benji Vaughan who may be better known for their own solo projects Shpongle and Prometheus, respectively.
The workshops were set to take place in London at an unspecified time in the future, and given the number of seats originally made available, the sessions were meant to occur over a string of days (which ended up being scattered widely over the next year). Apparently they overbooked themselves and with a lot of touring coming for Simon and Benji, some sessions had to be postponed indefinably. I slightly regretted telling them “the later the better” when asked when I’d be available to go on such a trip. A whole year went by until they checked back with me and asked if I would be available in early March this year. You bet I was.
I left on a Thursday afternoon at about 2 p.m., arriving in Detroit and departing at about 7:40 p.m.. When I arrived in London it was about 8:15 a.m. local time and I snapped this picture just before we landed in some very thick fog:
Unfortunately I barely managed to get more than 20 or 30 minutes of cumulative sleep on the way. By the time I transited the subway station from Heathrow to Blackhorse Road station and then walked about 8 blocks to the house I was staying in it was about 11 a.m. local time, and I was starting to feel some severe jet lag. Every time I took a step it felt like the ground was bouncing under me. I couldn’t remain awake any longer.
I stayed in a spare room provided by a couple named Jess and Luke, who among many others offer their rooms for rent at a website called airbnb.com. Anybody can use the site to offer up (or find) a place to stay for tourists and it was perfect for me; far far better than the idea of staying in a hostle with a bunch of strangers sharing a dorm filled with bunk beds and one shower or something.
I woke up that evening at about 8 p.m. and really didn’t have much choice when it came to doing any site seeing because it was already dark. After getting some frozen pizzas at a grocery store that seemed to be less than a block away as well as some Jim Beam whiskey for good measure, I sat down trying to decide if I wanted to go out late anyway just to try and see something, anything. After a lot of indecision I decided to try and trek my way back south west and see if I could make it to the Westminister station and see Big Ben at night, before the tube stations closed. I barely made it in time to snap a few pictures and turn right back around to head back to where I came from.
While standing there I ironically used my watch to check the time…
When I got back to the station I started at, the train I got off of just happened to arrive at the same time the last one was departing. That was a close one.
With my sleep schedule royally messed up I couldn’t get back to bed, no matter how much Jim Beam or pizza I consumed. I slept in until noon the next day. I learned that the primary subway line I was planning to use that weekend was going to be shut down for maintenance the entire time. The TFL website suggested I take a bus from the shut down station about half a mile to another train station, but that was because I searched for a route starting there, instead of where I was staying at. Had I put in the actual address I would have discovered there was a train station not more than 3 minutes walk from where I was… A big waste of time to kick the day off but I eventually made it to the famous Portobello market, had breakfast at about 4:30 in the afternoon (a sirloin steak, which was unremarkable by this Kansas boys’ standards) picked up a few souveniors, and then made it to the London Eye.
And from up on top of this thing, I managed to snap some very cool pictures, like this one of the Waterloo train station…
I took several others but there really isn’t any room in here for them. The end of the night involved me going to the wrong address trying to find a night club called The Fabric. The city guide app I was using on my phone to get around had the wrong address cached, so I had to ask directions at a small pub. In retrospect I wish I had just stayed at the pub. Long story short, there was a fair number of very creepy people wandering the streets surrounding that club and by the time I found the place it was almost time to start trying to find my way back home for the night. The subway route I attempted to take to get home was partially down for construction and I had go back to where I started to take a very long way around to find my way back home. Again, I wish I had known about the train stations that aren’t on the standard tube maps. If you ever go to London, use this map.
The next day I woke up extra early because I had a bad dream that I had actually managed to sleep in until 3 PM, which would have meant I had completely missed the studio workshop. I got up, had a traditional english breakfast with Luke and Jill where they made me some toast with marmite on it (which I thought was great) a boiled egg and some cereal, juice and coffee. By 10:30 I was ready to start making my way from the quiet Walthamstow residence and into Ladbroke Grove, giving a beggar some spare change along the way before finally arriving at the Saga Centre and met by Benji Vaughan.
He showed us up to a room on the second floor which was quite small but equipped with all the necessities, including a sound proof booth with a mic inside. We (another gentleman from Norway had, like me, purchased a seat and it was the two of us attending the session today) were given a quick overview of all the outboard equipment Benji had his iMac attached to.
Simon appeared a few minutes later and by that time we had already decided that what we were going to spend our time that day remixing a Younger Brother song (Crystalline) for a yet to be released album. It was either that or try to write a song from scratch and according to Benji the last sessions that opted to go that route kinda went south, so it was nice to know that what we were going to be working on was something that actually needed to be made.
