Fnord.

Believe it or not, at least two friends have told me that the following sixteen dollar gizmo ‘changed their lives’. Really. In so many words!

What is it? Well, it used to have the clever moniker of “Hold the Phone,” and is sold by the droids helpful people at Radio Shack, where they now call it the “AC Vent Wireless Phone Mount”. Kinda lost the sizzle there, dudes.

Here’s their pic of it:

It used to cost twice as much, so the new price seems a fair trade for the staid name.

Oh yeah, the review: It works great. You can read the display and reach the controls, and its much safer since your eyes are closer to the road ahead. I’ve used it for 2nd gen 20G, third-gen 60G, 4th-gen 30G, Nano, and they all fit. The sides slide in and out on a spring release to accommodate different widths. The only thing that didn’t fit was a case with an integral belt clip that pushed the ipod too far out from the back.

You slide the back bits into the air vent, and it has a lower tripod to stabilize it. Width is adjustable, so it should fit most air vents. Check and see where on the dash your vents are before you get one, though.

Recommended, quite a lot. I’ve been using this one for years and was thrilled to find that it’d fit the new Nanos.

Oh yeah, here’s the Radio Shack link. Sorry.

I’ve had a lot of people trying to use my wireless network of late

Sidebar: The Airport Extreme can send log messages to your Unix box via the syslog mechanism. Check out ‘Base station options’/ ‘Logging/NTP’ and ‘Send base station logging to’

I also set the LED light to blink for traffic, as I find that more useful than always-on.

See this page for syslog setup on Debian.

and I’ve been trying to close down the hatches. I’ve always used MAC filtering, so they couldn’t get on, but someone keeps trying. Given the rapid repeat, its certainly automated or just OS stupidity, but it annoys me.

Plan of attack:

So. First problem is my version 1 Squeezebox.

It’s been trouble before, but I don’t have the dosh to upgrade to the much-nicer v2 or v3. It’s WiFi is B-only. Fortunately, I had a Linksys WRT54GS spare, and had previously setup one as a bridge.

Since I wanted to put images in this post, here’s a pic of one borrowed from the Wikipedia page on it:

I found a slightly better set of instructions for bridge mode on AnandTech, and managed to get it working. I found that the newer Talisman firmware worked better than the Alchemy release.

Sidenote on firmware and Sveasoft: I am a former subscriber to Sveasoft, and have paid for a year of access. This time, subscription having expired, I downloaded the ‘Freeman’ version from this page instead, which lacks the ultra-stupid MAC-based copy protection. I am fairly certain that Sveasoft has bent or broken GPL on this, and FWIW the Freeman version is working well. Rant over.

After you do all the setup (subnet, DHCP, client-mode wireless) there’s just one real gotcha - to get it to work, you have to enable ARP proxying on the Linksys. There’s no way to do this from the web interface, and the setting is erased if you reboot the router. So you have to

echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/`route | grep default | awk '{print $NF}'`/proxy_arp

Messy, eh?

Once I had that figured out, I wanted to enable encryption. WEP is no good, so I wanted WPA or WPA2. I’m using an Airport Express which supports all of the above as my base station. Gratuitous picture:

However, the Freeman firmware pages use different terminology than the Apple admin program, so I had to google a bit. This page and this one got me going. You have to

Now, while it reboots, go to the Freeman firmware and select ‘WPA-TKIP’. Enter same key, reboot, do the SSH ARP voodoo above, and you’re good to go.

(You also have to go around to all your laptops and enter the key into their setups, but that’s much easier.)

Once I did this I hit the next problem: Slimserver is not working. I spent hours thinking it was the bridge setup, which was reasonable given the number of places you can make mistakes, but it isn’t. For some reason, the current release in debian unstable is borked, and the symptom is that the web interface never loads. You can connect to the port ok but you get no content. I erased the contents of /var/cache/slimserver/MySQL and restarted it, but got the same result.

Oddly, the web interface was working while it rebuilt the database, but somewhere in that process it Just Stopped. No error log that I can find, no errors in /var/cache/slimserver/mysql-error-log.txt either. I’m at a loss.

