Sidingsound

A quick message for those of you following this blog via the RSS (or Atom) feed: As part of sidingsound.co.uk's migration to WordPress (and a new Web/e-mail hosting provider) over the next week or so, the URL of the site's RSS and Atom feeds will change due to the migration from Blogger to WordPress. I am trying to find ways to minimise the disruption, and one way that you can smooth the transition for yourselves, is to update your feed reader application to use the new FeedBurner feed URL which I've just set up (http://feeds.feedburner.com/Sidingsound). This will be switched over when the site migration takes place, so the same URL will work seamlessly before and afterwards. When the migration has completed, I will leave a 'placeholder' file in place at the URL of the soon-to-be-old Atom and RSS feeds, notifying anyone still using them of the change. Apologies again for any inconvenience caused, and thanks for bearing with me while I put together a site which I hope will be worth the wait.

Since my last post talking about my moving Web/e-mail host, things have started moving quite quickly. I’ve found another hosting outfit, and my notice period with the old one expires in around one week from now, so I will need to start moving things in the next couple of days.

The exact ’switchover’ day and time is still rather up in the air, but I will be sure to let you know when things are likely to happen, and more to the point, whether there will be any disruption. The main item I can think of at this time, is that because I will be changing the blog platform I use (from Blogger to Wordpress), the RSS and Atom feed URLs for this site will also change. I aim to migrate all the existing blog posts over to the new Wordpress system, but anyone subscribing to this site via RSS/Atom may have to change settings in their feed reader—watch this space for more details.

The new Sidingsound site is going to be run entirely on the Wordpress system—that is to say, not just the ‘blog’ section, but any other pages which will be added to the site. This should not only make it easier to administer the site, but should also result in a more integrated look-and-feel throughout. It is also my intention that the new site will pull in content which I submit to various other sites, such as Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and Delicious, so that visitors can sample items from these sites before going offsite for more.

Without getting too technical, switching over to Wordpress for this site should open up quite a few new possibilities, and I’m really looking forward to getting to grips with what the system has to offer. In the meantime, please keep an eye on this site and on my Twitter feed for further news over the next week to ten days, and I hope the new site will be worth the wait for you.

A quick update to my last post, which muttered cryptically about "changes" on the way for this blog (and site, for that matter). I couldn't actually say much at that point, beyond that I was considering moving blogging 'platform' from Blogger to Wordpress, but now I can reveal more.

Basically, I'm changing my Web/e-mail host, which to anyone who's been there and got the T-shirt, knows this is not a task undertaken lightly, and I've thought long and hard about doing this, before concluding that it's the best way to move forward in a number of areas. I am currently making arrangements on both sides (old and new), and I currently believe that the switchover will take place sometime in the next two weeks or so.

I'll be sure to let you know how this will affect you (and there will be a few effects, mostly depending on how you read this blog, or if you e-mail us here), but I thought you'd appreciate knowing in advance that this change I was referring to, is on the way.

Oh, and keep your eye on my Twitter feed (ID: tawalker) for up-to-the-minute news…

Just thought I'd give the first faint warning that there may be some changes on the way, regarding this blog (and perhaps, with the other Web services I use).

No, nothing bad (to my knowledge, anyway!), but the main point is that I am seriously considering moving my blogging "platform" from Blogger to Wordpress, and have been thinking about it for some time. There are various reasons behind this, from more flexibility and easier maintenance (e.g. with Wordpress plugins) through to better options for maintaining the blog from my mobile phone (yes, I am that geeky sometimes).

However, the practical upshot of this for you, the reader, is that you may soon see some fairly major changes at sidingsound.co.uk, and I wanted to start preparing you for them before they happen (if they happen, for that matter, as I'm still weighing up my options).

If I do switch to Wordpress, however, this site is likely to become my main "point of contact" online, possibly replacing my Tumblr site (which I originally thought of as my "one blog to rule them all", but in practice, has ended up simply rebroadcasting my Twitter feed 95% of the time).

Anyway, sorry to be a bit vague at this stage, but I thought I'd let you know that change may soon be afoot here, and I'll be sure to let you know when there's more news to bring. Thanks for reading in the meantime!

If there’s one sounds in the musical instrument world which just seems to take my heart and do a 100m dash with it, it’s a properly-tuned 12-string guitar. Acoustic or electric, there’s just something magical about those unison octaves, the slight ‘phasing’ sound of two strings ever so slightly out of tune with each other… or maybe it’s a “Marmite thing”, in that you either love it or you don’t.

Well, I do, and even more so at the moment than usual, probably because I’ve been listening a lot to The Geese and the Ghost, the 1977 début solo album by Anthony Phillips, Steve Hackett’s predecessor in Genesis. The presence of layered 12-string guitars on the prog giant’s early LPs was in no small part Ant’s influence, even after he left the band in 1970, and he remains a very fine 12-string guitarist to this day (check out this video on YouTube of one of my favourite compositions of his, “Lights On The Hill”).

My Roland VG-8EX can pull off passable impersonations of electric and electro-acoustic 12-strings, but in the end there’s really no substitute for the genuine article. Unfortunately, until now, if you wanted a 12-string acoustic which didn’t have a horrid unplayable action (the distance between the strings and the fretboard), you would have to shell out a fair amount of money; however, I’ve noticed lately how good budget guitars have been getting, so I’ve started looking out for whether my theory applied to 12-strings.

