LookIt

Good, cheap independent music

If you like undiscovered music, you certainly should be visiting CD Baby fairly often. They carry a zillion not-yet-famous musicians in a wide variety of styles; their genre list includes blues, classical, country, easy listening, electronic, folk, gospel, hip hop/rap, jazz, kids/family, latin, metal, new age, pop, rock, spoken word, urban/r&b, and world.

Most discs are in the normal $10-$15 range, but they rotate many of their albums through their $5 special offer. At any given time, about 6,000 of their titles are $5 each as long as you buy three or more of those titles. They change these periodically, which makes the offer all that much more fun.

During a recent $5-each buying spree, I bought Celery Moonbeams by the Boatbuilders and The Grass Sun by Water. Both were great, and I'm pretty bummed that neither band has additional albums. (The other two discs I bought were just OK, not worth telling folks to go look for.)

If buying new releases of established artists at $15 is getting you down, you may find it fun to try buying a wad of discount music from CD Baby.

Gershwin Hotel review

I stayed at the Gershwin Hotel in New York city last week. Given that some folks find hotel reviews on the web, I thought I would suggest to, and warn of, this one. It is inexpensive (particularly when found through a web hotel service), fairly convenient (easy walk to two different subway lines), and in a not-too-busy part of town (27th Street and 5th Ave.). It is quite funky in a good way: there's real modern art on the walls in the lobby and the guest floors, and it feels like a refurbished old-style NY apartment building. On the other hand, it is really loud at night: there is a dance club on the first floor, the walls and doors are not that great at cutting down sound travel, and there is no carpeting anywhere in the building. I was able to sleep with earplugs, but the occasional slamming door woke me up because of the lack of sound absorption.

Overall, I'd say stay there if you want less expensive and quite interesting. However, a few blocks away is the Thirty Thirty, which a friend stayed at for less money. He gave it high marks. I'll stay there next time, if for no other reason than the quiet.

Stupid nutrition facts

The bottled water in front of me has a "Nutrition Facts" box that says it has 0% of everything nutritious, and is not a significant source of other good stuff. If there are more than 5% of Americans think that bottled water has any noticeable nutrition, we're in deep trouble. But I don't think we are; I think its just silly to put the "Nutrition Facts" box on a bottle of water.

Fun with Flash

If your browser does Flash, have a bit of fun here.

Still with Movable Type

Many folks are unhappy about the new licensing fees for Movable Type 3.0. I'm not; I'm sticking with the current version for a while. It does what I want, reliably. (And, yes, I contributed money for it long ago.) Maybe next year I'll switch, but that switch might be to MT 3.0.

If you like Vonnegut

...then read his latest in In These Times.

Odd and nice

Room, via Bifurcated Rivets.

Blogworld news

The Blogger service was updated. Many people love it, but not everyone is impressed.

Making a FreeBSD box a NAT

Few folks who read this blog will need to know this, but I guess that's true of most of the stuff I post.

I switched ISPs for my home DSL to one who only gives me one IP address, and serves it by DHCP (meaning that my IP address changes over time). I have multiple computers in the house, so I needed to set up a NAT to allow them all to share the one address.

My NETGEAR DG814 modem/router works fine for this setup, but NATs tend not to work with interesting protocols, so I wanted to be able to run program on the NAT router, which meant that I had to roll my own box. I chose FreeBSD because that's what I use on all my servers. It's flexible, it works, and it's well-supported. Unfortunately, that meant that I had to get a new DSL modem, since I couldn't figure out how to put the NETGEAR into bridge mode.

The FreeBSD handbook said I should use one method for NAT that required recompiling the kernel, which I did, but I couldn't get the NAT to work. So, I sent a question to the FreeBSD general questions mailing list, and got back a reply that told me I should be using a different method called ipnat. With a bit more help from the person who answered my original question, I have the spare FreeBSD box running as a NAT. If I need to add services on the box, I can.

The gory details are that I used ipnat. My system gets its external address from my ISP's DHCP server on interface em0. The machines in my house are connected to a switch that is attached to itnerface rl0.

Relevant stuff in /etc/rc.conf:

ifconfig_em0="DHCP"
ifconfig_rl0="inet 10.20.30.1 netmask 255.255.255.0"
gateway_enable="YES"
ipfilter_enable="YES"
ipnat_enable="YES"
ipnat_rules="/etc/ipnat.conf"

Contents of /etc/ipnat.conf:

map em0 10.20.30.0/24 -> 0/32

That's it. I have a great NAT, there's no firewall getting in the way of things, I can put services on the box if I need to gateway them to the NAT, and so on. I did this on a recent fast box that I have, but you can set up a NAT on any old creaky PC that has almost any tiny amount of RAM. FreeBSD wins again.

Great suggestion for Apple

Over at Macintouch, Jacques R. Blier gives Apple, and Apple's customers, a new opportunity. He says:
I've always found it strange to see digital songs costing more than regular CDs... However, my biggest question is this one? Why don't Apple provide a way for ordering up a physical CD when a client wants a complete CD. Now that iTMS is one year old, Apple should innovate again and help their customers buy a CD (through the Apple Store or through a third-party store). I, for one, would order some.
Assuming that their shipping costs were in line with my normal music store (Amazon), I would certainly buy from Apple. If I'm already there looking and sampling music, why switch to another store?

Not my order

Got a couple of books from Amazon today. (Yes, I checked my local wonderful bookstore first; they didn't have either). The shipping letter in the order was for someone else's order. It was a gift of four books:

• The Lorax
• The Bartender's Bible: 1001 Mixed Drinks and Everything You Need to Know to Set Up Your Bar
• Hoffritz 16-ounce Chrome Cocktail Shaker

Many stories can be made up from this item list. Classic children's books lead to drinking cocktails. Drinking cocktails leads to classic children's books. Half of the cost of this gift was for non-books. Here's what I took when I abandoned you and the kids.