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Soft Spoken Change Is Nothing; A View So Cruel

Rather last minute I decided to head out to the Royal Oak Music Theater to see Skinny Puppy perform. Despite Ogre having a 103°F (39.4°C) fever thus cutting the encore a bit short, and the backing video and costumes lacking the religious and political imagery which marked previous shows, I’m glad I went. Unlike years past I also brought earplugs, which were wonderful as I could hear properly both during and after the show.

As expected, the show was almost like a small reunion of Detroit-area industrial folks. While (obviously) not inclusive, I saw a good number of people whom I hadn’t seen for a few years and managed to say hello to most of them. I also ran into a coworker there, which wasn’t wholly unexpected as I’d previously seen him at an Apoptygma Berzerk show, and known his like for VNV Nation.

Due to life being fairly busy recently I made a last minute decision to go to the show, but it worked out well. As I was about to purchase my ticket someone was asking the queue if anyone needed a ticket, as he had a spare. While he was asking $15, I only had $20 bills, but I gladly handed one over in exchange for the ticket, as the result was still $10 less than door price, and no one in the process technically being shortchanged.

Here’s one more image, taken just after the show illustrating most of the stage setup, including the blood sprayed acrylic and metal box where Ogre spent much of the show.

I use my iPod daily, both in the car and at work for listening to music. I’d also recently come across a nice little PCB made by Tarkan Akdam called the iFlash iPod Compact Flash Adapter (mk II) which allows one to replace the 1.8″ hard drive in their iPod with a CompactFlash card. This card is a very nice, basic design, and can be purchased for a very reasonable price directly from the person who came up with it.

Since the hard drive in my iPod will eventually fail, I wanted to replace with flash before this happened and sell the working disk on eBay. A few months back I’d purchased one of Tarkan’s adapters for £14.50 (US$24.45, at the time) and kept it sitting on the shelf, waiting for a good time to do the replacement. Seeing that a 32GB Kingston CompactFlash card could be purchased for roughly $76.25 from Newegg I figured that now was the time, cashed in some change at a Coinstar machine, and ordered the card. (I was originally going to purchase it with an fee-less Amazon gift card from Coinstar, but the machine couldn’t issue one and thus did fee-less change counting. I then made the purchase from Newegg, who had faster free shipping.)

I’d also considered replacing the battery at the same time, but as I still get great battery life out of my iPod, I couldn’t see the need. Opening the iPod is easy enough, so when the time comes to replace that, I’ll do so.

The 32GB CF card arrived yesterday, and since I’m home watching Danielle as she recovers from having her wisdom teeth removed, I set to work today installing it. Opening the iPod was easily accomplished using one of Danielle’s guitar picks, and after disconnecting the flexible PCB cables and removing two little gray plastic spacers, the compact flash adapter was placed in the iPod frame, where the foam rubber cusions made for a nicely snug fit. After closing the iPod it presented me with a screen indicating that it needed to be connected to a computer for restoration, which puts the OS back on it. After doing so, the flash conversion was complete.

Since there is no longer a need to wait for the disk to spin up, the UI is much more responsive now. Battery life should also be improved greatly, as flash takes less power to run. The only current downside is that the iPod now feels off balance. Previously it’d felt very evenly weighted; solid and firm, but not overly heavy. Now the top of the device, where the battery is, feels a bit heavier than the bottom. Thankfully this shouldn’t matter for me, as most of the time my iPod is sitting on a desk or in a car mount.

Later tonight I’ll post an eBay auction for the old hard drive from the iPod, a Toshiba MK3008GAL 1.8″ 30GB hard disk. I hope that it’ll fetch $20 or $30, to offset the cost of the flash adapter and card. Now, here’s to hoping this iPod has another three years of life left in the rest of it.

A few months back I emptied my CD rack, boxed up the CDs, and removed the rack from the wall. Tonight I finally got around to moving the CD boxes into storage in the basement, placing them on 2x4s beneath the stairs. This both gave me a chance to straighten up that closet and finally got the living room / dining area cleaned out, as it’s where the boxes had been stacked.

