Technology

How many of us still have a landline? The recently released study from the Center for Disease Control says that 34% of US households have only a wireless phone. That's an incredible number. And yet, I'll also guess a lot of us would like to have an alternative to both cellphones and landlines. I know of plenty of people who can't afford a regular cell plan and use pay-as-you-go phones, at least when they can afford to replenish them. When they can't, they do without. And even those of us that can afford to use cell for everything sometimes wish we didn't have to, especially when we have a job, a business or a teenager that eats up the minutes as fast as they are credited. Okay, let's fix it!

I love my OBihai 100. It plays nice with Google voice who currently provide free VOIP service to the continental US, and a number of other providers. If (when?) Google ever starts charging for this valuable service they will go in with a lot of good will from all of us who have enjoyed the free lunch and a proven track record. I've had mine for a few months without a single dropped call or any of the usual VOIP issues. Best of all, calls between two Obihai end points are always free, so if you buy two units you can place one at a relative or friends house and really save some money. This is a favorite tactic for international callers. Read the reviews at NewEgg and Amazon and be surprised at the high ratings these devices have received. The OBi 100 is the least expensive model and the one I currently own. It has a single ethernet port and a single FXS RJ-11 analog phone port into which you will plug an ordinary wired or cordless telephone set. In combination with a regular VOIP provider or a Google Voice account you'll be ready to start making and receiving calls. I have a cheap cordless set with answering machine plugged into my unit with the idea that if Google voice fails to pick up an unanswered call, the answering machine will get it. This arrangement would also serve well if I start using one of the many VOIP vendors that can work with the device. Any vendor that supports SIP protocol should work, but anyone who has worked with VOIP knows that you can't be sure until you try. A list of known compatible VOIP providers is shown at the end of the review.  It should be adequate for most peoples needs and can support 2 VOIP accounts providers on one device. The web-based setup and administration screens on the devices and at Obihai.com are not dummy-simple but can be gotten through by a careful and patient consumer with good reading comprehension and a willingness to read help files and perhaps use Google to do further research. I've never had to call their support team but have heard good things. An app is available to allow you to run the Obihai client on your cell phone, for extra fun, confusion and bragging rights.

The OBi110 as the next step up differs from the 100 only in the addition of a FXO RJ-11 analog port which allows use of a regular POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) line as an alternate gateway. I can think of a few folks who might have need of such a thing, IE: those who already have a preferred vendor for overseas calls or who might need to make occasional calls out on a phone switch for some reason. It costs about US $10.00 more than the OBi-100.







The next step up is the OBI202 Router. Besides being able to function as a router either for a subnet on your current network or as a main router for a small home network, the 202 can connect using a wireless USB dongle costing about US $25.00 as its uplink, turning it into a true road warrior tool. I wish more routers supported this sort of connectivity. The OBi202 goes for about US $72.00 as this is written, and supports 2 Google Voice and 4 SIP providers. The router function only provides 2 ethernet ports so if you are going to use it as your main router you will need a small switch and possibly a wireless access point for a good home or small office experience. Personally I would recommend using it as a subnet router and leaving something more capable to handle the main networks routing needs.



SUMMARY

After this device is configured it's been very trouble free and even travels well. I have driven to other peoples houses and simply plugged it in and started making calls. SIP is not very secure so do use some caution if using these devices on the road or under insecure circumstances. There is no less expensive way to get good VOIP service and Obihai is regarded as the very best option for interfacing with Google Voice accounts. Do your research and I think you'll agree. I'm not affiliated with Obihai in any way and did not recieve any compensation or free hardware for writing this review.

I was asked why I bothered staying up to see Curiosity land on Mars last night. The fellow says it's too boring watching this stuff, just like the old moon landings!

