I am Patrick Perdue! I am bad for you!

My Phonic board is broken. Did that stop me from doing what I do best, I.E. wasting time, energy, and resources for not very much other than my own enjoyment, and hopefully that of at least two other people? Of course not! As a result, this week's show is now downloadable. In this show:

• We learn the day's true date, November 35, 1990-19.


• The current issues with Phonic, TriTech Electronics (who are, according to Phonic, supposedly authorized to fix my board under the manufacturer's warranty, although they claim otherwise), is discussed, as well as a description of this show's very convoluted broadcasting setup. Just for the info, this is probably the weirdest one I've used to date, and includes a keyboard being used as a master compressor.


• Wo, where'd that come from? A totally unexpected phone call from a long-time family friend, Josh Owens, which lead to an interesting discussion about radio, greyhound buses, West Virginia, Christmas, and many other things. This is a longer phone call than usual, as it was so unexpected, given that Josh had no regular computer access the last time we spoke, and, in fact, didn't really know how to use one that well.


• A standard fallback, going through production libraries at random, leads to a few interesting things, including showcasing some very nasty scratchy pots on the current broadcast board.


• Let's have a Sennheiser MKE2002+dummy head demo from 1973.


• Why wasn't the popular Beatles song 'Let It Be' called 'Let It Generally Exist' instead?


• What Things and Stuff episode would be complete without playing with an effects processor or two, even on a scaled-down streaming setup?


• If you don't have a phone booth, you can put a phone call in a box... Well, I can, so I did.

And there you have it, another show thingy has passed us by. As a reminder, Things and Stuff won't be on next week, since I'll be at Randy's place, for which I am leaving in about 10 hours. Maybe I should start packing? Yeah... Maybe. If possible, I will try to stream at least one of Randy's live gigs, but there isn't a lot of 3g coverage in West Virginia, unless you're in Charleston, Huntington, Parkersburg, or Wheeling. Maybe we'll get lucky, and have some available wifi somewhere. Who knows? Stay tuned and find out, because, after all, it's something to do.

Today, we have several stream archives available for you, the strange, bored person who likes that sort of thing.

PDAudio Realtime 2009.5

On Friday, November 27, 2009, P&D Audio Productions Realtime 2009.5 took place in the beautiful bedroom studio of one Derek Lane. Quite a number of bad, abnormal, and generally dumb things happened during the course of the stream, which, of course, is only to be expected at this point.
Here are just a few such examples:

• Autotune the blues, a prime example of why Derek and myself should never be given access to studio equipment


• slide whistles through autotune are fun.


• So are 1-a-cans with guitar slides.


• TBRN.AM, a good idea or not?


• Uncle Hanson's redneck poetry... enough said?


• Swedish disney songs... Sure, why not?


• How about a wire tape machine playing back a recording of an atomic bomb test?

All this and more can be found in this clickable link. I Think this may have been the shortest realtime stream to date, although this made it no less enjoyable for me.

PDAudio Cartime 2009.5

Adding to the shortest ever series, we bring you CarTime 2009.5, which only lasted 26 minutes due to being late, thanks to a few technical issues.
For those who don't know, CarTime is so named because the streams are done live from the car on the way back from Derek's place. Every one we've tried to do while taking Derek back from mine has completely and totally failed, and this one came close to not existing at all. Fortunately, it did manage to work, and was apparently more stable than any other stream we've done from the car, although it started later than we would have liked. Unfortunately, we couldn't take phone calls (again), but the messengers worked. Although the original stream was done at 24 kbps mono to improve the bandwidth to sound ratio, the archive is in stereo. So, even if you heard it live, you may have missed something interesting. Congratulations to you! Now you can hear just what you missed, and then say "Wow, was that really worth it?"

Things and Stuff for November 28, 2009?

Well... um... I haven't sent my board off to be fixed yet, though I plan on doing so this week. It's gotten even worse than the last time you all heard it in action. TO prove it, instead of a real show, have this fake one as I demonstrate why I didn't actually do a show this week. I think you'll understand, and I hope you'll forgive me. Hey, you can't say I didn't actually do a show, now can you?

What now?

Derek and myself are going to visit Randy Gilkey up there in West Virginia where it's all relative, so our respective shows won't be on for a couple of weeks. Naturally, we'll make up for it by doing strange, possibly random things while there. Of course, I encourage you to stay tuned to the website and TBRN's Twitter for all the latest news, and stuff. No, before you ask, I will not start a news show, and call it News and Stuff, amusing though the concept is to me, for a few seconds, anyway.

Proving that I'm still dedicated to the fine art of completely wasting time, this week's show is now consumable. It's probably not very tasty, but feel free to ingest it at your leisure... or something.

On this weeks highly enjoyable show:

• Although it's not terribly obvious unless pointed out specifically, my Phonic Helix Board fw24 MKII, the console I use to produce Things and Stuff, and many other fine? things, is having some power supply problems, and will most likely be shipped off to Florida for repair in a few days. Not happy about this, you know. It's the kind of problem I only know will get worse, so I'd better do something about it now.


• A fake section called "why I shouldn't own a studio" was introduced, including bad drumming, and a cover of a Beatles track I did while under the influence of a headache on Friday. Sorry about the nasty sound from the floor tom.


• We hear from the 1956 RCA MK II synthesizer, and explain very briefly how it worked, on the fundamental level.


• Mommy reports nothing at all, which is becoming more and more standard in these parts, now that all the loud fighting neighbors have moved away.


• We briefly discuss and demonstrate the G722 codec on a Snom 320 IP phone, and wish all phones could sound like that.


• Let's have fun with recordings made from my Icom tuner over the week, as well as an incredibly inefficient but amusing way to communicate with the show.


• Thanks to Kyle, a discussion of the Large Hadron Collider occured, including several possible theories as to why it didn't work originally, which leads to the world having never been destroyed, of course.


• Bored enough to count from 11:48 PM to 11:49 PM? I was, apparently.


• Random crap was added to the end of the archive to make it exactly two hours long.


• As per usual, other stuff happened that never quite made it to these pages when it actually came to writing these fake show notes.

And there you have it, people. Another week over, another show gone. Next week should, theoretically, play host to PDAudio Realtime 2009.5 from Derek's place on Friday, assuming it all works out. What it will do, I've no idea, but then again, things work best that way.

Have fun, and don't die.

And now, on the forth anniversary of a very memorable show from Portland with myself and maryannn, one of the more unusual shows in a long while comes to you a lot later than normal, and is available for download.

This show is a great example of how to recover from technical issues that make things impractical to deal with, and end up doing something interesting anyway. In this case, Melanie and myself streaming from the netbook on the hotel's internet connection wasn't working out so well due to saturated bandwidth, most likely caused by someone running torrents on the network. After nearly an hour of broadcasting this way, being highly fragmented and only just existing, I decided to try streaming via my phone on AT&T's 3g internet, which worked surprisingly well given that we were streaming in ogg quality 3 and taking phone calls through a sip softphone at the same time. Latency on phone calls was a bit long in some cases, and, over all, the sound isn't as polished as I've like, but given the circumstances, things could have been a lot worse.

This was a rather crazy show, which I would be hard pressed to describe and get right, so I don't think I'll say much, leaving you all to figure it out for yourselves. I will, however, mention that drunk people in a hotel on a Saturday night are fun, hockey in the south is apparently wrong, and... oh, look at the time!

I know you're tired of hearing this phrase, but I seem to be saying it a lot lately. I apologize for this show in advance, and promise to nevewr not do something like this again.

