Beermas 2011-2012 - Day 12 - Granville Island Brewing - Imperial Chocolate Stout

Beermas 2011-2012 - Day 11 - Unibroue - Raftman

Beermas 2011-2012 - Day 10 - Cannery Brewing - Maple Stout

Beermas 2011-12 - Day 9 - Rogue Brewing - Dead Guy Ale

Beermas 2011-2012 - Day 8 - Lost Coast - Winterbraun

Beermas 2011-2012 - Brooklin Brewing - Black Chocolate Stout

2011-2012 Beermas - Day 6 - Phillips Ginger Beer

Beermas 2011-2012 - Sierra Nevada Torpedo Extra IPA

Beermas 2011-2012 - Russell Brewing - A Wee Angry Scotch Ale

Beermas 2011 - Day 3 - La Fin Du Monde - Unibroue

Beermas 2011 - Day 2 - Red Racer ESB

Beermas 2011 - Day 1 - Mt. Begbie Nasty Habit IPA

I’ve been thinking for a while on what to do with my 2 domain names and I’ve come to a decision.  deadbeatguitarist.com will now be exclusively for music and beer related topics and all technology related topics will move to stevebaer.com. My reasoning for this is twofold.

1. It opens up deadbeatguitarist.com to people who might have stopped listening or reading due to the Linux content.
2. It builds Google juice and makes me more visible on stevebaer.com as a technologist and acts a bit like a resume.

I also am going to be pragmatic and lose the ogg only feed which limits my audience to just fellow freedom loving geeks. At this point I’m not certain I will continue the mugcast but if I do I’d like to offer ogg and mp3 feeds.  This will likely cause me to lose my listing on oggcastplanet.org which makes me a bit sad but I feel strongly enough to do it anyways. The mugcast as we know it will change. Thanks for your patronage if you were a mugcast listener. Thank you for your support up until now.  New format coming soon.

West Coast Guitar Night is an annual event, the brainchild of innovative Vancouver based acoustic guitarist Les Finnigan. If you haven’t attended and you appreciate solo guitar work, at the risk of not getting a ticket next year, I’m still encouraging you to go to this great event. This West Coast Guitar night like many before it was hosted at the Vancouver East Cultural Center (The Cultch) a great venue for an intimate performance. What a treat it was to be in the balcony as the lighting dimmed and the first ethereal notes began to fill the theatre.  Here is how the evening went down.

13th Annual West Coast Guitar Night Programme (art by Valeria)

The first guitarist to take the stage after Les’s warm welcome was Kent Hillman – Kent played a mix of jazz standards on nylon string guitar in his own unique style. A very fine introduction to the evening.

Next up was Hanh Nguyen who played beautiful classical guitar that nearly brought me to tears. Hanh dedicated her performance to her mother who was a day away from celebrating her 86th birthday. I briefly chatted with Hanh after the show and learned she also did stained glass art and that one of her pieces was on display at the Lees olde fashioned chocolate shop which I used to stop in on occasionally for their delicious chocolate mint bars.

The last performer leading up to the intermission was Les Finnigan. I served coffee to Les for a few years and got to know him and his lovely wife Valeria. I’m a big fan of Les’s work – so much so I asked him to play at my wedding. Even though I know him I’m still a little starstruck talking to him after a performance. Les delivered a great set of his more  rhythmical pieces.  Les also announced he has been hard at work notating his compositions and many of them are now available for purchase.  So if you’ve been puzzled using only your ears – here’s the help you need – I’ve seen him play up close and I still definitely need the sheet music!

After the intermission, Edgar Avelino took the stage. Edgar is a man who professed to be working on album #0. I really enjoyed how he spoke of song history and his rendition of a composition from the Philippines a place where he spend his much of his childhood. Although not a ‘working’ musician he certainly has dedicated much of his time to attain the skill of one.

Simon Fox took the stage next. I was first made aware of Simon’s excellent guitar works by podcaster friend Rich Wielgosz (Bloodthirsty Vegetarians) and when I saw that Simon had relocated to Vancouver from Australia, I was excited to get a chance to see him play live. Simon’s effortless work on the fretboard and his gentle comedy won me over instantly. I’m not the type of person to hang out after the gig and chat with the performers – I’m usually to shy for that sort of thing but Rich said he’d kick my ass if I didn’t get a picture for him with Simon in it, I had to man up. I told this to Simon who immediately smiled at the mention of Rich and his podcast and obliged for the photo and left me with his 3 cd set which provided excellent company for my 1 hour drive back home. Look for review of these CD’s in a future post.

