Edirol UA-101, external USB soundcard, Garageband

Have you ever wanted to split the output from your garageband tracks into different channels? It turns out that whilst you can bring multiple inputs into garageband and record each to a separate track as you are composing, so you can output these tracks when you play back.

The secret lies in using a decent external sound card and plug it in to your USB port. As an example, I recently bought an Edirol UA-101 device off eBay (they are a bit like hen’s teeth though) and wanted to use it on the community radio station as part of an outside broadcast solution. These wonderful little boxes allow you to set your mac playback through to USB and then collect it and split to different channels. The UA-101 has ten such (or five stereo) which is more than enough for what I needed.

Just connecting it to the mac and it is identified as a valid sound device – go into your Settings/Audio and set it to be the playback device. In Garageband preferences, make sure that it is being used there too, and you can then allocate a channel per track so that on playback you can send each track out. From the UA-101 you then connect the output to a mixer and you can then manually fade in each track from Garageband exactly as you want it. This avoids having to adjust the audio levels in garageband all the time (something I find great fun, but a little clunky), and you can then send your mixer output off to be recorded at the levels you create with the mixer. Genius!

Obviously, there are later models than the UA-101 that you can use – Saffire, Roland Octa to name a few. These are more and more frequently using Firewire over USB, and that’s not a bad thing in general – but I kind of like the way the USB interface works. Oh, the Octa is around £450 new, but the UA-101, if you can find one second hand, will be about half of that or less…

 

Community Radio

Can you believe it? A new radio station is starting up, and I am slightly involved in that.

This makes the count of three – Hospital Radio in Chelmsford, Saint FM in Maldon and Burnham and now Chelmsford Community Radio. I am sure it will be a real drain on my time and energy, but you know what… I’ll love every single minute of it!

There is much to tell about this new venture, but in essence it is not yet broadcasting on FM – only through the Internet. Check it out on www.tunein.com for example. As soon as Ofcom open the next round of applications we will go for a full FM license as well. If you’d like to help or get involved, then go to www.chelmsfordcommunityradio.com and use the contact form there. We’re looking for people with all kinds of skills, not just presenters. If you have some time, live locally enough and want to be part of a new sound in the town, get in touch!

Seagate GoFlex Satellite, iPad 2 and Apple TV

I bought a Seagate GoFlex Satellite hard drive whilst I was away on holiday, for the princely sum of about £110.00, thanks to the exchange rates.

But exactly what is a Seagate GoFlex Satellite drive anyway?

Basically, it’s a small and very portable hard drive that has a wifi broadcaster in it. Built in to the firmware is a media server and it has a rechargeable battery built in to. Basically, you can think of it a an external hard drive for your iPad. It can hold music, videos, documents, files of any kind, so it is a pretty useful device all round, and the fact that you can connect to it through wifi is really cool… it can stay in a bag or coat pocket and you can watch your videos or listen to your extremely large music library on your iPad.

The latest version of the firmware also allows you to set the device up as a bridge to a wider area network too. This means your iPad can connect to the GoFlex wifi, which in turn connects on to your normal wifi that gets you onto the internet. Lovely – I can now listen to music and surf the web at the same time.

But all of this is only useful if you have got a very small capacity iPad, or iPhone, like me. My iTunes library alone would need six iPads to fit all of it on, and so an external device like this is super useful for me. But there is a slight issue for me. I also own and use an Apple TV device.

Apple TV boxes are awesome. You can call up any content on your iPhone or iPad (or mac computer) and stream it to the Apple TV, which plays it through your normal TV set. I love this and really enjoy being able to show images or videos to a group of friends all at the same time. The bad news is that the GoFlex media player does not allow you to stream directly to the TV.

Worse, the GoFlex media player does not really like anything other than MP4 files for video, and that’s not yet what most of the videos are that I like to play.

The good news is there is a solution to both these dilemmas.

Firstly, you could use Handbrake to convert all of your video files to MP4. It works a treat and if you let it run overnight it’ll pretty much convert most of your stuff flawlessly, depending on how much stuff you’ve got of course! However, you can also use other video playback apps from the app store and connect them to your GoFlex device too.

But the best news is that the GoFlex device also has a HTTP connection, and if you simply type in the IP address of the GoFlex Satellite into a web browser on your iPad, you will see the same media server interface created through HTML. This is very good, because from there you can play a video AND you can send it to your AppleTV as well. And it works, perfectly!