Well, much like the moon landings, it's not really about the "pitchers". This mission is in many ways the swan song of our nations space program. There isn't Jack Shit planned for the future. The shuttles, which were a stupid idea in the first place at least as executed, are now mothballed. Our plans to work with the EU are officially canceled and what half-ass launches we did leave funded have been out-sourced to Russia of all places. It's a fucking tragedy, to those who think our future as a race of beings depends on our getting the hell off this single planet and learning to found colonies. Somehow this one very worthwhile mission remained on the board, possibly because it had already been funded before Obama took office. NASA and the JPL are like a race driver or athlete who knows he's not going to be invited back for the next season, and they had everything to gain and little to lose on this magnificent gamble. I don't know when it was all planned, but this landing was revolutionary and precedent-setting. It demonstrated just how far we've come with robotics and landing technologies. Those geeks have every reason to pop their corks. The success of that landing alone makes it harder to justify spending trillions on our war machine while whining that we can't "afford" a space program. The end result of our current space "program" as congress and the president seems to envision it will find the first American to set foot on Mars riding as a passenger on a Russian descent stage to visit a Chinese colony. NASA gambled big on this landing, won big, and like the race driver who wins at his last time behind the wheel is now looking to the rest of us to make the case for giving them another chance. And it's pretty hard to argue they don't deserve it.

So that's why I stayed up to watch the whole damn thing. Not because I expected to see much of anything... I wanted to see the geeks either fail or win big and rub the politicians noses in it, this one time. That landing was something straight out of a sci-fi movie and our space agency that has had the financial rug pulled out from under it pulled it off with fucking robots. Robots! Yeah. The descent stage had about 140 Kg of fuel left when it cut the cables and veered off. The whole thing was probably the coolest thing our country will accomplish in the next five years or possibly a lot longer. You may now return to your regularly scheduled program of economic collapse, oligarchic hegemony and climactic disaster. No deviation will be tolerated, citizen.

Support Issue Tracking is a topic at my day job the last few days. Weeks. Years?

I had decided to revisit the options we discussed way back a few years ago and see what direction all these softwares have gone in since the last time we decided to put up with what we had. Back then, I researched the various support tracking suites. At the time most of them were closed source and very expensive. Today, that situation has changed; there are many open source systems and one that is well liked and easily available is called Request Tracker. A look at their web page that lists some of the organizations running RT at http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/who.html makes interesting reading. It's written in Perl and supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQLite for a back end. The company has a knowledge base/article tracker that links to it called RTFaqM, which I didn't look into.

I also found this comparative matrix of support tracking systems.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue_tracking_systems

The screenshots at http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/screenshots.htm look nice.

http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/ has a wiki at http://requesttracker.wikia.com/wiki/HomePage

I'd appreciate hearing back if anyone reads this and is interested at all, or has -anything- to say about Request Tracker, good or bad.

Link: Project Blackbox

These have been around for 3 or 4 years now but I still think they are cool.

250 x64-based servers with 1000 cores
1.5 petabytes of disk storage
7 terabytes of memory
Can support approx 10,000 simultaneous desktop users
sufficient power handling and cooling capacity to support 200 kilowatts of rackmounted equipment

In a standard 20 ft shipping container. In flat black, of course.

I'll have the local chopper shop do some flames painted on the side of mine.

MiniDisc Death Watch and Multitrack Recording

Editors Note: I've cut most of the links in this article; some of the devices are no longer relevant in todays market. The most surprising thing is that most of them are still being actively sold and the prices haven't gone down much at all! This part of the market is somewhat stagnant and I look forward to that changing.


The MiniDisc Spins Down

It is my unpleasant duty to announce the imminent death of the Minidisc, at least as far as home-studio musicians are concerned. It died for most of the rest of you quite a while ago, but still hangs on among musicians and anyone who needs a reusable, high capacity, compact, beautifully accurate alternative to tape.


So lets all go window-shopping for multitrack digital recorders under $400.00 US and see what we find.

This weekend I felt like making some casual recordings of my original songs for voice and guitar. I have pro sound equipment: mixer, condensor and dynamic mikes, effects, direct boxes and computer interfaces and software that allow me to record and edit on a workstation, but I didn't want to set all that stuff up on this particular day. I just wanted to plug in something ready-to-run and a microphone and grab an old guitar. I pulled out my Sharp MDDR480HS grey-market MiniDisc recorder, plugged in a Sony ECM-DS70P mike, flailed away at the mighty Guild 6-string and had a ball. It was fun but it wasn't cheap. The stereo recorder cost me over $300 and is really more suited for recording live gigs than even casual studio work, but it will do just fine in a pinch for recording songwriting ideas or rehearsals. I got great results, but when I was finished, I was moved to research what it would cost to switch to a professional quality multi-track recorder. I'm tired of fighting with software drivers in both Linux and Windows, and frustrated with motherboards and their constant south bridge chipset issues. And while the MiniDisc gives a great recording it's no substitute for the real thing. The last time I looked into the idea of buying a dedicated multitrack recorder the equipment was expensive enough to be prohibitive but that situation has now changed, mainly due to a lack of downward price movement in the Minidisc field. Sony seems to own the very small US Minidisc market and feels no need to compete on a price basis. Recording equipment on the other hand has finally begun to come down in price.