We started off by muting a lot of the original tracks to make space for some new ones. The first thing Benji did was come up with a new drum beat using his new Maschine, which was kind of difficult to do without making it sound exactly the same as the original beat that we had muted. To give it some variety a kind of hollow reverb was applied to the snare and the tone of the reverb itself would slide upward and reset every two measures; just one of many subtle touches that give an electronic atmosphere to the track.
Simon decided to pull out a bass guitar, which proved to be a bit of a crap instrument. If you had your open string tuned correctly but then played the same string on the 12th fret or something it would become slightly flat. But that was fixed later by using the Grammy winning software plugin Melodyne, which was one of the most incredible tools I’d ever seen. We recalled first seeing a video for it years ago; I told them that when I first saw it I thought it looked like a concept pitch to potential investors. Turns out that today it’s quite real and quite awesome!
While recording the bass guitar the sound card crashed partially and recorded the bass as more like a robotic, extremely distorted mess. We decided to KEEP this awful sound and try to turn it into something cool with Melodyne. Then we sent that tuned, slightly cleaned up noise through some effects, and they had a LOT to choose from. I couldn’t remember every one we played with but I did remember using Effectrix, Buffer Override, Buffeater, Automaton and an assortment of effects by Universial Audio. A lesson learned while messing around with all this stuff was that it’s important to just mess around for the fuck of it. We never knew entirely what to expect when playing around with these kinds of effects and it just went on to demonstrate how you can have happy accidents if you just stop thinking about the song itself and just have a go at it.
A lot of the sounds that end up in any given track of theirs start off outside the computer, such as from an analog synth like the classic OSCar in the lower right. Benji played a little melody into Logic which would push MIDI data back out to the synth which then allowed him to go to the mixer and start a feedback loop between the console and his Eventide Harmonizer, which was set up to create a reverb or ping pong echo or something. (Speaking of Eventide, the fellow from Norway reminded us that there’s a shot of an Eventide Harmonizer in the movie Contact and Simon went on to point out that Eventide gets a lot of their dollars by selling specialized sound processors to the US military; quite a weird company). It’s a simple effect Simon demonstrates in this video. You can get a lot of weird stuff to come out a setup like that by very carefully feeding sound back onto itself while looping through an effects processor of some kind. One of a few ways in Reason that this can be achieved using the new Echo rack device and using a high percentage of feedback while playing with the frequency and resonance knobs (you can hear me do this to a bit of flute in the latest rough draft of Chill Grill; just click the play button below).
Simon often helped break dull moments by sharing videos he recorded on his iPhone. What does Simon Posford like to record with his phone you ask? Well in this case, his television screen when he was watching the original Batman and Robin series the previous night at home, which if you’ve not seen Batman in a good thirty years or more you don’t know what you’re missing. That show is over the top hilarious from time to time. He liked it so much he decided to hook his phone up to the mixer and sample an audio clip from the show into the remix. Hard to say what will stay in the final mix but I wouldn’t be surprised if Robin exclaiming “Holy Hi-Fi!” manages to stay in. They joked about telling Ru Campbell (the vocalist, who wasn’t present) that the remix wouldn’t contain any of his original vocals and that instead the song was now Batman based, saying he would be shocked if told that.
I also got to sneak peak a few very cool things, such as a new unreleased Shpongle track (it was quite good), what the “Shpongletron 2.0″ stage is going to look like, and the Younger Brother Vaccine sketchbook which fans have been waiting on for a long, long time. It is very beautifully laid out and features information about all the audio equipment used in the making of the album, the making of the cover art (which involved throwing tennis balls at Ru to get him to flinch and cover his face), photos from the recording sessions, a picture from Simons backyard in the middle of winter, a picture of Benji and a gypsy working in the studio; it all looked great! Benji is going to try and get an interactive digital version of the book published online for download. They also told me what little they knew about Twisted Records newly signed artist In:terlaken, which was almost next to nothing at all. They’ve never met him. All they know is he’s a perky young buck from Switzerland whose father would of preferred seeing him grow up to become a watch maker.
Day turned into night and the light rain never ceased. What was originally supposed to be a session that was to last 5 hours went on for 7 and a half hours. Most of the time was spent experimenting with plugins, recording different sounds, composting, eating a sandwich Simon shared with me, smoking hand rolled cigarettes and otherwise trying our best to come up with ideas for stuff to put into the remix. Coming at this with a background in Propellerhead Reason most of the hardware we were using weren’t particularly interesting to me, save for the synths themselves; they have a uniquely beautiful quality in their sound and it was nice to have something like that you could just reach over to and grab a knob and start tweaking. But I think the thing I most appreciated seeing were the VST plugins. Being a Reason user, I’d never touched or really had the ability to use VSTs before, but since my return I figured out how to do it with the help of Ableton Live and Rewire and look forward to experimenting with them more while actually using this as an opportunity to become more familiar with Ableton.