Finally, ending off the night was the double axe attack of flamenco/jazz/metal guitarists John Gilliat & Benjamin Woods. Their percussive rasgueados and lightning fast runs up and down the neck were impressive. I’d also nominate them for most comedic song choice of the evening by covering Yngwie Malmsteen’s I am a Viking.

And so after the hall emptied and the chatter with the artists came to a close, it was time to head for home. I hopped in the car with new musical inspirations and an annual event to add to my calendar. See you all next year at the 14th Annual West Coast Guitar Night.

Oh – and here’s one of my souvenirs from the evening.  Thanks Simon and Les for being good sports – you rock my world.

Les Finnigan, Me and Simon Fox

Cheers!

Deadbeat Guitarist Mugcast #11 – Testing Debian and the pain of a windows box lessened.

LINUX:
Debian Stable vs Debian Testing Blog post

WordPress – and the Jetpack Plugin pack – is the special goodness.

Getting comfortable on Windows by bringing the Gnu/Linux feel

1. Gnuwin32 tools (tar, diff, ls, du, df, grep etc).
2. A proper terminal – brings the coolness of transparency , tabs etc… checkout the console project.  ctrl-f1 creates a tab, ctrl-1,ctrl-2 switches to it.
3. Multiple Desktop – I really miss this under Windows and you can get them by installing VirtuaWin - ctrl-alt-left arrow or right arrow or up or down switches to that virtual desktop,  alt-windowkey left arrow or right arrow or up or down arrow moves a window from 1 virtual desktop to the one you specifcy with arrow key.

MUSIC:

Check out – Andy Rehfeldt on his personal site or his youtube channel:  Andy takes popular songs, builds around the original vocal only and re-tracks all the instruments either jazz, metal or funk and hilarity ensues.

BEER:
Dougie Dog Butterscotch Rootbeer – Tasty indeed.

Some of the issues that spurred this move were VLC media player crashing out completely when loading up the icecast directory listings, and pidgin locking randomly. I guess the responsible thing to do would have been to report these bugs and await a fix, but I was fairly confident these issues were resolved in more current versions of the software and after upgrading to testing this has indeed proven to be true.

Before closing I want to make the following observations:

• Stable means mostly predictable rather than free of bugs.
• The Net-Install rocks – setting up the system from the ground up the way you want it is very cool.
• The debian wiki is awesome – full of great info.
• XFCE and Gnome for me are more usable than KDE in terms of workflow.
• If you encounter an issue of not being able to mount sd cards after installing from an sd card – see below for solve.

su -c ‘vim /etc/fstab’
This line below prevented me from mounting sd cards. no cdrom on netbook, commented it out and now everything detects fine.
#/dev/sdb1 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0

So a week in Debian stable leads me back to Debian testing. It wasn’t the end I expected when I embarked on this journey, but I guess moving out to a smaller town hasn’t completely changed my computing decisions.

Link to the brewery’s site: click here
Link to the beer advocate review: click here

Cheers!

Enjoy.

Slackware 13.37 is now out and ready for the installing. Here’s a quick rundown of my recent experience installing and setting up the latest Slackware Linux.

I went hunting for my IDE to USB cable and a DVD drive and got the 32 bit torrent ISO image downloading, off to bed.

Next day: Hooked everything up to the netbook, burned the ISO, inserted the burned DVD, booted and ran the installer. Ah – the familiar ncurses interface is still here, surprised – nope, put off? Not really.

Installation is finished… Awesome, KDE runs alright but wait – what gives, no wifi??

Ok, I got sbopkg rockin’ and grabbed the broadcom-sta package.. Also installed wicd (manage wifi through gui) from /extra. Hmm still no wifi – ahhh, google informs me I have to name the interface to eth1 in the wicd gui config -see screenie below:

Ok got the wifi rockin’ but I was finding it annoying to wait for KDE – it’s not that KDE is slow per se, its that on this hardware HP Mininote (earlier atom processor and 1gb ram) its a tad overkill. What to do what to do, let’s drop it down to fluxbox.

