Shane_B.

23 hours ago, craigb said:

Did that just Dawn on you? ?

I did Wonder if my response was correct.

Or if it was even Jermaine to the topic at hand.

?

I got a message from Google a few weeks ago the my forum credentials were compromised and I changed my passwords immediately.

The 2 factor and the authorization thing isn't as bad as it seems. There's an official Google Authemticstor app that is used to do the authentication if I remember correctly. I had to use it once or twice. There's the initial setup then I never had to do it again. I can't even remember what I had to use it for to be honest. 

Irt my password from here being put out on the net, if you save your passwords in Chrome they are checked regularly. I think how it works is, if you use the Google Authenticator the password can't be changed unless it's done from the location the Authenticator was installed. It's been a long time since I did it but I think that's how it works.

IMO I think it's a good thing. I always have everything set to send me a code on my cell if there is a login from anything other than my cell or PC. Edit: let me rephrase and say that everything that has the security option to send a code. Not everything does.

On 2/18/2024 at 7:23 PM, SteveStrummerUK said:

.... four tops.

Your jokes add a whole new 5th Dimension to the forum.

(I checked. They switched to Motown in the late 70s. ?)

10 hours ago, bitflipper said:

I don't want to live in a world where you need an app to light a fire.

Lol.

It's a feature not a requirement thankfully. It still have buttons on it and a physical remote.

I agree though,.it's not going to be a good day if manufacturers ever do force you to use wifi controls only.

Another little hiccup about all these wifi gadgets is they only run on 2.4gHz. Routers have 2.4 and 5 but I could see a time when they go to 5 only to make them cheaper. That would render your entire house dead.

It's already started actually. Comcast iirc, just got in a lot of heat because of the new routers they were giving people. They changed some protocol on the 2.4 side of their routers that wouldn't communicate with Ring camera's. The last I read Ring was blaming them, they were blaming Ring, and people had to go out and get their own router or go back to the old ones if they could get one from Comcast. I would never use theirs and pay their exhorbant rental fees anyway, but those who don't know how to set this stuff up have no choice.

They tick me off. Im.paying $140 a month now for 800mb. They offer 1G at the place I'm hoping to buy for $80 with free Premium Peacock channel. Not that I watch Peacock, but WTH?!

On 2/15/2024 at 12:08 PM, Tim Smith said:

There are some quirky things, like my ceiling fan is on an alexa voice controlled switch that turns the fan on or off, but to turn on the fan light you need the fan control. Since I don't use the light very much, it usually isn't a problem.

I'm afraid to have an Alexa in my home. I really don't know why. It just creeps me out.

The center switch in the pic was for the ceiling fan. The fan was wired to have the light and fan come on with a single switch. I ended up having to run new 14-3 up in the attic to separate them.

I built the fireplace in this pic. The company I bought the fireplace insert from was having a sale and I upgraded to the wifi one for less than the non-wifi one. It said you had to download their app. At that point I was up to 5 different apps and it was a real pain. I was pecking around the settings of one app one day and it found everything in the house. I set the app up and it controlled everything, including the thermostat and fireplace. I could control the entire house inside and out from one app. Here's the fireplace I built. Indid all the trim and stone work. Everyrhing was done except for the top. I had a massive dead black walnut tree in my yard I was going to cut down and make a top for it, but I moved on before I got to finish it. I ran all the wires inside the wall for the TV and hdmi cables and put a box behind the TV and on the wall on the cubby hole below so you could set blu ray player down there. I had an outlet with USB ports. I also ran a dedicated circuit just for the insert. It was really nice. Even the recessed lights in the bedroom were wifi controlled.

And it wasn't expensive at all. Amazon is a great resource. If you can do wiring yourself it's really not bad at all. Sorry, I'm rambling. Hah. I put a ton of work in to that house and I really miss it. I more than doubled what I paid for it when it was sold and all that stuff made a big difference, not to mention the labor was free. 

20 hours ago, Tim Smith said:

I was repacing regular switches with smart switches that used wifi and they are larger than the other switches. I still don't know how I managed to stuff that wiring and those swtches into that cavity and even make it look normal from the outside.

I love all those wifi gadgets. I was slowly converting my house over to wifi control. All of my outside lights, ceiling fans, heated floors in the bathroom, cameras, heat/ac, even the electric fireplace I put in our bedroom, even my Lionel train was wifi controlled. You could control the heat, color, brightness on the fireplace. It's really amazing what you can do with these gadgets now.

One thing I learned about all this wifi stuff is, all the apps are the same. I had one app controlling everything even though some of the stuff was different brands. For the inside outlets I used the plug in wifi adapters.

They were great, especially at Christmas. I used weatherproof ones for outside.

I set everything inside and out to come on 15 minutes before dusk. The wifi followed sunset and sunrise via the internet. Inside was set to go off at 11pm, outside set to go off at 15 minutes before dawn.

