My new microphone – Behringer C-1U + audio sample
Lately, I have been thinking about the audio quality of my voice when I’m recording instructional videos.
I have been using the Logitech H555 foldable headset to record the audio in my videos, but as good as the sound quality is in the headset, the microphone quality is only good for Skype conversations in my opinion.
I wanted to get a better audio quality in my recordings, so I started looking around, reading reviews and listening to audio samples of different microphones.
I finally made a choice and bought the Behringer C-1U condenser microphone.
The C-1U microphone has a cardioid pickup pattern which reduces the noise from the surrounding environment. I actually record in a noisy environment (two desktop computers with fans blowing .. you can imagine the noise), and there is hardly any noise picked up from the environment. You can listen to the audio sample in the video below to get an idea of what it sounds like.
Getting high PR backlinks for free
I just made a video teaching you how to get high PR backlinks for free, using only free tools!
Here’s the video:
The tools I used are:
2. SEOQuake
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The Pastors Prayer
What’s the Pastors Prayer?
This is a beer that I made specifically for Travis Goodspeed – aka “The Pastor”. He’s coming to Iceland to speak at a security conference that’s taking place.
This beer is a non-IPA IPA .. essentially a low gravity IPA (too low for the style) but with such a hoppy punch – it’ll kick your teeth in.
Who’s the Pastor?
“The Pastor” is also known as Travis Goodspeed – a security researcher. You can find his blog over at http://travisgoodspeed.blogspot.com/.
He’s also got a great set of images over at http://www.flickr.com/photos/travisgoodspeed/ - most of them really cool. You can find schematics, images of IC’s and more.. check it out.
His twitter handle is @travisgoodspeed
Why is Travis called “the Pastor”?
Here’s his own description on Twitter:
Angry street preacher of the Gospel of the Weird Machines.
And one of his “sermon” tweets:
A large website found its password hashes on some forum somewhere. All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.
I don’t know if he’s legally a pastor (maybe he’ll comment and tell us …)
On to the good stuff – the recipe for the beer
Grainbill
- 5139 grams of Weyermann Pale Ale malt
- 657 grams of Biscuit malt
- 124 grams of Crystal 20
- 524 grams of Munich 20
- 400 grams of Flaked Barley
Hops
- 60 minutes 19 grams Columbus (14,5%)
- 45 minutes 19 grams Simcoe (12,2%)
- 30 minutes 19 grams Cascade (7%)
- 15 minutes 19 grams Cascade (7%)
- 5 minutes 19 grams Columbus (15,5%)
- 0 minutes 19 grams Simcoe (12,2%)
- Dryhop for 7 days 10 grams Columbus (14,5%)
- Dryhop for 7 days 10 grams Simcoe (12,2%)
- Dryhop for 7 days 10 grams Cascade (7%)
Mash
This beer was made using a Brew in a Bag (BIAB) method.
42 liters of water (with the mineral level adjusted to a “normal” water profile)
Mash at 66°C for 60 minutes
Raise temperature to 75°C and wait for 10 minutes
Pull the bag out and squeeze it.
Yeast and fermentation
Used Lallemand Nottingham yeast – 1 packet (~12 grams), rehydrated.
Ferment at 18°C for 7 days, then dry hop for 7 days.
Other ingredients
Yeast nutrient in the last 10 minutes of the boil.
Whirlfloc in the last 10 minutes of the boil.
You can crash chill after fermentation and use fining agents like gelatin to get the beer crystal clear. I didn’t bother doing that (time shortage).
Boil volumes, gravity and notes
Pre-boil volume was 42L (I must have mashed with 47 liters instead of 42 liters of water … whoooops). This meant a 2 hour boil to get the final volume close to 30L.
Pre-boil refractometry was approximately 8.2 brix – which is about 1.031 specific gravity – lower than the anticipated 1.042 but since the volume was 5 liters more than expected I didn’t worry.
End of boil volume was 29L.
