Thank you very, very much to everybody who threw data at me during the XP-to-Windows 8.1 migration, particularly dw:dreamatdrew for all the back-and-forth on Dreamwidth, which was critical. Thank you.

A few impressions about the process:

1. Win8.1 handles multimonitor really pretty well. It has bad data about one of my cards or monitors (not sure) which means I can’t run one at best resolution yet. I’m hoping to find a way to override that. But otherwise, it’s really good, and the whole weird-tiles-UI thing works a lot better when you have one monitor where you’re actually working, and another where you’re sometimes desktop-working and sometimes letting the tiles live there. It’s much less crazy that way.
    
   
2. There are no circumstances under which software on the compatible list should require this kind of misadventure to install. I should not be downloading hax0r toys from GitHub to make it work. One of the other commenters on the thread called the process “Linux-like” which … is about right.
3. Awwww, QBASIC doesn’t work anymore! XD
    
   
4. 8.1 is convinced nothing is plugged into my front sound output jacks, so won’t play to them. I eventually figured out it would let me use the back sound output jacks, even though it specifically said to use the front ones. WHY ARE THEY EVEN DIFFERENT?
5. Adventures in Open Source Documentation: the official support docs told me to install a package which no longer exists, and the live discs for which it does exist don’t start correctly on my machine, because who even knows. Something about my graphics cards and startx buggering off, it’s ugly. But I managed to manually boot via the grub command line and get enough installed under 12.04 LTS on my hard drive that boot-repair could run and FWOOM! We’re off.

That wasn’t so bad, now, was it? Well, okay, it was. But everything survived, and I didn’t even have to use the backup images I made earlier in the day! Any landing you can walk away from is better than an OS upgrade.

Anyway, I did indeed get it done, a new backup is running now, which means making it just under the wire for another hammer dulcimer recording session. Not the last day of that; there’ll be one more brief session in early June. Talking of, got to go get ready for that.

Don’t forget to stop running XP! Even if it leads to adventures like this, it’s better than what’ll happen with XP on the net after support ends.

Over the weekend, I posted about still having a Windows XP partition (that boots very rarely, but not quite never), asking what to do about it. If you’re still running XP, you need to do this too, because security patches stop coming on April 8th.

Forever.

It’s going to be a hax0r’s field day; as of last month, 29.53% of desktops were still on Windows XP. All of them will be active parts of botnets on April… 9th, probably. Even those which haven’t been turned on. I know this because of facts, but it’s also actually true.

Anyway, I’ve been making a backup image of my hard drive and I’m going to try what dreamatdrew said, after I run out to buy Yet More Crap because Reasons, most of which involve how I really, really wish Windows talked to ext3 filesystems, but it doesn’t, because kill everyone.

Killing everyone is an important part of a supervillain’s daily workout. That, and petting the kitty. Hi, George.

Anyway, that’s what I’ll be doing today, so wish me luck with all that, or else. Or else what? Well, I haven’t worked out today yet. That’s what.

So. I have a Windows XP partition on my digital audio workstation. It exists to run two things: imgcopy and lightscribe. The machine spends 98% of its time in Ubuntu – but XP support is ending, and 0% is about to be the right amount of time.

However, received wisdom (and every other time I’ve done this) says you have to install Windows first, in a dual-boot configuration, then install clean Linux. A fresh install of Linux is unacceptable, because of reasons. Good reasons, not bullshit/ph33r reasons. Don’t argue with me about that; if you want to, you are wrong.

Now, if I have to, I can just yank the network drivers, not even turn on the external network card YES YOU READ THAT RIGHT EXTERNAL NETWORK CARD AGAIN REASONS and keep running XP, but wow, do I not want to do that. I’d like to turn this into a gaming machine as well – it has l33t specs in many ways, and with graphics card upgrades, could be a tiny goddess.

So. First: is there a way to keep my Linux partitions and still end up with a dual-boot machine? I know I can’t upgrade WinXP in place, but I have enough room in the current XP partitions for Windows 8.1, if the spec sheet isn’t lying. I don’t mind wiping the XP partitions, If there’s a way to accomplish this, that would be awesome; how, specifically, do I do it, and if you’re proposing a method, have you done it?

Keep in mind that given that the supposed XP-and-Vista binary to check your machine for Windows 8 compatibility failed to run because it doesn’t support XP, my confidence in my former employer is not high right now.