This week's show can be downloaded here, and offers the following:

• Co-host Chris is introduced, and what is left of a heavily medicated dgl1984 explains the state he's found himself in.


• The technical problems begin with failing messengers, and a dying APC UPS that really wants my attention.


• A Canadian listener calls in, at which point several things, including broken Messengers, an appropriate sound scheme for Windows Vista, and old, bad Things and Stuff references from 2007 are discussed.


• Chris plays with my effects processor for what is arguably a bit too long for anyone's own good.


• Haven't you always wanted to play with a model airplane? Well, now you can, on model airplanes and stuff!


• More unfinished ideas, brought to you by the Yamaha Motif XS and it's pattern sequencer.


• No Mommy Call this week, truly breaking that after almost a year of doing it.


• Thanks to a Canadian node on GlobalTuners, we have a comparison of the United States NOAA weather radio, and Weather Radio Canada. Both are bad, but which is worse?


• Have you ever wondered how WWV sounds on narrow band FM, instead of it's proper AM?


• Shins for Windows takes the streaming client and a couple of other things down after a nice, hard crash, prompting a remote session from another computer to kill it, resulting in issues with the stream for several moments. Gotta love those external archiving solutions... I suppose I could have edited this more, but if Don Joyce can spend half an hour trying to fix a buzz on real FM radio, then I don't feel so bad.


• A ringing endorsement of Time Warner Cable business class? Well, maybe it doesn't actually ring...


• TBRN's live stream is dead... or is it?


• A call from a slightly intoxicated Kyle and Jody at a camp fire ends this poor excuse for a show.

Well, there you have it. Enjoy it more than I did, for what it's worth. Next week's show should be interesting, since Melanie, A.K.A. lostgirl33 will be spending a few days here, starting on Thursday... the twelth... OH NO!

Another month gone, another show in the can.
This show features a failed not quite demonstration of my Icom PCR-100 on Global Tuners, talk about radio for nearly an hour, the introduction of Berny the Fuse (yet to be developed into anything useful), proof that the Greensboro social security office is bad for you, cheap toys from Mommy (again), banging on drums for about 20 seconds, a tribute to 100.3, the not buzzard anymore, and a grand total of five incoming phone calls (all from kd6cae. Enjoy.

Yes, that's right, folks. It's October 25, and, instead of posting yesterday's archive, which is 12 minutes long, by the way, since it broke in all kinds of fun and interesting ways, I'm giving you a show archive that was previously not uploaded, because I didn't like it at the time. Have I changed my mind? Well, not really, but it's something to have.

According to the notes I wrote for this show in June:
At the time of the show, I was being plagued by a migraine from hell. I did manage to do a few fun things, such as putting a well-known and quite horrible song through a midi controlled Granulab, which was rather amusing (at least to me), showed the last couple of minutes of WCWG's analog TV feed as it went off the air forever, and complained about various things.
For some inexplicable reason, I extended the show for almost an entire hour just to talk to Alexander Nelson about keyboards and pointless things, and to play around a bit with the Ensoniq TS-12.
I think I left out a few things, such as Venison's problems with big words, I.E. anything longer than two syllables.

As there was no archive for this week's show, though I still may do another one soon to make up for over-sleeping, then breaking things yesterday, have this thing from last summer instead. I'm not really sure that this is any better. You can judge that for yourself if you like.

Well, ya know, time for another stupid show? ... or something like that.

This week's two hour masterpiece includes:

• How many knobs does Borris's board have?


• Derek's girlfriend, a Roland Juno G, is leaving his life after just a few days?


• The fake plastic stalker gets two seconds of fame.


• A listener's comment about being temporarily broke leads to the constipation blues.


• Let's play with a barebones Motif pattern and acoustic drums.


• Autotune the news? Sure, why not?


• to the listeners in Antarctica, We've got your weather conditions!


• "Ha Ha," said the clown, including a bunch of Mary Anns for good measure.


• This week's Mommy call reveals the fact that my father lost his sell phone at a local WalMart.


• A discussion of belching with Mommy results in some bad time with burping delays and drums.


• The Borris Sorry Mix?


• A fake Fideliphone promo (except not) provided by Over the Edge.


• A bit of info about my new Icom PCR-100 all-mode pc controllable receiver, which will be available to the public to play with soon.


• A waste of time, jerks, and going all keyboard crazy.


• Buzzy times with a Marshall condenser, a bad cable, and a sink.


• Kyle calls in to tell us about a retarded cat, which apparently has vocal quality of a dying baby, as well as introducing his new, up-coming show on TBRN (sort of).


• Someone in LA really didn't want me to leave. Too bad for them!

As usual, other things happened, which weren't mentioned in text.

Enjoy, have fun, and good night? Well, maybe it's not night where you are. For that matter, it isn't here, either. Oh well.

First of all, let me apologize for the lack of an archive last week. A show did exist, but it was a bad experience (tm) and I didn't like it much, so it never was uploaded or written about. I didn't even want to think about it, and thus, haven't actually reviewed it, and don't remember if there was anything fun from it. If this turns out to be the case, I might post it later on.
Now, I would like to also apologize for this week's show being available from here.

Due to the fact that I am sleepy, lazy, slightly preoccupied and lazy, I will summarize this week's show with the following few words:

• Mommy and toys that make bad noises


• a fake stocker who won't die, even with a burned and broken face


• self-made Jerks, and a call from Venison


• Kyle Mckenzie, music and more noises


• random samples from a vast, unorganized collection of crap


• a review of audiorabbit03's difficult phrases from Augost 2007


• a fake ride in a 1965 Ford Pick-up truck


• other unmentioned things.

Enjoy. I did.

Well, it's that time of the week again... Time to go off and download this week's show if you dare.
Here's what it did this time:

• Playing guitars in the rain, bad mic checks, the lonely conductor, and a phrase sampler? How do these all fit together?


• Monty's phone line is really, really noisy, and gets progressively worse throughout the course of the show. Since he called five times, this becomes apparent.


• I was bored enough to make my listener count a part of the metadata using a PHP script, so you can simply look at your player's title bar to see how many people are bored enough to listen to me being bored. Yep, innovations in all the wrong places, that's us...


• Don't stand on my monitor, a comparison between a badly miked and compressed recording of a track played first through my Alesis monitor 1's six years ago, then the same track miked up and played through the new/old JBL 4311's. Why? Why not?


• An abrupbt change from the standard archiving method to the Behringer Squishalizer at thirty minutes and seven seconds into the file, because I apparently was stupid and closed the archiving solution. Sorry about the Squishalizer. I really don't like it's sound anymore, and I'm to the point of maybe trying a software multiband solution that isn't Stereo Tool to replace it... if I can find a decent one.


• More accidental fun with a phrase sampler? Sure, why not?


• Cloning MaryAnn's, and a possible returning show on Sunday mornings?


• Kyle Mckenzie, a friend I met during my days as an active ham radio operator in 1994, showed up for the rest of the show to make life interesting by playing random sound effects, and some of his tracks via Fideliphone, after a technical issue on my part.


• How much are people willing to pay to have their caps lock indicator lights repaired?


• Some callers are apparently much more amusing in boxes.


• Talk of spring tank CB radio reception, fun with old cordless phones, baby monitors, FRS and drive through windows... Alwys a good fallback.


• Where did the weather go?


• How about the weather at the south pole?

This edition of Things and Stuff has been brought to you by an increasingly leaky set of headphones that I should really replace with something better.

