MeFi’s y2karl does his usual amazing thing with The Annotated Blonde On Blonde, setting my musical agenda for the day – Visions of Johanna is fighting for bitwidth versus a backup on my firewire bus at this very moment – Not incidentally, he reminds me, in a week where the world finds itself less one sensitive musical savant, beloved by his community, there remain others.
One of whom has an open offer for a beer, again, on the table. You know who you are.
I was finally able to get both Wallstreets to boot into OSX yesterday. Long story short, the CPU in the machine that’s been working hard serving the website for the past year-or-so is displaying signs of heat damage, and freezes, every time, when one attempts to install OSX from CD.
So I installed from CD after swapping the CPU card for the new one from the more recently arrived machine.
More tinkering yet required, of course. Just making note of it.
Oh the transcribing takes all day…
Building a Web Media Empire on a Daily Dose of Fresh Links: The Old Grey Lady takes note of the new pink one.
So I noticed that faithful chucklehead Andy Ihnatko wasn’t in my most recent ish of Macworld, something that was visible coming when he was removed from his last-page perch a couple issues ago.
What should I find but that the Boston-based pedant has signed on to the good ship Mac Observer, and that furthermore, he’s covering, as any good Mac scribe would, Panther (he’s a skeptic).
Apparently he’s been over there since September. And you know who else I saw in the house? Bob LeVitus.
What, did the site get funding, or are times hard? I read iBrotha before Rodney decided to move on, but GAWD I hate the damn look of the site – flashing blinking gewgaws make it pretty hard to actually read the content, and for the love of Mike (that’s me) the two-inch top banner is pretty horrific as well.
But hmmm… At any rate, nice to know where Andy is these days.
I’ve been looking for a way to control audio playback to a background application for a while, so that I can transcribe without a bunch of wrist-burning mouseclicks, and found the following method, which unfortunately depends on iTunes.
Why is that unfortunate? Well, iTunes insists on copying the 650mb-plus audio-capture files to the music library before it will play them back. A small hassle, I guess, but an advantage for QT player.
So, forthwith:
1. Download and install iKey, formerly YoupiKey. Do not set it to be activated by default at boot.
2. Make three Applescripts. They are the simplest scripts ever, and here they are:
playpause.scr:
rewind.scr:
fforward.scr:
I saved these files in a folder I created: ~/Library/Applescripts/iTunes
3. in iKey, select the ‘Universal’ set, and from the menubar select Shortcuts > Script > Run script from file. Name the shortcut as the scripts are named (i.e., ‘playpause’). Now click the tab labeled ‘Script,’ and ckick the pull-down menu with the bold question mark. ‘Select…’ will appear.
4. Navigate to the location of the appropriate script and select it from within the dialog that opens when you click ‘Select…’. The script name will then appear in the pulldown.
5. Click the tab labeled ‘General.’ Click the checkbox labeled ‘Keyboard’. The ‘Key combo’ text box will highlight. Press the key combination you wish to control the script. I used ‘Command-space’ for playpause.scr and command-arrows as appropriate for FF and RW.
6. Repeat until you’re happy with the results.
Now, I can directly control the audio playback of iTunes without having to swap to iTunes and have to click out of Word while I’m typing, which is just a huge benefit. Of course I need to make sure that the audio file is opened and ready to play within iTunes, but since I don’t really want the files added to the iTunes library on a permanent basis, that’s fine with me.
I do not want iKey activated by default at boot because Command-Left Arrow and Command-Right Arrow are the default forward and back controls in many interfaces, from the Finder’s filebrowser windows to Safari and IE. You may not care, but it was driving me crazy for a bit this afternoon as I looked up a spelling in the middle of my transcription session.
I didn’t see a way to exclude a given app from the ‘universal’ set in iKey.
Dan Shoop is helpfully taking the time to provide pointers. I post this here (as well as in the other threads I have going on these difficulties) to get some Googlejuice and to create a wider footprint for other frustrated Wallstreeters that will be facing this after they dutifully apply resets, creating this problem.