I found a nice slackware wallpaper, used sbopkg to install conky and …. now we’re talkin’ nice minmal desktop – black background, conky…  Nerds paradise.

What’s missing, AHH! keyboard shortcuts to my most used apps to limit the need for mousing – yup yup, fluxbox makes it easy – I edit the .~/.fluxbox/keys file and put in some entries to run pidgin, wicd-gtk, qtwitter, konsole,…

As an aside the fluxbox wiki makes it perfectly clear how to edit the keys file – very straight forward and kudos to them for it.

I also edited the ~/.fluxbox/startup file to auto start frequently used apps and tray icons (volume control etc) see below:

Alright now we are movin’, got a nice desktop environment that’s fast and under my control. What’s next – Install some more apps – qtractor, ardour, qjackctl, audio plugins, auteur, kdenlive – audio and video tools, Sweet. I’m feeling right at home.

So – to those that love Slackware, enjoy the new release. To those that haven’t tried Slackware, you might want to give it a look. And, to those that have been away for a while – Slackware is just as charming as it ever was – with slackpkg to maintain security updates and patches, and sbopkg to manage the extras that don’t come with slackware, including queue files to meet all the dependencies, you can get a very complete experience under Slackware – in fact there’s never been a better time to be a slacker I’d venture to say. Get your download started – pour yourself a beer, and get ready to slack.

Click Here for Ogg-Cast (Audio)
Brewery:
Chimay Peres Trappistes
Direct link to the beer itself

Beer Advocate:
Beer advocate findings on the beer

Personal findings:
Colour: Dark Brown
Aroma: Belgian yeast mild spice and fruit flavour
Summary: A very carbonated strong Belgian ale – not as sweet or flavorful as some of its peers (gulden draak and mardesous) but its nice in that regard. A pleasant beer to pair with cheeses. A beer that’s always good to have in the fridge.

Gratuitous beer shot:

Chimay Blue

Click Here for Ogg-Cast (Audio)

Surgenor Red House Ale compliments of Paul and Penny Vroom of Aquatec Seafoods in Comox BC.

BEER:
Brewery:
Surgenor Brewing Company
Direct link to the beer itself

Beer Advocate:
Beer advocate findings on the beer

Personal findings:
Colour: Dark amber
Aroma: Toasty malty – minimal hops
Summary: The pour yields a good amount of head that discipates quickly. Nice roasty malt flavour with minimal presence of hops and an easy drinking level of carbonation.
Letter grade: B+ Tasty indeed.

Gratuitous beer shot:

Sergenor Red House Ale

BEER #2:
Freenode IRC user rowinggolfer sent in this fantastic review of a ginger beer made by williambros brewing. rowinggolfer is an active member of the linux and free and open source software world including some podcasts and producing dental software called openmolar.

BEER UPDATE: Call out for beer reviews from the community!

Beer for Dogs?? You bet – irc user Anchakor provides us with this comedic link of the cast.

MUSIC:
KXStudio adds TAL VST plugins – tested the reverb – sounded and looked good.

Traverso DAW – coming along, interesting keyboard shortcuts

For those interested in a free and open source Tracker style music app that runs on Windows, Linux, Amiga OS4, AROS and Mac OSX,
check out Protrekkr. It’s based off of the same original codebase Renoise was based on – which is from a app called NoiseTrekker.
To get it running under KXStudio Linux 10.04:
1. Install libjackasyn0
2. Download and unzip source unzip modules.zip file into modules dir
3. Open a terminal window in that location and issue: jacklaunch ./ptk_linux
4. Have fun.

LINUX:
Android pick: Comes from [lsd] in #opensourcemusicians Chordbot. Chordbot is a slick application that lets you build chord progressions and decide on styles and time signatures to play it back

Android pick: Winamp (beta) media player. Yes, the much loved player on Windows that many of us got familiar with back on Windows 98 and was the defacto player for many years is now on Android. Unlike the current Windows version, the Android version is very fast. Although it’s a ‘beta’ app, it has yet to crash on me.

