Brad Arsenault (dot com)
The Blog of Brad
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iTunes new DRM-free Music Store
Apr 8th
As of April 7 Apple has a new pricing scheme for music. Previously all music was $0.99, then they introduced new DRM-free (iTunes Plus) music for an additional fee. Now, as per what was announced back in January at Macworld, there are three price points.
$1.29 – Popular and new music will all be sold at this price.
$0.99 – most music will be sold at this price, operative word ‘most’.
$0.69 – this is for older, less popular music. However as of April 7 there are only 23 songs on this list.
**In case you’re wondering, the “Scud Mountain Boys”’s music is all at $0.99. (The same is true for “Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir”.)
I’m now at DreamHost!
Mar 29th
I’ve been moved over to DreamHost for a total of… three minutes. If you’re interested, here’s what I did:
1. First I logged into my domain via GoDaddy’s SSH, I zip’d all of my files as allfiles.zip via the command zip -r allfiles.zip * This command says to zip (* means wildcard, so everything), the -r means to get subfolders, and the filename allfiles.zip tells it where to put the zip’d files.
2. All said and done that took less than a minute to do, but to transfer the 400MB files took about five minutes.
3. Then I had to login to DreamHost (they provided me with a temporary *.dreamhost.com address to do this, for free) and upload the allfiles.zip, which took just under an hour–so I then went to sleep.
4. This morning I found that bradarsenault.com has finally propagated through the inter-tubes to point to DreamHost, so I logged into bradarsenault.com via SSH and simply did the command unzip allfiles.zip. This took a few seconds and voila-all of my data is now at DreamHost.
5. Databases, I backed up my database last night at GoDaddy and downloaded it (via FTP) this morning. I then created a database at dreamhost with the same name (I know, Steve Gibson, but the passwords and names are REALLY long). From there, I simply chose the import button, uploaded the database.
6. Finally I had to edit the wp-config.php file to point to the new database.
So far, from what I can tell, DreamHost is much faster than GoDaddy, the load averages on my server are a lot lower, and everything feels snap-tastic.
Video: How-to Enable VMWare Fusion’s Built-in VNC Server
Mar 20th
Here is the how-to video accompanying my earlier post on how-to enable the built-in VNC server in VMWare Fusion 2.0. You can find more detailed instructions here.
How-to Enable VMWare Fusion’s VNC Server from Brad Arsenault on Vimeo.
How-to Fill A Fountain Pen
Oct 23rd
If you haven’t read it already in my twitter updates, I purchased a Hero 329–a replica of the infamous Parker 51. And however this pen doesn’t fill in the same way as some of the Parker 51’s, this is a very commmon filling mechanism. This is for use with fountain pens with ink bladders.
It’s of note that during the video I tap on the bladder just after disassembling the pen-and this is where you have to press the compress the bladder and release the ink.
- After releasing the ink back into the ink well (or elsewhere for disposal)
- Dip the nib into the inkwell, release the bladder. This will draw fresh ink into the bladder.
- Repeat the last two steps to ensure there is no dried up ink or contaminants in the pen (optional).
Note that this process is very messy. I recommend you do as I did and place a piece of paper over your table incase of spillage.
eBay Auto-bidding Tip
Oct 5th
In the past week I’ve done lots of work with eBay (in an attempt to get a vintage Parker 51). Any what I’ve found is that the other bidders seem to be able to outbid you instantly after clicking “confirm bid”–this is because of auto-bidding. To enable auto-bidding, when outbidding someone type in your maximum you’re willing to pay. This way when you’re outbid, eBay will automatically up your bid $0.25 above the other person’s bid. This will continue until either the auction ends or the item bid goes above your maximum bid.
Consider this to win more auctions.