End of boil refractometry was approximately 12 brix – which is about 1.044 specific gravity – lower than the anticipated 1.055. Oh well, I guess the beer is just lighter and more refreshing instead 
End of fermentation refractometry was approximately 5.6 brix – which is about 1.010 according to Sean Terrill’s new refractometry calculator.
This makes the beer about 4.6-4.8% ABV. Not bad.
You can find the recipe on hopville: http://hopville.com/recipe/1593844/american-ipa-recipes/the-pastors-prayer
Beer porn
A sample of the beer – yummy, hoppy and delicious!!
65 33 cl bottles of Pastors Prayer – 21,45 liters or 5.66 US gallon OR 4.7 Imperial gallon
Tasting notes…
Coming soon in another post.
I did taste the beer yesterday, after it had 1 day of carbonating in the bottle .. it’s almost done carbonating!! :O
Go Notty!!
Please comment below and share on the left.
Grill + laptop = disaster?
Have you ever wondered what would happen if your laptop and your grill had an affair ….?
If you lost your computer RIGHT NOW, would you be losing all your data? (read the end..)
Well .. it just so happens that I was fortunate enough to learn of what happens after an affair like that..!! Read More…
Open reply to Patrick Hollingdale regarding BIABacus
[WARNING: This is a long post .. reading required]
Dear Patrick,
(For those of you who do not know who Patrick Hollingdale is, he is also known as Pat, PistolPatch, BIABrewer.info, Nuff on brewing forums, and probably has many more pseudonyms. He is the owner and dictator of the Biabrewer.info forum)
I write this open reply because you chose not to disclose the recipients of the e-mail, thus my only option is to send you an open reply to ensure fairness of all parties. This way I know other people are able to reach this freely without moderation.
I do not know what you are trying by putting other recipients in the BCC field, my best guess is that you’re putting on a power-play attack as you so often do when people don’t follow your ambiguous bidding.
Email 1: Regarding no respect
Here is your original e-mail
From: Patrick Hollingdale <patrick.hollingdale@live.com.au>
Date: Tue, Jul 3, 2012 at 5:10 PM
Subject: Why no respect for me or Kostas or Lambert? (Sorry, should have said…)
To: Sig <nikkiclau@gmail.com>Sig, I’ve always treated you well but am in a pondering mood tonight.I wrote you a really nice email a week or so ago (I’ll find it and post it below) and have still had no reply. Why?Kostas and Lambert also treated with you the utmost respect and tried to correspond with you but you never/hardly ever replied to them as well. Why?I have no idea on how to deal with you now. To me and them you have become a bit of a weirdo now. Why wouldn’t you reply to us? You put in a lot of hours to this project but never anywhere near the hours I did and, even then, I still gave you the opportunity of equal value.So this email asks, “Why have you shown no respect for me or Kostas or Lambert or the forum?” Obvious answer is you are weird.But, I’m sorry, I should have said, “Given your actions, what would you like me to say about you in the BIABacus credits when I write them?” Let me know what bits you think have made a real difference or what bits you think you might like to contribute in the future? I think there is a lot you can still offer but, I also think I am bullshitting here. I am trying to give you credit for things you never did.We can embellish things, if you want, to make you look good because nothing can be worse than what you have actually done.I’m all ears.PatAnd, to the bcc guys, here is a copy of my last email to Sig to which, like countless others, I never have received a reply…
The e-mail ends here. The copy of this e-mail was not present. I will paste the e-mail that is being referred to below the answers to this e-mail.
My response to e-mail 1
Here are my responses to your e-mail:
Response 1
Sig, I’ve always treated you well but am in a pondering mood tonight.
I do not know where you got this idea that you have always treated me well, but this is far from the truth in my experience, Patrick. You tend to treat people around you very badly from time to time, I have been no exception.
Response 2
I wrote you a really nice email a week or so ago (I’ll find it and post it below) and have still had no reply. Why?
I have not gotten around to answering your e-mail, I will however answer it in this post since I am taking the time for it now. It has been ~5 days, 71% of a week.