As can be seen above, there’s quite a few boxes of CDs stored there now. Part of me wishes they weren’t in storage, but I know that having them out taking up wall space wasn’t particularly useful. Now this space is used by a bookshelf that is accessed much more frequently, as can be seen in this photograph taken a few minutes ago. Also, if you’re interested, here’s a photo of the closet and stacked CD boxes with stuff put back in around them.

Last night I emptied my CD rack, and today I’ll be removing it from the wall. Boxing the CDs up felt a bit odd, because almost every single one was purchased listened to, enjoyed, and reasonably understood. With listening to music during all sorts of times, feelings, and experiences, a large, well-used CD collection is almost a story of years of one’s life.

Now that I have all the discs ripped I don’t need as ready of access to the discs, and the wall space could be better filled by a book / stuff shelf, so the CDs are being moved into storage in the basement. Still, I can’t help but feel like I’m putting aside a big part of my life and what makes me feel like me: music.

I really like how the Wire song German Shepherds on Coatings uses the Human Voice patch from the Casio SK series of keyboards. I particularly remember this one from playing with my sister’s SK-1 when I was little, and trying to figure out where it could possibly be useful.

A slightly different version of this track, the B-side from the Silk Skin Paws single, may be heard here at YouTube. It still includes a bit of this patch.

An order arrived from Mouser today, which means that I was able to complete the AMB γ1 Modular Miniature DAC that I’ve been building. Complete it’s a bit smaller than a standard business card and feels very solid. The board assembly slides forward and back ever so slightly in the case when inserting or removing the USB cable, but it’s nothing that’s a problem. (A/B this photo and this photo to see the shift.)

Tonight I’m using it connected it to to the Millett Hybrid Maxed that I built last year, my most-favorite Sennheiser HD570 headphones, and each of my computers, and this sounds darn good. Now I’m realizing just how low quality some of the audio recordings on my computer actually are, but better than that I can now^† listen to high quality audio at reasonable levels while Danielle sleeps in the next room. Yay!

I’m really enjoying this.

^† Yes, I realize that I could have just used the high quality line out in my Mac Pro with the amp, but I’m also expecting to use this when at work or with computers with crap audio (eg: Dell D620).

Can any of you help me locate a digital copy of the album The Sounds Of American Doomsday Cults, vol. 14?

I’d heard samples from this a few times before, but when listening to Rough Trade Shops: Counter Culture 06 (disc 2 track 13) I was finally able to put an album with the sample. Searching around revealed this site with a broken RapidShare link, but no other traces of where to find a copy. Would any of you happen to know where I could get one?

Thanks!

UPDATE: I’ve found a few places to buy the CD from, so it looks like it’s available, it’ll just take a while to get.

I ended up some tickets to see Coldplay at The Palace of Auburn Hills. Upon collecting them we found that they were in a rather nice location, and while this isn’t the sort of music I tend to listen to it was quite an interesting show. It was also the whitest show I’ve ever been to, but I guess that’s to be expected.

We were about five rows up from the front corner of the stage, just high enough up that we could easily see everything happening on stage without being too high up. As can be seen above we or in the links below we were close enough a basic cell phone photo without digital zoom just barely fit the main part of the stage. There were some really nifty effects as well, including spherical screens with internal projectors, video feedback displayed on a large screen behind the band, and die-cut fluorescent plastic butterflies dropped while the venue was lit with blacklights.

Here’s the five cell phone photos I grabbed during the show: 1 · 2 · 3 · 4 · 5

Tonight’s beer is Dark Horse Brewing‘s Perkulator Coffee Dopplebock. It’s nice, but interesting. It’s got the coffee taste which one would normally associate with a really dark breakfast stout, but it’s lighter and a bit maltier. This is a nice beer.

Mmm. It’s time for the Perkulator. And Cajmere’s Percolator, which comes to you via Detroit’s The New Dance Show.