jonathans blog » projects

hp mini 210 external wifi aerial mod

jonathan — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 11:54:04 +0000

I have a little hp mini 201 that I decided to mount an external wifi antenna on. here are some pics of the mod and somelittle descriptions to go with it. the main aim of the mod was to get an rp-sma connector on the outside of the case that i can connect any wifi arial to.

this was ths final product; after a few trials and ordering of a couple of parts from the net I ended up with something that was usable.

this is my desk, where i would perform the mod: tools used -soldering iron; screwdriver; vice; (though if i had waited for my rpsma pigtail i would only have needed the screwdriver..)

here are some photos of the process…

i didnt have a pigtail to start, but one was ordered, so in the meantime i decided to use the rpsma from this old wifi card and make my own

taking off the connector from the old wifi card..

the rpsma connector..

inside the back of the screen..

the internal antenna that i needed to break to make my fake pigtail..

location of the original connector on the back of the screen: when i got the real pigtail form the internets i moved it and put it where the kensington lock is on the side (who acctually uses those things ?)

antenna on the back of the screen before I moved it to the side…

once i had this mod done I got theparts i had ordered from the net (an atheros a/b/g/n card and a pigtail) – I then drilled a hole in the kensington lock and mounted the pigtail there.

facebook page for artu

jonathan — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 08:39:44 +0000

i have setup a facebook page for artu. the link is on the left. the link for the music on itunes is on the right sidebar

i have a digi 003 =)

jonathan — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 20:56:46 +0000

ive been saving for a while. i wanted a digi 003. so I got one. ive been to the pub about three times since june, but it was worth it. i finally got my 003. i got the factory bundle (that was all they had) basically, if you dont know what a digi 003 is, its like a mini control24, and if you dont know what a control24 is, then, um, its a big mixer thingy for protools =P

the 003 only has 4 xlr preamped inputs, and 4 line inputs (the 003 rack has 8 xlr pre’s). but it has adat, so i can add 8 channels of preamp goodness to it later on.

it has motorised faders. which make automation very fast. very fast indeed. it also has pans, etc transport controls, loads of buttons for loads of things, and a vegas mode =P

it came with protools 8 and a host of other cool stuff (a crapload of plugins too). Ive yet to record anything with it (im saving that for the weekend) just now im digging up a few old sessions and getting acualinted with the control surface. anyway, better get back to playing, um, i mean learning =)

(oh, i also bought a casio 12 megapixel exelim camera, thats where the photo came from =)

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my new album up on itunes artu sarajevo rose

jonathan — Sat, 16 May 2009 09:39:32 +0000

my new album is up on itunes – it is 33 tracks long and is a collection of the electronic music that I have made over the last two years released under the artist name ‘Artu’ – i was going to go for R2D2 but written out artuditu is a bit hard, so i shortened it to R2 written out as Artu.
you can get all 33 tracks for 7.99GBP from itunes here

I will need to setup a proper myspace for it and start actually promoting it so that I can get some sales – hopefully i will gig a few of the tracks once I get my new macbook and a new firewire soundcard, but that wont be for a few onths yet!

anyway, enjoy the tracks.

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I have new music on cdbaby =)

jonathan — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 18:55:49 +0000

I have mentioned the tracks before – here
there are 33 tracks in total, they will be on itunes soon, and I guess they will be on amazon too.
for now you can get the 33 tracks for $9.99 from cdbaby.com/cd/artu
that works out at 30 cents each =|
If you have heard my other stuff, then this is a bit different, its electronic music. you can preview the tracks at cdbaby.com/cd/artu

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Second blog post in one day!!!

jonathan — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 16:14:53 +0000

well, this is my second post in one day – I’ve just had a look at google analytics and looked at the popular things on this site – It seems that this article with some drum micing tips is the most popular single page on the site. guess that I will have to do some more things about mics and drums then…
The second most popular page is this page – how to use a playstation pad as a midi controller – I must admit that that article is one of the better ones!!

guess I will have to do some more tutorials then =)
I have got a list of tutorials to do – some things for the protools 101 and 110 courses to help you pass, tutorials on limiters, eq, reverb, frequency ranges, gates along with other far out things, like using a guitar hero controller instead of a ps2 pad to control your ableton (actually this one is easy, just follow the ps2 pad tutorial, and plug in a ps2 guitar hero controller instead of a ps2 pad =P )

well, I guess that I have enough content to make for my blog for a good few weeks now, and hopefully I will be able to get a few video tutorials along with them so that you can see how to do it and not jhust read about it.