TBRN's archives are currently offline due to a situation beyond our control. Thanks, China, plus some other things. They should be back up by the first of the month.
In the meantime, you can download this week's show from my personal server.
I'm lazy, so I'll just say this about this week's show.
Did you know there is an official sound for Summer going away for a year? Yep, there is.
Basically, as for the rest of it, the show features a lot of fideliphone, including alcohol issues (except not), loud things that go toot, dogs, and a friend who found me after losing contact for about thirteen years. Fun times.

Due to levels being all over the place this week, I decided to try using the c4 multi-band compressor in post-production. Doubt I'll use it every week, but it worked for this.
If loads of people complain about the sound, I still have the unprocessed file, and can edit it all over again... Of course you'll all want me to do that, right? Yeah, definitely a fun time!

Sleep is also a fun time, followed by existing. Yes, it's a great way to live your life, I think.

Edit: October 10, 2009
This archive is no longer on my personal server, nor is the one from September 26. However, I have left the references for the sake of history.

click here to download this week's show thing.
What does it do?

• Thanks to MaryAnn, a new rule has been enforced. If you don't have a valid ID in your possession, you can't listen to the show.


• Last Saturday, I went to Piedmont Dragway with my father to see some nytro-burning Harleys in action. I talked about that, played a small preview of what I recorded there, and complained about the horrible band I saw at a bar afterward.


• Last Tuesday, I blew up my Hafler 50-watt per channel amp, which I replaced with a much cleaner AB International precedent Series 600A on Thursday. Twice the power, and three rack spaces instead of two. I had to move things around in the rack to make it fit.


• Let's play with keyboards and vocoders again.


• Mommy visited the studio, at which point, such strange things as bad bands, bar violence, wireless microphones in toilets, marshmallows, cadavers, condoms, and beeping baby Borrises brought to you by slow scan TV are discussed. We also discover that Mommy's mic technique sucks, but not as bad as some.


• The recording I made with an open transducer in the toilet was played again.


• Slow scan TV will die? Apparently, Borris through a pitch shifter thinks so.


• Beds and vocoders are fun.


• FX Radio is also fun.


• 9-minute drum solos from Deep Purple are also fun.


• Plastic melodica keys and fake wurlitzers are fun as well.

Enjoy.

Yes, that's right, get a Things and Stuff archive a day early this week! Aren't you special?
Click here to grab a copy of your very own!

In this week's edition:

• It's the Ensoniq TS-12's 15th birthday.


• Derek got yet another broken turntable, but refuses to trade his three broken ones for all the working ones I have. Oh well, I tried.


• Time is apparently not consistant, prompting what turned out to be a running discussion about time in various forms throughout the show.


• kd6cae pointed out that the last four letters of PDAudio's phone number also happen to spell another relevant word.


• Roland SC88's, filters, an pitch bends? Um, ok, if someone says so...


• Apparently, the US naval observatory master clock is brought to you by a guy who sits in a room all day and says the time... Well, according to Ken Nordine, anyway.


• I mentioned in passing that, after over a month of absence, FX Radio is now back online, including it's SHOUT-Box.


• As this was the Ensoniq TS-12's 15th birthday, I relayed the story of how I found and eventually obtained the keyboard, and played a couple of celebratory sequences made for the occasion.


• I found, and played, some sounds from the old Fairlight CMI IIX workstation, including the sounds of it's actual operation (floppy drives, keyboards, fans, etc.) as well as some of the effects, some of which were presumably digitally sampled in the late 70's. Someone even included "the standard door."


• Thanks to byron27 and PhoneSpell.org, we are made aware of some incredibly amusing alternative spellings of PDAudio's phone number.


• The reason Things and stuff was a day early this week was discussed. To make it short, I'm going to a drag strip later today, and may stream it live on location, just for something to do.


• I called WWV, discovered just how drifty my TCC-14 has become over the last couple of months, and attempted to synchronize a Things and Stuff intro at roughly 120 bpm to WWV's ticking.


• Let's play part of the Ensoniq TS instructional video, shall we?


• Byron called in, broke the law, and went to jail, without passing go, or collecting $200.


• I can now break it again on demand, thanks to a submission from audiorabbit03.

On a side note, I want some headphones that don't leak as much as my Audio Technica ATHM40's do, though I don't remember them being quite this bad before. I'm hearing my speech come through the archive more than I remember, and this angers me. Maybe I'll buy some that isolate better when funds are more easy to come by. OH well. At least it's an acoustic problem, not an electronic one.

Time to get my stuff ready for the morning, and crash. Hey, this is like Saturday night, except an hour earlier, and stuff to do the next day. How weird.

For those of you who heard the show live, you'll know why I'm not going to bother uploading. In short, everything broke, except the computer I was streaming from, and the server hosting the stream. Oh, yeah, it was pretty bad, and included the final moments of one of my Cad M179 multi-pattern condenser mics (time to buy a new pair of those with money I don't currently have). Some, however, may find it entertaining to watch thing after thing completely break on the air. Believe me, if it weren't me, I would have. So, for those of you who want the archive bad enough, I offer the following proposal.
Give me something nice that I can really use, and you can have this week's archive. Now I think I understand how Don Joyce of Negativland's Over The Edge must feel some weeks.

Want to hear things fizzing, hissing and buzzing at random? How about pops and clicks that show up out of nowhere, and completely break my train of thought? How about a partially high quality FideliMommy call?
Just give me something worth having (and it must be something I don't already have, and find valuable enough as trade for something this incriminating, and generally bad), and a password protected temporary link for this week's show will be created just for you. If only I had access to DRM licensing stuff, I'd have fun enforcing things, like only one play time per user, and all kinds of fun stuff, just because I could.

All I have to say is thank (insert deity of choice here) that August, and thus Summer, is nearly over!

This is another one of those apology shows. Sorry, both for the show's actual content, and for the late post. IN the words of Lord Belchly, "Oh deer, I broke it again."

In this week's episode:

• We celibrate the fact that this is archive number 200 in my local Things and Stuff folder by... well... not doing anything special.


• A new "oh no" has been found. Whether or not this is a good thing is left up to you.


• Some callers apparently preempt themselves, but don't die when told... even by themselves.


• Apparently, 1(800)JustDie is the national A1 advertising hotline.


• Remember the big red knob from Realtime 2009? It makes a comeback on a few phone calls during the course of the show, and makes ending calls a lot more interesting.


• arfy8820 called. I became bored while doing post-production, and slammed it all together in the style of someone who won't be named to protect the not so innocent.


• Let's all hang out in the fake rain, and talk about lightning strikes.


• Apparently, Remote Studio No. 0 was experiencing intermittant buzzing problems. Well, you know how we are about making things even worse than they already are, also known as post-production and boredom...


• Frustration about said buzzing causes us to go on an incredibly bad keyboarding tangent with the Motif XS and Ion, drumming, and timing issues.


• byron27 calls from a CTA bus, just in time for the show to end. Convenient, given who provides the intro and outro music to the show at the moment (Chicago Transet Authority, before they were forced to change their name to Chicago by the real CTA).


• Just because it could be done, this, as well as every show this month, has been exactly two hours long to the second. Remember that thing I said earlier about post production and boredom?

If the above description doesn't turn you off too much, and you still wish to download this week's episode of Things and Stuff, you can click here to do so.

Share and enjoy!

Though it's a bit late, thanks to a bit of stupidity on my part, it's now available to download.
This was the first show done with the new Kel Audio HM2D microphone. I think I like it. Yes, it's dark like a cold Russian night, but that's why I like it for this sort of thing.

On this week's show:

• After a quick ride on Beeping Becky's rather empty Beyond Bus, the show starts off with some chaos provided by Mommy and a drum kit.


