Rick Hurst - Freelance Web developer. Bristol, England.

my long awaited powerbook turned up during the week and so far it has more than lived up to its expectations. One thing I was particulalrly keen to try out was using it as a digital multitrack, something that all my previous hardware has never been up to. I opened garageband, I dragged and dropped a few drumloops in then plugged my bass in, followed by my guitar.

This is a 30 second excerpt of the epic jam that I then proceeded to have with myself.

i’m pretty chuffed with the result, considering that the guitars were plugged straight* into the line in socket on the powerbook - all the effects and amp simulation are done with garageband. The bass is distorted on purpose - i’m trying to break from my old sound and am now going for ROCK by using a plectrum and a simulated overdriven amp. hurrah I now have a fully portable portastudio - it even runs on batteries

*OK they were plugged in via a digitech multi-effects unit, but it was set to "bypass" and only for the sake of using it as a 1/4 inch 1/8 inch jack adapter.

/kupu_library_tool/kupu_config (on kupu 1.2b)

i’m feeling a bit schizo about this site at the moment - i’m going through some mood swings. At least twice in December I decided that i’m not comfortable with writing all the introverted stuff in public (in fact not comfortable with personal blogging in general) and should just keep it as a techie thing and at least twice i’ve decided that it is full of techie bollocks and not at all interesting.

The skate blog at least has a focus, but is a bit sparse because i’m trying to keep it to actual skate things, at least related to me in some insignificant way, and December didn’t hold a lot of that, for various santa induced reasons.

So i’m making a bit of a pruning decision here - this main blog ain’t gonna contain any personal stuff - i’ll just focus on the techie/media stuff.

(but you know how I change my mind all the time, and if I ever get on here drunk…).

I’ve been using open office on windows XP for a few weeks recently for a few routine tasks and so far haven’t had any compatability problems with existing MS office documents. very encouraging.

The honeymoon period is over with my Treo 600 - i’ve found a bug in the calendar application - it keeps moving (or creating an instance of) a repeated event to a different day when I sync. This type of "random" bug makes it effectively useless as a diary as I now can’t trust it, and know that I need to keep a second copy of stuff in paper format to be absolutely sure things are in the right place. I haven’t got time to look into why it is happening, so back to the faithful old filofax.

A new motherboard including 1.4ghz processor donated by Ben at work means new life for the media PC I was planning to build a way back - coupled with various parts stripped from my collection of derelict PC’s (some of which am now going to dump - hurrah!) it could be a half decent machine, especially if I can find someone to donate me a graphics card capable of the odd game or two.

The powerbook work are buying for me still hasn’t arrived