Monthly Archives: March 2012

Windows 8 Consumer Preview on Asus EeePC 1011px

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I’ve just installed the Windows 8 Customer Preview on my netbook to see what all the fuss was about, and first impressions are…

…strangely positive!

The install took about 20mins from booting from the USB installer to having a working desktop. From that desktop, I noted that all the components were immediately usable, including a reasonable driver for the Intel GMA3150 graphics chipset.

I then tried to play with the Metro apps, quickly finding that they all require a desktop resolution of 1024×768. Since this machine (and pretty much every other netbook I’ve encountered) has a small 1024×600 panel, none of the new apps work. Frankly, given that the Metro interface is most suited to such small displays, this seems to be a bit of an own-goal on Microsoft’s part, and something that I think ought to be fixed before the final release if MS wants to give an incentive for a lot of users like me to spend real money to upgrade.

Besides Metro, the rest of the desktop interface seems to make sense. The new Start interface seems to work, and I was soon able to remove entries for the Metro apps I won’t be using. In doing so, I noted that the tiling and grouping doesn’t seem to be as flexible as most users would like – I wasn’t able to choose a tile colour or size for other installed apps, nor was I able to change their labels.

After installing Chrome, Thunderbird (with Lightning and Google Address Book addons), LibreOffice and a couple of other apps to get real work done, I’ve found the rest of the interface informative and swift.

One surprise as a former XP user wo migrated to Mac OS X, is the ability to calibrate the display colour output using a built-in tool from the Control Panel. It’s simple but surprisingly effective, removing the blue-tint. I tried this in Windows 7 when the netbook still had it, but it wasn’t terribly effective – perhaps a user error on my part.

It seems to me that for the kinds of admin, email, browsing and media consuming tasks I’d usually put this netbook to, 2Gb RAM is enough to keep Windows 8 happy – even with an email client, multiple Chrome tabs, iTunes, Dropbox, LibreOffice Write and some other apps open, memory use rarely topped 1.3Gb – better than my Dell Inspiron 6000 running similar workloads on XP.

So I’ll be sticking with this for a while, and will report back with more findings when I have time.

Burning Data DVD/CD from Mac OS X “Lion” (10.7.x), for use on non-apple devices

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Slight alarm bells ringing here.  It’s been a while since I last had to burn optical media for anything other than DVD-video mastering, so it’s not an issue I’m likely to have come across since the early days of Mac OS X “Leopard” (10.5.x).

This afternoon I happily burned a DVD using Apple Finder as usual, and it all went fine, verifying as usual. Since the target is a mixture of users on Windows and Mac OS X, I asked a Windows-using colleague to check the burned DVD worked on her machine.  Epic Fail.  Came up with the usual dialogue box asking how to open the contents, and Explorer showed the disc as having nothing in the root directory.

When I took the disc back and mounted it on the Mac, I checked in Disk Utility and sure enough, the mounted drive is in the native HFS+ format for Macs. Totally useless on PC’s.  I’m sure Mac OS X used to burn Hybrid media suitable for use on either Mac or PC, but this seems to have changed somewhere in the last few years.

Googling the problem online doesn’t bring up obvious answers, so I had to do a little more digging.  One possible solution was found here in the Apple discussion forums, which I’m now trying for myself.

Burn (Freeware utility) for Mac OS, on Sourceforge

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So – I’ve told it to create a disk image suitable for PC’s (as shown in the dropdown menu above), and I’ll mount it in the Finder before burning to DVD to see what format the image actually has:

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Good sign – the Finder sees ISO 9660 (Joliet).  Now I just need to burn the image to disk, which I’m doing from inside the Burn app rather than asking Disk Utility to burn an ISO.  I’ll test that later.

So while I wait for the disk to burn. I’ll add to these notes that I need to check the disc on a Windows box, to check that the file names remain intact.  For some uses this might not matter, but for the application I have in mind (sending multitrack audio projects to multiple users for training purposes), the file and directory names to remain intact for Reaper (or any other audio sequencer) to find them again without having have the user point it to them.

As I write this I also realise that the burning process, despite being set to run at 8x (the fastest the drive supports) and the data-set and transfer rate remain the same as in Disk Utility, seems to be taking about twice as long as Disk Utility.

The final result:

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Also looking promising – let’s test it on a Windows box and see what it looks like!

UPDATE:  Fail. Comes up as blank DVD in Windows.  

Looks like the only option left in the time available is to transfer the content via USB key and burn the disk on Windows.

Anyone else have any better solutions that don’t involve spending money or reverting to the command-line?

Headphones in live mixing.

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[rant]

I’ve probably posted about this before – it’s certainly one of my pet-hates. 

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I often find myself wanting (or having) to remind noise-boys happily mixing in their own head that they’re ripping the heads off the front 20 rows because they’re not dealing with an EQ, balance or feedback issue that they’re not hearing!

In summary, headphones are a great way to check individual inputs or outputs for:

  • problems with mic positioning,
  • distortion,
  • crackling,
  • presence of signal,
  • balance of a mix YOU CAN’T HEAR IN THE ROOM, such as those for foldback, recording, or other rooms.

When NOT to use headphones…
In live sound reinforcement, headphones are simply terrible for listening to the mix that you’re producing in the room, whether for judging mix levels or tonal quality.  You’re hearing small speakers, close to your eardrums, mixing for a space that exists only in your own head.

So don’t use headphones to check or perfect your main mix – it’s truly an accident waiting to happen.

If you’re changing something and you can’t hear a difference in the room then going to headphones isn’t going to help anyone hear that change except you. Worse still, while you’re dealing with a problem that only you know/care about, you’ll likely miss something crucial that everyone will notice!

[/rant]