mememiner

a blog by wallace winfrey

MPC card reader mod

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So, almost 2 months after getting my IDE card reader in the mail, and having my MPC opened up with it’s guts spilled out in the corner of my studio for roughly the same amount of time, I finally got up the nerve to install it.
Why did it take nerves? Because the power cable connecting the floppy drive to the motherboard used a floppy connector, and the IDE card reader I was installing uses 4-pin Molex. I spent some time at J.B. Saunders (Boulder’s excellent electronics supply store) trying to find a cable that would go from the motherboard with a 4-pin Molex out, but no such luck. It’s apparently a rare, maybe proprietary cable, so I was gonna be forced to splice a Molex cable to this proprietary cable, and I guess if I fucked it up I’d be left without a card reader or floppy.
My worries were completely unwarranted. As my friend Chris said, it was clip, strip, wrap, solder and tape, and voila! My MPC has a nice flash-card reader, and I can say bye-bye to the zip drive and external SCSI. No more moving parts!
Here’s a picture of the installed card reader:
MPC Front
and here’s a picture of the 32MB CF card showing up as mounted:
MPC Screen

Stupid Safari

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I knew there was a reason I quit using Safari — it’s CSS support stinks.
See the great thing about CSS supposedly, is that it separates the display information from the content. You’re supposed to be able to put your content wherever you want in your HTML page, and then through the wonders of CSS, render that content whichever way you want as long as you follow the rules.
So let’s say, that in a document where you’re concerned primarily with content, like say, a listing of blog posts, you’re going to subscribe to some hierarchical design philosophy, and put said listing of blog posts at the top, and links, etc at the bottom, and let CSS sort it all out right?
Well, most browsers do not care about the topology of said content and instead follow CSS’s positioning directives to a tee. Not included in these browsers is Safari.
Perhaps I’m missing something here, but Safari wants it’s left-to-right two-column web pages written in such a way that the stuff on the left appears on top, and the stuff on the right appears below it, valid CSS be damned.
I have done this at the expense of my own content-organizin’ philosophy so that the page doesn’t look all fucked up in ye olde Apple browsere. Now when my page gets indexed by google, it’ll grab all the links at the top instead of the real content. Thanks a lot Safari.

Posted in Geekstuff | Comments Off on Stupid Safari

I’m only doing this silly thing because Josh asked me to.

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OK, so Josh23 has requested that I do this silly survey thing. Here we go:

  1. Total volume of music files on my computer: 
    [wally@datacide ~]$ find /mp3 -name "*.mp3" -print | wc -l
14617
[wally@datacide ~]$ find /mp3-sorted -name "*.mp3" -print | wc -l
424
(that says a lot right there, don't it?)
[wally@datacide ~]$ find /shorten\ -\ flac/ -name "*.shn" -print | wc -l
346
[wally@datacide ~]$ find /shorten\ -\ flac/ -name "*.flac" -print | wc -l
45
  2. The last CD I bought was:
    The Maurizio metal box from some guy in Israel off Ebay. I have not actually received it yet though.

  3. The last song I listened to before writing this was:
    “We Were” by Minamo off Shining, the most recent release on 12k, which I received in the mail today from Ear/Rational, where I have a 12k subscription. It has some surprisingly sad moments on it. A very delicate, fragile album.
  4. Five songs I listen to a lot or that mean a lot to me:
    (In no particular order)

    1. “Jesus Saves” by Slayer, because it fucking rocks, that’s why. The breakdown is massive.
    2. “roygbiv” by Boards of Canada, because I love the 70s zombie movie synth sounds being used to such good effect on what’s essentially an uplifting bittersweet track. It really hit me how good this track was when I heard UFO drop it at the peak of a smoking jungle set at Even Furthur 2000 and watched the whole crowd collectively sigh after being punished with vicious breaks for 2 hours.
    3. “King In My Empire” by Rhythm & Sound and Cornel Campbell, because it’s so sweet and deep at the same time.
    4. “Expedition to the Barrier Peaks” by Crix Madine, partly because Nate is my brother-man, mostly because it’s my favorite track of his and I had a really strong experience with it one evening.
    5. “After The Gold Rush” by Neil Young. If you have to ask, you wouldn’t understand.
  5. Five albums I listen to a lot or that mean a lot to me:
    (In no particular order)

    1. Autechre – “Amber” a masterpiece.
    2. Scion – “process and arrange basic channel tracks” I love Basic Channel and this is a great way to digest their discography.
    3. Pink Floyd – “Wish You Were Here” Go ahead, laugh. You know you listen to it alot too.
    4. Coldcut – “Journeys By DJ” The only release in this series of mixes that lives up to the name “Journey”.
    5. Tetsu Inoue – “Ambiant Otaku” A very healing listen.
  6. Which 5 people are you passing this baton to, and why?

    7. I’m not. Sorry.

Posted in Music n Gear | Comments Off on I’m only doing this silly thing because Josh asked me to.