PK1048

Sound Cue Playback Tools

When I asked on the Theatre-Sound List  for suggestions of software tools that permit playback of sound cues for Theatre, I received lots of suggestions. I was asking specifically about tools that work under Windows. My primary laptop runs Mac OS and I use QLab from Figure 53, but I have a secondary laptop that runs Windows and I wanted to put it into service for playback as well. I occasionally run into situations where I need my primary system, but also have a gig needing playback. So I gathered together all the suggested products (and a couple comments from...

Beware iDNS (and others)

Everything on the Internet has a numeric address, much like your phone number. The system that converts names (like pk1048.com) to numbers is called DNS or the Domain Name System and it is much like your phone’s address book. In order to use a name on the Internet you need to register that name. In the early days of the Internet there was only one name registrar, Network Solutions, and all names cost $35/year. Today there are many, many name registrars, of which Network Solutions is still one; others include GoDaddy and the one I use DynaDot. They all provide...

ZFS Resources / Links

I see some of the same questions come across a variety of mailing lists. Often times the questions are phrased differently, but they are essentially asking the same things over and over again. This is not a bad thing as new people are introduced to ZFS and start asking about it. I find that I am sending people to a number of links where people who know more about ZFS than I have already answered the questions. To simplify giving out all these URLs I am gathering them up here for reference in one place. Expect this list to grow as...

Loudspeaker Death ?

A local community theater I volunteer at is having trouble with the main speaker cluster. I am one of two Sound Coordinators for this company, so I get called for problems. Some background, the main sound system consists of a flown cluster of four speaker cabinets: a Main covering the bulk of the audience, a Front Fill (FF) covering the first 4 or 5 rows, a Subwoofer (Sub), and a Stage Monitor (SM) covering the vast majority of the stage. All are ElectroVoice EVF series speakers. The Main is a 15″ 2-way, the FF is a 12″ 2-way as is...

ZFS Protects Data Again

One of the servers I manage is essentially a file server. There are two SSD boot devices and 16 data drives. The configuration is five 3-way mirrors plus one hot spare. At one point four of the 16 drives go offline all at once. My first thought is a controller gone bad. There are four controllers in play, the onboard with six ports and three add-in cards with four ports each. But looking at the device names they are not consecutive as would be expected of the four ports on one controller. So it must be something else and I...

ZFS Resilver Observations

As it has been discussed on the ZFS mailing list recently (subscribe here), I figured I would post my most recent observations on resilver performance. My home server is an HP MicroProliant N36L (soon to be an N54L) with 8GB RAM, a Marvell based eSATA card (I forget which one), and a StarTech 4-drive external enclosure (which uses port multipliers). The system is running FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE-p7. The zpool in question is a 5 drive RAIDz2 made up of 1TB drives, a mix of Seagate and HGST. Note that drives ada0 through ada2 are in the external enclosure and ada3 through...

Japanese Industrial Video Formats of the 1970’s

When I was in High School (1978 through 1981) we had a small closed circuit TV station with B&W cameras, video recorders, and a small switcher. Much of the equipment was Sony or old broadcast cast-offs (Conrac monitors, Tektronix waveform monitor, etc.). The video recorders we had were all Sony. Starting with the largest (and biggest), the EV-200 was an EIAJ 1″ B&W helical scan recorder with mechanical transport control. In other words, a big Rewind – Stop – Play/Rec – Fast Forward lever / knob. The tape wrap was 180 degrees around the drum. Next was the EV-340 which...

USB … beware

Call me old fashioned, but I have never bee a big fan of USB. Part of it is because I have always had trouble finding a USB hub that just works. I have tried hubs from Belkin and the Staples store brand and while they might seem to work for a while, eventually I am loading data to or from some device and it just randomly goes offline (usually due, I suspect, to high throughput, but nowhere near the limits of USB 2.0). I have found one hub that, with one small exception, has never caused me a problem. It...

Portable Video Tape Recording Formats of the 80’s and 90’s

Between 1984 and 1993 I worked professionally in Broadcasting on the Engineering side of the house, mostly at TV stations. Right around 1990 there was a new low cost video tape format on the market, Hi-8, that was supposed to be better than the bulky 3/4″ U-matic. The TV Station I worked at decided to try it and bought three combination camera / recorders. They were given to three of the News Videographers who were told to shoot with them and see what they thought. Keep in mind that adding a new format took more than just putting gear in...