Here's what I percieve as the current top-of-the-heap portable MiniDisc recorder; the Sony-MZ-RH1. At $329.00 USD there are more expensive models but this is what I would choose were I buying one today.

Link: Sony-MZ-RH1

Taking that as my base line, I went off to Musicians Friend to see what the competition looks like. These units are presented in no order other than that in which they caught my eye, and while I tried to stay in the same general sub-$400.00 USD price field I wandered away for a couple models that seem like an especially good deal. You'll notice I don't even mention effects, for a couple of reasons. One is that I don't consider them to be something you should be thinking about when recording. If you are recording an instrument that has it's own effects loop such as an electric guitar stack or keyboard and you know exactly what you want, and are OK with the idea of not being able to go back and take out that horrible flanger effect you plugged in, thats just fine but in most cases I think the goal should be to record pristine tracks, other than perhaps a bit of compression to keep the peaks down. You can always muck them up with your favorite plug-in later, and if you were smart enough NOT to record the original track with effects you can always change your mind. The other reason is that the manufacturers and retailers are always more than happy to distract you by blathering on and on about how great their effects are, and you can only find out if they are lying by trying them out yourself. I won't waste our time by repeating their marketing claims.

I've tried to consistently point out some features such as number of tracks, USB, XLR Balanced microphone inputs, and number of tracks for simultaneous recording, but this doesn't mean I'm describing EVERY feature of these devices. I haven't said a word about tone controls, faders, warrantees, displays, A/D converters, effects patch capability, sample rates, user interface, firmware upgrades and many other issues. You have plenty of homework to do. Keep in mind this stuff is at or near the -bottom- of the barrel of stand-alone digital home studio recording equipment; for more money you can get substantially extended capabilities. Also keep in mind I don't yet own any of the devices in the following list. I decided to go shopping at the low end of pricing and I'm taking you with me. What follows is reasonably well-founded guesswork from a musician/computer geek familiar with the technology and terminology. It's worth every penny you're about to pay for it.

Some Nomenclature

Phantom power

XLR Balanced, TRS Balanced and Unbalanced Inputs

Track Bouncing: The practice of combining multiple recorded tracks (bass and drums, for example) into a single track in order to free up track capacity to record more tracks.

Virtual Tracks: The ability to keep multiple versions of a track, only one of which can be selected for playback at a time.

Taking a musician to shop for gear is about as smart as inviting a crack whore along on a Colombian vacation. Let's go!

The Gear

Link: Korg D4

The Korg D4 for $349.00 USD. It uses compact flash cards up to 2 Gigabytes so no moving parts and a gig of flash can be had for about $20 lately. USB connectivity, 4 tracks with 8 virtual tracks per track, runs on 9 volts, has two line inputs and one balanced XLR, records 2 simultaneous tracks and comes with an onboard drum machine. Cons: I don't think we have to settle for 4 tracks at this price level.

Link: Korg D888

The Korg D888 is quite a bit more expensive at $699, but ye gods I want one. 40 gig IDE hard drive, 8 XLR inputs with phantom power, 8 tracks of simultaneous record and play (!) with 8 virtual tracks per track, USB 2.0 connector, MIDI Time Code transmit, optical S/PDIF connector, 2 headphone jacks, effects, and it appears to be basically an ordinary 8 track mixer you can use for gigging that happens to record. For the extra money you also get some features usually found on more expensive equipment or digital editing software such as punch-in/punch-out for overwriting sections of a track or inserting a quick track segment, 100 mark points and four editing points to help you locate particular sections of a track, a metronome... could someone hand me a towel? Cons: Well, just the damage to your bank account.

Link: Tascam DP01FX

The Tascam DP01FX is $449.99 for a unit with somewhat similar features to the Korg D888 but only the usual 2 tracks of simultaneous input and only two XLR jacks. It could not be used as a gigging mixer, and I'd still prefer to spend the extra $250 for the Korg. If your budget can't go there you might feel differently. I see there is a promotion right now that lets you get the Tascam unit with an MXL V63M condensor mike for an extra 99 cents. This is an entry level $100 condensor microphone, so it's a great inducement. Cons: They are facing hard competition at this price level from Fostex.