Second: Failing that, and I think we can assume failure there, are there reasons of which I’m unaware which would make it insane to install Windows 8 to a USB drive and just boot off that when I need to run Windows? Preferably a flash drive? Obviously I’m not an Enterprise Customer ™ so I don’t have Windows To Go, so only have Windows 8.1 Pro, but does it really matter since I’d be only using it on one computer ever?

Or, again, is that crazytalk? I don’t have USB 3.0, so this might be crazytalk, and honestly, I’d prefer a regular non-USB-drive install. But as a workaround, this would be fine. I’d have a Windows partition on the drive and use that for swap and My Documents and and and.

If neither of these are options, but you have another option that does not involve reinstalling Linux, I’m all ears. Maybe some sort of VM solution, I could see that. Please, tell me. Because right now I’m looking at lol winxp 4eva, or, more accurately, winxp until it decides it really wants to register again and can’t because it has no network, and tells me to DIAF.

I’d rather avoid that outcome. Because reasons.

Anybody?

I know I’ve posted too many pictures of George lately, but apparently, he really missed having us around as couch-warmers.

So there’s some content to this post: the problem with the MIDI interface is the US-800 itself, apparently. No, it works, and it works fine with iOS and OS X, but Linux is all snippy and picky about things and stuff and won’t deal with it. Fortunately, my old M-Audio Fast Track Pro’s MIDI interface is common enough to be tested against, and now I have my chimes. Excellent.

So for the longest time, the comments count on the blog page have been totally wrong. A post could have 30 or 40 notes (comments, likes, etc) of various kinds and show up as zero or one comment in both archives and latest-post (“Blog”) views. The correct number would never appear.

For example, the two pictures I posted of George today showed up as zero notes combined; the real number was 14, mostly likes. But if you went to the post view or went directly to the individual post, you’d see everything.

There are reasons for this, having to do with custom comment types and echoing posts around and stuff. I’ve tried to fix it before, to hilarious failure sound effects, but now? I FINALLY HAVE IT YEEEEEEEEEEEEES 😀

It still doesn’t count linked comments, which means comments on places like Livejournal and Dreamwidth aren’t included, but those are only linked-to comments anyway, so that’s fair.

Damn, this place has felt inappropriately lonely from the Blog view for a long, long time. Talk about discouraging new people from interacting!

Oh, hey, also – I have a mobile theme (Carrington) that kicks in on small devices. Mobile users, are you okay with that thing? It’s incredibly hard to customise so I haven’t. I could turn it off entirely, and you’d get the desktop view on your phone, but that’s… not super-optimal either. Any thoughts? (She asked on a Friday afternoon, when nobody reads anything… XD )

(I will say this for Carrington: it has counted comments correctly the whole time. So there, WordPress! XD )

Heading north again tomorrow, to Victoria and then up the island to Cumberland. This time I’ll try to remember to take the camera, tho’ I’ll have less, sadly, to photograph. Ah well, such is the way of things.

MIDI is still giving me problems on Ardour; everything works (including the on-screen mouse-click keyboard) except it’s ignoring/not seeing my actual MIDI keyboard, the one pictured yesterday. I know the keyboard works, I used it with Garage Band a week ago when using those other chimes. I don’t suppose anyone has experience with this, do you?

On the other hand, I’ve been shown Sound Fonts. Sound Fonts are like fonts, but for sound, and are plug-in/software independent (to the same degree typography fonts are) and this is super awesome. Imagine that you had to get a different company’s word processor to use this other typeface you like, and that’s what instrument VSTs seem to be like. Then someone throws typefaces at you and suddenly you’re all I LOVE YOU FORVER.

That’s what sound fonts are, for sound font supporting plugins. It’s so obvious and yet soooooo cooool. Or will be, if I can get Ardour to see my @&$#(*!!! keyboard.

Separately, the water heater has sprung a leak. It’s not much of a leak, but any leak is much worse than no leak. That’s what I get for playing with the 15 tesla pocket magnetic field generator in the basement, I guess. Live and learn. And mutate some genomes. But really, that goes without saying.

I’m starting to see the advantage of those smaller, two-octave-ish mini-midi keyboards:

don’t lean on that

I’ve found some chimes that sound pretty good, now I just need to make everything talk to that keyboard. I’ve always cheated and gone over to Garage Band in the past, but this is very close to working natively in Ardour, and that would make a zillion things easier.

Adding and editing notes, that I can already do, but I’d really prefer to play the originals then edit them into place than do the whole thing via screen keyboard. It’s making this first time more difficult, of course, but it’ll be easier in the long run. Or so I keep telling myself. XD LEARN ALL THE THINGS!, I guess.

