Introspection
In the tech industry, we’re often driven by a relentless pursuit of innovation, efficiency, and more recently, growth. I’ve built my career in this space, starting in olden times (read: 2009) with this blog, leading into organizing public engineering meetups, and eventually in various roles in the tech
Music
I am pleased to share that Modartt has released the long-awaited Pianoteq 8 for iOS (iPhone/iPad). As of this writing, Modartt hasn’t even shared this news on their website, so it’s likely you may be hearing this news here first. Recently, I wrote up a deep dive
Vacuum Tubes
If you’re a jazz or blues guitar player, there is a good chance you’re not interested in much distortion in your tone. You probably seek mostly clean tone. One of the most crucial yet frequently neglected components of any guitar signal chain is the preamp vacuum tube(s)
Vacuum Tubes
Understanding how to perform the visual study of vacuum tubes can enable you to readily identify the unique characteristics and applications of a given tube. In The EICO 667 Vacuum Tube Tester I shared high-level information about what vacuum tubes are, their use cases, and how to test them. In
Gear
In the last week of 2021 I purchased the above Rhodes electric piano (or EP for short), a 1975 Rhodes Mk. I Stage Eighty Eight from Tim Warneck and his team at Retrolinear in North Wales, PA. According to Tim, this particular instrument was produced at a strange time: right
Gear
This story starts in an unexpected place: In mid-February, Clavia Digital Music Instruments of Stockholm, Sweden teased the imminent release of the Nord Stage 4, the long-awaited update to their flagship stage piano, the Nord Stage 3. The Nord Stage 3 had been my main digital keyboard for many years,
Vacuum Tubes
I was recently fortunate enough to get my hands on a workhorse vacuum tube tester, the EICO Model 667 Dynamic Conductance Tube and Transistor Tester. For those of you who don’t know, vacuum tubes are amazing little piece of hardware that are similar in construction to lightbulbs and have
Introspection
I feel ashamed at the thought that thousands of years from now our descendants may discover what I refer to as Artifacts of Unbridled Consumerism. To our progeny, these items would be seen as small components collectively representing the grand folly of our era. At some point in the ’90s,
Uncategorized
This blog is now 13 years old, certainly a relic by Internet standards. It’s now 2023, and it’s been some time since I’ve last posted. Still, I regularly receive messages from those readers who have found value in my posts, whether they’re wrangling legacy software, or
It Started As Fun With Ones and Zeros, and Now It's So Much More
Today we’re going to build a router. Yes, that’s right, we’re venturing into networking, which for many is uncharted, technically daunting territory. Together we will work through all of the steps required to build a high performance, Linux-based router I have named alpha — almost totally from scratch.
To celebrate Halloween I’ve decided to put together a guide that will show you how to install Raspbian Jessie, the (as of this writing) most current version of the Debian operating system for the Raspberry Pi. The biggest difference between this guide and the hundreds if not thousands of
Yesterday evening I posted a detailed tutorial that explains how to flash/update the IPMI firmware on the X9DRW-iF server from Supermicro. Today I’m going to explain how to flash the BIOS on the same hardware. If you’re not familiar with what a BIOS firmware flash is, there’
I recently tasked myself with bringing IPMI up to date on a Supermicro X9DRW-iF server. This can be quite dangerous, as a bad IPMI flash can break IPMI in a way that requires you end up having to mail your hardware (RMA) to Supermicro to get it re-flashed. As such,
In this post, I’ll begin to demonstrate how beneficial it can be to automate some of the more tedious tasks involved with setting up a new install of MacOS X Lion (10.7) or Mountain Lion (10.8). In this early post we’ll focus on getting our machine
A Java zero-day exploit was reported today. Here’s how to disable Java on Mac OS X Lion so that for the time being, you won’t accidentally run any applets that could compromise the security of your system(s). A command to reverse your changes is also included so
If you’ve upgraded to Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) from Mac OS X 10.6.x (Snow Leopard), and you’re managing a network that uses OpenLDAP for authentication, you may have found that you can no longer authenticate using OpenLDAP from Mac OS X Lion. Today I’
If you’ve decided that you want to learn the Django framework, but you don’t know where to begin, you’ve come to the right place. In this guide we’ll be walking step-by-step through the setup of a Django development VM. By the time we’re done we’
If we insert the following function into our .bashrc or .zshrc we can then easily run what I call a “quick find” on the current working directory. # qfind - used to quickly find files that contain a string in a directory qfind () { find . -exec grep -l $1 {} \; return 0 } Now,
If you use OS X or Linux on your desktop/servers, you may be at a point where you have configured a lot of your own settings, configurations, or themes within dotfiles. For the uninformed, dotfiles are files in your home directory that begin with a dot, or full-stop character.
Almost every single time you visit a website you are using DNS. DNS serves a lot of functions, but the most frequent thing most depend on it for is translation of the domain name you type into your browser (such as www.google.com) to an associated IP address, which
A bunch of tricky issues arise when trying to install Ubuntu Server from a USB drive. Also, there exists a bug in the GRUB installer that threatens to muck things up once you work through the issue of even getting Ubuntu Server installed. Today I’ll be describing how to