• A discussion with nick6489 about microphones, and the possible bands to which Mommy's awesome drum skills can be contributed.


• P&DAudio Productions now has an official phone number (951-PDAudio). Eventually, it will do something more interesting than simply ringing my phone. Eventually, PDAudio.net will have a website, too. Right...


• This week wasn't so great for Les Paul, as he died on Thursday, incidentally, the same day I got the new microphone, though it's probably not related.


• Hear how to not properly modify a set of MXL 604 omni-directional capsules, the result of an unfortunate accident I had with mine when trying to do so.


• We mentioned that Playback Magazine, a production done by Edd Potter on cassette every two months from 1979 to 2007, has been digitized, and is now available for download. Lots of historical stuff here in regards to radio, audio, electronics, and blind toys. The server's a bit slow, though.


• What happens when two songs with nothing in common are played back to back?


• Let's have fun manipulating the sound of an incredibly loud wall-mounted brass ship's bell that belongs to my brother.


• The weekly Mommy call is followed by a call from audiorabbit03, which leads to lots of intelligent belching, naturally reminding us of a particular bit from last year's reverendbigdawg Christmas cd.


• My domain, BadForYou.net, is due to expire tomorrow. I invite all domain squatters listening to take advantage of this fact.


• More trouble with patch bays, sliders, buttons and knobs that ultimately winds up going nowhere, as per usual.


• A listener wrote in asking for the old "You're Screwed!" series done in 2000 by myself and dgl1984. Some things never quite die, do they? Nope, not played, not published. Sorry.


• Let's hang out on the front porch of the past... well, a few hours before the show, with nothing much interesting going on.


• Part of a recording of myself hanging out at Randy Gilkey's studio was played by accident. Randy Gilkey and a pedal steel guitar... oh boy!


• More pointless drumming.

As per usual, enjoy. I certainly did, even if I lost all the edits I made to the archive while editing it, and had to do it all over again. Oh well.

This week's show warrants an apology in advance. "I'm really sorry about that." OK, now that's been taken care of...

Here's what happened this week:

• The show starts off with a dying microphone, in this case one of my Cad M179's. The normal Heil PR20 was still on the snare drum, and I didn't get it off the kit in time to start the show, though I switched to it a few minutes in.


• No phone calls could be taken due to a situation beyond my control, except for Derek, who called from inside the PBX.


• On Friday, I finally got around to creating a track template for recording my drums discretely. Here an incredibly bad mix of something I threw together with the kit, a bunch of melodicas, and some issues. This is not an example of what will eventually be the final result, I promise, I just wanted to make sure it worked, andI want something better for miking my toms.


• Speaking of microphones, we talk about them for a while, including the premise behind my purchase of the Kel Audio HM2d, and demonstrate the mystery, maybe electrovoice mic, which people seem to think was made in the mid fifties.


• After playing a couple of tracks and calling Mommy, a discussion of grounding, balancing and 60 hz hums resulted in... you guessed it... playing around with my keyboards in some pretty stupid ways.


• There's nothing like having an arguement with a recorded version of yourself, is there?

Oh, yeah, and as per usual, all that other stuff in the middle that didn't get explained, because I'm just boring like that.
You can, of course, go over here to grab your very own copy of this week's fine program to see just what you missed for yourself. Naturally, you don't trust my poor excuse of a description, do you? Oh well, I don't either.

And now, friends and foes, this week's Things and Stuff, starting the chronically depressing month of August out good and... proper? Well, maybe not.
Description=off. download=on. Just know that it had several issues, including a live Wesley Willis impersonation by yours truly, a back-up Borris via radio link, Dexter talking to himself (again), and several other bad things.
Enjoy. Yeah, maybe I'll actually write a description for the next one.

What do "we are the Borris," "we are the flock," an old Omnichron TCC-14 talking clock, a couple of clippy drum solos, some stupid Digitech Quad presets, Buckethead, Deep Purple, Ozric Tentacles, and Herbie Hancock all have in common? Well, this week's show, of course!

This non-description has been brought to you free of charge by a very lazy person. Enjoy.

OK, I did a terribly, horribly stupid thing, or would that be a very good stupid thing, given that it was dumb, and we're possibly rating the level of stupidity.

Since dgl1984 wasn't around to do his show this week, I decided to do his three hour slot rather than my standard two hour one. Never again, I tell you! Here's why:

• The show received one phone call throughout it's duration: a combined call from Andre and Alexander, which totally broke my fake professional start, and all that.


• "How was your week?" Mine sucked, with the possibility of maybe, finally moving out of this place sometime in the not-so-distant future. Information pending.


• I finally got the Alesis Ion fixed after about 3.5 years, and bounced around with that for a while, though nothing ever really came of it.


• Accidental patchbay configurations lead to some interesting effects that shouldn't happen, spawning radio free Borris, another idea that will probably never go anywhere, but was fun at the time, at least to me.


• Let's talk about guitars and stuff for a while. Sure, why not? Not much else to do.


• I decided to open Fideliphone, which meant several bad people dropped in, including freakyfwoof, matt02392, Alexander Nelson, and, very briefly and without the ability to hear anything, Danny Mac on the fretless bass. Fun times with melodicas, pitch shifters and keyboards, with much chaos to go with it.


• I tried closing one fideliphone window, after which point about 300 of them popped up in my face, causing me to have to kill the process from another computer, breaking the normal archiving process along the way. Thus, the last few minutes of the archive sound completely different from the rest, since it came from the stream archive which was compressed with the Behringer Squishalizer, while the rest was mastered in Sound Forge, as has been the norm for archiving lately.


• We learn what happens when broadband audio is piped through a narrowband FM 2 meter transceiver, in this case the Icom ICT2H, purchased from kellytheeyes a few weeks ago, using the old Behringer MX2642A board, the Samson C-Com compressor, and the Heil PR20. Again, nothing better to do.

I don't even want to talk about the badness that occurred while editing the archive. In fact, I don't want to say much about much these days, prefering bed.

Yes, for those who missed it, I also did a show from Derek's place last week using his Mackie 1202, Samson S-Com, and the Heil PR20 in his basement. It was either that or try to use the big scary digital board, which I refuse to do. I like buttons and knobs and everything, but I prefer to know what they're doing.
More info about that and lots of other stuff to come in a future entry.

By the way, please don't blame me for this week's archive intro, it's all Andre's fault. He made me do it, you must understand.

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot to put an actual link to the file in here, stupid! Well, here it is. Enjoy.

This week's show is now available
In this episode:

• I fully intended to have a properly working Fideliphone setup, using the netbook to host. Unfortunately, that flopped over and failed. Oh well, I'll try again next time.


• DJ Fumble-fingers broke levels to start off the show. Yeah, typical.


• Derek has a small, metal friend, which indirectly made him money today. He introduces this unnamed friend to the show via phone.


• Andre demonstrates a way to generate GSM noise by shouting.


• Alexander and I discuss several things, including why I wasn't on the air last week, and the fact that I was very sick on Wednesday, when I wanted to do a make-up show.


• A clip was played from around this time last year, when I was similarly sick, and playing with a carbon mic to exentuate the issues I had at the time.


• All tracks played on the show but one originally came from vinyl.


• Thanks to Andre, after a bunch of technical issues, we are introduced to an old, but still active British time service from god only knows when (1960's or 70's?)


• A comparison is made with three different mixes of Frank Zappa's Peaches en regalia from Hot Rats -- the track from the official Hot Rats CD release, the version from 1995's Strictly Commercial, and finally, the far superior mix from a vinyl rip from an LP originally pressed in 1969.


