phutureTEK

Walk Sign

Praveen — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 06:51:38 +0000

Picked up a recording of the audio from a crosswalk and mixed it into a track

Walk Sign (mp3 link)

On SoundCloud

Im Wald

Praveen — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 01:06:49 +0000

Here’s a track that’s more of my kind of sound. Still a work in progress…

Im Wald (mp3 link)

On SoundCloud

My first track

Praveen — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 07:42:50 +0000

Here’s a taste of what I’m working on. I got the inspiration for Stimmen aus Tibet (i.e. Voices from Tibet) after watching a few movies on Tibet and saw the Tibetan monks performing Kargyraa. I love deep, dark sounds and wanted to incorporate the throat singing vocals with fierce tribal elements to create a sense of urgency. In the background, you can hear Japanese taiko drums in full force. Enjoy!

Stimmen aus Tibet (mp3 link)

ARIA imposes new license to let DJs format shift music

Praveen — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 21:40:13 +0000

The ARIA in it’s infinite wisdom has once again come up with an aggressive plan towards copyright infringement. This time they are targeting DJs. ARIA is introducing a new license to let format shift their music to use at gigs. DJs now have to purchase a license fee to copy “legal” music to their digital devices such as iPods, laptops or compilations.

This is absolutely ridiculous! Of all the people, they want to go after the DJs who help promote artist’s music at clubs and other venues? How many times have you walked up to a DJ playing a cool track asking for the artist and track name and end up buying buying the music the next day? Charging DJs license fees to format shift their legal music for convenience just seems insane. They get license fees from clubs anyway.

In this digital age, laptops and iPods are increasingly penetrating the clubbing scene for convenience and more importantly the technology allows the DJs to carry a bigger collection of music to play at venues. Plus it saves a lot of time searching for records in the dark. Although I’m not a big fan of substituting digital copies of vinyls, one can’t argue the obvious benefits to the DJ. So now the DJs have to carry boatloads of CDs and vinyls to avoid licensing fees. How does it help? It doesn’t solve the copyright infringement problems that the ARIA is so worried about.

What’s going to happen is that the Aussie DJs are just going to start playing outside of Australia and in the end the public is going to get affected. Mind you, this is the same public that goes out and buys legit music. Who is losing out in the end?

Check out…

iPod sad face icon

Praveen — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 19:01:41 +0000

Your iPod suddenly displays a sad face icon when you power it on. Well, it doesn’t mean that it’s angry with you but it’s actually displaying an error code that it’s not in good health.

I saw something similar on my iPod and I freaked out! My iPod showed a folder icon with an exclamation mark. Alas, all my mp3′s were gone at that point. The only option was to restore the iPod to the factory defaults. But that didn’t work either.

Here are a few things you need to consider before you send it out to Apple for a replacement hard disk

First things first, BACKUP YOUR IPOD before you update the firmware! I found this the hard way. It all started when I tried transferring my latest tunes to the iPod and saw a creepy error message

“Attempting to copy to the disk failed. An unknown error occurred (-36).”

Thinking that my iPod hard drive had crashed, I tried to flash the firmware to the latest available from Apple. That was a huge mistake since the firmware update failed rendering it useless. After some digging around I found that the error was USB related and you can workaround the issue by plugging your iPod onto another USB port or a different machine.

Also, you might want to try the in-built iPod diagnostic mode to run some checks on your HDD before you attempt to replace the hard drive. More information about this can be found here

I found a handy tutorial for replacing the HDD on your iPod here. The article has some very interesting comments from many iPod users.

Good luck!

Welcome to the new phuturetek.com…

Praveen — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 02:21:53 +0000

I just finished replacing PHP Nuke 5.6 with WordPress and the WPG2 plugin. Why? Well, the website originally started off with great plans and so PHP Nuke fit the bill at that time for it’s ease of customization and feature-rich plugins. As time went by, the only features I ended up using was Articles and Gallery2.

Recently, I experienced an “old” issue with PHP Nuke’s administration menu that displays “Access Denied” for the admin user account. I gave up after trying to Google the problem for hours and fixing it since there are multiple issues and workarounds for the same error message and finding the right fix was not easy!

I decided it’s time to retire the old CMS system and replace it with something simpler to manage. WordPress fit the bill nicely and I’m currently in the process of customizing the features and look and feel. So it’s going to take some time before a layout is finalized.

Hang in there and keep checking on progress!