Tales from the…

As some of you know, my old av amp’s right front channel died at some point during my new-year’s party warmup thingy. Not one to overly freak out over such things, I bought a new amp, a NAD T747 (which is awesome btw) and a month or so later some new front speakers, ELAC 243 Limited Edition’s, (which are also completely awesome) and thus have spent the evenings re-listening to all my cd’s.

Well worth the time, because the new set sounds so amazing that it’s almost as if the cd’s are new, virgin,  unlistened to by my ears, whole audio landscapes that can be reexplored, where things that I have never heard are suddenly hearable. Well known old friends like Radiohead, Interpol, DJ Shadow, Elbow and many others have developed an extra shine, while new friends like Fever Ray, Florence and the Machine, Wintersleep, Mumford and Sons are extra fun to get in to. I mean, I don’t know what was up with my old speakers, but there are whole audio parts -especially voice- that I swear I’ve never heard before o0

In a quest to make it sound even more betterish, and refusing my friend Dennis‘  commanding wish to invest in (imo) stupidly expensive power cables which (imo) do fuck all to enhance anything because (imo) it’s impossible for anything that short to (imo) make a difference. Imo. :p Anyway, according to him I fail to comprehend what is done by these special cables, because they’re awesome and thus I generally suck and am a non-believer in the church. Which may be true, but we’ll see about proofs before I deign to invest money that could be beer in something that I get for free usually.

That said, and in complete contradiction of me not believing stuff that may or may not be true, I used the guide on the website that I link to below to connect my lurvelery ELAC’s to my amp in bi-wired mode. Sexy, nerdy, and it was do this or do the dishes, so the choice was easily made. So, after chopping up the last of my reserve of cable that I still had like friggin years after Maks gave it to me I hooked up the speakers and hit the couch for some serious listening. Radiohead’s Amnesiac spesh ed was first, now Florence and the Machine’s Lungs is on, and I’m going to finish with Mogwai’s Young Team. Too bad all my whiskey is gone hehe!

So, bi-wire, yeah or boo? I know that this is something that is at the fringe of things I might believe (if I’m in a good mood). Technically, meh, I have serious doubts: I don’t believe that I am hearing better sounds. Also, I’ve read a lot of stuff on the interpipes that says that bi-wire tech is full of shit. On the other hand, my amp sounds different now. It’s almost like my living room has magically gotten bigger, or that my amp has suddenly aged by 10 years or so. Hard to describe. Point in case is that right now I am not sure that I am pleased with this effect. It may have to go.

Still, it is potentially a cheap upgrade. Have a look at the guide below and may spend an evening nerding out…just like I did

http://www.brilliancehifi.co.uk/how-to-bi-wire-speakers.htm

EDIT: there’s actually a silly bug in this one. I’ve fixed it in dev, but hey, who cares about getting around to making a new post ^^-))

My little backup script thingy has been completed, and ofc I’ve become inspired to make it more than it was.  This is a great exercise to see if I can still knock these things out, I mean, I’m not a scripter or have any real programming background to speak of. There are new criteria for the version 0.4 of the script.

teedlescript criteria

DONE    * runs in manual or non-manual (eg cron) mode, configurable in a variable.
DONE    * pulls the content of a (configurable) directory into a tar archive, compresses it on the fly with gzip and stores it in another (configurable) directory.
DONE    * detects if the run is the first one (eg backup is mandatory) otherwise it checks to see if the configured directory that should be backed up has changed size. If it has, the script will backup the dir, otherwise it won’t.
DONE    * detects the size of the backup, and will write a warning if the size of the target dir is less than twice the size of the backup, and will write an error and fail if the size of the target dir is equal or less than the estimated size of the backup.
DONE    * has a a lock file scheme, eg prevents the script starting while another instance of it is running
DONE    * has an email scheme, ie you get a “backup was successful || failed miserably” email to a mailbox you configure in the script.
DONE    * do something snazzy when run in manual mode to show the user that the script is actually still running hehe
* implement passwordless scp copy to a configured remote machine…..maybe
* asks the user questions at first run about what variables need filling
* check for presence of external variable file
* is flexible about the location of the variable file in case the user is allergic to /usr/local/etc
* test for everything eg extreme paranoia, assume nothing

I’ll be working on it if I have time

oh, yes, for those curious to what it looks like (or wanting to point out how bad I am at scripts hehe) you can see the thing here

README:

put the script somewhere on your linux server.
copy it somewhere sensible like /usr/local/bin
make sure that it can be executed (chmod +x)
edit some variables (vi /usr/local/bin/teedlebackup):
this is where your stuff is you want to backup: SOURCE=/my/important/stuff
this is where you want your backup to go: TARGET=/my/backups
manual mode or not; 1=on 0=off (eg using cron) MANUAL=1
leave ADDY= blank for now

once you’ve tested it and it seems to work, change MANUAL=1 to MANUAL=0
if your account can mail, put a valid email address here and it will mail you ADDY=myself@mydomain.tld
set up your cron or root’s cron or whatever to run at a time you’d enjoy (crontab -e). example:

15 0 * * 1 /usr/local/bin/teedlebackup

^^ runs teedlebackup every monday at quarter past zero in the morning

if you are running it automated, and did not fill in your email, it will also leave messages for you in the system’s main logfile, which is usually /var/log/messages. you can look at the logfile with the tail or cat commands.

Enjoy!