To make this a little more robust I tried connecting the Apple TV and the iPad to the GoFlex Satellite wifi instead of the usual connection to the web. I then set the GoFlex wifi to use the house wifi to get out to the internet. In effect, AppleTV was connecting to things like YouTube through the GoFlex Satellite and it worked perfectly. The videos on the GoFlex device played through the iPad and on to the Apple TV and out to the main TV screen, and I could also read email on the iPad as I was doing all of this.

So – I now have an ultra portable hard drive for my iPad so I can keep as much data as I need when I am travelling, and I can watch videos of my own choice on airplane journeys, and of course I can watch them on my home TV when I am there, too. I’ve yet to try it on a long car journey with the kids watching videos they want to watch, but apparently the GoFlex Satellite allows multiple simultaneous connections… I’ll test that another time, but for now I am delighted with the new gadgetry!

Jimmy Carr

I rarely get political on this blog – it is just asking for trouble, but today I saw that our own Prime Minister has seen fit to criticise a single person and draw scorn upon him by criticising his tax strategy.  I saw this, and thought I needed to write something.

Now, you may love or hate Mr Cameron, and you may love or hate Jimmy Carr, and indeed, you may love or hate tax strategies that enable you to minimise what you have to pay to the government. None of this is my concern, except when I perceive such a ludicrous amount of hypocrisy and unfairness – wielding the power of the Prime Minister’s office on a single person in our country is not just unsavoury, it’s completely unacceptable. Mr Cameron is entitled to his own opinions but to become the nation’s moral compass and pass instant judgement on morality in the way that he has is to live up to his ‘Flashman’ nickname.

Let’s be clear – Jimmy Carr is acting within the law. Our own definitions of morality are not the point, but acting within the law is something we should be aware of at all times in this. The law is upheld by the judiciary, and made through legislation that is debated at length by our politicians. In short, Mr Cameron, you and your peers created the very situation that Jimmy Carr and others have exploited. It is totally legal, and whilst you may say that it is unsavoury, I am pretty darned sure there are many more things we would find unsavoury about you if only we knew them.

For example, did you not say that having dealings with people running an aggressive tax scheme is something you should avoid? Did you not allocate £900M extra funds to HMRC to combat this sort of loophole? Did you not appoint a person who you knew works this kind of strategy? And did you not inherit a whole shedload of money from similar activities and investments designed to minimise the tax payable to the government? How do you deal with yourself, dear David? Here, in case you don’t recall, is your interview.

Should Jimmy Carr repay the money? No, I don’t think so. He has simply taken an option that is available to ALL people in the UK, and uses a loophole that thousands of very wealthy people use, including many of our politicians… if not this exact strategy, then one very similar.  And so would any one of us in his position.

Is it not a bigger issue to chase down the lost revenues from major corporations, such as Barclays, Vodaphone, Boots, etc, who are allowed to exploit similar loopholes and operate from overseas and who therefore cost thousands of times more money in lost revenues than you, I and Jimmy together would save?

I find this kind of bullying very unpalatable, the hypocrisy is epic and the nerve to consider yourself a moral compass entirely distasteful. However, yet again the media and the politicians will sew up the situation to their benefit and deride those who are taking perfectly legal action. One man’s morality is not another’s, clearly. Indeed, arguably, a moral man would not become a politician. Anyone recall the expense scandal? Oh yes… wasn’t that where we found out just how much immorality exists in Westminster, but were unable to remove all of the rotten apples, just a few examples?

In conclusion, I believe Jimmy Carr has done nothing wrong. He has made jokes at the expense of ‘fat cats’ and been found out to be one himself. So what. He still makes people laugh and has not acted illegally. There are many examples of similar schemes (Gary Barlow, anyone?) and many people benefit from using them, including politicians.

Of course, not everyone benefits from them… and that’s perhaps the point most would like to make. If I don’t benefit directly then it is a moral crime. If I do, I should keep quiet! If I were David Cameron, I’d be as quiet as a church mouse right now…

 

Water Shortage? In this weather?

So yet again the English weather is doing it’s best to drown all things. And yet again the water companies are telling us there is a drought – apparently despite the flooding, constant downpours and general feeling of being underwater, there is no water reaching the Aquifers – the underground reservoirs and storage spots that nature created. I have a theory that I’d like to test.

All of the water that falls on to the country is apparently the property of the water companies – that alone is incredulous of course, but there it is. The water company harvests the water and treats it to make it safe to use and fit to drink, filtering out impurities and so on. At some point in the process the harvested water goes into a large surface reservoir. At this point evaporation happens, and lots of water is taken back up in the water cycle to fal again as precipitation.