Click Here for Ogg-Cast (Audio)

BEER:
Brewery:
St Peter’s Brewery

Beer Advocate:
Beer advocate findings on the beer

Personal findings:
Colour: Dark brown – bordering black
Aroma: Woah! That’s different. Floral, sweet, perfumy.
Summary: Wow – that is so different… Lavender? Rose Pedal? Some kind of floral action going on here. Comes in a cool and funky bottle, but don’t let this fool you – the styling is all upscale and so are the ingredients but woah what a weird tasting beer – and not in a good way.
Letter grade: C – This is weird stuff.

Gratuitous beer shot:

St Peter’s Honey Porter

Movie: Beer Wars (2009) Documentary
Cool documentary on the craft brewers movement and the (at the time) big 3 American brewing companies trying to squash it. Good film – very upsetting to see yet again how large corporations are evil but you can’t keep a good craft brewer down – thankfully.

MUSIC:
Movie: Air Guitar Nation:
Make Air not War – Follow American Air Guitar champions to the Finnish world finals. Great movie – exciting and fun – check it out. I found myself surprised by how much performance art their is in Air Guitar.

Qtractor the other big Linux daw.. . Cool beans – this episode is done in it. Some features I like are the ability to track in ogg or flac codecs as opposed to straight wav file – audio purists be damned. This allows you to save hard disk space if you aren’t tracking on very good equipment. Another cool feature is the ability to archive a session to a zip file from within Qtractor itself. It creates a qtz file which has all the raw audio files and the xml file of changes to them. This feature is in the current svn repository as of November 7/2010. The main use case for this feature is that it allows you to move an entire session from 1 computer to another with ease.

For tutorials on using Qtractor, check this out:

Android Pick : Jamendo streaming music app. Check out the top 100 songs on Jamendo – some great material in there.

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of the linux audio distribution called KXStudio and that I think it’s where the future of Linux Audio should be heading. The distro while pretty solid does have a few slight annoyances – namely – I had breakage occur fairly regularly with my Wifi on my HP Mininote 110 netbook. I spoke to Falktx about this and he gave me the following suggestion and it seems to have resolved my networking issues.

Open a terminal window and key in the following and press Enter afterwards:

sudo apt-get install plasma-widget-networkmanagement

You will notice it removes the kde network manager and uses this widget in its place. Log out and log back into KXStudio and you will then be able to add a widget to your taskbar called NetworkManager.

Presto – wifi now is reliable again and the widget looks cooler anyways

Addendum: If that isn’t working out for you, as of Nov. 4th /2010 updates you can install wicd instead : sudo apt-get install wicd , after that is finished, issue sudo apt-get remove network-manager network-manager-kde plasma-widget-networkmanagement … reboot and wicd should autolaunch on startup.
Cheers.

Click Here for Ogg-Cast (Audio)
Brewery:
Duvel Moortgat Brewing website

Beer Advocate:
Beer advocate findings on the beer

Personal findings:
Colour: Halfway between black and brown.
Aroma: fruity, concentrated liquor like.
Summary: Colour beseached the weight on the tongue I expected. Full flavored, sweet and tangy Belgian brew. Letter grade: A

Gratuitous beer shot:

Maredsous - Brune 8

Click Here for Ogg-Cast (Audio)
Brewery:
Tree Brewing Co
Direct link to the beer itself

Beer Advocate:
Beer advocate findings on the beer

Personal findings:
Colour: Coppery – slightly cloudy.
Aroma: Intoxicating mix of sweet roasty malt and hops
Summary: Provides a big beer in the mouth – more weight then most IPA’s – I like that its less citrus like and has more roasty malt goodness then I was expecting.
Letter grade: A – Hard to beat!

Gratuitous beer shot:

Tree Brewing Co - Hop Head Double IPA

Click Here for Ogg-Cast (Audio)
Brewery:
The Old Yale Brewing Co Website
Direct link to the beer itself

Beer Advocate:
Beer advocate findings on the beer

Personal findings:
Colour: Pours a copperish colour with very little head.
Aroma: Hops and pineapple.
Summary: A delicious IPA with big hops and a hint of pineapple, this has got to be one of my favorite local IPA’s – it’s not overly citrusy or sweet and the hops provide a nice bitterness. Very nice balance.
Letter grade: A – Hard to beat!