Link: Foxtex MR-8 MKII

The Fostex MR-8 mk-II at $249.00 (!!!) has 8 tracks, uses Compact Flash, has two phantom-power XLR inputs and two simultaneous tracks of recording, midi connector, USB, two headphone jacks, runs from DC 12 volts or 6 AA batteries. That's almost a hundred bucks less than the minidisk! You could spend the money on Compact Flash cards and (for long-term storage) a DVD burner for your computer. I note this unit can take CF up to 2 gigs. It also has the ability to drive an external CD burner over USB and has a very complete manual available online. If you're on a small budget this unit is a killer deal. Cons: Few, but see the track bouncing problem described for the Fostex MR8HD below. I suspect this machine may have the same limitation.

Link: Fostex MR8HD

The Fostex MR8HD at its current sale price of $399.00 US is -very- competitive. 40 gig IDE drive, 4 simultaneous recording with 4 XLR phantom-powered jacks, USB, S/PDIF, 2 headphones, 8 tracks. It appears to be pretty much an MR-8 with hard drive instead of Compact Flash, and 2 more XLR jacks. For someone like me who likes to record a voice track, a miked guitar track and the same guitar running through a pickup all at once, this is a nice little system for very little money. Cons: I note it does have one odd pecadillo in that you cannot bounce multiple tracks to a single track but only to -two- tracks, 5/6 or 7/8. This is a limiting factor in terms of flexibility but not a deal-killer when you remember it records 4 tracks at once.

Link: Tascam DP-01 Portastudio

Tascam DP-01 PortaStudio. $299.00. 40 Gig IDE hard drive, 8 tracks total, 2 to record, 1 headphone, USB, Midi, with no XLR jacks, instead you have two 1/4 inch TRS jacks. Cons: the lack of XLR inputs means any condensor mikes will have to be self-powered or be given an external supply and you'll need an XLR to TRS adapter. If I had to choose I'd try the Fostex MR8 instead. If you need the extra storage afforded by the hard drive and don't care about the missing XLR inputs this unit might be an option, but be aware you may badly want XLR and phantom power later.

Link: Boss BR-600

Boss BR-600, $399.00 for 8 tracks, USB, two headphone jacks, uses Compact Flash. All the docs I found were strangely silent on the issue of how many tracks it can record at once but I'll assume its the usual two tracks. There are no XLR jacks but it does come with an XLR to TRS adapter. Runs on 6 AA or AC, and has a drum machine onboard. I'm a little ambivalent on this one but it does have the very nice feature of supporting 8 'virtual' tracks for each track, like the Korg D4 and D888 we started with. I'm not sure if the virtual takes can be saved between sessions. Having all these virtual tracks can suck up storage in a hurry but I can't imagine anyone running any of these units with less than a gig of storage anyway, which is as much as this model can handle. For this price level I'd much rather have the Fostex MR8HD. Cons: the one-gig limitation is not shared by competing models at this price level and below: you can do better.

Conclusions

So that's our shopping trip. Did you make up your mind? I have decisions to make. The Korg D888 is my favorite but price is an issue
unless you'd like to let me hold your wallet for a few minutes. If we can't go there, I may need to choose between the Fostex MR8HD
and the Tascam DP01FX, pretty much in that order. Feel free to visit my website if you buy any of these, and let me know how it turned out.

- Rick Moore 06/10/04

A first test post for Serendipity. I really like this blog software, not because it does a lot (it doesn't, really) but because it's pretty simple to install, operate and customize.

Rixter Gets First Post on Alternet: Woot!



"Users of the most popular operating systems exist in a sort of 'monoculture', where vandals and criminals know malicious code will find its widest possible range of unpatched targets. An excellent alternative solution lies in exploring the wide range of Gnu/Linux operating systems that have become available. Most are free or low cost, and the days when the argument that "there are no applications" held water are long past us. Distributions such as Knoppix and Damn Small Linux even let you boot into a Linux environment from CD and return to your Windows OS at the next reboot without ever writing to your hard drive at all. Best of all, it's Free: not free as in free lunch, but Free as in Free Speech. Think about it, and come to visit us when you're ready." - Rixter on Alternet, 060807.
Rixter – Thu, 2006 – 08 – 10 00:14