I hear ya about getting them to fit in the box. This pic is the worst one I ran in to. It originally had a 2 gang box. I had to cut out the drywall and install a 3 gang. I tidied up the wires and tapes them before I stuffed it all in. I also didn't have a big enough nut for the ground and I had to run to Lowe's and get a box of them.

I have to replace baseboard heaters a lot, as well as thermostats. It used to freak me out because the old ones are identical to the new ones, but they are wired differently than the wiring diagrams show that come with the new ones.

240vac is supposed to go to the thermostat, then when it kicks on, it sends it to the heater. These are wired so there's always 120vac at the heater, and at the thermostat, fed by both sides of the 240vac breaker. When the thermostat kicks on it completes the circuit and 240vac flows. That seems so dangerous to me but I'm not a "licensed" electrician so I really don't know.

I had one that was flat out wired wrong. No matter what the thermostat was set to it was always on full. The tenant said it was always that way and asked if I could fix it. Trying to figure out how someone wired an apartment complex 43 years ago is very stressfull, and you dont know what someone else did over the years to try and fix it. I kept thinking I'm going to burn the place down. I eventually figured it out but it was not fun. There were two small heaters on one circuit and half the power came in to one thermostat and split off to another thermostat, and like the others I mentioned, the other half went to each heater to make a loop. They got the wires mixed up at the thermostat and it was acting like an on/off switch.

@craigb Are you sure we aren't related? Lol. I swear to God I watched that video a couple of days ago and was going to post it and tag you.

Remember my blue LED Christmas light thread a couple years ago? They always fail regularly. Which is why I'm surprised to hear @Wibbles mention that white LEDxs were actually blue with filters. I have sets of white LED lights that are over 10 years old and still work like new.

Here's another good LED light vid. This guy is crazy about LED lights. He has a couple really good "rant" videos about LED Christmas lights.

This vid though is about the old school Tru-tone C9 lights. You can get actual Tru-tone brand LED C9's now and you can't tell the difference from the incandescent ones, at a tiny fraction of the operating cost.

..... ma-sheeeen

Happy belated birthday Bapu. Thanks for making our little world here a better place.

Shane 

4 hours ago, Rain said:

Never mind - I read posthumous. 

We'll be back after lunch for a post hummus follow up on this thread.

I greatly enjoy watching the most gory, true to life accurate, violent, and disturbing scenes ever put on film by Tom Savini ...

... but the thought of hummus makes me gag.

5 hours ago, craigb said:

Nice band name! ?

We had a short-term bassist who came up with "Random Precision" as a proposed band name.  Maybe he was just trying to be honest? ?

I was quite a bit younger than the other guys in my band.  I was in my teens back in the 1980s and they were all in their late 30s early 40s.

We decided to change the name of the band as our music got newer over the years and we weren't really an oldies band anymore. 

I suggested Midlife Crisis. I thought it was great but my idea got out voted. 

3 hours ago, craigb said:

"This video is private"

Apparently is only meant for Kenny! ?

Oh! Whew! My bad. I thought it said it was a video of his privates!

17 hours ago, Grem said:

There are songs that I hear on XM that just don't have the sound/impact of the songs I remember. Example: "The Ocean" Led Zep, album "Houses Of The Holy". The drum lick that John puts in that song, made that song!! It was the highlight of it. Today when I hear it on XM or even the local radio station, that triplet kick is almost unheard now. So younger people that hear it today for the first time will not get the very important 'feel' of the song. 

Seems that radio today has computerized all music to eliminate the "loudness difference" with algorithms that have effectively  drained the dynamics  and altering the mixes of once great recordings!!

ZZ Top "LaGrange" is another example, when it was released on CD it had way too much reverb on it. Did not have the same sound as the original. Kansas "Leftoverture" release on CD was the same way. Way too much reverb. ZZ Top corrected this when they released their "Studio Albums" box set. Thanks Billy! (However, some radio stations still use that over-reverbed versions)

I could go on... but I will stop this rant from getting out of hand!! 

Blame it on @craigb, he got me started!!!

 

The website with all those dB readings is great. https://dr.loudness-war.info/

I got a lot of CDs as they first came out back in the day. Before the loudness wars began. I have the original CD of Brothers In Arms.

Mobile Fidelity by far wins the dynamic range war for the good side. If you are Moody Blues fan, without doubt the best version of Days Of Future Passed is the Mobile Fidelity version. It's like you're sitting right there live. A Night At The Opera, Dark Side Of The Moon. Absolutely beautiful to listen to from Mobile Fidelity CD.

I'm a little torn on this topic though. For example, I hear things in the background  in all the current Beatles releases I never heard before. I don't know if that's a result of the compression or remix.

The trick at home is to tame spikes so you don't over trigger compression while still maintaining some kind of dynamic range. It's taken me many years on a DAW to fully get an understanding of that and get a grasp on it. It just seemed to be a lot easier and almost a non-issue with analog.

