Diesmbodied reunion

By Josh Highland in Josh's Rambling, music, video

disembodied_flyer1

I know that I don’t typically blog about my personal experiences anymore. for the last few years I have have turned this into a very tech oriented blog. I’m going to start breaking that mold and start posting about a wider subject matter. I think it will to help increase the frequency that I update this site, and because, well… I make the rules around here.

Last Saturday was something that I didn’t think would ever happen. I got to see the band Disembodied play a reunion show. It was the first time in 10 years that Disembodied had played California, and possibly one of the best shows I have ever seen.

Who is Disembodied?
Disembodied formed in 1995 in Minneapolis, MN. Disembodied had a devastating effect on the sound of hardcore. Introducing themselves as simply the heaviest band in hardcore and going way beyond. Disembodied disbanded in the late 90’s, later moving on to form the band Martyr AD. Disembodied was instrumental in creating the distinct metal/hardcore sound so prominent todays heavy music.

Seeing Disembodied play had been a dream of mine for a long time.I sang in the hardcore band xDEATHSTARx for several years, Disembodied was always sighted as one of our major influences. The brutal honesty and raw emotion pumped into their music was something that always attracted me to them. I’ll be the first to admit that their music isn’t for everyone, but for some reason is strikes a chord deep inside of me.

disembodied_singer

My friend Jav put a lot of work in getting Disembodied to play 2 nights at Chain Reaction in Anaheim Ca. I bought my tickets 6 months ahead of time and patiently waited for June 5th 2009.

Now I regularly go to shows (concerts), and I have literally seen thousands of bands play, and heard tens of thousands of songs performed. Most of the time it not memorable and blurs together. On June 5th, Disembodied played a set that I would rate as one of the best I have ever seen (top 5 easily), and is something that I wont seen forget. This show renewed my faith in the hardcore scene and brought out emotions in me that I thought were dead.

After being in retirement for 10 years they didn’t miss a beat. The vocals were just as sharp, and still emotion packed. The music was delivered perfectly and with the impact of a bomb. “Heavy” is a term thrown a lot in this genre of music. Disembodied defines what heavy is.

Here’s a video to gove you a sample of what the of the show was like.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcTVpdU3bBY[/youtube]

I got this shirt at the show. Yes, it’s a goats head. Yes, I’m ok with that. Yes I have worn it to church.

disembodied shirt

Controlling Twitter SMS notifications through code

By Josh Highland in hacks, internet, iPhone, linux, software, tutorials, web 2.0

twitter sms

It’s not secret my current favorite tech toys are my iPhone and Twitter.

I follow several hundred people of interest, and regularly use TwitterFon Pro, TweetDeck and Twitter.com to keep up with them all. For an elite group of people I follow on twitter I choose to have their updates pushed to me via SMS (text message) to my phone.

Sometimes I’m in area where I dont have reliable service to my phone (most of the meeting rooms at my work for some reason), and Twitter will try to send me an SMS message telling me that one of my good friends just made a tweet. If Twitter cant deliver that tweet for some reason, like the phone doesnt have service, Twitter simply stops sending message to your phone. There has been many times where i have thought to myself “damn Twitter is quiet today”, then I log onto Twitter.com and see a “is you device have trouble?” error. If i don’t go check the website, I have no idea that Twitter turned off SMS updates to my phone. Twitter is cool but they aren’t cool enough to send you an email saying “Hey your phone is screwed up, we are going to stop sending you SMS message until you fix it”. Atleast then the poor bastards like me who are addicted to twitter would know what we have to do.

Because I am such a Twitter addict, I have come up with a plan to end my frustrations with this problem. The solution? Use some evil “robots” to do my bidding. I have blogged about them before, I am talking about Cron and Curl. okokok, so they aren’t evil robots they are software running on my computer.

Twitter has an awesome API (Application Programming Interface) that allows you to do all sorts of sweet things using REST based http requests, including turning on and off SMS notifications to your phone.

cURL is an application that allows you to connect to web addresses from a command line.

cron is an application that allows you run application at scheduled intervals.

Can you guess where this is all going? Here is mathematical representation for you
((Twitter API + cURL) * cron(30 minutes)) = Happy Josh Highland

I have cron run the following command every 30 minutes (replace username and password with your own of course)

/usr/bin/curl -u user:password -d device=sms http://twitter.com/account/update_delivery_device.xml

I will never need to log onto twitter to turn on my SMS notifications ever again. In the event that Twitter disables notifications to my phone, every 30 minutes my evil robots enable MS messages to my phone. At most I will have 30 minutes of down time. I can live with that.

This is a perfect example of what one of my Computer Science professors told me… “If you have to do it more then 2 times write a script to do it for you”.

Info on the new iPhone has leaked

By Josh Highland in hardware, iPhone, mac

iphonemb717

I have been keeping my ears open for rumors about the new iPhone. Earlier this week, the above image was leaked onto a mac rumors website from a chinese source.

The image above shows a new iPhone model number “MB717LL” with 32GB of Storage. If the poster’s claims are to be believed, the new iPhone will contain the following features:

  • 600MHz CPU Speed (up from 400MHz)
  • 256MB RAM (up from 128MB)
  • Digital Compass and FM
  • 3.2 megapixel camera with auto focus
  • 32GB size
  • No major changes in battery, screen and external casing.