Response 3
Kostas and Lambert also treated with you the utmost respect and tried to correspond with you but you never/hardly ever replied to them as well. Why?
I don’t know what you are talking about. The only e-mail I found I have not replied to Kostas is on Febuary 2nd and those were answered in a Skype chat IIRC. Granted, I am not the quickest to reply to e-mails sometimes, but I do try my best to reply once I am able. That is most often within a week. Maybe you’re talking about some forum post where things got blurry (as they usually do when you’re trying to make some point across). Maybe you can expand on what you are talking about.
Response 4
I have no idea on how to deal with you now. To me and them you have become a bit of a weirdo now. Why wouldn’t you reply to us?
I still do not know what you are talking about. See my previous answer. It’s not nice to call people weirdos though. I find this personal comment very offensive.
Response 5
You put in a lot of hours to this project but never anywhere near the hours I did and, even then, I still gave you the opportunity of equal value.
Dear Patrick, you seem to think hours are more worth than actual value and that’s a shame.
If you take 10 hours to do the same thing I do in 10 minutes, does that make the value of my 10 minutes less than your 10 hours? No, the value is the same.
Work smart, not hard (especially in software development).
I put in a lot of hours, and you probably put in a lot more BUT many times I put in work for a half an hour that you had been struggling with for hours or even days. I do not consider that a good contribution on your behalf, especially since you knew you are not too good at math, programming or efficient layout work (time wise).
Also, a lot of my time went into fixing things you seemed to be breaking time and time again.
As for opportunity of equal value, I was on my way to write a brewing software that had a particular purpose and it was not meant to be a project associated with anyone but myself. I mentioned this to you when we began working on this project. It was no less me who gave you the opportunity of equal value. Your brewing software is however stuck in a similar place as it was when I begun since you have started once again, it appears, from scratch.
Time I put in the project I took from my family, my whole summer vacation 2011, my company and other things that give me revenue with the idea that this project would head somewhere (it didn’t and it still isn’t).
Response 6
So this email asks, “Why have you shown no respect for me or Kostas or Lambert or the forum?” Obvious answer is you are weird.
For Kostas and Lambert, I do not know how I have shown them disrespect.
For you, Patrick, I do not know how I have shown you any disrespect.
For the forum, I do not know how I have shown the forum any disrespect.
As for the part calling me outright weird, this is very disrespectful and obnoxious of you, Patrick.
Response 7
But, I’m sorry, I should have said, “Given your actions, what would you like me to say about you in the BIABacus credits when I write them?” Let me know what bits you think have made a real difference or what bits you think you might like to contribute in the future? I think there is a lot you can still offer but, I also think I am bullshitting here. I am trying to give you credit for things you never did.
I do not know how you intend to present the credits, so please put credits where they are due.
I noticed that you have removed everything that has been done to date (once again..) and started from scratch.
I take credit on many of the formulas since I (re)wrote a lot of them. I do not know if you agree (and quite frankly, do not care), but I took the time to create the equations, even though you do not understand them all. They are all in a Google Document that shows the history of this.
I do not know what else is left that I have done (I imagine you started with a fresh excel sheet) except maybe thought and ideas on a lot of things.
I have little or no interest in continuing to contribute since I know all contributions are worthless. You manage to destroy most of the contributions that come your way. This happened a couple of times when I was working on the BIABacus Excel spreadsheet/program.
Please give credits where they are due, don’t try to be some sort of Messiah.
Response 8
We can embellish things, if you want, to make you look good because nothing can be worse than what you have actually done.
What are you talking about?
I simply don’t know how to respond to such a stupid and childish comment.
Response 9
I’m all ears.PatAnd, to the bcc guys, here is a copy of my last email to Sig to which, like countless others, I never have received a reply…
I have gone through all my communication with you numerous times when you have made the accusations that I do not reply. I simply am not able to find ANY e-mails or direct questions that I have not answered.