I have seen a fair number of Kickstarter burnouts and explosions, but I have never seen one like this.

A few years ago, there was a truly great and hilarious webcomic called Sad Pictures for Children. I always thought – despite reading it during almost all of its run – that it was called Pictures for Sad Children, and I still think that’s a better title, but that’s not important right now.

It gained a following, and, as such things do, eventually wrapped up and the writer/artist launched a Kickstarter project to fund a collected book edition. It kept ramping up, and went way, and I do mean way, over the creator’s head – particularly as stretch goals started piling up, and super-arty features got added, like … okay, the last comic in the book included a joke about a dead wasp. Of course, it was only a drawing…

…originally.

As it snowballed, and costs exploded, and we find out that really, the creator didn’t include any budget for his time and labour in the project, things started to get goofier and goofier.

This is the final update, which just went out.

Yep. That’s a video of him burning a bunch of his own books. And, posted along with the video, you’ll find many pages of anti-materialist philosophy and anger, interspersed with bold text inserts like this:

I called this post “never ever do this,” but not because of the business aspect of this implosion, and not even because of the spectacle of the whole thing. All that’s obvious. I could talk about successful Kickstarters I’ve run, and why things like this shouldn’t put you off the ones I’ve been promoting this week.

I call it that because…

This shit ain’t healthy. I mean, seriously, not. And that’s obvious, isn’t it? But it’s like the (apocryphal) boiling frog, I think.

There’s an old Dilbert cartoon from the 90s, called “When is it time to quit your job?” and, of course, you get a whole series of panels that end up with Wally or Dilbert or one of them hanging themselves and thinking, “Yep… this is better than work,” and everybody laughs.

This artist didn’t get to the last panel, but… yeah.

So. Don’t let anything get there. Don’t let anything here, for that matter. It’s not worth it for anybody. Including you.

ps: I got my book, 18 months or so ago. Just had it down last night. It’s genius.

If there isn’t already a group noun for microphones – you know, like murder of ravens, school of fish, and all that – there should be. I propose a silly of microphones:

A Silly of Microphones

I had all those wired up at once because we were doing some test recording of Anna for flutework on Kitsune at War. Despite appearances, the two mics on the far left are quite different to each other, due to their different head capsules having dramatically different pickup patterns.

The choices coalesced really quickly, as it turned out, because Anna’s metal flute is totally clicky in the keys. Lots of clicking sound, and no way to turn it off.

Not even when dampened with a shirt. Not even two shirts.

The funny part is, back when I was trying to get these couple of Octava 012s, I really mostly just wanted the cardioid heads. And one came with that option only. But another ended up having a set of three heads: cardioid, hypercardoid, and omnidirectional. And that’s come back to serve us well now.

See, most microphones you’ve used have either been omnidirectional (pick up in all directions fairly evenly) or cardioid (pick up in front of the mic in kind of a circular-bubble area in front of the microphone). A hypercardioid mic, though? It’s like a laser beam, or at least this one is. Instead of a circular pickup area, it’s shaped more like a dirigible. And that means you can zoom in on the sound you want, and simply not record a surprising loudness of noises coming from shockingly nearby that you don’t want.

Which is why it was a damn good thing I bothered hooking up two versions of that microphone. Otherwise, we’d be looking into rental flutes. But we’re not. Go us.

eta: Over on Dreamwith, Corvi suggests “a Feedback of Microphones.” I do like that! But feedback also requires speakers – or in extreme cases a turntable – so… hm…

eta2: With 29 more ideas for this from people(!), we decided to make a list and poll, here. Look and vote if you want!

I may not be able to play guitar, but I can fix ’em. If they aren’t too broken, anyway. This is the nwcMUSIC loaner guitar – the one we have to loan to people if they need one – and is the second third! one I’ve repaired. (Spazzkat on Tumblr reminds me I helped fix one of his electrics.)

There’s not a lot of how-to involved, just get a block of that material – I don’t even know what it is – from somewhere like Dusty Strings, cut it down a bit with a hacksaw so it’s the right length and roughly the right height, then sand it with 100 grit until it’s the right shape. Add grooves with a sharp knife and use old strings to sand them into the right shape, and you’re done.

I had a guitar player check it out and he thought it played fine, like from the factory.

So, yeah, there. Now you can replace a broken nut on a guitar. Easy!