The other problem that I have is probably my error - I can’t load the Linksys web interface unless I’m cabled into it. I enabled the remote admin, but it may be subnet-related or such.

I really wish that the ARP proxy setup was a) permanent and b) web-interface-settable. Yeesh.

I also am a bit peeved at Slimserver. It’s the program single most likely to break on a Debian dist-upgrade.

Ahh well, maybe with G-only and WPA it’ll cut down on the neighbors trying to associate with my base station…

Update 8/19/07: Squeezebox got updated and appears to stay up now, so I’m reopening this one. Fixed the missing anandtech URL, sorry. I should also note that the WPA+G change did remove the slowdowns and associations — hooray! Now tackling the ARP proxy and such. Post to follow!

Via VSL, a pointer to a cool music video, done with dice as pxels. Check out a screenshot above, and then check it out. Note that the actual QuickTime file is at this URL if you want to download it. Kind of a catchy tune.

…the new-to-me Neil Diamond album 12 Songs (2005) is pretty damned good.

Wow. Either I’m old or he put out a decent album. Maybe both, yeah.

It might also be due to the fact that, as Amazon observes

… “What’s It Gonna Be” sounds like something snatched in a pre-dawn lark from a Leonard Cohen disc.

…he sounds rather like Cohen, one of my all-time favorites.

1. Review on Allmusic
2. Album on Amazon
3. (Short)LaLa review

Personal favorites after a dozen or so listens: “I’m on to you”, “Hell Yeah”, “Delirious Love”, “Man of God” and “Oh Mary”. The only one I regularly skip is “Save Me a Saturday Night”, which is weak compared to the rest.

I blame Jason for this - he loaned me his ipod shuffle on the train back from Vernezza to Milan, and it had the album on it. Shuffles lack a display, and Jason is a Hip Young Dude, so I just assumed that Neil Diamond was too uncool for him. Getting off the train, I said something like “Dude, you have some band on there that sounds exactly like Neil Diamond!”

He was amused. I now have the album. Join me in my shame, won’t you?

I have to confess: for the most part, I’m not a Mozart fan.

He’s widely held in high regard for very cerebral music, genius, yadda yadda. To me, he’s a lot like certain forms of jazz: intellectual brilliance does not necessarily make for pleasurable music. You need, IMHO, some emotion.

(Updated 5/6/07: There are exceptions that I enjoy - symphonies 40/41, some of the operas, the Requiem, not sure what else.)

Which leads us to Bach. (JS, that is. There were several.) There are many, many reasons to love ‘ol JSB: the Brandenburg Concertos (the last word in Baroque IMHO), the Goldberg Variations, The Art of Fugue, the Mass in B Minor (I like this performance) and of couse the coffee cantata! The man wrote a cantata about coffee addiction! How cool is that?

If I can’t drink my bowl of coffee three times daily, then in my torment, I will shrivel up like a piece of roast goat.
…
Recitative Narrator
Old Schlendrian goes off to see if he can find a husband forthwith for his daughter Lieschen; but Lieschen secretly lets it be known: no suitor is to come to my house unless he promises me, and it is also written into the marriage contract, that I will be permitted to make myself coffee whenever I want.

Trio
A cat won’t stop from catching mice, and maidens remain faithful to their coffee. The mother holds her coffee dear. The grandmother drank it also. Who can thus rebuke the daughters?

Not to forget the cello suites, either. Get the Rostropovich version, I have two others and neither is even close.

Of all the forms of Bach, I have a particular weakness for his works on the pipe organ. My mother used to play organ for our church, as was also instrumental in introducing us to classical music in general. Thanks, Mom! I also used to work in Cordiner Hall, and every now and then music prof (emeritus) Stanley Plummer would rehearse on the halls’ pipe organ. Once, we were in the tunnel underneath the seats, which is 4′ tall, and he was playing Bach! Total ‘Phantom of the Opera’ moment.

Pipe organ is definitely an acquired taste. Actually, its closer to musical anchovies. I like ‘em both.

Bach spent 17 years as church organist in Leipzig, and I think that gave him a comptence and insight for the pipe organ that no one else ever matched. He understood how the low pedal tones, when sustained, would setup standing waves in the long, narrow cathedrals, and how to maximise the limited dynamics of the instrument. Magnificent stuff.