• Alex and I discuss the old Apple 2 and Macintoshes from days of the dead.


• A clip from Negativland's Over the Edge is played, just to prove that I'm not the only person around who likes playing with buttons and knobs.


• This week's Mommy call is interrupted by a dead cordless phone battery, and subsequent white noise, but it comes back anyway.


• The houses on both sides of us are enpty and up for rent, and I discover that, unfortunately, they are not available for the price of $0/month. Shame, that would have been very convenient.


• For the first time ever, Derek calls from his very own cell phone, and gugs a couple of times, just to make the experience a proper one.


• Flip phone magic, a part of this complete breakfast?


• Someone calls from a sip phone under Gnome with some issues, that, of course, must be exaggerated.

Things and Stuff will not be on next week, as I'll be in Orlando with dgl1984, brandon_h, kellytheeyes and Steven. Depending on what's going on, what kind of internet access we have, and if we're really that bored, Heavy Stuff FM may exist in it's place, live from a cabin. Between Derek and myself, we have enough portable equipment to pull off a high quality audio, low quality content stream from wherever we may be, provided the net access is good enough. If all else fails, we could always broadcast at a reduced bitrate on my AT&T 3g connection, which is actually pretty reliable if you're not moving. I've managed 384 kbps upstream with it, which is easily enough to handle streaming and phone calls, but I don't know how reliable that is at sustained upload. Of course, results will vary depending on the connected tower as well. Who knows?
Stay tuned for more info as it is available.

Well, what do ya know? I'm actually writing in the blog again, properly this time, rather than in the guise of a delayed, semi-automated RSS feed. How's that for something?
Not impressed? Oh well, it's all good. I'm not either.

As you've probably noticed, no archive was posted for last week's show, which, by the way, did actually exist. While some fun things did happen, I wasn't really happy with the over-all result. At the time, I was being plagued by a migraine from hell. I did manage to do a few fun things, such as putting a well-known and quite horrible song through a midi controlled Granulab, which was rather amusing (at least to me), showed the last couple of minutes of one of the local TV station's analog feed as it went off the air forever, and complained about various things.
For some inexplicable reason, I extended the show for almost an entire hour just to talk to Alexander Nelson about keyboards and pointless things, and to play around a bit with the Ensoniq TS-12.
Yeah, it's all quite boring. Maybe I'll post a highly edited version of that archive at some point, but I really just wasn't in the mood to deal with it after the show, nor did I feel like it this week either, apparently.

Speaking of not feeling like doing things this week, that's the position I found myself in yesterday. Since Derek was busy, Arfy was... er... somewhere, and the Clower brothers were away visiting relatives, I decided that being the only live person on a Saturday was quite boring. Besides, it was really hot down there, as it hit 99 degrees Fahrenheit yesterday, and I didn't have fans or air conditioning running in the studio all day. These combined issues yielded the end result of my staying upstairs and being lazy. Pretty sad when you don't even feel like doing a self-appointed task from which enjoyment is usually gleamed, isn't it? But, such is life. Oh well.
Derek and I have both agreed to do our respective missed shows at some point on Wednesday, so stay tuned for that. I don't think I've ever done Things and Stuff on a Wednesday. I'm usually pretty inflexible about my time slot, since I like it just the way it is. I don't want three hours, or different hours, thanks for asking. On this TBRN fake station thingy, the only exceptions have been when I've missed shows completely due either to laziness or special events, or stupid things like the broadcastathons.

Enough of that... I know you're probably about as bored reading all this internal whining as I am of writing it, so no further effort will be exerted on my behalf, at least on that topic.

Now, for some stupid news about my recent life, or lack thereof:

I won third place in the NokiaMailtone contest for my entry made with sign and triangle waves and Sound Forge's tone generator, all without getting out of bed. Apparently, the third place prise is a new Nokia E63, which is a lot like the E71 I have. It's stripped in some ways, I.E. no internal GPS or HSDPA (although it's still 3g), the camera isn't as good (2.0 vs. 3.2 MP I think), and it's plastic instead of metal, which, ironically, makes it less resistant to fingerprints, although it might not look as shiny at first. However, it does have a real 3.5mm headphone jack instead of the 2.5mm of the E71, which is really one of my very few complaints about that particular phone. While I have converters and adapters for everything, I don't like putting extra weight on the jack, which is done a bit even if using a 2.5mm to 3.5mm jumper cable. Now that I'm actually starting to use it for downloading and listening to podcasts, reading books in text format, etc. it would be nice to have a real native jack.
So, I guess they'll send that to me at some point.
I haven't actually gotten a firm confirmation on that, so yeah, in either case, it's something to do.
freakyfwoof also submitted an entry, but sadly was not even put into the top five. Shame, really, because I honestly thought his submission was better than mine.

I also managed to break my Iriver H320's hard drive by dropping the player while it was recording, and the drive was caching from memory. I could easily get a new drive and a new battery, since it needs both, and I probably will still do that at some point, or more likely attempt to revive one of these busted H120's, but for now, I bought a used Iriver H10 on Ebay. No line-in recording, but I really just wanted a good solid player for the trip to Orlando. I rockboxed it, copied things to it, and played around with it a bit. Seems to be all right so far.
In place of the up/down buttons found on all the previous Iriver units I've owned, there is a touch strip, kind of like a really narrow rectangular laptop touchpad with only two contact points, one on either end, corresponding, of course, to up and down. Honestly, I like it better than the buttons, which I realize shouldn't be the case, but I do, so there. The only real issue I have at the moment is that the current Rockbox daily build seems to have issues with the H10's fm radio, mainly being that it doesn't actually turn the thing on. You can fake scan for presets, and go up and down the fake spectrum, but it doesn't really do much. Oh, I think I got it to go "click" a couple of times, but that's about it. Maybe I'm missing something really obvious, but the radios in either my 120 or 320 never did these things when controlled by Rockbox. Oh well, it's not really important anyway. It's just terrestrial commercial badness, though it's still good to have around sometimes.

In other news, I bought a mystery microphone on Ebay for $5 the other day. It's a dynamic mic of some kind, and the guy who sold it doesn't know what it is, since the switch plate containing the make and model has gone missing. It's rather vintage looking, and could be something from Electro Voice, which generally doesn't suck, although nobody seems to really know what it is. So, it could be good, or a pile of crap. In either case, it was $5, and I'm always looking for different microphones for different situations. I still wouldn't mind another Heil PR20, so I can use one on the snare drum in place of the Behringer XM8500 I have there now, which is still better than the Audix snare mic I was using originally. On the other hand, perhaps I could acquire a super cardioid dynamic. I currently don't have any of those, just standard cardioids, and the nice, old, slightly noisy Shure SM85 from 1983, which is an electret condenser that takes phantom power. It's probably got the narrowest axis of any of the mics I have, which makes it incredibly useful for stuff like singing while at the drum kit, or, in my case, being stupid while banging badly on drums. I want something with that kind of directionality, but not a condenser, and with maybe a bit more on the bottom end of the spectrum. It probably won't happen though. Even the Heil PR20's pick-up pattern is a bit wider than the SM85. I may have to eventually get something like a Shure SM7b, EV RE20, or god forbid... a pr40? Nah, wait, scrap those last two mics, and probably the first one as well. I've yet to spend $350 on a microphone, though I've come almost close, and I'm not really doing enough to warrant the expense. Oh well, hasn't stopped me before.

Sleep, however, has stopped me from doing many things, like continuing to type in this virtual box of issues. It is, in fact, telling me to do so now, so who am I to refuse? A sleepy person, that's who!