Well, so far, so good. At lunchtime today, I dropped into one of my local music shops, and asked in there whether they were aware of any sub-£200 (about US$330 at current exchange rates—in other words, pretty cheap) 12-string acoustics. “See what you think of this one”, the assistant replied, lifting down a Vintage guitar (which I’m now fairly sure was a V800-12 (Correction (03/06/2009 – 20:50): it’s actually the V400-12)). I looked at the price label—£179—and instantly thought I was about to try an “egg-slicer’.

I stand corrected. I have to say that if I’d tried the Vintage blindfolded, I would’ve guessed the price was £250-300 at least. The action was a tiny bit on the high side, but certainly far better than I was expecting at the price, and the assistant said it would not be at all difficult to lower it without risking “fret buzz”. Moreover, it didn’t matter that this guitar had no pickup; if I were to buy a 12-string acoustic, it would be overwhelmingly for recording with, and I would never use the direct output for that purpose (I’d go for a condenser mike).

Money’s not exactly plentiful at the moment, so I think I’ll be saving up for this for a bit, but I was definitely surprised by the quality of this particular budget 12-string. I wonder if there are any other contenders?

Apologies in advance if this post is full of weird characters and cryptic codes; I’m trying to send a post to Blogger via ShoZu, and particularly want to see if I can send my own HTML code in the post.
If this works, then it means I’ll have found a free solution for posting to the Sidingsound blog (which is powered by Blogger) from my Nokia N95, and doing so with my own HTML code. If not, then it looks as if I would have to either pay up for Wavelog, wait for a free Blogger-compatible solution which will work on the N95, or consider some kind of move to WordPress.
So, let’s see how (if?) this works…

Apologies for the seemingly endless stream of posts about the Nokia N95, but this one should be the last for the moment…

Ever since I got my N95 just about two years ago, I’ve wanted to be able to access the photos, videos, music, etc. on our home server (a ‘hacked’ Linksys NSLU2 running Unslung Linux), but for various reasons none of the possible solutions I’d looked at were ideal. The good news is, finally I’ve now found what appears to be the best way.

At the weekend, I finally upgraded my N95’s firmware from a positively ancient version (12.x, I think) to the latest (v31.0.017), which amongst many improvements, added UPnP “renderer” (client) support. In other words, the N95 can now play media from a server, instead of only being a server, as was the case previously.

I’m now in the process of trying out a couple of UPnP servers on our home server, to stream our multimedia collection to the N95. The one I’m testing right now is MediaTomb, and aside from it seemingly putting a quite high load on the system (”top” was reporting a load of over 3—the NSLU2 is not that powerful a machine), the functionality seems to work. I’ll be testing this further, but it does look as if my quest for portable multimedia anywhere in the house, may have finally found its goal…

Another post sent via my Nokia N95, and typed out on an Apple wireless keyboard (a very useful accessory, I've found). So far, the main thing I've been missing with the keyboard has been any kind of case, to protect it from scrapes and other damage whilst it's bumping around in my bag; I've kept the keyboard in its original box (which does the trick), but it would be great to have some kind of case for the keyboard to travel in. So far, I've found just one: a fitted padded "bag" by a well-known laptop accessory company, which looks good-quality but is quite expensive (nearly US$40), and isn't sold in the UK, so I would have to import it. What I would really like in an ideal world, is some kind of hard case for the Apple keyboard: perhaps a "clamshell" design, maybe with a carrying handle (a bonus), and if it could open at a laptop-type angle and have some means of supporting a PDA or mobile phone so the whole combination could be used on a lap, that would be nigh-on perfect (for this user, at least!). I realise the market for such a case is probably small at best, so this will probably remain a bit of a dream, but nothing wrong with that, eh?

Just want to pose a rhetorical question here, while I'm sat outside my daughter's Kumon maths class, typing this into my Nokia N95 via a Bluetooth keyboard (OK, geeky, I know ): how come, over two years since its launch, has Nokia failed to come up with another handset which packs every feature of the N95, and then adds a few more? Basically, I was wondering which phone I would choose as an upgrade to my N95, and I realised that there isn't one: this venerable handset does pretty well everything I want in a smartphone, and amazingly, there isn't one of the 10-15 Nokia models which has followed it, which sports all the features of the N95 (operative word there: "all") and adds more into the bargain. I don't mind as long as my N95 keeps on truckin' (as it were), but one day it's bound to keel over, and I just hope that by the time that day comes, some phone manufacturer will have come up with a model which can truly replace it. Mind you, these are some pretty big shoes to fill….

No, nothing to do with reducing the number of Web services I'm using (actually, I finally joined Facebook late last week, so in fact that number is growing).

After a couple of catalysts, I've finally come to the conclusion that I have to start making a determined effort to get my weight down; not that I'm about to get stuck in doors or anything, but I'm definitely flabbier than I really ought to be, and it's only going to get harder from here on to jettison the ballast, as it were.

A friend gave me some good tips, so I'm going to make a concerted effort to follow them and see what happens. Perhaps I should do the same as Mitch Benn, and have a weekly "weigh-in" on the blog?