Fix Found for Weird Noise from Mac OSX Audio

As I was just researching unrelated stuff pertaining to Android, I came across this post from a guy who was having an issue on his Mac that sounded exactly the same as one that’s been bugging me for months now! He never followed up on his post, but it was from about 7 months ago, so I thought it was worth shooting him a line to see if he ever solved it. He had!

For him, it was the Android emulator, but for me, I believe it was caused by VirtualBox. The internal speakers were fine, but when I used a USB DAC or even the in-built headphone output, I would get a subtle fuzz noise in the background when the music was playing. (The noise was missing when all audio was silent.) This forced me to rely on the optical output to get sound from the MacBook Pro to my headphones.

The fix is to open up OSX’s “Audio MIDI Setup” tool in the Utilities folder. Select your output device under the “Properties For” drop-down and make sure that it is selected to be “2ch-16bit” on the right. For some reason, these apps seem to want to switch to “2ch-8bit” and that is what causes the problem. It does appear the fix will need to be performed again after each use of these applications.

Don’t really know who to blame for that one… But thank you, Duncan, for the tip!

I hope this helps someone else. I had no luck searching for a fix, myself.

Ubuntu Dapper Drake Flight 5

It was a few days after I saw Ubuntu Dapper Drake Flight 5 featured on Digg that I realized I needed to try it out on my laptop, upgrading it from Breezy. Wow was that ever a good idea.

Now, not only does my laptop properly go into and out of suspend AND hibernate (where this would fail in Breezy), but I get to use the excellent Gnome 2.14 before it even comes out. (The final release is due out today, however.) Linux just keeps getting better.

Dell UltraSharp 2405FPW, Good House Party Tonight

It’s Friday the 13^th and two good things are happening today. First, My new LCD has arrived. I’d been thinking of getting a new lcd for a while, and when I saw deal like this one, I had to splurge. It’s a combo Dimension system & LCD deal, but the price is killer. The bad news is that I’ll have to find a buyer for the tower that comes with it and my old LCD, but after all is said and done, I’ll have saved several hundred bucks on this screen (hopefully).

I’ve got the thing set up at the kitchen table right now… so that’s what’s in the picture. I was nothing but wow’d when I opened the thing up. I’m really not used to seeing screens larger than 19 or 20 inches. The design is really nice; the black & grey scheme matches the rest of my system. The base allows the screen to swivel with ease in all conceivable directions—including raising the entire screen up and down. You’ll need to raise it up in order to make enough room underneith to rotate the entire screen 90” clockwise and go into portrait mode. I haven’t looked into making this feature work in linux yet. Oh, and it has a multi media card reader in the left side of the screen which saved me just now when I couldn’t find the usb cord for my camera. I have no frickin clue where that thing is…

And I found it interesting that this product made #5 on PCWorld.com’s 100 Best Products of 2005.

The second good thing happening today is that I’m going to go DJ at a house party on Durand street (like a block over from me). I’ll be working in some other styles besides dnb to appease the peoples tonight. I may end up posting at least part of it for those of you who couldn’t make it. ;)

Happy Christmas Etc.

I hope everyone had a great Christmas or whatever holiday you’d like to celebrate this time of year. Yesterday, we went to the aunt/uncle’s place for a family get-together of about 17 family members. As for loot, I got mostly just the cash and checks. The clear message this year is that people don’t know what to get me. But I pretty much expected this… which is why I’ve already upgraded the computer like a month ago. :)

In unrelated news, our amateur neighborhood wireless provider has proven that he has no idea how to manage an ISP. 1-2 days ago, he began blocking ALL except a select few outbound ports. This had the net effect of breaking my dnbradio streaming, quake playing, file sharing, and even email checking (imap) capabilities to name a few. He’s been faster to fix some than others. SSH tunneling allows me to use some services over an encrypted tunnel (using a 3rd host) but that doesn’t work for a lot of apps that are unpredictable as to which ports they’re going to use (quake, bittorrent, etc).

But anyway, he wants my dad and I to come over tomorrow and help set up a linux box as per my suggestion to handle the firewall rules and quality of service functions for his ISP. He’s clueless, but at least he’s willing to accept help.

My New Gear + Intruding Vine

I’ve been meaning to post some pictures of my new gear… you know… to exercise my bragging rights.

Up above, you can see the speakers from Creative Labs. They don’t look like much, but they sound quite good. They’re perfect for what I need down here in my room, and they were less than $60!

Also, the Logitech MX518 gamer’s mouse that I just acquired very recently is friggin amazing. On-the-fly adjustable dpi (essentially sensitivity), nice side buttons, and sweet ergonomics make it very comfortable to use.

Here’s where most of the work went. I’ve already layed out the specs in prior posts, so I won’t bore you with them again. It lives under my bed, but I can move with it pretty easily with the HANDLE you can see on the front. It’s a very nice case from Aspire. And if you think I care about the white face plate on the dvd burner, you’d be wrong. I don’t. So there.

One last thing… a friend casually hanging out in my room suggested that I post a picture of this vine that seems to have grown through the ceiling of my room. It is pretty funny, so I thought I’d share it with you.

New Web Engine, New Web Server

It’s been almost 24 hours since I made the switch to the new web server. I’m now running the site from a Linode that we’re hosting some sites on for work. This is where I was linking all the big files from on here.

Typo is a very nice blogging engine written in my favorite new technology, Ruby on Rails. It has all sorts of neato “web 2.0” (as they call it) features. Try posting a comment. I didn’t even turn on moderation because the spam bots apparently don’t know how to post comments via ajax (yet). Wordpress was getting pounded pretty hard with something like 50-100 spam comments a day.