He recently presented on bare-metal recovery for OS X. His opinion (I think) is that when the Wallstreets were reset (shift-fn-crtl-power) it zapped a Wallstreet-specific boot component which he refers to as XCOFF. Below are the steps that I’ve abstracted from his recovery recommendation, as yet untested.
1. swap the 10gb / 2 partition drive into the local bay to rule out wonkiness in the exp bus connection as regards the XCOFF/nvramc
2. reboot into OS X 10.2 installer CD
3. reformat HD to 7gb/2+gb in DU
4. Set startup disk to OSX 10.2 installer CD. shut down
5. reboot into OSX 10.2 installer CD in single-user mode (must be a cold boot!)
6. Create a synthfs filesystem and mount the internal drive and backup drive using autodiskmounter.
7. bless the intended boot drive locally. Using ‘bless -device’? Unsure.
8. restore from backup. CCC won’t work, Shoop states (possibly because we’re booted into a flavor of the OS that can’t run it).
9. backup in place, use nvramrc -f to copy the Wallstreet’s nvramrc file from the CD to the internal HD.
10. bless -folder
11. Reboot.
—
I have research to do:
step 6: filesystem creation and mounting (the backup drive may not be mountable at this juncture)
step 7: clarifying the command
8: no backup tool has been specified. You note a commandline binary is needed but psync and ditto are unavailable from the install cd. Dan mentioned rsyncx.
Metafilter brings news of Free Web hosting for three years via a promo offer good through January-ish. No credit card number is required for billing. 500mb storage, 5gb transfer. All mod cons.
Tom Donohue, a longtime Bloomington music scene supporter, passed away in Indy yesterday (November 12, 2003) from cancer at age 52. Most recently he owned and ran the record store TD’s CD’s and LP’s, just off Kirkwood.
Tom trained Eric and me at the cable radio station WQAX when it was up in the Union, either late ’78 or ’79. Eric and I were 13, so probably ’79. Between his patience and willingness to share his encyclopedic knowledge of music – enhanced by the fact that he ran, with Dr. Ugly, the best record store in the history of Indiana at Duroc – he provided, for both of us I believe, a role model for engagement with music in general and music communities.
Eric, of course, chose to take some of Tom’s low-key style and apply it later to his role as GM of QAX, and although I’ve never discussed it with him directly, I suspect that along with his father, Tom’s understated humor provided Eric with an adult role model.
I will never forget visiting Bloomington sometime in the early nineties, after Tom had returned from Austin – his absence from town coincided with the peak of my involvement in the local music and arts scene – and running into him on the street. I was overjoyed to see him, for the first time in over ten years. He knew who I was right off the bat. I promised to buy him a beer at Second Story that night, but later, at the bar, I was so busy catching up with with various other folks I hadn’t seen for years that the beer slipped my mind.
A few years later, I was in town again and someone told me Tom had a store again, which excited me. I went and threw fistfuls of cash at him as I stocked up on more or less every local record from the prior five years or so. As we were closing the order (Tom suggesting additional records, naturally) he paused for a moment, looked me in the eye, and said: “You never did buy me that beer.”
And I never did. But even if I had, I’d still owe him a beer, as, I’m sure, many other will concur that they do as well. So Tom, tonight, before I eat dinner, I will drink a toast to your memory and thank you for your contribution to my life and to the life of one of my communities, to the musicians and music lovers of my home town. Godspeed, Tom, and may you be on the guest list.
Anybody know if there’s particular brand Mr. D favored?
The June entries looked scarier — more fighting and shooting. The last entry was written June 9, 1864. He had to “hide out all day,” he wrote.
This was absolutely compelling for me. (I can’t imagine how a tiny leather datebook from 1864 could survive the Civil War and still be around today in decent condition. I can’t imagine what else he wrote in there, or the things he dealt with within the context of the war, or the day-to-day realities of 1864 in general.) And suddenly…
Oldtimey finds a blog (well) from the Civil War for Veteran’s Day.
Maciej finds a post from a French blogger that visited an American cemetery from the Great War.