Jacken’s Blog

I just got my Asus eee pc 900 from Taiwan. Here’s a quick tip for other users of tre.se 3G wireless broadband. When connecting the Huwei USB modem, the Asus Mobile Phone tool automatically starts. But the supplied carriers are only for Taiwan. Select Chungwa and select “Others”. Enter bredband.tre.se in the field. Save the settings and your up and running!

Update: There’s actually an option to select tre.se when creating a new connection.

After getting my E-MU 0404 USB audio interface I have started to rip my vinyl record collection. I want to retain as much as possible of the amazing sound of vinyl, so I rip everything in 24bit 48khz. Why not use 96khz? Well, my preferred playback device, the Squeezebox only supports 24/48 unfortunately.

Here’s how I do it… [Read more →]

For probably 20 years I’ve been searching for a song. An old friend of mine, Micke Fredriksson used to play this punk song from a live recording. The only thing I remembered was that they sang “They called me an animal, then they cut me up”. So sometimes I searched the net for the text, but could never find out the name of the song. Irritating!

But today I went to a vinyl record sale and I found it! As soon as I saw the album cover I knew that it was the right one. So now I can finally listen to Art Attacks masterpiece Animal Bondage

The last couple of years due to the iPod, I’ve listened to more music than ever before. I also haven’t bought much music. But in the last six month I bought a lot of CDs and now also vinyl records. I would never pay full price for a CD, in Sweden you pay around $18! But I do buy nice price CDs. Then I have to pay around $5. And vinyl can be even cheaper. Hopefully the record industry will finally get it and change their pricing so I don’t have to buy back catalog all the time.

I’ve been sick today with stomach flue. If this keeps up I’ll have to do a rectal transplant.

I just read an article on why Apple can’t do to video what it did to music. Interesting article, but using the iPod as an example is probably not a good idea. What all there guys seems to forget is that the iPod will never be a popular device to watch video on. And it has nothing to do with not being able to get content. I have downloaded a lot of films on mine. It’s not even the small screen size that’s the problem. It’s the fact that watching video isn’t something that people want to do on the go. You can listen to music and drive a car, but try to watch video while driving.

Well, let’s face it. The iPod have changed my interest in music during the last few years. With my 5 gig first generation iPod I had most of my music coded in 128kbit MP3 due to the constraints of the number of songs. The first year I put up with the included earphones and really didn’t think of upgrading.

But finally I got a Koss Porta Pro by recommendation from a friend. These headphones are not audiophile, but good enough to make me realize how much better MP3 files coded in 160 or higher sounded. But to accomondate that kind of upgrade in sound, forced me to buy a 15gb third generation iPod to fit more songs. So I recoded all my music to AAC in 160kbit and faced out older songs when I could get my hands on a higher quality version. The third generation iPod worked excellent for me for over three years. Then I upgraded my headphones to some in-ear headphones which took the sound quality up a notch again. A month ago I bought a iPod Classic 160gb and now have all music in lossless full quality.

But guess what, I bought a vinyl record player a while ago. Some would say that it’s a step backwards, but have to disagree. There is something about listening to vinyl. It’s like smoking a pipe, It’s a bit more involved. An other good aspect of this is that I’m forced to actually listen trough a whole song. But one thing is for sure, you need to invest in rather expensive equipment to get good performance from vinyl. But one can still find interesting records dirt cheap. It really is the black gold.

After trying to start VPN Tracker 4 and failing after upgrading to Mac OS X Leopard 10.5 I could no longer contact any servers at the same domain as the network I tried to connect to. To fix this, look inside the /etc/resolver directory, if there is a couple of files called vpn-resolver-#### you have to remove these files to get everything to work again.

There’s a new version 5 of VPN Tracker that supposedly fixes problems with Leopard, but you have to buy an upgrade. I just wish that Apple could make a front end to Racoon. It’s very irritating to have to pay Equinux $80 to get functionality that’s essentially built in the operating system. And I have always hated their way of locking the program to one specific machine serial number.

I just bought a new Mac Mini Core Duo2 as a media player in my bedroom. I connected it an old 23″ Cinema display that I don’t use. First I was a bit annoyed that I needed to use the keyboard and mouse, but then I found Remote Buddy. What a relief! I can now do almost anything with Apples lovely simple remote. I’m going to use it for playing back my CD collection that’s been ripped to a large hardisk. Watching DiVX, DVD, MPG films on it. And watch TV with my EyeTV kit.

So the next step was getting the audio out of the mini. Well, let’s face it, the output quality from line-out isn’t something you can call great. So I’m about to order an Zhaolu DAC 2.5 and mod the crap out of it! I’m thinking of installing a ZapFilter, better clocking etc. I’m then going to use mini-spdif connector to get the digital data out from the mac to the DAC.

Now I just need to get my home built amp finished.