My favorite performer is Marie-Claire Alain, who I found via MHS. However, last week I found a ten-disc set of pipe organ via Dan’s blog. Cost? twenty bucks!

The artist is Helmut Walcha, whose personal life is fascinating - he was blind, with perfect pitch and musical memory. From the article:

As a result of a smallpox vaccination, Walcha had poor eyesight since childhood, and was fully blind by sixteen. He learned new pieces by having musicians (including his mother in his childhood and his wife in later years), play for him four times (each hand separately, the pedal part separately, and the complete piece). Having perfect pitch, he would memorize the piece while listening.

I got my copy yesterday and am enjoying it. I think the low cost is partially due to the older analog recordings (40’s and 60’s) , but it still sounds damn good and the price is irresistable. I’ve listened to three of the CDs so far and am enjoying them immensely.

(As an aside, consider headphones or limited sessions, out of sensitivity to others within earshot who aren’t pipe organ fans.)

As the Wiki article notes, his voicings were unusual; his performance of the classic Toccata and Fugue in D sounds like call-and-response at some points by his use of alternating ranks. Most interesting.

Highly recommended.

Via BB, the magnificent Best of Bootie 2006 CD. (Free, MP3, what are you waiting for?) There’s also 2005.

Mashups are kind of a semi-new thing, dating back a few years. It seems to be the evolution of cross-fading and mix tapes to me, but judge for yourself.

I like the whole disk, but track 9 really hooked me - ‘Crazy Logic’, a mashup of Gnarls Barkley, Supertramp and Rockwell. (Direct link to song.)

The backbeat and main content of the track is ‘Crazy’, by Gnarls Barkley:

Having heard the un-mashed-up version, I think I want to get the album, St Elsewhere.

Mashups seem to be musical anchovies, either you’ll love ‘em or hate ‘em. Go decide for yourself!

Other personal favorites:

1. Sharp Dressed Party
2. Rock it Like its Lobster

…was the show we went to on Friday.

I’m an indifferent fan of Primus, but the show was good and the music interesting, with a very high skill level on the musicians and killer LED-based light effects.

Sound boards are all digital now, of course, and I had a lot of fun watching the screens and trying to see what was going on.

The opening band, Gogol Bordello, was awesome. Here’s a pic, stolen from Allmusic:

Very high energy show, odd lyrics, odd side performers, very catchy. The front man gives even Southern Culture on the Skids a run for most entertaining and hyper. Think I’ll need to get a CD or two and see how they are in the studio. It’s not music you’d think’d be good, but I really liked their show.

If I do any more shows, though, I’m gonna get me some
Etymotic earplugs:

Via Guy Kawasaki, a nice short page on how loud you can play that iPod:

As they note:

The maximum listening times above represent the amount of time that a typical person could listen to their MP3 player every day without greatly increasing their risk of hearing loss. It is important to note, though, that not everyone shares the same risk of hearing loss. For some people who have “tougher” ears, these recommendations are overly conservative. For other people with more “tender” ears, these recommendations do not eliminate the risk of hearing loss. Today, however, we have no way of predicting who has “tough” ears and who has “tender” ears. Hearing loss occurs slowly and is often not noticed until it is quite extensive, so early prevention is the key.

…and games for the iPod, and this tasty morsel:

Now checking out the itunes update - it’s cranking through my library and ‘Determining gapless playback’… I have Large Hopes, here!

This one is for Larry.

Some people wonder why I like Slayer so much. Then I got to wondering the same thing myself, and while wondering this I started thinking about William Gibson’s microsofts (again).

Here is my theory: Slayer’s music acts just like a microsoft. It plugs directly into the part of your brain that takes over when you’re running from a sabertoothed tiger. It makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up and your heart race. Three hundred thousand years of evolution peeled back by the Slayer microsoft.

This is why I think Slayer is so revered by so many. They have figured something out that no other musical act has - how to plug directly into the lizard brain.

I have to agree somewhat, although for me slayer is guilty pleasure due to their politics.