When recording with a Tascam US-122 USB interface on OS X Leopard (10.6) you will get better performance if you run it through a powered USB hub.

OS X Leopard is loathe to allot heaps of power to any one of the USB ports. The interface needs a lot of power to work properly. If you do a clean install of Tascam's 3.4 driver every time you unplug the interface it might work. For me it varied day-to-day but it probably worked 3/5 times. I saw some kids on the internet saying that it worked fine for them but they might be using desktop computers rather than laptops.

I bought a 4-port hub for 22NZD from Advanced Computer (pretty sure that's the place) and everything seems to work fine now. I also bought a new interface but I have to wait for that to make its way to me via a residential address in the US. I looked at online remailing services but they were exceedingly expensive for insured, tracked shipping.

This post has not only helped you learn how to get that particular interface to work with OS X and also the difference between "allot" and "a lot". NB: "alot" is not a word.

TL;DR: US-122 + powered hub = things work.

BeOS and Haiku, its open-sourced phoenix were the operating systems that got me excited about operating systems. This was back before I knew how to subscribe to a blog or anything. Back when I thought blogs were just online diaries.

Anway, you can download the alpha 2 here. They're offering .iso, .vmx/.vmdk and Anyboot files. I'm running it in Virtualbox right now. No internet because it only supports WEP encryption and obvs we're on WPA2 here. Maybe tomorrow I'll get all ethernetted up in between boughts of fighting with the USB interface I'm recording with and writing smooth as, stone cold jams.

(Side note: Crashes for no reason but I can't tell if it's a Virtualbox thing or a Haiku thing. I'm going to go with Virtualbox because I'm an asshole.)

While I've been away sleeping on floors and sitting in the van Futurnari has been further establishing himself in the chipmusic scene. Soon after Another Unlikely Hero was picked up by Bleep City comes Retrospective Forward Thinking.

This five-track EP is a synthesis of Atari 2600 and DMG music with a couple of field recordings. An interesting facet of this release is the hardware. Both the DMG (original 1989 brick Gameboy) and the Atari 2600 are subject to limitations in terms of polyphony, tracks, tempo and tuning. It is especially difficult to sync the tempo of the two devices as the Atari plays at several rather strange fixed tempos which are not whole integers. LSDJ (the Gameboy software) cannot exactly match these tempos so the longer a piece of music continues for the more incongruous it becomes.

However, Futurnari achieves this coupling with aplomb, mixing odd-time numbers (Retrospective Forward Thinking is in 7/8) with broken-beat robot-dancehall numbers like this track, Analyse:

Retrospective Forward Thinking is "the story of the creation of itself."

Grab the entire EP here.

• Complaining
• Sports
• Facebook

HE'LL GET IN FOR SURE

• Rob gets dumped by his girlfriend and it makes him sad.
• It makes him think of all of the other girls who've dumped him over the years.
• He goes to find them for absolution.
• It makes him sad.
• Then his ex-girlfriend gets back with him because being complacent and mostly contented is easier than being sad.

Like Brave New World, this novel is set in London. The characters and places in this book are stereotypes from London. Rob owns a small and pokey, snobby record store. None of this is really interesting. The good part of the book is the start where he goes through all of the girls who broke up with him. The rest of the book is basically him floundering around in middle-aged emotion. Middle-aged emotion brings to mind Gavin McInnes' views on people over thirty wearing band t-shirts: Who cares?

Perhaps I'm being unfair. Middle-aged people care about middle-aged emotion. My parents are middle-aged and I care about how they feel but this feeling doesn't extend to characters in shitty novels, sadly. This hardly extends further than my immediate family.

Read this book if you are desperate.

Synopsis:

• It's the future! (dur)
• No one is born anymore – they gestate in bottles or tubes or something!
• There are five castes!
• The lowest caste gets an impaired gestation to ensure impaired cerebral function!
• The highest caste doesn't!
• The other castes get varying levels of impairment!
• This is to ensure they will be happy in their jobs!
• Everyone receives conditioning and sleep therapy/teaching!
• OK!
• Everyone fucks everyone else and "everybody belongs to everybody"!
• Monogamy is considered anti-social!
• Displays of emotion are considered anti-social!
• If anything becomes to dire or boring or whatevs, people take soma!
• OK!
• Shock horror there is an OUTSIDER!!!!!
• OK!
• He (of course it's a he – this book was published in 1932) goes to an Indian reservation!
• Here he finds the NOBLE SAVAGE!
• He brings the SAVAGE back to civilisation!
• The SAVAGE is a hit!
• Suddenly the OUTSIDER is popular!
• He likes being popular!
• So much so that he becomes a functioning part of society!
• OK!
• BUT!
• The SAVAGE finds this BRAVE NEW WORLD strange and terrifying!
• CULTURE SHOCK!
• He no longer wants to be exhibited!
• He flees society!
• OK!
• Sidenote: About this stage in the novel the author commences with a long and boring and indulgent discourse on this modern society through the SAVAGE's knowledge of Shakespeare. It gets really, really tedious and it's really, really obvious.
• OK!
• But the people make a movie of him!
• They come to his hermitage and harrass him!
• The noble SAVAGE kills himself!
• THE END!