All I have to say about this week's show is "what? Huh? Did I really just do that?" Oh, yeah, and that it is available for download. Well, I suppose I should probably expound on that a little, shouldn't I? OK, screw the fact that I'm tired, and I really don't want to. Here goes anyway...

• For once, Derek is not the first caller to the show. Instead, we get kd6cae, a carbon Borris, and a hard left/right configuration for no reason other than because it can be done.


• Derek called in, and related an amusing story after being side-tracked by conversation: "The dog ate my microphone? Well, not quite..."


• A discussion about microphones occurred, including my recent purchase of a vintage Grundig W1 stereo dynamic microphone from the early 70's, which I don't have to play with at this time. Believe me, you'll all know when I get it, as it should be strange.


• Mom shows up at the studio, at which point all hell breaks loose.


• The ask Mommy segment of the show was introduced, garnering lots of phone calls and weird things, including some incriminating Borris anecdotes.


• It's nearly time for Realtime 2009, the tenth ever such show. Discussion of this occurred, including requesting ideas for things to run over with various vehicles. Crunch time, anyone?


• Dad even showed up near the end of the show, for the first time ever.


• Yes, it is possible to have "dripping drums" using a couple of threshold activated phrase samplers. Sorry about the bad drum mixing, the overheads were too loud and the rest of the mics were too quiet. Still, the main point of the idea came across just fine.

You know what? Listen to the show for the rest of it. That's all the discription you're going to get from me. Sorry 'bout that, folks.
Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that this show is half an hour longer than normal. I hope this isn't a problem.

As always, I hope you enjoyed the show more than I did, although, I have to say, this was one of the most enjoyable shows in a while. Messenger interaction was a bit sparce on my part, since so much was going on with the phone and in the studio... I sort of forgot about them. Honestly, it was refreshing to not babysit messages all the time. Please don't feel offended if you were ignored. It's just one of those things, ya know?

Good hello... Oh, crap, I can't use that line. It's already been taken by Crozly Bendix of the Universal Media Netweb. Oh well. Just goes to show that I've been listening to Over The Edge/Negativland a bit too much lately.
Anyway, this week's Things and stuff can now be downloaded at your discretion.

On this week's show:

• Arf9, a new show on TBRN? Perhaps, or not.


• Find out exactly why I have grievances against radio buttons, or at least one in particular.


• A very broken demonstration of the FX Radio SHOUT-Box takes place. We discovered rather quickly why I should move the phone bit away from the 384K connection when three callers show up, plus the outgoing FX Radio stream. I'll probably work on that tomorrow, as well as other stuff.


• Someone from a braille jail called in, at which point I go on a semi-tangent about said institutions, and my opinions on them.


• My fake Borg impression using a bunch of Quad IV pitch shifters prompts a call from Steve. All I'm going to say about that is look out for Reverend Borgdawg around Christmas time.


• A "butt" song was played, which was horribly broken on the stream, because my ISP decided to make things annoying, even though I just paid the bill. Not a problem for the archive, however.


• The "Mommy call" segment featuring the "mother" song, brought to you by my Mom, pressing a bunch of buttons and twiddling a bunch of knobs, as well as "the weekly hood report."


• Kelly called in from Nashville, at which point several things were discussed, including Kelly's far too friendly hat, various Startrek movies, and the fact that I want to see the new one showing in theaters now.


• Using a phrase sampler from my Digitech Quad IV, I made it overly clear that "I want to see the movie!"


• A discussion of old Alesis effects processors occurred, and I attempted to emulate the nasty background hiss from one.


• I called back into the SHOUT-Box to end things, and because I wanted to make sure it decided to work again after breaking itself.

I hope you enjoy this show as much as I enjoyed doing it, or, if you heard it live, as I say every week, "hope you enjoyed the show more than I did."

Yep, welcome to May, and another weekend. Time for another one of these archive things

In this week's show:

• Human error bordering on technical issues gets this show off to a rocky start, which is transparently fixed in the archive.


• Someone mentioned owning a Technics KN-1000 keyboard, upon which I mentioned wanting to find a good deal on a Technics KN-2000, one of the keyboards used by the legendary Wesley Willis, and proceeded to play one of his tracks.


• I demonstrated some of the fun, pointless things that can be done with Tank-FX.com, a website made by a strange German person, which uses a Linux box to record wav files through a stereo mic array and a speaker through a huge room, then allows you to download the processed sample. Some internet explorer users have had issues displaying this page, so here is a direct link to the upload form if you want to play with it yourself.


• Apparently, bad things happen to me when I imitate bad old school 60's-era radio dj style.


• A failed attempt at calling Mommy. Oh boy, Things and Stuff voicemail.


• We play a track that contains the "things and stuff breaky noise," and remind current and new listeners of what that is.


• We hear from an old CasioTone MT400V keyboard from 1984, which was found in the basement. Naturally, we had to use it in conjunction with the Electrix Warp Factory vocoder, just because it was something to do.


• Going through the downloads folder on my laptop yields some nick6489 incrimination, and some odd sounds.

Other non-mentioned things happened as well. It was fun, and I had a good time at it. It did not piss me "awwf!"

Although it doesn't matter, I failed to mention that May second of this year marks the eleventh anniversary of the day I got my first mixing console, which was a crappy GLI PMX-9000 four channel DJ board, for which way too much money was given. I've learned a lot about audio in eleven years, at least I'd like to think so.

This week's show exists here. Honestly, I probably could have compressed the most fun bits of the show into a single 10 minute segment, but oh well.
Things learned during the show:

• Time Warner Cable is starting to deploy data caps in select residential markets, including mine. Naturally, lots of people aren't happy about it.


• Derek wants my splash cymbal.

Yeah, I think that's the extent of it.
It was semi-fun, and something to do, like packing... which I really must do. I'm going on an international trip tomorrow, and I haven't started packing yet. I am a bad person!

OK, here's the deal. I'm rather tired, and, while this was an awesome show, I feel like being lazy and not making show notes for it. So, this week, have a mystery show.
I will, however, mention that it includes a few minutes of content from this very odd radio station which is fast becoming one of my favorites. Venison likes it, too, so that makes it strange by default.

Enjoy this non-textually described episode of Things and Stuff. Sorry to those who rely on closed captioning, but... hey, it's radio!

This week's show is now available from here. In this week's episode:

• Find out how I lost almost seven years of work in a matter of seconds.


• I introduce a new effects concept, at least for me, using external midi controllers to manipulate effect parameters on my Digitech Studio Quad iv effects processor, rather than it's single clicky data wheel and a bunch of buttons, and do bad things with a delay matrix I made using all 8 possible external modulators, inspired by the effects used by negativland.


• These effects are used on a phone call from Chelsy, just because.


• the snowman calls in, and we discuss several things, including President Obama's supposed non-existent bowling prowess, and the comment he made on the tonight show regarding the special Olympics. he also relates an interesting bowling story among other things.


• More effects processing fun (just gotta play with those knobs).


• Short Wave radio is brought up, and discussed for a while.


• A call to Mom reveals her fascination with the old Henry game from the mid 90's, as well as other random noise-making toys found in her closet. More opportunities to play with effects on the phone patch, of course.


• "Dumb," yet another fake spontaneous single, created using a multi-tap delay with infinite feedback, the music for a show intro from last month, and a drum kit.

Not one of my favorite shows, but it's there nevertheless.

This week, the separate archiving process didn't break, thus, post-stream mastering without the Behringer ultramizer, which was used live. The Ultramizer is really starting to bug me now. I'm thinking of buying another DBX 266XL or 166XL compressor, and a Phonic tube exciter for the master process chain, and making this ultramizer shove off and die, although I will lose my limiter with this configuration. Oh well, no one will notice anyway.

