Computer Tips -Tech Info

Category: Hobbies

  • Morse Mp3 Ringtones

    I’ve spent a bit of time over the last week putting some scripting together to build a new website. The site is morseringtones.com and as you might imagine there are morse code mp3 ringtones available there for download. I’ve put together a list of over 9100 names and there are 4 ringtones available for each name. These are played at 4 different speeds in morse code. For the quicker speeds the names are repeated multiple times to make sure you have a better chance to hear them if you’re using them on a cell phone. I’ve put things up to where you can submit ideas for further names if you like. I may be adding prosigns at some point in the near future and at some point may make it possible for people to go ahead and generate custom morse ringtones from a web interface. So if you want a morse code ringtone for your phone step over and take a look.

    I’ve also bundled up the whole collection of them for download via lulu.com, more details can be found on the Purchase morse mp3 ringtones colleciton page.

    In the future here I may detail some of the scripts that I’ve used to build this site. It’s all built on a linux server ( the generation of 9100 ringtones at 4 different speeds took about 6 hours.) I’m sure the scripts could have been designed differently but was quite proud of putting together the process for making the whole site so that future maintenance is minimal.

    Anyway …-.-

  • Do it yourself Macro Photo studio

    I don’t know where to file this, but it was interesting to me…. this how-to walks you through a cheap way to make good closeup photos… Basically they have you construct a light tent from a card board box (cut large openings in the sides and use white tracing paper to diffuse the light and posterboard for backgrounds.)

    The idea here is that for those good closeups of small items being bathed in light is the ideal, but a direct flash usually is not good, diffuse light is the ideal and this setup does nicely.

  • Zoom H4 first look…

    If you’re interested I’ve got a “first impressions” look at the Zoom H4 over on the ashevillemusiclessons.com site. I couldn’t decide where it would be more appropriate to post…..

  • Zoom H4 recorder becoming reality?

    I’ve got to say, I’ve almost wondered if the Zoom H4 was true vaporware the last few days. it’s supposed to be received by various vendors (around October 1st-3rd) and I still haven’t seen ONE first hand review. I’ve seen one music site that has 7 people that have rated it on a scale of 1-10, but no written review – for all I know they could have said “Man that looks cool I bet it will be a 9…” There are several posts from a podcasting expo Friday that mention it though this says it’s the “ONLY field recorder worth getting”. The other is basically a “fluff” article with no real substance other than that the device was demo’ed.

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  • More audio recording musings…. Samson Zoom H4 Handy Recorder

    So, I mentioned a few weeks back that I was really starting to look again at audio equipment. I have a planned project that I would really like to capture high quality direct to digital audio for and the old tascam portastudio cassette based system from years ago just won’t suit get what I hope for. (And setting up a stereo mic pattern and the tascam as a mixer and a laptop isn’t really something I WANT to have to go through – field recorder is the goal and it would suit a few other purposes as well.) I wouldn’t mind having multitrack capabilities and for all purposes I’ve looked at the Boss BR-600 the last few weeks and thought I had found a suitable device…. 8 tracks, built in condenser mics to make it easy to setup and capture on the spot. And compactflash based (I was hoping for something nice and quiet like a flash/memory card based recorder.) But, there are some things about the Boss that have discouraged me….

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  • Google puts historical articles online, searchable

    Wow, this is nice – and frankly, something I could probably spend hours with. Search Engine Watch tells us that Google will debut a searchable news archive that takes us back through around 200 years worth of news stories. Yes, folks, google is putting the last 200 years of history online. I remember the newsgroups being google-ized was a big deal and that just took us back to the beginnings of the modern internet…. Well, in actuality the articles aren’t hosted at google, but at either the content providers or their aggregation services….

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  • Audio on Linux weekend…

    For most people here in the US, this last weekend was known as Labor Day weekend, for me though… it was more like Audio on Linux weekend. I’ve mentioned before that I use my computer for most EVERYTHING and that’s not far off…. I have watched movies on the PC, I’ve recorded multitrack audio, captured tv shows to disc, and of course, work…. database server, digitial photos/editing, test web sites, word documents, test various hardware, etc. etc. test software, etc…. vmware…. oh the list could keep going and going and going…. Well, sometimes it seems that optimizing the machine for one thing comes at the expense of another. Since I had to swap out the system board on the main machine (massively failing probably due to overheating…. multiple pci slots had failed, etc….) I hadn’t had a chance to see why some things didn’t work the way I used to….

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  • The pendulum swings… looking at Audio hardware

    I’m such a sucker for technology sometimes…. I’m into too many things it seems. I do computer repair which can keep things fairly busy, I keep up with this and a slew of other websites which is another job in itself. (Not to mention the genealogy hobby (or addiction/affliction?)) We’re fairly involved at Church… and then there is piano and music. I’ve been teaching piano now for about 9 years which is hard to believe in itself and over that time other obligations have taken their share of time, but now the pendulum is swinging back where I’m really getting in more time to try to improve my playing in one particular area. Towards that end I wanted to get some recordings of a few other pianists to dissect their approaches….. well, that’s taken me to another place – audio hardware.

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  • Translating web pages

    I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before here, but languages are one of the things that fascinate me. I’ve studied Spanish, German and French. Although right now I would barely be able to recognize a handful of words in German and French. Of late, spanish has been the language I’ve focused on *(3 1/2 years at this point.) My goal was to spend at least 5 years reading/listening to *just* one language (in addition to my native English…) anyway, I’m at a point where I feel like I have a very good understanding of written spanish, pretty good understanding of much spoken spanish (depends on the accent/pace/pronunciation of the speaker, but in some cases I feel that way with English as well…….) From time to time though, I’ve used web tools to automatically translate a page or a bit of text to see how well I’m understanding….

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  • Direct links to international broadcasters audio streams

    I’ve posted several things over at the onlineradiotv.com site. For starters I’ve got links to a few international (shortwave) broadcasters live audio streams and where available their “latest” english news update (and in some cases spanish and other languages.) I’ve also started posting some bash scripts there that can directly start mplayer streaming a feed.

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