Like I said before, I think the best thing I got from the session besides exposure to a lot of cool VST plugins was the message that it’s best to walk into a studio with nothing in particular in mind and just start banging on stuff randomly and accept the fact that you’ll probably produce a lot of rubbish, because rubbish is still a lot better than nothing at all. Also, it’s best to not to over think things or try to plan out a concept for a track in advance or else you’ll likely set yourself up for failure. This coming from a couple dudes who insist they have no idea what they’re doing. Cheers!
March 16th, 2012, posted by david_steinlage
Imagine you had a computer small enough to fit in your pocket but had the ability to plug it into a computer monitor or HDTV? Very soon you’ll be able to do just that. Check this video out to see what I’m talking about. All he does is take his phone which is running Ubuntu Linux and places it in a dock that’s connected to a LCD monitor, keyboard and mouse. And like that, he’s got a fully functioning “desktop” PC running right from his phone. Very cool.
February 23rd, 2012, posted by david_steinlage
For the last two years or so I have been using an open-source piece of software that was originally called “Gitso” (which I re-branded as “Virtual Dave” with permission from the authors) to establish remote desktop sessions with customers over the Internet. I could fix PCs over the Internet using it. This worked pretty well for most cases, especially when Windows XP was the OS being worked with. But Gitso (version 0.6) relies on a seperate program called TightVNC (version 1.3), which doesn’t work well at all with Windows Vista or 7. Video streams wouldn’t refresh, the connections were often dropped any time a UAC message appeared, so it could be rather cumbersome at times. There hasn’t been any new work done on the software for almost 2 years now and I’ve gotten to the point where I simply can’t wait for a code upgrade, so I decided to go hunting for a more modern and professional alternative and I found one.
Today I’m happy to announce that I’ve replaced the open-source VNC-protocol-based software I was using with something better: TeamViewer. TeamViewer is one of the most popular remote desktop connection programs/services out there (with over 200,000,000 users world wide) and they offer a very cool service. The way remote assistance sessions will work now is simply a matter of visiting the Virtual Dave page, clicking on the logo for your OS (Windows, Ubuntu or Mac OS; other Linux versions are available from TeamViewers’ website) and then running the file that you’ve downloaded. You’re then presented with a TeamViewer window which will generate a fresh/random User ID number and Password, like this:
To give remote access to someone, you just tell them what those two randomly generated numbers are. That’s it! A super simple, super secure solution for remote tech support. One thing to note is that TeamViewer QuickSupport does not install anything when you run it, so if you intend to use it again you’ll want to Save the file you’ve downloaded for future use.
I love open source software and maybe someday I’ll go back to using Gitso if it ever hits version 0.8 but at the moment it would seem TeamViewer is by far the best choice for my needs and I look forward to making use of it.
January 28th, 2012, posted by david_steinlage
Heads up Norton users! A headline hit the news last night about the confirmed leak of source code for the popular Norton Antivirus software by Symantec. You can read the articles for yourself here and here.
For those who aren’t tech savvy, the word “source code” refers to the so-to-speak “recipe” for the development/creation of a program. It is literally the instructions that are more or less written by computer programmers. This kind of information is proprietary and is often a trade secret, much like the coveted ingredients list for Coca Cola or my moms apple pie. If one were able to obtain such information, say a competator or the creators of compuer viruses, one might use this information to one-up the software or, more importantly, exploit design flaws to circumvent the software. In short this means it is quite likely there will be a new breed of viruses on the horizon that will be capable of outsmarting Norton, rendering it useless and crippled.
Symantec has been trying to downplay the severity of this breach by stressing the age of the code, stating that the origin is a version of their software that dates back to 2006, or so we’ve been told thus far. This is an attempt to defuse the concern by implying that their latest software is far different at its core and that there won’t be very much that is useful to virus writers because they still don’t have their hands on the latest blueprints. But the reality of the situation is far less peachy than they would like to paint it. In the world of computer programming software and even entire operating systems will retain a fair chunk of old code from previous versions simply because, well, it’s already been written and if it “works” then there’s little need to rewrite it from scratch. I’m not saying source code is never rewritten, revised or updated from time to time, but when it comes to large programs such as Norton Antivirus that’s made up of tens of thousands of lines of code it could easily be argued that there is likely a good percentage of old code that has been retained for years without ever being modified. It would be like having a castle or fortress that is under continuous construction and maintenance. You can’t afford to tear the whole thing down every year and rebuild it from scratch, so instead what you do is build around and upon the existing structure and make repairs to the parts that need repairing the most. This means that likely most of the fundamental structure is retained and knowledge of the construction of such a structure could be used by an enemy to find a previously unnoticed vulnerability.