I know that you have the tedious tendency to ask so indirect and ambiguous questions that they give the best professors in English a wicked workout to dig through and find. I (like many others that have the same problem with you) am simply not able to dig through your garbage of a text to find a question. The worst questions you ask though, are the questions where you think you are asking a question, but are in fact making a vague statement.
In the past I have kindly requested of you to ask direct questions, yet you have persisted and ignored this request.
While responding to this e-mail, I got the following reply from Patrick.
Reply from Patrick on his own e-mail
From: Patrick Hollingdale <patrick.hollingdale@live.com.au>
Date: Tue, Jul 3, 2012 at 8:07 PM
Subject: Re: Why no respect for me or Kostas or Lambert? (Sorry, should have said…)
To: Sig <nikkiclau@gmail.com>Just re-read one of my sentences below – “Obvious answer is you are weird.”Hahahaha! That is an obvious sign that I am still working at 4am for the third or fourth day in a row.That sentence should have been written as, “Such uncourteous behaviour is really weird.”Yep, that’s better!There should be enough in today’s correspondence to easily focus any blame on me. Easy peasy to do but it still won’t be true.Annoying stuff!Pat
My response to this e-mail
It’s never an obvious sign how long you work, you always seem to be cranky and pissed off at everyone, steaming on whoever pisses you most off at the time you boil over.
You wrote a very obnoxious sentance, even if you meant it in another way.
You do very well at assigning blames. I won’t be focusing on much of that.
Working long hours is no excuse for bad behavior. Own up to what you say and do.
Email 2:
Below is the e-mail sent from Patrick that I did not reply to in 5 days.
From: Patrick Hollingdale <patrick.hollingdale@live.com.au>
Date: Tue, Jul 3, 2012 at 5:22 PM
Subject: Fw: Hey there fella!
To: Sig <nikkiclau@gmail.com>Oops! Forgot to copy my last email to Sig to you others. Here it is and I am still awaiting a reply from it and the many others I or Kostas or Lambert have written months ago. Here it is…Been wanting to write for ages to see how you are. I’ve been waiting for a time when I didn’t have a hundred things flying around my head and could just sit back and say hello. Well, have finally found that time!Nice to see your post on the mill and thanks also for posting on my birthday. When’s yours btw?Has everything being going well at your end?All’s good here. Have been ploughing on with the BIABacus making at as good as possible without macros so as to keep the LibreOffice people happy – lol! I think the end result will be good enough until we can find some old bugger who has retired from programming and has nothing to do for about two years. Kostas did a good job on the db but then *MODERATED: Removed due to respect of private matters* My goodness!
Anyway, just wanted to say howdy.Spot ya!Pat
My response to e-mail 2
Response 1
Been wanting to write for ages to see how you are. I’ve been waiting for a time when I didn’t have a hundred things flying around my head and could just sit back and say hello. Well, have finally found that time!
Hi, nice to hear from you Pat 
Response 2
Nice to see your post on the mill and thanks also for posting on my birthday. When’s yours btw?
Thanks. My birthday is on May the 21st.
Response 3
Has everything being going well at your end?
Sure, things have just been really busy with my day job, my start-up company and my family (one newborn baby). How about you, really busy as usual?
Response 4
All’s good here. Have been ploughing on with the BIABacus making at as good as possible without macros so as to keep the LibreOffice people happy – lol! I think the end result will be good enough until we can find some old bugger who has retired from programming and has nothing to do for about two years
*MODERATED: Removed due to respect of private matters* I know he did a fantastic job on the db design.
*MODERATED: Removed due to respect of private matters*
Response 5
Anyway, just wanted to say howdy.Spot ya!
Howdy.
Response 6
Oops! Forgot to copy my last email to Sig to you others. Here it is and I am still awaiting a reply from it and the many others I or Kostas or Lambert have written months ago. Here it is…
Here this is again … I don’t know where there are unanswered questions. Expand instead of ranting!
Why this rant?