Gratuitous beer shot:

The Old Yale Brewing Co - Sergeant's IPA

Brewery:
Driftwood Brewery Website
Direct link to the beer itself

Beer Advocate:
Beer Advocate findings on the beer

Personal Findings:
Belgian style beer with a twist – this saison has a interesting hint of black peppercorn making it slightly spicy and completely delicious.
Letter grade: A+ It doesn’t get much better than this.

Gratuitous beer shot:

Driftwood Brewery - Farmhand Ale

Click here for Podcast Audio

Info:

Android App:
Network Discovery
http://rorist.github.com/android-network-discovery/

Beer #1:
Howe Sound Brewing – King Heffy
Brewery web site: http://www.howesound.com

Unfiltered – As far as Hefeweizen goes – you’d be hard pressed to find a better one than this. BC Craft Brewed in Squamish.

Howe Sound Brewing - King Heffy

Beer #2:
Driftwood Brewing – Driftwood Ale
Brewery web site: http://driftwoodbeer.com/

Pours a lager-ish color, seems a cross between a pale ale and an IPA with the citrus aroma and extra hops. Decent beer – doesn’t take a lot of chances but a solid outing.

Driftwood Brewing - Driftwood Ale

Click here for Podcast Audio

http://www.russellbeer.com/index.asp

Today’s brew of the cast or brew show and tell is Russell Brewings – A Wee ANGRY Scotch Ale.  An A grade beer in my opinion -  fantastic in the fall and winter season.  A glorious pour after work, good in times of fortune or misfortune.

Enjoy.

Russell Brewing - A Wee Angry Scotch Ale

From what I can see, Falktx – the maintainer for the distro is working very hard testing and packaging the latest apps – Jack2, VST support,  Ladish and Ardour3, Mumble with Jack support are just a few examples.  He is also doing things like patching older applications here and there – an example being the gNinjam client which no longer compiled under Ubuntu Lucid.  I expect to see other projects such as Ubuntu Studio benefit from the experimental playground that is KXStudio.

There have been a few changes in KXStudio recently and you can read all about them in the atom feed here: http://feeds.launchpad.net/kxstudio/announcements.atom

Chiefly, the most recent change in direction to run audio from Alsa to Jack vs Alsa to PulseAudio to Jack as detailed here:

https://launchpad.net/kxstudio/+announcement/6106

While it does appear that PulseAudio bridge is still running, it is not the preferred way to go unless you have to.

So, if Alsa is layer 1, and PulseAudio sits upon layer 2, then Jack is either on layer 2 (no PulseAudio – just Alsa then Jack) or layer 3 which would be Alsa -> PulseAudio -> Jack.  The more layers involved or the more complexity involved.

For those that don’t understand what all this means.  Alsa is one of the main sound servers running under Linux to handle audio, and if you have an Alsa supported sound card you could get sound with just Alsa.  Alsa however doesn’t handle situations where more then 1 application wants the audio card at the same time, therefore workarounds such as PulseAudio which is a layer above Alsa allows for the sound card to be accessed by many applications at the same time and offers volumes controls from each application in a PulseAudio mixer as well as the ability to stream audio on the network.

PulseAudio has come under fire (unjustly or justly – you decide) for not being a very good resolution to the common challenges that have plagued Linux audio for years.  Be as it may, PulseAudio under KXStudio is stable for me under the Generic and the Lowlatency kernel, so I can’t complain at all – it runs stable.

Which brings me to the part of the post I am most excited to announce.

As a co-host of The Open Source Musician Podcast separated from the host by geography, we had relied on a closed source application to handle our phone call to one another.   This was always a sore spot because all the other software we use is Open Source, however this was one last hurdle we couldn’t get over.  Recently this all changed and we did our first fully open broadcast Friday using the GPL’d VOIP client called Mumble.  The Mumble team has added experimental integration with JACK (Jack Audio Connection Kit).  This completely solves our VOIP issues.  The quality is excellent and Dan and myself can record a good track of local audio and each other’s VOIP call into its own track in the Ardour DAW software, we stream this all out on the internets and it all takes place with just 1 PC on each end – no double-ender, no extra hardware – it’s all in the box and its pure gold.