In the interest of full disclosure I will have to admit that Norton hasn’t been on my list of recommended software since the late 90s when it was practically the only anti-virus software available. It’s early bird status was followed by years of successful marketing and advertising, which lead to its continuous wide spread recognition of the software/brand name, giving the impression to novice computer users that Norton really is the best thing out there. ”How could it not be good when its so popular?” they might ask themselves.
I am here to tell you that the number one problem I fix for people in this line of work is virus removal and far too often I see systems that are running Norton that have become utterly trashed by multiple viruses while Norton gives inaccurate scan results, claiming the system is clean and virus free. This is particularly irksome to me because when you consider the wide spread saturation of their software along with the monetary cost to the users for the renewal every year you would have to expect the company to use their position and resources to everyones benefit. Despite its wide spread usage and price tag it fails to survey new viruses and develop new definitions for capturing and stopping them in an effective manner and so many users never seem to get their moneys worth. I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt and accept the fact that there is no such thing as a “perfect” antivirus software, but you should expect to be given better treatment and results if you’re paying upwards of $70 a year for protection, especially when there are free alternatives out there that have been statistically shown to do a comparatively better job. And to think these kinds of problems existed before some of their source code leaked. Now that some source code has leaked and the potential for new viruses to be developed to exploit Norton itself are likely right around the corner I feel obligated to suggest that people avoid using it all together. No amount of marketing or PR can change the consensus of most IT professionals who can see past all the BS and to me this incident is more than just one more nail in the coffin.
So what do I recommend instead of Norton? I mentioned that there is “no such thing as a perfect antivirus” but there are alternatives that hold a higher reputation than Norton that cost a fraction of what Norton costs or even nothing at all. In past blog entries I’ve mentioned Microsoft Security Essentials, Malwarebytes and Combofix and still recommend them, so here’s a little information about them.
Microsoft Security Essentials is a free antivirus solution that Microsoft itself actually produces and it’s quite popular in the IT community right now for a couple of reasons. I already mentioned that its free but it is also effective and not as resource intensive as other software. There’s also a new stand-alone bootable version of it that’s going through public beta testing right now which is handy to have for particularly difficult viruses. You can read more about it here. Be aware that there has, in the past, been a rogue malware impostor simply called “Security Essentials 2010/2011/2012″ which people have confused with the real deal, falling victim to a trap. You can download the real deal from here.
Along side MSE I also recommend users purchase the full copy of Malwarebytes for the one time payment of $25. Some of the handy features it has is an active connection monitor which will automatically block your computer from attempting to connect to known malicious web servers. It also features an active process monitor like a traditional antivirus and will help prevent a good number of rogue malware type software from infecting your system. There is a free version of this available but its active monitoring features are disabled. I’ve been using it in the field for over 2 years now and it has worked incredibly well for helping clean systems that had already become infected. You can read more about it here and download/purchase it from here.
Finally a tool I use quite often to help clean systems that have already become infected is a program called Combofix, which is free. This isn’t so much a traditional antivirus that runs in the background as it is a stand-alone utility for scanning a system after it has become infected. It is regularly updated so it’s best to not bother downloading and using it until you actually have to. You can read more about it here and download it from here.
In conclusion I strongly advise my clients to not use Norton Antivirus because it’s one of the most over-hyped, over-priced products out there right now and with the news of parts of its source code being leaked it only stands to become an even less effective product that will do less to protect you than other cheaper alternatives out there.
Speaking of alternatives, there is always the option of picking an alternative operating system such as Linux.
Linux is a free open-source OS that comes in many flavors. We are already seeing Android being adopted by smartphone and tablet users like crazy and it is just one example of a Linux based OS that is taking the world by storm. But for desktop and laptop users there remains a need for a full fledged desktop OS and there are many out there to choose from. My personal favorite is Ubuntu Linux which you can check out at ubuntu.com. It’s not for everyone but I can easily say that it is a very ideal choice for the average user. Keep an eye out for future posts; I intend to record a new introductory video for Ubuntu 12.04 when it is released this coming April.
January 7th, 2012, posted by david_steinlage
As I mention in the post below, I haven’t made updates to this page in quite some time and I just noticed that the last song I posted an update about is not the last song I’ve posted most recently. In fact a lot has happened since then. To keep things tidy, here is a SoundCloud player with all my currently published tracks in it:
A few notes about the most recent additions:
All my music is available for free under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. You are free to download, share, remix and use this music for non-commercial purposes.
November 6th, 2011, posted by david_steinlage
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