I have YouTube Music. Some albums are significantly softer than others. I listened to The Wall yesterday and I was constantly raising and lowering the level. So I'm assuming they do not compress the music for streaming, but I don't know. Another thing I like about YTM is there are no gaps between songs if you are streaming a full album, but you can skip around tracks. IOW it appears they don't just rip the albums to mp3s with gaps. I also have it set to stream in high quality. It sounds really good to me. I haven't picked up on any compression artifacts, but I haven't listened to anything on a good home system yet. Just in the truck and TV. I can hear compression artifacts sometimes when I listen to XM in the truck. My truck has a really good Bose system with a sub and it sounds almost as good as my home system.

Soooo ... how 'bout those Cheif's this year. Go Pattie! I think they're gonna go all the way to the Superbowl. I wonder who is doing the halftime show this year. (SWIDT?)

???

3 hours ago, craigb said:

I don't know why, but I also heard he was going to build a giant state of the art aircraft carrier for the Navy and load it with a bunch of ... no ... no, I can't. (My inner voice, "Shane! Back away from the keyboard!)

https://on.soundcloud.com/yJxgt

Might as well throw my hat in to orbit too.

It was just a chord progression I was tinkering with one night and it turned in to this.

Edit: Duh. Posted wrong song. I ficksed it. Don't know why it won't embed. Sometimes it works sometimes it don't.

18 hours ago, John Vere said:

So now let’s see how hard it is to learn Band in a box l. I see it’s now using samples instead of the terrible GM synth it used last time I tried it.

There's a few people here that are really in to BiaB and their forum is great.

There's a lot of really good tutorials on youtube to help get started and do more advanced stuff too.

I had it for a while and plan on getting it again once I get a little studio set up.

You can buy a high quality .wav version of it that comes on a hard drive. That's the version I had.

@craigb and/or @Bapu. Maybe @kennywtelejazz?

Guys ... we're waiting ...

?

1 hour ago, hockeyjx said:

if I had a copy of it in a DAW, I could have played with it until I was happy.

I did this recently. I transferred some very old recordings I made on 4 track from back in the mid 80s.

I added instruments, fixed a lot of vocals with Melodyne, remixed, and remastered everything.

I was even able to separate out some instruments that were bounced down on to one track using O9A.

It was a lot of fun and the end product was amazing compared to what I started with.

I also did that with some old 8 track band demos from the 90s. We played to a click track and I was able to completely remove the poorly mic'd drums and replace them with samples. I also sped the track up without artifacts using software. We originally recorded it too slow but didn't pick up on it at the time.

If Joe Schmoe sitting in his bedroom/home recording room can do that, imagine what the professionals in real studios with access to a lot more equipment and software than I have can do. Not to mention a lot more talent and skill than I have.

51 minutes ago, pwal³ said:

why so?

They went public with their non-business related views a few years back and let millions of their users know exactly how they felt about them. So, I choose to use other software providers who are more focused on the product they are offering.

Plus, FF was not all that great to begin with on any of my PC's I had it on. It may be different now, but even back before they alienated millions of people I stopped using their browser because I couldn't get it to work with the forums here and other sites.

I use Brave and the AdBlock Plus browser and Gmail to manage my Oulook stuff, but like I said, Gmail doesnt work well as a multi email account manager, especially on my cell which is all I have access to right now. I just pop back and forth between it and the Outlook app now. I never use my Hotmail accounts anyway. I used to years ago and have a lot of software registration under those email accounts. I'm too lazy to go in and change account emails with all the vendors. Plus there's some nostalgia involved too. I've had those addresses for decades.

I used Gmail to manage my old Hotmail (now known as Outlook) accounts. It will randomly lose sync though so I gave up.

I'll never use anything by Mozilla again, but to each their own.

Youtube Music.

So far out of the hundreds of albums and random songs I've asked it to play, only one was partially blocked.

Long Road Out Of Eden by The Eagles.

I'm not missing much, I really didn't care for the album and I have it on CD. You have the option to upload music you own and stream it, but I've never tried it. The 2 songs I do like on that album are blocked though, plus a few others on that album.

I like how you can download everything. I don't know if the other streaming services allow that. I have terrible cell coverage where I live and its nice to have what I want to hear downloaded for when I have no cell service.

4 hours ago, craigb said:

My neighbor said that to me one time to try and embarrass me in front of a group of friends.

I replied to her ... "Huh. If you could see me doing that through my bedroom window on the second floor I'm surprised you didn't call me for a date".

True story.

Oh to be 16 again.

Lou Reed

There's a vid on youtube by a person who makes and sells fx pedals. Reed expected some for free because he was a "star". Edited because I remembered the story wrong, but I was close.

I found the vid from 10 years ago.

https://youtu.be/3ZFjVfR9_XQ?si=IBLMPCdYc6M9VVdB

There's other reasons too,  but that story didn't surprise me in the least.