Recent Posts
Short of finding one on EBay, I don't know where else to suggest. 6U is an awfully specialized chassis size, so there aren't going to be that many choices (new or used) to begin with.Thanks. Yes I am willing to go to 4U because they are so much cheaper! I was just trying to avoid noise issues. This is for a gigging computer. I'm finally satisfied with the technology we have available and am ready to play keyboard through the computer rather than onboard sounds. After all 32-128 MB onboard can't compete with a desktop running multi-GB samples.
If you're willing to come down to 4U or smaller, places like Directron offer very affordable cases you might want to look at. These won't all be from top-shelf makers (or built to data center specs) but for something like a large home server that's mostly going to stay put and not be constantly ditzed with, they'll work just fine.
Maybe Stoic has some recommendations for this one since he gets involved in more hardware purchases than I do?
Luck!-40hz (May 16, 2014, 11:25 AM)
You might also want to consider Dark City. There is a groundhog loop - admittedly engineered every 24-hrs by an alien social experiment where everyone gets "reset" each night - but to the humans who are subject to it, it adds up to the same thing.I saw Dark City in college and it blew me away. Great looking movie.-40hz (May 14, 2014, 01:36 PM)
Ha! Thanks.Anyway, I've never found a good client option. I hate Outlook. i don't much like thunderbird. What else is there? the other options seem to either be really old and unsupported or too new and overly simple.-superboyac (May 10, 2014, 03:01 PM)
If you're still looking for a client option have you looked at Sylpheed ?
It's been my major choice for a long time - there's also Claws of course which is a version/fork of Sylpheed.-joiwind (May 12, 2014, 07:41 AM)
I have Mint on an old laptop ~2008 that is not very powerful at all, and Mint is very fast. I also use virtual machine linux installations, i've tried a whole bunch. VMs are always more sluggish, no matter what. I use it like 40 says, as a sandbox to try stuff. I have never done anything serious with VMs. There's a great jazz sheet music app that is only available on Mac, and i use the VM for that.The Mint is still pretty sluggish.-MilesAhead (May 11, 2014, 06:35 PM)
That's likely because of the virtualization. That's why I think it's better to just run Linux live and off a USB key if you're not gonna install it for real. VMs are ok for occasional use. But for any sort of real day to day productivity, unless your machine has serious kahunas, the results are often disappointing running virtual under a Type-2 hypervisor (i.e. OS-level rather than baremetal) - which to me is more a glorified sandbox than a true virtual environment. (That's purely my opinion BTW. There are many who will strongly disagree with me on that point.
But FWIW, I've got Mint 16 installed baremetal on a couple of older Core 2 Duo laptops with 4Gb RAM (and those slow laptop drives) and the response is very crisp. On my i5-powered box with 8Gb RAM, Mint flies.
-40hz (May 11, 2014, 06:57 PM)
What other email clients? That's the question. There aren't many good options. The Bat has LOTS of minor issues, but no real major ones. Most of my complaints are interface related or "nothing written about THAT!" related. It's hard to figure out how to do anything fancy because there's no updated manual or forum where you can search and find answers. it has a stupid old listserv where most of the activity occurs, and the crowd there is of a very *particular* sort...i.e old school.
- Website Watcher
[/b]
- TheBat
- VmWare
- My own apps
-mouser (May 10, 2014, 01:27 PM)
I used to use TheBat ages ago. It was ok. But I never developed the degree of reverence some users seem to have for it. Has it since gotten that much better than all the other email clients out there?-40hz (May 10, 2014, 02:31 PM)
It totally is! As soon as I heard the groove and the organ...I'm like, oh yea! The guy is fantastic, I'm buying this live album for sure. I'm actually in the middle of arranging a song with pretty much the same instrumentation and style.@tomos - Nice! Some older influences to be sure. And all the better for it I think. Refreshingly honest and real performance for a change. (No twerking dancers or other distractions either!)
-40hz (May 09, 2014, 02:39 PM)
Yeah, the only distraction was the big screen slide-show. That was there because it was a tribute concert (to the guy who was the founder of the Montreux Jazz Festival; I used always think that was somewhere in French speaking Canada - seems it's in French speaking Switzerland)
I think it might be Superboyac's cup of tea as well. Looking forward to getting my live CD anyways-tomos (May 09, 2014, 03:14 PM)
clipped and saved. dammit 40, i need to make a new category for your stuff in my notetakers.When living in the Netherlands I did have a bank card and that I used a lot, because it felt much more secure than a credit card. Just saying, it's not that I have too much against 'plastic', I just don't like credit cards.-Shades (May 06, 2014, 07:45 AM)
Makes two of us.
Interesting that there's such a demarcation between credit and debit (i.e. bank) cards in Paraguay. Over here they're virtually interchangeable. Especially now that the transactions go through in near real time. Far from not liking debit cards, many merchants here prefer them. They pay a fee just like they do to process a credit card transaction. But the funds clear into their checking account almost immediately if the customer has sufficient funds and enters a PIN number at the time of purchase. Transactions going through the credit card process can take up to three days to appear in the merchant's account. Credit card transactions are also much easier to get reversed, so there's a greater risk to the seller if a customer decides to play games.