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some more cool ways to get free music

jonathan — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 14:04:30 +0000

As you know I am always on the look out for ways to find new music (as in music that I have never heard before)
well, I found a couple of cool ways to get some tunes playing.
The first is Twisten.fm
its a site that lets you listen to twitter. basically is searches twitter for all the ‘bob is listening to metallica’ type posts and adds a little play button next to the post and if you click it then the song plays. it also adds a link to grooveshark where you can listen to the song. pretty neat. also, If you log into twitter via twisten.fm then it will only search your friends lists for the songs they have been listening to. pretty neat.

another site that is very cool is seeqpod.com just type in something into the search box and it returns a massive list of songs, you can then add them to a playlist and you can embed that playlist pretty much anywhere. like this

SeeqPod – Playable Search

another one is mixturtle.com though it doesnt really have as many cool features as seeqpod. so for now my online music player of choice is by far seeqpod (if only twisten.fm had a feature to keep playing through all the tracks that pop up on twitter then you wouldnt need anything else, but it stops after each one, and there is no way to build a playlist of the songs =(

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taking photos

jonathan — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 15:51:09 +0000

My dad got a new digital camera for christmas, so I borrowed it to have a mess around with it – its pretty decent, here are some of the photo’s I took with it

plectrum, keys and stylophone in the background..

my old minidisc player, keys and stylophone

stylophone and sliders =)

knobs

tube preamp, stylophone and keys

my computer.

stylophone, keys and plectrum

As I said, I was just messing about, and I know nothing about cameras, or photography, but I was reading a cool guide about focusing, aperture size and a whole load of other things that I have no idea about. It was a fun half hour, and I think that I now want a camera.

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mastering tracks

jonathan — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 22:30:34 +0000

well, ive just mastered 37 tracks (I actually mastered 51 of them, but a few got dropped already)
I have bounced them all down to disk and now need to sort out the order of the tracks to make them flow better.
I have my own ISRC codes to use on the tracks, which is nice.
So I have a lot of listening to do, I might even have to go in and add some fades to the ends of some tracks to make them go together better.
I mastered them in protools (which isnt ideal, but im used to the way it works and I had a lot to do, so it worked for me. the songs were all written in ableton live, recorded parts done in ableton, mixing was done in ableton aswell, then an exported .wav was dumped to a folder on my machine, and then imported into protools. where I did my mastering magic.
it took me 2 days of messing with eq’s, compressors, frequency scopes and calculating gains to get them all to sit nice with each other. it then took me a full day to bounce all the tracks internally to a track and apply fades at the starts and ends of the tracks to avoid any nasty clicks at the starts. once that was done it took me another day to actually bounce them all to disk (and do the dithering at the same time). now they are on my disk and are ready. well, they are ready to be put into the correct order and then i might even have to go back into the session and adjust the fades and re-bounce them to make them fit into the album (or albums).
once all that is done I still need to get a barcode for my new album (or albums) I need to make artwork (though I think I have a photo I took on my phone thats perfect) add the ISRC info to all the songs, put them into burning software, make the master disks (and make a couple of copies) register them with catco, send them to the states and get them on itunes and promote them online.
guess ill be hard at work over the next month then.

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flock 2 has been released !!!

jonathan — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 13:15:20 +0000

www.flock.com

Ive been using the flock browser since about version 0.5
they have just released version 2.
whats so good about that i hear you ask ?
well, I sell music online. so I have profiles on most of the ‘social networking sites’ I also have a host of email addresses – some purely for myself, others purely for my bands.

so, whats so good about this new version of flock ?

well. It has myspace support for one thing.
myspace is now built directly into the browser.
you dont even need to go to myspace to check if you have new mail. it shows you on your homepage when you open your browser.
flock has had support for youtube accounts for a while now, also flickr accounts, picasa, twitter and pownce, facebook and digg accounts too.
all the information about all your friends shows in a neat column on your homepage, with all the rss feeds you subscribe to and your most visited sites.
handy indeed.
I did notice that it thinks I dont have any friends on myspace (maybe cos I have too many of them) but it does tell me that I have 1 message =) which is all I really want it to do.
ok, scratch that, I just got inundated with myspace statuses! it just took a few minutes to process all the people!
now I have one less account to check when I dont need to be there. all they need now is bebo support (or support for multiple accounts on myspace and facebook, so i can have my personal and my band profiles all in one stream)

another major thing it now has is theme support!

I think though that the best part of flock is the blog editor – you just put the details of your blogs (I have three set up at the moment)
and it gives you a text editor that you can type your blog post in, add pictures, video clips, etc then upload to your blog and view the finnished article – you dont even need to log into your blog to do this – it does it all for you!

there isnt much change from the beta, apart from the addition of myspace, but the improvement over version 1 is fantastic!

try it out for yourself. you will be amiased.
it works on linux, mac and

that crappy other microsoft platform too =)

get it from www.flock.com

anyway, here are some screenshots for you to enjoy..

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