The Golden Age Of Those Who Can Pull It Off

AI is for perfectionists, solopreneurs and startups- regulatory capture is for grunt workers and corporations

Pharao- PHP-Like charm for Nim

There are some genuinely good things about PHP, the greatest of which, in my humble opinion, is the ability to just dump a script on a web server and run it on request. It's eminently practical and I missed it, but there is no way I will part from my fiercely appreciated Nim programming language any more.

The Best Linux Audio Distro In 2026 Is CachyOS

So I've been on the Linux Audio bandwagen since about 2003, it was the reason I switched from Windows. Worried about having all sorts of problems, I took the plunge, and installed Slackware- if we go, we go all the way! And sure enough, you could get a kernel and I even helped with packaging (until the slackware audio guy told me to improve my package quality and I took that kind of badly). It actually worked okay!

How To Use Syncthing On Android

The real super poweruser command line way

Syncthing is excellent- just keep some folders in sync, full privacy, just works. I love it.

It even works on android!!! Full file sync on the phone- doesn't get much better. With graphene, this is like the full privacy perfect functionality kind of solution. What is there not to like?

Well it so happens that syncthing for android is a bit of a bolt-on kind of thing and I wasn't really able to get it to run exactly like I wanted.

Going Metal

This is my first tech blog post for... almost thirteen years!!! Oh my goodness me has a lot happened since then.

Your Cheap, Scalable and Safe DropBox with Git-Annex, LVM, Raspberry PI and USB Sticks

There is no cheaper storage than USB sticks. When writing this, they’re 30 bucks for 64GB. Unlike hard drives, they don’t eat a lot of juice when you keep them plugged in, they’re quiet, they are not sensitive to having a dusty home (thank god!), and they last. It’s also very easy to wipe out the dumb cruftware that comes pre-installed on them.

SuperCollider &jack the easy way

Starting up the jackd sound server first, then starting up supercollider, and then connecting everything later can be a major hassle.

Finding An Artist Name

Here’s a hard one… I’m getting a hunch Carlo Capocasa is not going to click it. To long. To unwieldy. Everyone thinks I’m in the Mafia.

Ubuntu 12.04: Upgrade your realtime kernel for music making

Sometimes, good is just not good enough.

Crushing The Kworker Uprising (or how to fix your Linux Lenovo Ideapad y560p)

Note: This stuff works on Ubuntu 12.04, Precise pangolin. It should be fairly easy to port to other distributions.

The Endeavour Evo with Supercollider on Ubuntu Linux 12.04 (Precise Pangolin)

In a rush? Scroll all the way down to skip the tinker story, rant, and attempts at humor, and get just the instructions on how to get it working.

Using Amazon Glacier

I need backup. The time I almost lost 80 hours of work tought me that. And I can’t trust myself to handle the encryption. The guy who lost his life savings in bitcoins tought me that. And me, at four in the morning on a work day, trying to get GPG keys right for duplicity.

Mail screenshot in Gmail

It’s nice to keep users informed of software updates but they just don’t understand. Enter screenshots.

Traits with Symfony 1.4

PHP 5.4 is so nifty. And traits are mad cool.

Sending Email to Google Apps Address on same domain

Google Apps email is great!

Habits vs. Unity

Want something that’s great? Try Unity, Ubuntu 12.04′s new Desktop.

Practical Use for Hash Functions

And now for something completely different: A piece of information that seems to get taught at universities that not only has plenty of practical use in everyday web development, it is also surprisingly easy to understand. Here goes.

Blobs in Doctrine Fixtures

Looks like Doctrine 1.2 (in Symfony 1.4) doesn’t like loading blobs in fixtures. You can base64_encode them, but that kind of defeats the purpose of having a blob, now does it!

PHP Doctrine ORM: Low memory

Today, I made an arduous discovery: Doctrine 1.2, the Object-Relational mapper used with symfony 1.4, has a HYDRATE_ON_DEMAND fetch mode. This allows doctrine to function just like pdo does: You do a query, loop over it, and the data doesn’t consume memory until it gets fetched. (And can be freed before the next pass)

Backups for Linux Audio Recordings

If you spend a lot of time recording, you don’t want those recordings to suddenly go away. Enter backups.