This week's show is now over.
'What did it do?'

• Arme Tsering, the oldest living person in the world, turned 118 last Monday. As a tribute, we played an interesting recording from 1891.


• We learn that emptying the basket in an industrial dishwasher is a good idea, and using wet towels to quell stove fires is a very bad one.


• We throw the audio from a ProMax UK video, simply entitled "Harrr," or "how to produce a radio commercial." Rather amusing, I must say.


• We reflect on the fact that Things and Stuff has been on long enough to have done at least one show on every numbered day of the month, I.E. the First of November, Second of February, Third of May, etc. all the way through 31, and play a bit of a tribute to this incredible milestone in Things and Stuff history.


• A call to Mommy yields the idea of doing a 30-minute Things and Stuff every day for a month, since the show has the distinction of having aired at least once on any numbered day of month. Will this actually happen? Probably not.


• The vocoder got something to do for a few minutes.

Um... I think that's about it, except for all that other stuff I didn't write about, which would take 95% of the fun out of listening to the show yourself, don't you think?

My normal method of archiving the show... um... broke, due to user error. If anyone wants a 2 hour file of just me talking with no context, however, I'm your man.
Thus, you get the sound of my Behringer Ultramizer as it was streamed live. I've fallen out of love with this particular processor. Something about it just grates on my ears even with no exciting or compression active, and I don't even know how to describe it. Oh well, time for more research when more cash is available, I guess. I'd love a TC Electronics Finalizer, but can't justify the $900 for the little baby one, when all I'd use it for is streaming my show, from which no income is produced. Any projects I do (which lately aren't many) all have software mastering applied.

Enjoy.

Oh, and happy birthday to this poor excuse of a blogbox, which has mostly been a Things and Stuff link repository as of late, and not much else. It has existed for four years as of today. Yay, or something.

This week's show, subtitled "the show that must not be named," is brought to you by something slightly different.

Out of boredom, I set the challenge of not saying the name of my show during this week's Things and Stuff, with a few set bad things that would happen on each offense, as determined by listeners. The first time I said "Things and Stuff," I was to use reverb on the mic for the rest of my show. On the second offense, I had to pan the mic hard left or right, and keep it there. On the third offense, I had to switch from my lovely Heil PR20 to... my kick drum microphone. As you can imagine, all this and more occurred, although I did a pretty good job of not screwing up until close to the end of the show. Oh well. All in all, highly fun and incriminating to yours truly.

I show, at least to the extent allowed by microphones and acoustic things, my new Altec Lansing Orbit portable speaker system, which is the cutest thing I've come across in a while for small accessories, such as mp3 players, netbooks, PDAs, etc. It gets way too loud, and has far too much bass for the size.

How many keyboard demos do you know of which feature bad things happening to people? One is featured on the show, that being the Korg X5DR.

We hear some semi-rare stuff from the Beach Boys, as well as revisiting a few small clips from the Sunday Night Serenade in which Borris was live at Randy's place in West Virginia last November.

Oh, don't worry, there are other good things, too, but my brain is freezing, and not allowing me to put forth the proper effort to write it all down.
Instead, you can have a download about it.
I didn't get around to showing some other fun things this week, so stay tuned for more interesting stuff next week.

At this time, I'd like to go away, as staying awake is really becoming quite problematic for me. Enjoy the archive while I enjoy pretending not to exist for a while.

This week's show consisted largely of being slightly annoyed with Canadians, reminiscing about elementary school days, talk of bovines, icesickles, and the audio equivalent of a well-known derogatory statement. There, how's that for an incredibly vague description of the show?
click here to download a complete description.

I hate Sundays. It's 80 degrees F outside, and probably around 150 degrees in this room, which naturally traps heat, and contains things which output even more of it. The rest of the house isn't so bad, but it's not fun in here. Last week, we got six inches of snow, a good deal of ice, and tons of business and school closings. The window is open. Let the exhaust fumes and loud annoying people exist without delay!

On this week's fine edition of Things and Stuff, we make sure everyone knows that Borris is a bad, geeky audio person who, after all these years, still likes playing with effects processors. Hear the incredibly dumb effect combinations he came up with for your listening pleasure this week, which involve LFOs, dynamic envelope controllers, and feedback.

We hear a rather strange track from Landy's Mods, submitted by nick6489. Dumpsters, free food, and autotune?

Borris played a clip of a dying electronic clock recorded from Mommy's workplace, which was slightly amusing.

Mommy called in, shared some memories on the late Paul Harvey, and talked a bit about "da hood" and all of it's various issues, including domestic violence, though there was, unfortunately, no live audio from it. Oh well.

An old Fender Rhodes promo record from the early 70's, recorded by Herbie Hancock, was also featured, because Borris seems to like strange things of that nature, even if you don't.

Borris mentioned that February was the first month since May 2008 in which he has been able to successfully stream on every Saturday of the month

Other things happened as well.

Want more info? Why not have a little download. Enjoy this one, though. Borris enjoyed it almost, but not quite as much as he enjoys speaking/writing in the third person.

This week's show is now available for download. This week's show is pretty standard, other than a semi-broken live demonstration of Fideliphone with byron27, some tracks, and some random talk about pointless things, I.E. regular deal, for the most part.
Over all, I enjoyed it, and now you can too. Have fun!

Due to some incredibly crappy performance from TBRN's machine, as well as the ever so helpful staff at midphase... er not... TBRN has moved. The network is now hosted by a few linode servers in different datacenters, each with specific tasks for the sake of redundancy.
This means a huge downsize in terms of locally stored content, and available bandwidth per month.
However, it also means a striking increase in reliability, and more fun things to come in the future.

Most critical services are operational, but currently are accessible through a different address, until DNS hosting is moved and migrated to reflect the new changes.
Until said issues are resolved, you can listen to TBRN's live programming by visiting http://tbrn.andrelouis.com:8888/tbrn.ogg. Sorry, no automation at this time, though this will change as soon as some other issues are addressed.

All archives will be hosted off-site by Bluehost, conveniently provided by seather12, and links to past shows on this blog may or may not work until the entries are manually edited. At this point, I don't know, and, to be honest, I really don't want to manually go through and edit each "Things and Stuff" link to connect to something that works if it can be helped, but... well... whatever.
I have some time on my hands if it comes down to it, as I know some people find my show, and thus, TBRN, through this strange and odd misshapen thing that appears to be a blog of some sort.

Also, due to the server move, FX Radio has a new address. It can now be found at http://fx.pdaudio.net:8888/fx. The link for FX Radio has also been updated on PDAudio's semi-broken website as well.
Same great... um... great? content??? you're all used to. Only the address has been changed to protect the innocent.

Now, before I go to bed, I'd like to bring the following interesting application to your attention: Fideliphone.
This is a high quality p2p, full duplex audio app, similar in concept, at least to some extent, to AudioTX. Differences:

• It doesn't cost $800


• It uses the open-source Celt Codec for it's audio via UDP, rather than mp2, mp3 or pcm wav


• It plays nicer with points that are not connected via VPN

and much, much more... Well, eventually, anyway.
It works sort of like Speak Freely without a reflector, in that you and your remote party must be connected to each other. There is currently no way to send a connect request or anything fun, so that bit must be done very manually.
It just works when both machines have established a connection.

