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Category Archives: Blogging

My thoughts, essays, and ramblings

Why I (mostly) Dislike The iPhone 4S

iPhone 4SIf you’ve even casually glanced at my site or social stream then you’ll know that I’m an Android fan. I am an Open Source enthusiast, in favor of Copyright and Patent reform, so on and so forth. So what am I doing with an iPhone?

It was actually issued to me for work. My Blackberry Bold 9000 was dying, and people in our enterprise have been gravitating away from Blackberry to iPhone, so it was the logical choice. Work doesn’t allow Android devices yet, but our management solution can handle it (as well as Windows phone), so it is not far off.

For my personal phone I use a DroidX on Verizon (running stock Android 2.3.4, aka Gingerbread). I love the Droid and it has served me well.

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Uncle! Big Corporations Are Making Me Leave Linux

I love open source. I love the technology, the philosophy, and the people in the trenches making things better.

But I give up. Between proprietary hardware drivers and slow software release cycles for the things that matter most to me, I’m done.

I just spent two hours to accomplish the following: Download a new album that we paid for and play it back on my television. That’s it!

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Movie Review: Prometheus

A bit late, but I was finally able to catch Prometheus tonight.

In short: I loved it.

There is some weak writing and plotting, but great acting and the whole is better than the sum of its parts.
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There are DAWs and there are DAWs

I have been struggling for some time with the question of what Digital Audio Workstation to use for music production and for podcasting. My needs are different then a lot of people and the quality of a DAW is somewhat subjective so this is a hard thing to pin down. The truth is that most of the big names do more or less the same thing, however, their work flow is a bit different as is their compatibility with hardware (controllers, sound cards) and software (operating systems and plug ins). I’ll tack on a little list of these differences at the bottom of the post. I wrote it as response on Google+ to an inquiry on DAW recommendations.

Up until recently I primarily used CuBase and Ardour. CubBase came with my Alesis Firewire mixer. I took to it pretty quick. In the past I have used Pro Tools to a limited degree as well as many other tools that aren’t necessarily DAWs, but have a lot of overlap. These include CakeWalk, Reason, Sound Forge and Audacity. My open source brethren may be sad to hear I am now (almost) 100% using the proprietary DAW Reaper.

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