David Fisher : What is Noise Blog

The new Radiohead CD is coming!
It is titled, “In Rainbows”. You can find more about it here: http://www.inrainbows.com/Store/Quickindex.html

Even better, there is a severe twist. Radiohead has apparently not signed on with a record label. It is only currently available from their website in forms of download or discbox.

The download price is what you like it to be. Seriously. If you think it’s worth 1000 bucks, then it is. If you think it’s worth nothing, then it is. No DRM or bullshit. The download will be available October 10.

The discbox will be shipped before December 3rd. The discbox contains vinyl of the album, photos, other neat things, and the digital download. It’s 80 USD (or 40UK Pounds). Go sinking US dollar go!

Great concept. Who needs a record company?

Keep in mind, in a perverse way this isn’t socialism or whatever, it’s actually as capitalistic as it gets. The value of the object is whatever the consumer thinks it is.

Tags: album, dec 3rd, discbox, in rainbows, october 10th, Radiohead

I’ve been away the past few days attending to life. I went to NYC/NJ for a few days, had a terrible cold, was crazy busy at work, etc.

I came back to find that I had 12 unmoderated comments, with speculation that I was intending to censor them. I won’t censor any comment here that I can foresee. I just want to have a good tab on what’s being said, and keep the spammers away.

Just as an interesting note. I’ve been working to figure out the best video hosting site out there. So far the number 1 has came up as Blip.tv.

Blip is pretty awesome. There’s no hard cap on the size of files. You can upload via FTP, a client, or a variety of other methods. The quality of the videos is top notch. Developers have told me the API seems to work ok. They do advertising if you ask them to. Overall it’s pretty sweet. Beats the pants off YouTube for putting video on your site IMHO.

My only complaints with it being that editing large batches of files is a bitch. Seriously. I have nearly 100 videos I’m working with right now for a super-secret project for work, and dealing with the Meta-data is a hassle.

Blip- look at Flickr and Apple’s Aperture for how to deal better with metadata. Metadata editing shouldn’t make you want to shoot yourself.

And also of note, while they’ll let you upload it… I haven’t been able to get a file larger than 500MB to playback properly, which is understandable

Tags: away, blip.tv, blogger, comments, posting

A reader named Pat posted

“Loved your review, excellent insight into the ins and outs of the new MBP. I wanted to know a little bit more about your external hard drive configuration… you say you have four attached, does that mean that you have an additional powered USB hub attached? And how are the load times for your External HDs, are you waiting for them to wind up before the system loads their content, or are you keeping them busy and constantly whirring, haha.”

So I sent him the following response:

Just wanted to get back to you and let you know more about my drive configuration. I currently have three LaCie D2 drives hooked up (of various ages and sizes) via Firewire. Two of them are FW800 and one is FW400. The last one is only hooked over FW400 because that’s all the drive has (older 80GB model). All of the drives have external power bricks. I wish that you could more easily daisychain the power. I want to look into hacking one of the power cables to do that actually, but it might be more of a pain than it’s worth since it’s a multipin cable.

The last drive is a bus powered FW800 drive. It’s a little 120GB one that I use for travel between the office, since the D2 drives aren’t great for taking around. I don’t like using bus powered drives however. I graduated from Berklee and they don’t allow bus powered drives in the studios since they historically had several problems with the drives frying motherboards. I don’t honestly know if it’s still a problem, but I figure it’s best practice to limit the number of bus powered drives.

So in the end, 4 external drives go from just two cables out of my computer. I also have a Mackie 400F firewire audio interface daisy chained from the FW400 drive. It makes it nice. Since there’s no MBP docking station

If the drives haven’t been accessed for a while they do tend to go to sleep. If I open up iTunes and need to access that drive it takes a second or two to spin up initially, but asides from that they are pretty fast.

Ideally, I want to get the LaCie rackmount kit so I can mount all of the drives in the rack rails in my desk. The drives are pretty quiet most of the time, and don’t get too hot. Some people have had issues with the LaCie drives, but I think it’s just a very vocal minority. The studio I freelance at also has 3-4 LaCie drives with no problems. Nate, the President of Jazkarta, has 3-4 of them too. No probems. And at Berklee it’s pretty much the standard studio drive.

I am looking into the LaCie NAS drives, and they are coming out with a new one in a few days here at a reasonable price. Apparently according to some reports however it doesn’t support Samba (SMB), which sucks. I was going to use my Linksys router to mount the drive, but that’s a no-go. I wonder what it does use for network mounting. More research needed.

Tags: D2, firewire, hard drive, Lacie, Macbook Pro, mackie 400f, rack

According to a Wired Article, they have uncovered that the TSA and the airports are recording information about what you are reading in a database.

Why in the world would government be interested in what you’re reading. Keep in mind that provisions in the Patriot Act allowed for federal agents forcing libraries to turn over large amount of book borrowing information.

Are we one step away from thoughtcrime being a chargeable offense?

Also of note, they are recording the race of people flying. Why they need that information is totally unknown. Is recording their religion next?

Tags: 1984, airports, big brother, books, flying, thoughtcrime, TSA, Wired

Somehow my low checking account balances have made me not want to look that much at new photography toys. I’m a Nikon guy for various reasons, but I had been wishing for some of the things that Canons offer including the ability to shoot at higher ISO speeds. My D200 is pretty good at ISO800 (usable photos), grainy at ISO1600, and looks like a cameraphone at ISO3200. I shoot some pretty dark things on occasion, so I enjoy the ability to shoot fast.

If you’re a non-photo geek and haven’t dropped a few thousand on photo gear (or the thought of doing so sickens you) then you probably shouldn’t read this. No really, stop now lest I tell you the price of a Leica M8.

Nikon has released (not shipping yet) two cameras to really get excited about. The D300, and the D3.

First the D300. The D300 is the new D200. The main differences are (or that I care about) as follows. It has LiveView on the 3″ LCD. This means that your girlfriend who is used to looking at a screen on a digital camera and not looking through a viewfinder can use it too! No really, it has it’s other uses as well. I mean it’s not a ground glass, but it could have it’s uses.

The D300 will now use a CMOS instead of a CCD sensor. Hopefully this will help make the higher ISOs more usable. The sensor is now 12.3MP (eh who cares, the 4MP of the D2H is just fine). More importantly, it can shoot up to 100 frames in high speed burst mode. Wow! And it also has a ultrasonic self cleaning sensor. Yeah!

It has some new auto mode things that are neat, but not as useful as you might think. The camera comes in at $1799 for the body. Does what a D200 does and a little more.

Let’s move on to the real badass of a camera- the D3. The D3 can shoot up to 11 frames per second at 12.3MP. Not only that, but it’s standard ISO goes up to 6400 for it’s ’standard’ range, and pushes reasonably to 25600. Yes, that means if you were shooting at ISO1600 before at 1/30 second, f/3.5 (dark club), that you can now shoot at 1/500th at the same aperture with ISO25600. That’s just sick. I’m sure it will be a little noisy, but that’s insane. Just insane.

Oh, and it’s a full frame sensor! I want to know how well it works with crop lenses like the 18-200.

Overall i’m impressed. I think the body comes in around $5000. Not cheap, but damn.

Tags: D200, D3, D300, Nikon