OK, so that synopsis is basically the whole review.

Honestly, the start of this book is pretty good. The structure of the society is coherent and abhorrent. The first part of the book is a run-down of how the gestation and promotion/retardation of the fœtuses thinly disguised as a tour of the facility for new workers, which is fine. I suggest you read this bit then skip forward to somewhere in the book where everyone's answer to the problems of life is "chillax – take a soma."

Then stop reading and create your own ending to the book. Skip the SAVAGE altogether (his name is John). Skip Bernard Marx and the other guy with pretensions. Mustapha Mond, World Controller for Western Europe, is probably the greatest character in the book. You should read the part where he acknowledges that Bernard Marx's theories on the conduct of society are probably right but are heretical and dangerous to the stability of society.

The main theme of the book is that stability and happiness are essentially exclusive.

Not from Comics Alliance

Suggested additional signs:
GOD HATES UPDATING MORE THAN ONCE A WEEK
GOD HATES THE MAN
GOD HATES FAGS-ING AROUND
GOD HATES THE OUTDATED, OUTMODED PRINT-COMICS INDUSTRY
GOD HATES FANZINES

Winner:
GOD HATES HATERS

Knee-high socks are not to be worn with stockings underneath.

I know fashionising.com think it’s ok to wear stockings underneath as layering to add “a whole new dimension to an outfit.” A whole new dimension of stupid, perhaps, but not a whole new dimension of good. I know that it’s “practical” because it’s winter and the other morning it was -5ºC. You want to wear knee-highs with your boots because they look good but you feel like you need something warmer than just knee-highs. Seriously? Practical ≠ fashionable. Otherwise you’d be walking around in oilskins, gumboots and wool everything else with one of those waterproof cellphones and a Panasonic Toughbook.

My stylist told me that this is kind of the poor-man’s version of wearing thigh-high boots with stockings. YOU GUYS WANNA LOOK LIKE POOR PEOPLE?

Another Unlikely Hero is the debut release from Futurnari.

Futurnari is a Christchurch-based chipmusician who composes, performs and records on native, 8-bit trackers. This DMG release is a 5-track EP in the vein of Zan-zan-zawa-veia and Alex Mauer.

Download Another Unlikely Hero from Bandcamp.

8bitcollective profile/music.

Chipmusic.org profile.

Instead of being a Burberry model I really wanted Emma Watson to become one of two things:

• My wife or
• nah, probably just that.

I wish I were Mothra smothered in peanut butter and jelly – Middle Class America Mothra – on an internet connexion self-bumping his 4chan posts until they bump up through the top of the site where the source says:

<html><head>
<meta HTTP-EQUIV="content-type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<meta name="robots" content="noarchive"/>

Like Mario in the code and the mushroom bumps out of the top of your browser and trails along to the right, you have to follow it on your virtual desktops and click on it before it falls out your CD drive on the right there. Well, it might on my laptop but last time I put a CD in there I had to shake it to get it out. Fucking retarded, how come they couldn’t design a slot CD drive that can handle a mini-CD? Laugh all you want but seriously, “It just works?”

Where’s the future at? I guess the future isn’t going to be great at all, it’s going to be an escalating compatibilty/incompatibilty war as the proprietary formats fight it out for the exclusive right to grant the paying public general access to their own digital property.

I guess the future is going to be someone climbing up to the peak of a mountain to plant their flag as advertisers encroach. The mountaineer hopes that at the peak there will be practical, affordable space travel and she can spill up into space like that PBF comic but she’ll arrive at the top and someone will take a photo of her and add it to the “Dreamers / Wall of Shame” section of the cloud and then they’ll float it to catch her but when she tries to grab onto it she finds her hand is incompatible with that state of matter and she floats on, upwards into the void.