However, lots is also sent through to the country’s homes, businesses, and other buildings – billions of them. And in each of these buildings there is at least one toilet and probably a water storage cylinder or overhead tank, and these hold a gallon or two between them. Let’s assume a standard toilet holds one gallon (OK, 4 litres in metric). Let’s also assume a storage tank holds ten gallons – they probably hold more. And let’s ignore hot water systems and radiators… but say there is an average of 11 gallons per household in the UK.

So how many households are there that are storing up this valuable resource? In 2005 there were 25.5 million homes.. there are more now. We can probably assume the same number of offices and other businesses, if not more – and how many of those have more than one toilet do you think? Then there’s schools, colleges, universities and other buildings like museums, swimming baths and cinemas, shopping malls and so on – ALL of them with a water supply.

OK – let’s consider there are about 100 million buildings and each has got at least 11 gallons of water sitting in it – many will have more (anyone got two bathrooms at home?) and so this calculation is probably massively under-estimated.
So we are looking at somewhere around 1 billion gallons of water… that’s about 4 billion litres. I reckon that’s a lot.

But wait! We have not included another industry that uses massive amounts of water! Yes, the retail business! How many bottles of water are on the shelves in shops, supermarkets and garages around the country? How many bottles of water are in transit to a shop? I’d guess there’s a fair amount of water sitting doing nothing at all.
So back to the water companies – they harvest the rain, they move it to a reservoir, they don’t add it back to the aquifers and therefore anything that falls on the soil in the natural scheme of things is probably diverted well before it has time to sink into the places where it is needed.

There is a water shortage because we do not allow the water to go where nature has intended, and we divert it to places that are convenient for us – or, quite literally, conveniences for us! Anything else we stick into a bottle and sell over a counter.
Now this is not a new situation – well, apart from the water companies claiming rights over any water that falls out of the sky. In the summer of 1976 we had a drought… weeks and weeks of high pressure weather systems over the UK and the most fabulous sunshine I can remember. And yes, we had to put bathwater on the garden if we wanted to stop the grass getting scorched. And there were other hardships relating to water too – swimming baths were closed, hosepipes banned, only essential services allowed to access the precious supply. Oh – I don’t remember a huge amount of bottled water being sold either… the occasional perrier maybe.

So I suggest the water shortages in this country at the moment are a result of the aggressive behaviour of water companies, the desire for multiple bathrooms in a house, the retail market for bottled water (driven perhaps by the health and fitness industry?), the massive use of water by industry, and not at all to do with natural processes.

Woes abound – the aquifers are empty. Is there any wonder given how the water is diverted , packaged and sold…? It’s about time we took a long hard look at the way the water companies are doing things. I am all in favour of the filtering, cleaning and processing, and I accept they need to make enough money to cover the cost of this, but I don’t accept there is a need to make millions of pounds in profit by telling us there is a shortage when quite simply some of that shortage is down to the way they have got things sewn up!

So what is an alternative solution? Well, how about using dirty bathwater to flush a toilet? Yes, you *can* divert your waste water to a secondary system in your house that collects the used water (which is probably not that dirty really), filters out the scum and then stores it for use in toilets. Have you heard of ‘greywater’?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greywater

What’s the difference between tap water and bottled water? Oh – the advertising? The filters made of natural rock and the taste this gives it? Possibly. Is it water that would otherwise have reached the aquifers? Certainly. Could we do without it and just drink tap water? Absolutely. Will we? I doubt it!

I’d like to return to being able to catch the rain water that falls on my roof, and store it for use in my domestic systems such as toilets. I don’t think there would be any more stored than currently gets stored anyway in the water systems we mostly all enjoy, and there would be no need for water companies to claim ownership!
We could use it in hosepipes too – and if it really did not rain too much, we’d really not have enough to water the garden…

I’d love to find a way forward with this – it seems a vicious circle to me. The water falls, it is caught up and diverted before it can filter through to the bedrock aquifers, it is packaged up as a product and sold to us in various ways… until there isn’t anything in the reservoirs, and then we have a drought – the water companies fear they cannot supply the water to us any more, so we all have to stop using it and instead we have to allow the water companies to get their resources back so they can sell it again, and again.
I think mother nature had a better system, really.

Yes, let’s catch it, and clean it before it goes out to homes as tap water for infants, the elderly and infirm, pregnant mothers, and any other sector of society that needs it, but let’s not try to create a worry about empty aquifers and fears about global warming when quite frankly, more rain and water is falling than we can hope for, and there is enough to go around. I don’t want to see another water company official telling me the drought is a huge problem – it may be a problem for the water company, and of course it is a problem for the way we use water, but a few systematic changes to that (costing some of the precious profit, perhaps) and it could be solved.

Discuss!