Technologists Notes

In my primary collection, I’ve accumulated roughly 800 LPs over the years. Some are junk, some are treasures, a few have never been unsealed, a few are in terrible condition, but mostly these are LPs that I want to hear and preserve. I’d been gradually digitizing them so I could listen to them in the car and on my phone, and so I’d have archival versions if the LPs were lost.

A few years ago, I got a new Audio-Technica turntable to displace my finicky decades-old Thorens (which is now configured for 78s). I did that, in part, to accelerate progress digitizing the LPs and now have maybe 20^[1] left before I’ve finished with the primary collection. Now seems the right time to summarize the tools I use and techniques I’ve developed. Both this post and the video are intended to be self-contained, but each probably offers details missing from the other.

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“It’s gettin’ dark, too dark for me to see”
“Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” – Bob Dylan (1973)

tl;dr an attempt at a tribute to Denny, my memories from 1969-73

Denny Freeman’s legacy is being thoroughly covered after we lost him Sunday:

• Denny Freeman, the Graceful Guitarist Who Made Everyone Sound Better, Has Died
• Austin guitar great Denny Freeman, who played with Jimmie and Stevie Ray Vaughan, dies aged 76
• Beyond the Horizon with Denny Freeman
• “As soulful as humans get” Austin guitar great Denny Freeman remembered by music community PDF
• Guitarist Denny Freeman’s Musical Mastery Cut Across Austin’s Scene

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“Genghis Khan and his brother Don
Could not keep on keepin’ on”
(1971) “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” – Bob Dylan

For many years, starting in high school, one of my ambitions was to make good recordings of live music. Until I could afford and justify the cost of good machines, I progressed through a series of mediocre, but less expensive reel to reel recorders, starting with a Wollensak similar to the photo at left. (more…)

I’ve had the privilege of playing music with a few famous musicians, mostly before they achieved their full public prominence, e.g., playing bass with Jimmie Vaughan a couple of times in small clubs in Austin. Perhaps the most notable of these opportunities was impromptu playing harmonica with Pete Seeger, sitting in the grass at a Clearwater Festival in 1976, a time of his full prominence. Seeger’s most famous composition, Where Have All The Flowers Gone?, ends each chorus with the refrain “When will they ever learn?”

Though the song is about more substantive issues than interoperability of video calling solutions, that refrain comes to mind when thinking about all of the isolated islands of video calling solutions that seem to be proliferating instead of reconciling.

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Oops. I really meant Apollo 11 delivered…

But it’s not July 20 anymore, so about Fedora 11:

• Overall, no big problems
• Fedora Project slipped their final release schedule a couple of weeks, so I didn’t get started trying Fedora 11 until mid-June.
• VMware Server 1.0.x still doesn’t work with the 2.6.29 kernel(s) in Fedora 11. It appears that a one line kernel change is needed (assuming VMware doesn’t fix directly). However, I’ve never built a linux kernel before, and my first attempts have failed.
• The nastiest surprise, for me, was confusion about BIND. I’m used to Fedora putting BIND in a chroot’d jail. Fedora 11 seems to eschew actually doing this, but provides the /var/named/chroot directory hierarchy as if the jail still exists. I don’t find anything in the release notes about any of the BIND changes, and the additional DNSSEC  support in BIND 9.6 threw me off temporatily, since I don’t know much about DNSSEC. It took me a couple of hours to sort everything out, and my current solution is a bit clumsy, but seems to work.

There are other awkward aspects, such as the need for a /boot ext3 partition when trying to use ext4 for the rest of the filesystems, but these are adequately documented in the release notes, so not big problems for me.

I put Fedora 11 on my primary mail/web/DNS server yesterday, and all seems OK so far. (This post is stored on that server.) But the machine that depends on VMware Server is still running Fedora 10.