This is almost identical to what I’ve seen from Patrick as attacks on other people. They usually start as a “nice ways” to get his will done (email 1) .. then escalate (email 2) .. and then escalate until there is a finale – the other person gives in (or is indespensible)
This open reply makes sure that whatever I write and whatever Patrick writes remains in the open, freely interpreted by anyone as they like.
My predictions on the BIABacus future?
I imagine that the BIABacus will not go anywhere beyond a semi-working spreadsheet with Patrick as a project leader.
In my experience with Patrick, he is unable to take a software project forward to the end simply because of bad leadership.
If he offers you to be a part of his project, please take an educated decision, no matter what the decision is.
Patrick is not a good project leader, nor a software engineer (no matter what he says about his days in MS Access). He likes to micromanage and try to understand every small detail everyone else is doing, this is the main cause of BIABacus slow development. Patrick also doesn’t understand bug reporting software or any other software that helps and accelerates general development.
Conclusion..?
Patrick is a really great guy (even though this post focuses on negative things) .. just not always.
When someone pisses him off (usually due to some obscure imagined or badly interpreted reasons) he isn’t such a great guy. He usually attacks people, using e-mail communication (as you see above) or personal messages in the BIABrewer.info forum.
I know this because I have seen it and ignored it in the past (perhaps I should have spoken up about this in the past …). I have only seen this to users of the BIABrewer.info forum, but I imagine that Patrick is the same to most people that are around him. Some of the people he attacks usually get so pissed off that they stop using the BIABrewer.info forum.
People I know that have been a victim of his attacks are:
- Founded the “BIAB – Brew In A Bag” Facebook page
- Patrick didn’t like it when Scott mentioned that Patrick was moderating heavily. IIRC, Patrick replied that he almost never moderates. I know this to be false, Patrick moderates (to date, Patrick has moderated other peoples posts 519 times according to my sources).
- Eoin and his wife sow custom BIAB bags. Patrick didn’t like it when he didn’t get “his cut” of the action. Patrick claims that Eoin promised to give him a percentage of the sales. I don’t know the facts here, but I’m guessing that Patrick was expecting something for nothing.
- Patrick didn’t like it when Eoin advertised his custom BIAB bags on the BIABrewer.info forum without asking him first.
*NAME REMOVED DUE TO REQUEST*
Stuart Espey
- Really smart guy that figured out some formulas (for instance, “auto efficiency adjustment”)
- Don’t remember what he did to piss Patrick off, but I remember there was something.
There are more
In conclusion, working with Patrick can sometimes be OK , hellish at other times.
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Do you have any comments? Please comment in the box below.
*EDIT*
Please note that the people mentioned in the list above have nothing to do with this e-mail communcation between me and Patrick.
If you want to have your name removed, please notify me and I will remove it.
DIY telephone handset-headset switch box
I wanted to do something a bit different one day at work (I had been working like a crazy man and had to give my brain something completely different to do to keep my sanity), so I decided that I wanted to be able to use a computer headset instead of the handset at work. The best part of this switch is that you don’t need any active or passive components to change impedance or signals!!
4P4C (sometimes called RJ9, RJ9, RJ10 or RJ22) plug information
To begin with, you must understand how telephone handsets are wired to the 4P4C plug. Fortunately, the connections are dead simple to understand. The 4P4C connector has 4 contacts. Contact 1 and 4 (the two outermost) are the microphone contacts (polarity doesn’t matter here) and contact 2 and 3 (the ones in the middle) are the speaker contacts. See diagram 1 for more details.
Diagram 1 - 4P4C (RJ9 RJ10 RJ22) contact diagram - ©DnetSvg CC-BY-2.5.
Schematic Diagram
Telephone headset switch schematic diagram
As you can see, the schematic diagram is very simple. The most complex part in this schematic is connecting the ground signal together .
Part list
2x 3.5mm stereo jack connectors, preferrably the screwed type.
