Fun with Cubase

Recorded over a long period of time as an exercise in learning to use Cubase. I never got around to adding the bass but think it sounds better without it.

John Siracusa - Mac OS X Reviews

 

I have been a long-time reader of ars technica and have been amazed by the amount of detail contained in John Siracusa’s OS X reviews each of which is a pocket symphony of tech information. I have been patiently working my way through all of his OS X reviews starting from 10.0 Cheetah from way back in 2001.

I had to spend a bit of time searching reviews of all of the releases and some of the results took me to seemingly old versions with missing graphics. After I bit of work I managed to find the best version of each review and thought it would be helpful to share them here.

John Siracusa’s Mac OS X reviews from are technica

• Mac OS X v10.0 Cheetah – March 24, 2001
• Mac OS X v10.1 Puma – September 25, 2001
• Mac OS X v10.2 Jaguar – August 24, 2002
• Mac OS X v10.3 Panther – October 24, 2003
• Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger – April 29, 2005
• Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard – October 26, 2007
• Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard – August 28, 2009
• Mac OS X v10.7 Lion – July 20, 2011

Happy reading.

Best Skype Microphone Ever

, a photo by John Robertson on Flickr.

I was about to purchase a Yeti USB microphone when I remembered I had this little baby tucked away in a cupboard.

Clutter Clearance Burst

Possessions can be a bit overwhelming can't they? They slowly and gradually take over your life.

I have always been a hobbies person. Over the years I have immersed myself in music, photography, computing and reading. All of these interests bring their associated paraphernalia such as books, manuals, accessories, tapes, cables, etc. As a consequence of this I have filled my house to bursting with the accumulation over the years. I am not thankfully in the hoarder class but am somewhere down that road.
It got to the stage where I could never easily put my hand on things I needed. I would waste hours searching for my capo, a lens or a specific book I needed to refer to. It was inconvenient but I could have happily continued like this but for the death of my father.

Without going into too much detail I can say for sure that dad was a hoarder. After his death my sister and I spent weeks clearing and sorting his possessions. There were drawers and cupboards overflowing with things that I remembered from childhood and knew them to be junk even then.

A combination of these circumstances started me on the road to a clutter-free life with the ambition of disposing of unnecessary possessions which would hopefully leave me with only the things that I needed.

Here is an example of my home office before I started. Almost everything you can see in this photograph is now gone.


It has been a slow start but I am getting into my stride now.

Goodbye floppy disks full of midi programming files from studio sessions in the late 1980’s.


Goodbye RAM for old laptops that run slower than the Simon game I have on my keyring.


Goodbye master tapes of old studio recording that nobody cares about.


Goodbye to the last of my vinyl collection.


Goodbye to boxes full of old music transcriptions.


Goodbye cassette tapes.


And goodbye to the storage all the above was contained in.


To end on a happy note here is my capo which finally turned up on the bottom of a box full of midi cables.

Technorati Tags: declutter,downsize,zen,home

Goodbye London, Hello Bellshill

iOS Update

iOS 5.1 was finally released last night. Get details here. I updated all four of my iOS devices quickly and without any untoward incident. Battery life does seem to have improved somewhat in my iPhone 4s based upon a single morning’s unscientific observation.

The iPad 3 keynote is now live on the Apple homepage.

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Avaya

I had a meeting today with Avaya, one of our communications technology partners. Usually a meeting for me involves trains, planes and automobiles as they are generally held in or around London. I live in Glasgow which is a place most tech companies don’t seem to know exists. I had a total door-to-door journey time of 15 minutes from my home to their office in Bellshill.
The meeting was fascinating as we are getting to grips with they typical large enterprise problems relating to platform proliferation. Industrialisation of platforms and processes is the order of the day and this is not an easy task with voice and communication systems. With a mixture of almost every type and age of PBX you could imagine the challenges are immense. Even where there is a single platform the integration options are limited due to the mixed use of SIP and H.323.

I am not sure where this is going to lead but the journey is starting to look interesting.

Technorati Tags: Apple,iOS,Avaya,Travel

Paradise for Techs

Where to begin?

I spent several hours today working on a strategy for evolving our global voice estate and associated services. We have a mixed estate comprising Avaya, Cisco, Siemens PBXs with limited integration. Even within a single platform such as Avaya there are integration challenges due to the use of both SIP and H.323 in different countries. And let's not even think about the issues with dial plans.

I am meeting our Avaya account manager tomorrow to put the pieces of the puzzle together and agree next steps. He is coming to Glasgow which makes a nice change from me having to travel to London.

Apple Next-Generation iPad Event

I am worrying fascinated by the launch of a device that is probably only going to be a little bit better than the one I already own.

Watching several liveblogs and the best seems to be from engadget.

I can’t imagine why Apple doesn’t stream these events.