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This is my current DJ setup with the following components: Decks 1 and 2 - 2x Reloop 8000mk2 Vinyl Turntables with Serato intergration Deck 3 - Numark NDX500 CDJ with Serato Integration Deck 4 - Roland 707m Serato Controller and Mixer using its internal drum machine as a deck Behringer TB-303 Clone fed into the Aux input of the Roland 707m Controller Pioneer EFX-1000 DJ FX Unit placed between the master out of the 707m controller and the input of the sound interface on the broadcasting PC Reloop Neon Serato Controller used to control the Serato DJ Pro sampler Rode Procaster Microphone (not shown in diagram) fed to the Mic 1 channel on the 707m Controller as the main microphone for me while DJing t.bone MB 88U Dual Microphone (not shown in diagram) fed to the Mic 2 channel on the 707m Controller as the guest microphone for use when I have guests in the studio I have simplified things massively over the last year over my previous setups with the purchase of the Roland 707m. It it an amazingly clever piece of equipment and does so much. I think it is definitely one of the most advanced and most powerful controllers on the market today. This is what I can do with the new setup: ...

Using Jenkinsfiles in repositories for declarative pipelines, which is an example as infrastructure as code, is absolutely the right thing to do, in my opinion. However the tooling for debugging and error checking Jenkinsfiles is currently quite difficult. Setup Jenkinsfile linter First of all you need to make sure to be able to access the Jenkinsfile linter. This linter is processed on the Jenkins server itself, unusually. There is a configuration option that requires adminstrator access to the Jenkins server. ...

I thought I’d write here a bit about how I got into technology and how my career has progressed for those people wanting to get into technology. I was lucky enough to be born in a supportive home to good parents. My father was an early entrant into the world of computing, and my birth certificate records his profession as a ‘Computer Science Lecturer’, which was very rare at the time. In actuality, I’m fairly sure he taught only at local higher education colleges, but technically that still made him a lecturer. At any rate, he definitely worked in computing at a time when few others did (1982). ...

Ever since I worked at an internet marketing company on an advertising analytics platform, I have realised that I don’t want my personal internet browsing tracked, monetised, influenced, and sold to the highest bidder. These are the steps that I have taken to reduce (you can never totally eliminate) this process. Pi-Hole DNS This is a DNS server installed on a Raspberry Pi on my local home network. I have all the internet traffic going through my Virgin Media router filtered through this DNS server. It has many privacy-boosting features, but its main claim to fame is that it blocks the vast majority of internet advertising and analytics traffic on the DNS level. It currently blocks 20% of the requests made, which results in approximately 20% faster internet for me, and a lot more privacy/less tracking/less adverts. ...

It seems that for a lot of people, perhaps the vast majority, they cannot expect to be 100% happy all the time. Even those incredibly successful celebrities and incredibly rich CEOs and politicians are not happy 100% of the time. So is it a good idea to seek 100% happiness right away? Or should we always try and select the ’least worst’ situation? If we keep making progress and optimse our happiness levels through constantly selecting the ’least worst’ situation whenever we have a descision then it seems to me we will maximise our happiness potential in the long run. ...

