Mon, 24 Oct 2005
FCC trys to order all VoIP systems to comply with wiretaps
The whole concept of a
wiretap when dealing with voice
over IP networks is
ridiculous. It's incredibly difficult and could potentially involve hundreds of
variable situations. Compare this to tapping a traditional analog pair from your
local CLEC, which simply involves finding the demarc and touching a speaker
with two wires on the end to the pair, and you will begin to see the gravity of
this mandate.
So the FCC
thought it would be a cool thing to try and order every single VoIP company and
non-profit institution with existing VoIP infrastructure to comply with some
abstract concept like "let us listen to your phone calls in the name of
freedom."
posted at: 12:54 | path:
/power |
permanent link to this entry
Sun, 23 Oct 2005
Tyondai Braxton Played at Tonic
Tyondai is my favorite living composer and performer. He makes very well
orchestrated pieces right
before your eyes with a guitar, his voice and a
rather complicated matrix of looping samplers and effect boxes. Mike Burke,
part of JMZ records, the small record
imprint that pressed his first solo CD
described his performance by telling me "he becomes this cybernetic organism."
Ty played at Tonic on the 21st of October 2005. I recorded it. He asked me to
only place part of the show here. The segments are in ogg/vorbis format, to
further confuse you so you'll buy the record when it comes out.
First seven minutes
Last 6 minutes
For all the geeks reading this, I recorded it with a
Sony ECMZS90 stereo condensor
microphone attached to an iRiver
ihp-140 portable harddisk
player/recorder. The source format was wav, which I moved to FLAC and finally
to vorbis.
posted at: 23:40 | path: /music | permanent link to this entry
Tue, 18 Oct 2005
Why I didn't get the 2005 Eyebeam Open Labs residency
- Ben Engebreth comes to Eyebeam from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Cal Tech where he worked on trajectory optimization for spacecraft.
- Limor Fried is a recent graduate of the MIT Media Lab where she earned a Masters of Engineering in Computer Science and
Electrical Engineering.
- James Powderly has a master degree from NYU's ITP program and comes to Eyebeam from Honeybee Robotics, where he has worked as a director of technology development, applications engineer and lab foreman since 2002.
- Evan Roth is a recent MFA graduate from the Design Technology department at Parsons where he was his class valedictorian.
I have no skills. On paper I have no skills. I can only embrace the bad-boy outsider mad inventor cliche if I want to run with this crowd. Fuck. How do I defeat someone with so many computer hacking skills!?
posted at: 01:56 | path:
/art |
permanent link to this entry
Mon, 17 Oct 2005
Installing the Adobe SVG viewer with Debian stable
I find more and more projects using the SVG format for vector graphics on web
pages. Unfortunately there is no Free Software plugin for Mozilla or Firefox to
display SVG files. Adobe does make a non-free plugin, built against Redhat 9
but not in RPM format. It installs easy enough on Debian but actually getting
it to display an SVG file is another thing entirely. Fortunately, Mozilla gave
a helpful error message, which cleared everything up. You need to
enable
TrueType2 fonts for your Mozilla compatible browsers and install some TT
fonts to actually see anything in an SVG file. You can find the file referenced
in the documentation at
/usr/lib/mozilla/defaults/pref/debian.js.
If you only have Firefox installed and not Mozilla and the default kernel for
sarge, it appears that this plugin doesn't work at all. Or maybe it's the
nvidia graphics driver. Who knows. Fuck closed source binaries for Linux.
The above instructions are dependent on some Debian packages, most
notably, libfreetype6, libttf2 and ttf-freefont. In proper Debian syntax
apt-get install libfreetype6 libttf2 ttf-freefont. The last package gives you
some default TT fonts to work with. You can see all the fonts available with
apt-cache search ttf-
That's it. Go
here to test your
plugin installation after restarting your browser.
posted at: 21:46 | path:
/debian |
permanent link to this entry
Thu, 13 Oct 2005
Free pizza is something which benefits humanity
In my neighborhood there are not one, but two drinking establishments which
will give you a 10 inch brick oven pizza for $0 if you buy a drink, which will
cost you at least $4.50 for cheap beer. This is amazing. This is also dangerous
and addictive. I can't remember all the times that I have ended up at
the
Alligator Lounge at 2AM and drunkenly ordered another and...got a pizza to go
with! The other place is called
Capones. If you live in Brooklyn, hell if you
live in Manhattan or even Queens go there. It's fun.
posted at: 00:07 | path:
/brooklyn |
permanent link to this entry
Wed, 12 Oct 2005
An Internet Radio Stream Directory
If you are running Debian GNU/Linux, type
apt-get install streamtuner
alsaplayer-gtk. You won't be sorry. Start stream tuner from your Gnome
menu (or any other way you please) and open the preferences. Enter
alsaplayer -E %q in the "listen to m3u" and "listen to stream"
Application settings. Now browse your streams. Then go to the "Local" section
and point it to the music on your hard disk. Yeah. Fresh. Like iTunes but not
sucking so hard or, like, sold out n'shit.
posted at: 23:59 | path:
/debian |
permanent link to this entry
Mon, 03 Oct 2005
Simple, CD quality live recording from any JACK application.
qarecord is a neat little program that sits
in your JACK patchbay, waits for you to patch a signal to it and records that
signal as a stereo WAV file when you tell it to do so. I have been throwing
live shows at
my apartment and
recording all of them with some fancy new condenser microphones I bought. Until
I discovered qarecord I was using
Timemachine which is excellent but
only writes 32 bit files. Qarecord can write 16 or 32 bit files and supports
pausing while writing to a single file. Good for live shows. It also claims to
support binding controls to MIDI events, which would be quite cool if it works.
Anyway,
here's my Debian
package, built against Sarge. It depends on a lot of shit, which is even
more of a reason for me to set up an APT repo. Until then, read the
APT
HOWTO to set up your own with my packages on your local hard disk.
posted at: 17:15 | path:
/debian |
permanent link to this entry