FWIW, I have a small checking account linked to my main account. It has it's own debit card. Anytime I want to make a purchase (especially online or via phone call), I'll transfer sufficient funds out of my main account into this account (easily done online or by old-fashioned voice phone keypad) and use its debit card to make the purchase. Unless I'm about to buy or order something, the balance in this account is kept very low. This way, even if the account becomes compromised because some seller got careless (or I did) I'm only at risk for the small 'idle' balance in the account. My main checking account remains as "anonymous" and "safe" as these things can be. (Which may not be all that much, but every little bit of extra security counts.)
And if my "for purchases" account ever does get hit, I can just close it, open a new one with it's own debit card, and be on my merry way.
One nice side effect: Because I have to transfer money onto this account to use the debit card, it greatly cuts down on impulse purchases. Sometimes that extra step makes me think twice and decide I really don't need to buy it after all. That can hardly be a bad thing.
-40hz (May 06, 2014, 08:25 AM)
(Note: Being a playing and tarot card collector myself, I also think "collector's disappointment" is driving a lot of this. The concept for the deck was brilliant and highly original. And the artwork was drop-dead gorgeous. This deck could easily have become a much sought after "investment grade" collector's deck.)they do look great.-40hz (May 06, 2014, 02:07 PM)
I've been happily using TheBat for over a decade (there is a discount on the forum for those interested).dayam! power user!
I have about 800,000 emails stored in it.-mouser (April 23, 2014, 09:53 AM)
I thoroughly enjoyed this post! more more!I'm a wannabe audiophile. And I think a lot of it is a kind of OCD; we want it to be perfect, and if we believe it IS perfect, then we can relax and enjoy it more.
I'm suspicious of 'premium' sound systems enhancing the bass to give an extra depth which makes the speakers sound better on first listen but is actually not an accurate reproduction. One reason why I hate trying to judge speakers straight up. It might sound better now, but is it genuine?
I've heard that CDs are purposely flattened so they don't clip on low to medium speakers so it sounds better on average speakers.
People who work in professional studios tell me that the final mix sounds a lot better before it's turned into CD format but I haven't gotten to confirm this.
Also I listen to the start of Alison Krauss's New Favourite to quickly judge a new sound system on how it holds bass. That song is much harder on speakers than dance music.-Fred Nerd (April 21, 2014, 07:24 AM)
You touch on a lot of things I enjoy thinking about. Audiophiles in my experience tend to listen at music, music lovers listen to music. A music lover can get lost listening to the most crackly, fuzzy sounding 78 (old time vinyl for anyone who doesn't recognize that) if the performance is good, whereas many audiophiles will run from the sound. In addition, I've always wondered at audiophile mentality where someone spends tens of thousands of dollars on gear to reproduce music when it was originally recorded on a mixing board utilizing $.29 cent patch connector wires from Radio Shack! An attorney friend of mine who paid $40,000 for a pair of speakers in the early 1990s keeps one of those wires on his desk to remind himself of how his hobby cost him more than it probably should have. And he still owns the speakers which are taller than he is and are kept in a tuned listening room.
It is true that mastering engineers master to the medium - something mastered for radio will sound different than something mastered for mp3 players, and something mastered for CD will sound different yet. But most of us save audio files in digital format. Some use FLAC, I prefer wav as do all of the engineers I work with. There is a reason programs like ExactAudioCopy use wav as the default copying format.
It is also true that what we hear in the studio doesn't sound the same as the finished product, but there are many reasons for that. In our studio we prefer to record to tape then transfer to the computer for editing. There is huge debate over whether analog is better than digital, and I work in both, but I can affirm that after listening to music for 4-5 hours, something that was tracked digitally exhausts me whereas something tracked to tape doesn't fatigue me at all. I also get to listen to first generation sound, meaning it has only passed through recording devices on the way in, and playback devices on the way out, one time. No audiophile has ever heard anything sound as good through their ridiculously expensive systems. But you can only do so much with first generation sound - as soon as you add a second/third/fourth instrument or voice you have to start creating space to hear it, which requires adding eq, delay, panning, reverb, whatever it takes. That first generation sound fast becomes a squashed, artificial sound when individual instruments/voices are lifted from the mix and listened to solo.
There really is no right answer to all of this, except that if you like it it is right for you. I'm a music lover so I don't get caught up in how it sounds as much as I do the quality of the performance when I'm listening privately, but I do my best to make it sound exactly as you want it to sound because I'm delivering a service.-Joe Hone (April 22, 2014, 08:42 AM)
The local one paused to buffer a lot for me too -- of course that is not because it's local per se -- but rather a reflection of the local server's performance weaknesses and the bandwidth limits of its location.How can I make it faster? other than getting a private server option, that is, which is way more expensive. shouldn't i have enough bandwidth to play smoothly once in a while? I've never had good performance on videos i've locally hosted...and i've tried at least 3 different web hosts.-mouser (April 21, 2014, 12:14 PM)
@Wraith- is "moleware" a word?Sublime won me over as well. That preview margin is just too cool. I don't know if it is terribly practical for me, but I can't live without it any more!
I think I'll just stick with Sublime.Especially since I already paid for it.
Funny thing about Atom. From the way the website is talking about it, it almost seems like they're reinventing that other "everything editor" (EMACS) - except this time with a more "modern" interface.
-40hz (March 03, 2014, 08:22 AM)