2x 4P4C (RJ9, RJ10, RJ22) connectors
1x dual state switch
1x hobby box (plastic box to keep everything tidy)
Some spare wire (I used a bit of Cat5 cable)
Solder
(Super)glue
Assembly
Here you can see the internal wiring of the switch box. To hold the 4P4C connector, I used superglue.
Handset switch wiring
Below you can see the box completed. The only thing left to do is to label it and put it to use.
Completed switch box
The switchbox on my desk. It is really easy to use and the sound quality doesn’t suffer a bit (the sound quality in phone systems are horrible to start with .. )
Switchbox in use on my desk.
If you build this box, please let me know in the comments below!!
Did SendMail screw your server?
Recently I got a phone call about a Solaris server being unresponsive.
I immediately went to investigate and soon found out that SendMail had been sending tons of e-mails (however it couldn’t send it anywhere so everything was stuck in the spool directory…).
The server was unable to boot up normally, fsck gave the error that the OS hard drive was not needed to be checked in single-user mode.
Sure enough, I boot the server into single-user mode and run fsck, allowing it to fix all the errors it finds. Unfortunately fsck complained that it wasn’t able to fix the system partition. This was bad.
What was next in line was to destroy the current mirror (the system disk was mirrored .. didn’t I tell you? ), boot on a hard drive (not on the raid mirror) and run fsck on that disk.
The machine booted successfully on the hard drive and allowed me to boot into single user mode. After the boot I ran fsck on the hard drive (and I had to use the -y option so the computer would say yes to all..). After allowing the server to run fsck for 48 hours (and a lot of inodes had been reconnected), I started to investigate this issue further. I checked the count of inodes in use and saw that the count was a whopping 1.2 million inodes. At the 48 hour mark, fsck had fixed ~300K inodes. Needless to say, this would take a lot of days to complete.
Then I had the ingenious idea of just clearing out the rest of the inodes, it must be quicker than fixing all the inodes, right?
Well, after a bit of googling, I found out that there is a command in Solaris for this … clri, my life saver!
To clear inodes 300K – 1.2 million, I had to write a one-liner for loop:
for i in {300000..1400000}; do clri /dev/dsk/c0t3d0s6 $i; done;
Sure enough, 6 hours later, I had cleared all the inodes from 300K – 1.2M. Then I only ran fsck to fix the remaining errors (took a little while, only a half an hour or so..) and then I booted up the machine. This trick worked and saved me and the customer quite a number of days in downtime.
The cause of all this headache was badly crafted cron lines and SendMail. A couple of cron lines told cron to check something (and the scripts output messages) every single minute and of course cron piped the output directly to sendmail, which was not correctly configured.
This amounts to 1440 e-mails per day per line. Then some day something flipped and attemped to send an e-mail, but sendmail was unable to send the mail, causing sendmail to send a mail about not being able to send a mail etc etc (sendmail loop of death). This causes an e-mail loop that will cause the server to crash.
My recommendation to anyone to prevent this type of error is to make sure that sendmail is correctly configured and you prevent cron e-mail spam by appending ” 2>&1 /dev/null” to your cron lines that run a lot (and you don’t care about the output). This will pipe all messages and errors to /dev/null.
Got a SendMail horror story? Please post it in the comments section below
No brew for a while …..
Unfortunately I haven’t been able to brew for some time now, but one of my last beers is still aging. This beer was supposed to be a Christmas beer, but I put too much mint in it (waiting for it to age off).
You can see the recipe here: Christmas Chocolate Mint Stout
The first post on this website.. Introductions
Since this is my first post, I will introduce myself to you, the reader.
Who am I?
My name is Sigurður and I live in Iceland. I have lived in Iceland for all my life, and I quite like it.
I work as a service engineer in the medical imaging industry. My work revolves mostly around keeping radiology departments and companies running and up to date.
My hobbies include (but are not limited to) computers, equipment designing (creating gadgets) and fermentation of beer and cheese.
I like knowing the people that read my posts, so please leave a comment and introduce yourself in the comment section.
My name is Sigurður and welcome to my website!