Oh, and sorry for dropping all that content… I’ll try and bring it back soon.

The New Computer, Quake 4 on AMD64

So I got video card #2 yesterday. This time it’s an eVGA (nVidia GeForce 6800GT) from newegg. I thought I could save some money by getting the video card from ebay, but the MSI one I got turned out to be fried (nasty snow & artifacts constantly all over the screen). Ebay/Paypal buyer protection to the rescue, though! I filed a complaint, and I just need to pay to ship the card back to the guy (who does NOT communicate to me), put the tracking number into a web page, and I get my refund. So not all is lost…

This machine seriously hauls ass. Everything is snappy as ever, and games run amazingly well. That means 1280×1024 at the highest details running solid well over 60fps with the latest games. I don’t mean to brag, but that just feels good. :)

I had some trouble getting Quake 4 to run on Ubuntu 64. Apparently Quake 4 depends on the 32bit version of libsdl. Since all my system libraries are compiled to 64bit binaries, Quake 4 simply complained that it couldn’t find the libsdl shared library. It turns out, that the fix is to put the 32bit libsdl (which I found in my Neverwinter Nights installation) in my quake4’s lib directory and prepend ”./lib” to the LD_LIBRARY_PATH exported in the launcher shell script.

I don’t usually like to attain software by dishonest means, but I just had to try this one out. You can bet I’ll be acquiring this title come this holiday season.

OMG I Just Bought a Bunch of Computer

So it’s about time for Adam to upgrade his PC, so in anticipation of Christmas cash, he spends a bunch of hard-earned dough to buy some computer. Here’s what we got:

• Aspire Black/Silver Micro ATX Case is the shuttle pc sized case that will probably end up ON the desk and looking badass next to my black speakers/lcd/kbd.
• Foxconn NF4K8MC-EKRS motherboard with cpu-matching 1 GHz front-side bus and nforce4 chipset.
• Athlon 64 3500+ is the 64 bit beauty with the Venice core running at 2.2 GHz.
• I needed a new video card to go in the PCI-Express slot of the new motherboard, so I decided not to beat around the bush and just splurge on a MSI GeForce 6800GT (256M) which will be sickly fast.

I’m probably stupid. It’s way more than I need. But it will be small and will run Quake 4 real good. >=]

Update: Oh yeah, if anyone wants to buy my old stuff, let me know.

• Real nice Antec tower case w/Aspire PSU and case fans
• Asus mobo with all the modern features
• Athlon XP 2800+ Barton CPU (512k L2 cache!)
• GeForce FX 5600 128M

$450 or best offer. Ask me about it.

Update: I’ve found a buyer.

This Week in Tech

Podcasts have recently become more popular. Now that iTunes supports podcast downloading (basic usage—no torrents) podcasts have come to the masses. TWiT is apparently #2 on the iTunes podcast roster! If you don’t know, it’s Leo Laporte, Patrick Norton, and many others from the TechTV crew. It’s quite a nice show if you’re one who enjoyed their appearances on TechTV’s The Screen Savers and Call for Help.

I like listening to these shows with dnb in the background. Shit, I’ll listen to dnb whenver possible! Anyway, as I was playing some tunes alongside the podcast, I decided to fire up Audacity and add my last released set at lower volume to the podcast. I’m not going to post it, but if for some reason you’re actually interested, msg me on aim.

Oh, and my other favorite podcast is LugRadio.

Logitech v500 Mouse & UltraX Keyboard

First of all, happy July 4^th, everybody! (even non-Americans have a 4^th of July.) I hope everyone is enjoying good time spent with family and friends.

I just got a couple interesting input devices from Logitech, and I wanted to take a moment to tell you all how cool they are.

First is the relatively new Logitech v500 wireless optical mouse intended for use with a notebook. This thing is quite small, but still manages to feel nice in my hand thanks to some quite impressive engineering. An easy-to-release latch on the bottom of the mouse releases the chassis. The bottom side of the mouse comes up to fit better into the palm of your hand. This also exposes the slot hidden in the now-exposed surface to store the micro receiver. It also has a 4-way scroll pad (not a wheel!) making this one badass little mouse.

The other big selling point for me is the new technology. This is one of the first mice to incorporate a scroll pad like this one. It’s also at least one of the first to use 2.4 GHz wireless technology to provide super-low latency transmissions and a completely reworked all-terrain optical engine. The two of these things together mean that this mouse will be very quick and error free on about any surface you can think of for up to 30 meters!

Now for the bad news. I didn’t even realize this until I got the mouse, but it doesn’t have the ability to send a signal for a middle click. I guess the pad is designed only to allow the swiping motions to signify scrolling, and can’t distinguish a simple tap. This is annoying, but using xorg’s emulate3buttons (both buttons at the same time for 3rd mouse click) isn’t as annoying as I thought it would be. I thought it was odd, though, that I read a couple reviews and nothing I read hinted the fact that this mouse is missing a third button as though it wasn’t even a consideration.

Anyway, this mouse is otherwise perfect. I’d recommend it to anyone who is looking for a sleek and tiny mouse to use with their laptop, doesn’t mind the lack of middle mouse button, and has the moolah. The SRP is about $70, but I found mine on Newegg for $53.

The keyboard I just picked up is a IBM-Compatible keyboards. I actually stole this keyboard idea from my friend Dan who picked it up a few months ago. Having proper, full-sized keys along with the familiar layout make it very comfortable to type on. The media keys up top are few, but few is more than enough for me. Also, with this wrist rest I use, the keyboard ends up being a bit too low when my hands come over the rest because this keyboard is so thin. So, I’ve put a couple jewel cases under it to elevate it a bit. This is an okay temporary solution, though the keyboard does tend to drift around a bit.