When you’re really interested in web design and you wanted to get started, Dreamweaver is a really good program to help you understand how web pages are built. But as you advance and you learn HTML, CSS and maybe some PHP, Dreamweaver also starts to become quite useless. You’re better off using a text editor and a web browser.
In fact, i think it would work out quite well. TextWrangler on the left hand side of the screen and Firefox on the right with the HTML document open that you’re working on. Just set the HTML to refresh every five or ten seconds so when you save the document you’re editing, it’ll refresh on the web browser. Presto. If you’re working with PHP web pages, just run everything from a MAMP or XAMPP installation.
Probably the only super useful feature about using Dreamweaver is the ability to easily create Image Maps.
All programs listed above are for Mac OS X, with the exception of XAMPP, which is also available for Windows/Linux.
Text editing programs: TextWranger (Mac) = Notepad++ (Windows)
Local Server Environments: MAMP (Mac) = WAMP (Windows) XAMPP = Mac + Windows
I’ve been doing a lot of searching around lately for e-commerce software that will do what we need and do it well. That is to say, it needs to handle album downloads pretty damn well. Since our label isn’t exactly very big, ideally it would need to be free or of very little cost. This is my experience and rant with:
WP e-commerce 3.7.5.3 – WordPress Plugin (http://getshopped.org/) – Free / $40 single / $195 business
This is a plugin designed for WordPress to help you sell things on your blog/website. It’s one of the very first i found when searching for an e-commerce solution. We took this plugin into strong consideration because it was very easy to customize (WordPress is essentially the template and there’s thousands of them). The ability to use FTP to upload our .zip albums was a huge plus, since many of our albums run 100MB and over. With the help of an additional plugin (which you have to pay for), you can make single song uploading easy.
Here’s where the good comments end. The plugin is incredibly buggy and chunky. Changing the plugin and tweaking it to your liking requires PHP knowledge, time and a lot of patience. Support on the forums is nearly non-existent. Seriously, don’t even bother making an account to ask questions. There aren’t nearly enough developers to help and/or they mostly seem to be on vacation. If you’re hoping to sell multiple versions of an album (Such as offering MP3, FLAC, etc.), you’re out of luck as product variations don’t work well for downloads. The only options you have for user downloads are the number of times the customer can download the album and “ip-address lock”, which restricts the downloads to the customer (assuming they have a static IP). If you would like an easy way for customers to listen to the album tracks, you’ll need some crappy MP3 plugin that they sell (that ALSO requires the “Gold cart”). Read the rest of this entry »
Tom> mark
Tom> i have 1 hour left to submit my essay on the website
Tom> i need to write 1 more page
Tom> 1 success i’ve had
Mark> triple space action GO
Tom> i cant think of anything other then playing my first GIG
Mark> I/O?
Mark> Unnamed Label?
Tom> but i gotta tell a story
Tom> “then my non-RL friend over the interwebs bought the domain and we where excited, cant wait to start coding PHP into the web pages”
Tom> lol
Mark> Be like “i single-handedly fixed the entire music industry using nothing but duct tape, a hair pin, and an HP laptop with a 3D screen defect.”
Tom> LOL
Tom’s laptop earlier that day recently went haywire. The laptop screen malfunctioned and whites were replaced with pink and blacks were replaced with green. The pinks were shifted one pixel to the left while the greens were one pixel to the right, giving an odd 3D look to it. I jokingly told him to wear some 3D glasses to fix the problem.
Iron Chef of Music (ICOM) is an event that takes place every 1st and 3rd Sunday of a month in a location in Chicago or online. You’re given a secret sample (WAV or MP3) of a random recording. In the past, this has ranged from a recording of a game of table tennis, an 8-bit game, a clip from a movie or a kitchen environment. From that sample, you must create a song in under two hours. No other external sounds or forms of synthesis can be used. At the end, all tracks are uploaded and are played back to back to everyone. Visit the FAQ for a little more information.
The sample for the latest one (March 7, 2010) was a recording of someone messing with Styrofoam. You can listen to it here.
From that sample, i have made this song in under two hours: Until the end by the chief of thieves
If you have FL Studio 9 and would like to see how it was done, you can download the project i made. The .zip file contains the samples cut from the original source file, Glitch VST (Effect) and the project file itself. Just double click on it and it should open everything just fine.
There’s quite a number of you Apple users out there that use Boot Camp to run Windows naitively on another partition. When Apple released their 3.1 drivers (64-bit version here), most of us jumped the gun, downloaded it and installed it. With it brings support for the new wireless magic mouse, official support for Windows 7, and a couple of other stuff.
Wait a second, why are my colors brighter? My reds look like they’re about to vomit all over my screen. The new 3.1 update automatically adds “digital vibrance” (i.e. “enhancements”). I wouldn’t call this an enhancement. It looks horrid.
In the NVidia Control Panel, under Adjust desktop color settings, you can see that the third option, which is Digital vibrance is bumped up all the way to 79%. That’s right, that’s the default. Apple is blinding you by enhancing the colors to make up for the fact that they put 16 bit LCD panels in Macbook Pros, even though these were advertised of displaying “millions of colors”.
Thankfully, you can turn it completely off. Just set the slider all the way to the left to turn off the disgusting explosive diarrhea of colors. You’ll have to do this to a second monitor you may attach as well.
-Update: May 7, 2010-
The 197.16 GPU update from the Nvidia website changes the Digital Vibrance settings a bit. Sliding all the way to the left completely turns your monitor black & white (Why? Who knows). 50% is the default setting, right in the center.
Tom: http://madison.craigslist.org/m4w/1568706277.html
Tom: HAHAHAHA
Tom: You can be his “girl”, Mark.
Mark: He looks like the kind of guy who would drug my drink.
Mark: No thanks, i’ll pass.
So what better way to spend a Saturday than to go a friendly neighborhood Goodwill and buy two cheaply priced VCRs and travel to a dollar store and purchase blank VHS tapes? I may be a couple of cables short of what I need but i can purchase a couple of those super cheap off of monoprice.
The word of the week is Lo-Fi!
i’ll be taking a bit of video i made and other video from the great internet archive for a good ol’ music video. For which song, you may ask? You’ll have to find out. The idea is taking all of that footage from digital means back into analog tape (vhs). Then that same footage from that tape gets recorded to another vhs tape, then back to the previous and so on and so fourth. In other words, i’ll be looping this video through two tapes, hopefully degrading the quality further as it passes. The trick here is getting that video BACK into my computer. don’t know how i’ll manage that.
i didn’t have the videos ready at the moment, so i did record some music (notably Strangers and a bit of Nova Scotia from Artificial Horizon) onto a VHS. I then proceeded to remove the tape and crumple it up with my hands and smeared my fingers all on the top side of the tape. Then i neatly rolled it back into the case. The result is a beautiful warble effect:
i also plan to get a tape deck and do the same thing, only with cassettes.
at one point, i did manage to get the vhs tape stuck, for whatever reason. I had to open the VCR and see how i could manually remove it. In defense, the VCR managed to give me a nasty cut on the thumb. I got the tape out but now i have to leave the cover off to manually push the tape downward, if i’m inserting a new one. not a big deal, really.
