Spanspek

I just bought—tried to buy—an Audix D6 microphone.

The seller had the wrong address registered with Paypal. So when I tried to pay, nothing happened except for Paypal debiting my credit card. The email address was not registered with Paypal, so the transaction could not be completed. I spent days sending messages to the guy to fix the problem. He didn't.

I wasn't worried because I couldn't get ripped off. But the seller claimed he was (at the time of writing, is) leaving for Asia for a month and wanted to ship the mic. So why didn't he just fix the problem in a reasonable time? I tried four times to pay and each time could not complete it.

To add insult to injury, ebay's autobot accused me of not paying (because the seller had not accepted payment 7 days after the end of the auction). I sent a lengthy message referring them to all the messages sent back and forth and a copy of an email from Paypal showing my payment.

In the end, the guy cancelled the auction, which I hope fixes things with ebay, and relisted ... at a slightly higher price than I paid (US$1.50)— cheeky. It still came in under A$200 so I bought it (again). But what a to do.

If you ever read this, Lance, I don't want bad karma on ebay, so I won't leave a negative rating (if the mic turns up, that is it arrived!), but you're an idiot and I don't want to deal with you again.

Just bought an Audix D6 on ebay. Even with shipping, it's 20% under the lowest Australian price I've seen.

We've got a couple of these at work. They're great—much better than a D112.

Anyone interested in a second-hand D112?

After installing Opensuse 11.2 and experiencing the loss of Vmware, I decided to play around with desktop settings. I wasn't seeing the nice olive green background that advance pictures and the Live CD version showed. I suppose that was the result of my upgrade rather than a clean install.

So while looking for the background picture setting (still haven't found it), I decided to change the appearance of the windows. The default "theme" is called Ozone. I looked at the preview of Plastik and changed it. Immediately, the computer froze.

Well, now I know I can hold the power key and the computer will shut down, (however inelegantly). But before that the only way to do it was to pull it off my port expander and disconnect the battery.

Upon startup, it froze half way through the KDE start-up. I did a few system repairs off the install DVD, had a few gos at re-installing (e.g. KDE). Nothing worked.

With thanks to those nice people on the Opensuse Forums, I simply deleted the KDE prefs at ~/.kde4 and all was well. Oh, and since that restores defaults, I got the nice background too.

I just Opensuse 11.2 and installed it. Wouldn't you know it? Vmware Server 2.0.2 doesn't work with a 32-bit install (which mine is).

Fortunately, because Google is my friend, I discovered an install script. Instead of using the rpm, it uses the gzipped source and builds the server.

It worked faultlessly.

That got your attention, didn't it?

As some of you may know, Digidesign announced the end of support for PPC systems. This causes a problem for PPC owners who still want to use their HD systems. Unless you bought the very last G5s, you have PCI slots in your machine. And if you bought earlier, and bought a great big HD system, you probably bought an expansion chassis to hold all the PCI cards your computer wouldn't (since it has only three slots). Your new Mac Pro will have PCIe slots.

So now, if you want to get future version of Pro Tools (from 8.0.3) you need a Mac Pro, or maybe a Macbook Pro with an ExpressCard slot and a cardbus interface to your expansion chassis.

Problem is, a lot of users bought the Digidesign 64-bit 7-slot chassis. This was actually made by Magma and is otherwise known as the PR7464. We have one at work, though it doesn't have the model ID anywhere on it, so it took a while to figure out whether that was what we had.

Now it turns out that most, if not all, of those chassis do not work with a Mac Pro. What you need is a chassis with the Pericom bridge chip. So I took a look inside ours. Lo and behold, there's a great big Pericom chip. It's not the one shown here, but I was hopeful.

Whoops! Turns out that's a clock chip. I haven't been able to find the (incompatible) Intel or DEC chips. So now we have to buy another expansion chassis. And those things are not cheap.

Actually we need two. The studio computer has two HD cards inside it, so we need a new chassis for those cards anyway. But the HD3 system (three cards) is in the existing chassis.

It is possible to replace the boardset inside the chassis. That's about US$1450 instead of $2500. But that's not a big saving after having to spend $2500 on a new chassis and also get two computers.

All this took more than a week. The person from Magma turned out to be helpful, but I could have figured it out sooner if she'd read my first couple of emails properly. I thought what we wanted to do was pretty plain at the start. Still, while Magma is the only game in town for PCI expansion (since SBS disappeared and one wouldn't trust those cheap things now appearing on ebay), they probably do way more business with server farms and the military. As usual, audio is marginal.

Goodbye $15000. (If we can afford it, that is.)