There is no way of telling if this information is correct, but the leaked photos and  information on the unibody MacBook and MacBook Pro also came from the same Chinese website, to they have some merit in my mind.

It’s no suprise that the screen and the physical shape of the device hasnt changed, if it did, us iPhone application developers would be screwed. I think its going to be nice to have a better camera and an FM tuner.

If this is all true, its not a major leap ahead, but I will still be inline to get one. I am guessing that the device will be announced and possibly released at the WWDC (Apple Worldwide Developers Conference) in June.

Swine Flu Zombies

By Josh Highland in internet, Josh's Rambling

swine kiss

I’m not one to panic about outbreaks, I laughed in the face of SARS and the Bird Flu but this Swine Flue has me kind of worked up. I’m also not one for conspiracy theories, but I think this Swine Flu deal is way more serious then we are being told. When the state of Texas closes down ALL sporting events in an attempt to stop it’s spread, you know something is up. People are demanding we close the boarder to Mexico, Obama is addressing it nationally, this is some major stuff! Living less then 2oo miles from Mexico, the place this all started, isn’t settling either.

swinemap

With the help of the all powerful Google, you can track outbreaks in real time. Things like this don’t make me feel any better.

I like to think of people with Swine Flu as “The infected”, kind of like a zombie movie… 28 days later / I am legend, etc. FREAKING INFECTED ZOMBIES WHO ARE COMING AFTER ME!

zombies

How the notPopular.com podcast is made

By Josh Highland in hardware, internet, Josh's Rambling, software, tutorials, wordpress

podcast_icon

Some of you blog reading people might know that I have a fairly well known podcast called the “notPop podcast”, that centers around music news and the activities of my site, notPopular.com. for almost 2 years now @xFLORIDAx and I have been churning these podcasts out and having a lot of fun doing it.

From time to time I get people emailing me asking how we record and put the podcast out onto the web. I’m going to be honest, it wasn’t easy to figure out, but we made it through. I’m going to tell you how we record our podcast, so that it might help you figure out how to do yours.

If you are un-familiar with my podcast, There is a minimum of 2 mics, but up to 8. We also play music and take listener calls.

The notPop podcast format is as follows:

  • intro music
  • welcome / introduction / catch up
  • featured band
  • news stories
  • throwback band
  • feedback from callers
  • ending statements
  • outro music
  • outro bonus clip

That might look like a lot of stuff to take on if you are un-familiar with recording audio on a computer. Don’t worry, I will walk you through it. (Disclaimer: I use Windows Vista for podcasting, but this will also work on Windows XP)

First off since we do have so many mics running at once, we need to capture all that audio at once. One solution is to just have one mic that everyone talks into. You can do that if you want your podcast to sound like crap. I don’t suggest it. Another way is to use a sound mixer board, and professional mics. That’s pricey and requires a lot of know how and fancy audio cards installed in your computer. I don’t suggest this method either. The best way I have found to get multiple mics working at the same time is USB headsets.

USB headsets are cheap and offer great sound quality. The real advantage is that each USB headset will act as their own sound input to the system so you have will have sound control over each device. I personally like to use the “Logitech Premium USB Headset 350”, you can get them cheap online, about $25 each.

350headset

Once you have them hooked up, windows will see them. Go to the control panel and go to recording devices. I like to set each mic to 30%. I have found that this is the best setting to prevent clipping. Clipping happens when a sound input is higher then can be recorded. when clipping occures, you lose out on the data trying to be recorded and you end up sounding like crap.

For recording software, I use Adobe Audition. It’s super powerful. Inside the application, you will see multiple time lines. I assign each time line to a input (remember that each USB mic is its own input!). I leave an open time line for sound clips and songs. Arm the tracks to record, press the record button and start talking into the mics. You should see the sound coming in.

adobeaudition

Once in a while we press the stop button and drag in an mp3 or wav file to be played. Once its in place, we set the timeline right after the clip and start recording again. We do this for the intro and exit music, along with the songs and listener calls we take.

For listener calls, I use skype with the skypeIn option. With sypeIn you get a phone number and a voicemail box. By default, you cant save the voicemails that people leave you in skype. I use a software package called PrettyMay to save the voice mails and calls as mp3 files. I use the PrettyMay Call Recorder for Skype, it costs $24 for a license with free upgrades for lifetime. After I save all the calls to mp3s, I can drag them into the time line in Adobe Audition, just like the songs we play.

Once all the audio is finished and complete in Adobe Audition, I export the raw WAV file by going to file->export audio. The export takes a while to complete.

After the WAV is exported, I import it into Audacity, and export it out as a 128kbps mp3 file. You need the LAME MP3 Encoder to export mp3s from audacity

audacity_mp3export

Once you have the mp3 exported, listen to it (or atleast spot check it)! You want to make sure your rad new podcast sounds good. This is the final product, the rest of the post will be on how to deliver it to the listeners.

A podcast is simple an entry in an RSS feed with a media file enclosures. I’m not going to go into details on how to do this, but Apple has a great page on how to get your podcast into iTunes.

notPopular.com is powered by WordPress and I use a wordpress plugin called BlubrryPowerPress to syndicate the podcast to the site and to iTunes.

itunes

That’s basically it! I love podcasting and have been doing it for several years now. If you have some questions, leave them in the comments below..