So life is peachy.  Our audio woes are virtually non-existant.  A big thanks goes to Falktx of KXStudio for packaging this experimental Mumble version,  and of course to the Mumble developers themselves for making this all possible!

I must confess in advance to not being a KDE 4 fan in the past,  but after living the dream in KXStudio, I’m hitting the KDE Koolaid and hitting it hard.

Sure, I could rave on about the beauty of the desktop environment and how it really enhances my work flow, but I’ll move onto the main reason I think this is an important milestone in Linux audio.

What really interests me most is that the developer (Falktx) a young fellow from Portugal has made the decision to make the Jack audio server run at boot.  No messing around.  This is the kind of gutsy move I’ve been waiting for to upgrade my Desktop box.

Rest assured that whatever doesn’t run through the Jack audio sound server will run through the Pulseaudio to Jack bridge and you’ll be ready to rock those video sound samples, SIP or mumble VOIP calls into an armed track in Ardour.

Not only has Falktx included the latest audio applications – too numerous to list, he’s also given you Abigoni’s low latency kernel (through PPA), Ardourvst (vst support enabled Ardour through the wine emulation layer),  free VST plugins, the LADI tools for session management, and you could also take a peak at  Ardour 3.0 with ease – it’s in the repos and will install to /opt so you don’t need to worry about it borking whats working.

KXStudio has both 32 bit and 64 bit DVD ISO’s as well as NETinstall disks, and a recent revision to the distro brings some important fixes rolling it up to its current 10.04.1 release.

I have flip flopped between running audio specific Linux distributions and regular Linux distributions fitted with the audio applications of my choice and configured the way I like.  There are pros and cons to both methods, the pros being everything is setup for you, and the cons being, well -  everything is setup for you and it may not be exactly as you like.

KXStudio for me makes the best case for a pre-configured best of breed Linux Audio Distribution and I see no reason to remove it from my laptop, and many reasons to consider dropping it onto my Desktop.

I took this screenshot because it shows one of the compelling reasons for me to switch – the latest jack and the pulse to jack bridge which will allow for a skype free podcast.   Very important to note as of now that the PULSE-JACK bridge is only reliable in a NON RT kernel, so Generic and Low Latency are fine, but RT will crash PULSE-JACK after a minute of running.

KXStudio liveDVD in action

KXStudio project website can be found at http://kxstudio.sourceforge.net/

First I had to ask myself what that really meant.  I think to sum it up it would be someone who writes amazing poetry and puts it to good music.

There really is only one Leonard Cohen or say, one Bob Dylan.

However, there are  I think good lyricists/musicians, Ben Folds comes to mind as does Hawksley Workman.

I do find something  about this question interesting, but it’s not the hunt for a new Leonard Cohen, its more to do with the enjoyment of music based on the strength of the lyrics.

Lyrics to the song are very important to some people,  and if the lyrics aren’t good, the song won’t interest them – yet to me, the melody,  interesting chords and phrasing are of greater importance.

The way the words tumble out and mingle with each other, not so much the lyrical content, or the way the melody sits against the chords are of primary interest to me.  This is not to say the lyrics aren’t important to me, I can appreciate good lyrics when I see/hear them and that adds to the overall tastiness of a song, but I won’t hate on a song just because the words aren’t clever.

That said, I’m sure there is some overlap and sliding scale because people who value the lyrics greatly will still reject a song with good lyrics if music is terrible to the  ears.

In fact, this segues a bit is into my new mission. To analyze the ingredients of a memorable pop song – in fact – I want to write an unabashedly catchy pop song.   Like sugary cereal or cotton candy – almost zero substance to it but addictive like crack.

The next post will detail my analysis of what key ingredients are needed to make a catchy pop song,  I must add – by identifying what they are, I can’t guarantee I will come up with a good poppy song, but it will be an interesting exercise, and I will share my findings in the form of a song.

Steve

I’m working at getting an RSS feed going for Open Source Musician and my personal podcast – The Deadbeat Guitarist Monologues. I also plan to post my own music content here as well.

Keep checking back as I promise there will be interesting things happening.

Take care,

Steve