It's still very much in development, but so far, this promises to be a rather cool tool for things like net radio remote co-hosting, or just chatting with very high quality, stereo audio, which I've done quite a lot over the last day, including a three-hour Fidelicall with Jim Snowbarger, with stereo miking on both sides. that was fun!
In fact, there is currently no way to use this program in mono (though this will be implemented soon, I've been told). The idea was to get a stable stereo application working first, then implement other things on top.

Celt, which is a compromise between the quality of Ogg Vorbis and the latency of Speex, allows mono and stereo encoding at either 44,100 or 48,000 hz, and fixed bitrates from 32 to 500 kbps, or quality managed bitrate.
The quality of the Celt codec is adjustable within the program, although the default quality is right on the edge for users who have 256/384 kbps upstream.
In fact, due to a stupid issue with one of Charter's routers, I can't seem to send to Derek at anything higher than about 20 KBPS without errors, while I can send Andre, in london, much further away, a solid 100+ KBPS stream from this program with no break-up at all, with Andre sending a slightly smaller stream, somewhere around 90/93 KBPS to accommodate his upstream... and the quality is amazing at such a bitrate!
If you didn't notice, we're measuring in kilobites, not kilobits, so it can get pretty intensive at the upper end of the quality scale for some users. Still other people were not able to make good connections, despite having available bandwidth... Maybe some bad routing? Well, one of them was in New Zealand, another was onMCHSI which has lots of bad old AT&T routes, so it wouldn't be too surprising, or anything...

I'm very excited about the potential of Fideliphone, as I've been looking for an alternative to the highly expensive AudioTX for some time now, and it looks like this could very well do it.

I, however, have not been looking for bed replacements in a while, although I've decided to make use of the one I've already got. They're convenient, these bed devices. I like'em.

P.S. I bought a Samson C com mono optical compressor for $29, for use with my mic upstairs. It should be here tomorrow. Just thought you'd all like to know.

This week's Things and Stuff was streamed earlier than usual: 5:00 PM EST. Thanks to a really boring Saturday lineup this week, I decided to stream after Derek's show. However, things broke rather hard for him, and he didn't do his full three hours, so I thought I'd start the show at 4:00 PM. Well, that broke too, since, right before Derek was supposed to go away, the server fell over, and then came back at around 4:30 or so. Rather than starting then, I waited until 5:00, at which point I had a pretty interesting show, consisting of lots of calls from the UK from people who would not normally be able to listen live, as my show isn't the most conveniently scheduled one for that part of the world.

Various things were discussed, including the introduction of a Poultry power plant in central North Carolina and it's associated bad puns, a rather boring demonstration of a new set of hot rod drum sticks, and much more that I can't bother to list here, since I'm lazy like that.

Now that I've said my bit, it's time for you to see what fun things you missed... or not.

At the time of this writing, I would normally be on the air. Instead, I'm uploading the archive for a show that should, theoretically, still be in progress. Fun times.

Other than the fact that I streamed this week's show in both Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Flac lossless, which Klango Player can stream, by the way, it wasn't really so different than any other show.
No, there won't be a flac version of the archive, unless you *really* want one, and you have to give me something nice in return to prove it.

I spent quite a long time complaining about Vivian's various problems over the week, demonstrated why it is a bad idea to put an arosol powered air horn under water, which was a suggestion from byron27 a couple of weeks ago, played around a bit with the old Ensoniq TS-12 and Yamaha Motif, and generally made bad things happen. All in all, a very typical show, though a bit light on external support. Oh well, sometimes less distractions make other stuff more interesting.

I accidentally encoded this file at a higher bitrate than normal, and I can't be bothered to re-encode and re-upload, so enjoy this file, which is a little bit shorter than normal, yet almost 40mb larger. For anyone who cares, I again bypassed the Behringer Virtualizer for archiving, though it appeared on the stream. For some reason, I don't like the sound it's putting out anymore, no matter what I do to it. Oh well... I like being dead, so dead I shall be.

On February 8, 2000, I had broadband internet installed in my house for the first time.
Now, nine years later, I'm commemorating this anniversary in a really dumb way.
Not only will I broadcast using the standard Ogg Vorbis stream to TBRN, but I'll also be providing an Ogg Flac lossless version as well, just because I can.

Hear every fine detail that you would not otherwise notice or care about. Cringe at the artifacts of any mp3 or ogg file I use as music or bed material. Experience the true high fidelity of lossless streaming as it was never meant to be heard... well, assuming your player of choice can stream Ogg Flac.
Unfortunately for Winamp users, the libraries are too old to support Ogg Flac streaming playback. However, if you use Foobar 2000 for windows (unsure of programs for Linux and mac, though I'm sure they exist), plug the address http://tbrn.net:8888/tas.flac into your ogg flac streaming player of choice tonight at 10:00 PM EST. Doing so before then will yield a non-working feed.
Otherwise, feel free to listen in any of the normal ways provided by TBRN, as I do plan on an interesting show tonight, geeky bandwidth-using thingy or not.

If you are as geeky as I am, chances are you have some deep, dark, hidden secrets that you'd rather not have published... Actually, that has no relevance here, so forget I said that.

This is a one-off deal. I don't plan on doing this every week, or, in fact, ever again after this particular show.
Mainly, I'm just bored and feel like wasting some resources. Yeah, that's about it.

Welcome to the second show in as many days.

This one was rather interesting, as it features the all new random breaky-noise button, as well as a few other buttons that pull up random things, and can sometimes make phone calls more interesting.

We talk about highly expensive Italian cars that apparently buckel just as easily as a Kia, go "moo" several times, show the rather respectible outgoing quality from the Nokia E71's voip client, get a phone call from Mommy, and much more.

Something is slightly broken with my Behringer ultramizer configuration, and it sounds a little too processed on the bottom end for my taste. It decided to obtain a subtle excited digital FM processing quality, without the terribly horrible bad clear channel compression. I don't particularly like that sound, although no one complained about it, other than me and my headphones.
I only discovered this issue last minute, so to avoid playing with it in realtime on the show, which is always a bad thing, I simply recorded the archive without the Ultramizer in the chain (although it was used for streaming), and did mastering post-production in sound forge. This is one of the few times when having the Phonic's main firewire l/r routable to main mix on the board without the inserts in the chain comes in handy.
I actually think it sounds a little better with Wave Hammer than with the Ultramizer, but I have both versions of the stream, if lots of people complain about the quality of this archive... or something. Let's see who actually notices or cares.

Yeah, despite the above description, it's actually not boring. So, go on, have a download of your very own.

I, in the mean time, will enjoy some quality time with my sheets and covers.

P.S. It's 2:10 AM.

This week's show can best be described in two words: train wreck!
Lino the telemarketer, Decendy, the new month in the gregorian calendar which has even worse representation than February, terribly horrible bad swedish songs, and some other issues... Yep, typical show.
I went on for a few extra minutes, because an Irish guy told me to. It was a bad idea, so I didn't do it for too long.

This wasn't one of my favorite shows, but it could have been a lot worse as well.
Fortunately, it's over, and I can put it behind me. The only cool thing about this particular show is that, since I have my new cable connection, the archive uploaded in 9 minutes. I like that.

Now I can play with my new toy, the Nokia e71-2, which, by the way, is the first Nokia phone I've seen in a very long time that doesn't go "gug" in my coverage area, plus the sip client sounds awesome as well. Too bad it doesn't fully support Talks yet, but it works enough to use most things with a little weirdness. It's incredibly quick to respond about things though. I'll definitely be loving it when the next Talks comes out. Mobile Speak fully supports it, but compared to Talks, it's incredibly sluggish and bad.

Oh well, enough blind talk for the day. I'm going back to bed.