Well, 2021 has been a bit of a downer in a number of ways. There has been some upsides though. I spent the first part of 2021 burned out, as in - totally burned out - of my career and really needing a break. This affected my work. It turns out that unknown to me at the time, I had cancer, Hodgkins Lymophoma, and a lot of my lack of energy and generally feeling awful was down to a large tumor that had been growing my chest for some time and was pressing down on my heart and lungs. In June I was admitted to hospital and they diagnosed the cancer. In July I started chemotherapy. Now the good news is that Hodgkins Lymphoma is one of the best cancers to get if you were able to choose, as it has a very high cure rate and very low fatality rate. The chemo as of November’s scan seems to be working even better than expected and they were expecting a good outcome. So that is positive. I should hopefully be done with chemo by March 2022. One of the good things about 2021 has been the job that I found in the music industry. It is still doing software engineering, what my career has been based around, but they seem like a very nice bunch of people, and were prepared to support me and keep me on around chemotherapy. I am still employed part-time and that has been a HUGE help financially as you really don’t get a lot of money in benefits from the government, even when you have cancer it seems, and my family have had to help me out quite a bit. I have also had some success in the work that I’ve been doing - it seems very appreciated which is something I’m not really used to! I have continued DJing on Twitch which has been great. I still do my regular Sunday show for 4 hours most Sundays, and it is a lot of fun and I have a bunch of regulars who pop in. I enjoy it a lot. I reached 500 followers and raised a LOT of money via charity streams with other DJs, both as a DJ and also helping as an organiser. In December Conny and I caught the omicron varient of COVID-19 and that was a huge worry at the time because of my low immune system due to chemo and cancer. However we both have beaten it now, I had a short stay in hospital but it wasn’t that bad. NHS staff were very helpful and I think it really helped that I had 3 vaccinations in my system at the time of catching it. In Jan 2021 I took the third of the 10 week university level courses at Point Blank Music School as part of my study of Electronic Music Production. This course was on mixing and mastering. I have learned a lot from it already, although I still haven’t finished it as I was quite busy most of the year. I single-handedly raised £270 from friends and family for a cancer charity for my mother (who also has cancer) during a 12 hour DJ stream on my birthday in 2021. Ironically I had no idea I had cancer myself at the time. I ripped all of CDs to FLAC. Hundreds of CDs. Ripped hundreds of DVDs, PS2 and PS1 games too. Hosted them all on a Plex media server and gave the majority of discs away to charity. I sorted all my physical books, split into different subject bookshelves, alphabeticalised and catalogued in GoodReads.com. I have read more books this year than several previous years. I still have a huge backlog to go through though. I played quite a few more computer games than I have for a while, including beating Cyberpunk 2077 in a no-sleep 28 hour marathon after it was released. (Although that was technically in December 2020 I am going to include it anyway). It was such a great game in my view, amazing storyline and setting. Here’s to 2022!

Enlightenment is a very underrated window manager choice, in my opinion. It still looks very pretty and is very configurable. There is a packaging bug with the latest version of Enlightement in the 21.10 repo which means it doesn’t work correctly. The fix is to set the suid bit on the ’enlightenment_system’ binary. So: sudo apt install enlightenment sudo find /usr/lib -type f -name enlightenment_system -exec sudo chmod 4755 {} \; Log out of Ubuntu Click the settings cog in the bottom right to change your Window manager to enlightenment Log on and the settings wizard will help you configure Enlightenment

This is a simple description of how I work 99% of the time, as I am a simpleton. Origin/main is the new origin/master for future repositories, I just note both here for completeness because I use origin master for a lot of current repos. I first make sure I am uptodate on origin/master or origin/main by git pulling. git checkout origin master git pull origin master I start making changes to the local copy on my local machine. When it gets to a point where I want to save my changes, I: git stash push git checkout -b <branch name which will be made into a PR> git stash pop I then commit the changes to the new branch. git commit When I am ready to create the PR, I create and push to the remote branch: git push origin <branch name which will be made into a PR> Github will tell me if master/main has diverged past a state where my commits can be merged in without conflict. If there is a possible conflict, I will merge in origin master/main to my local copy and then push to the PR branch again: git checkout <branch name which will be made into a PR> git pull origin master (or origin main) I resolve locally conflicts through git mergetool which, for me, is vim’s three way diff tool. I commit the updated conflicts and push to the remote branch - git add && git commit && git push origin <branch name which will be made into a PR> Often at this point I find I have to add new commits to fix things I have broken or have been flagged up in PR review. git commit git push origin <branch name which will be made into a PR> Reviewers now have some of their comments made on stale commits in Github. This is better than squashing the commits I find because sometimes the commits are not stale and their comments are still valid, and it becomes easier to keep track of. They can view the ‘files changed’ tab to add review comments until they are happy. I loop back to check whether master/main has diverged, and if it hasn’t just keep adding commits to address their concerns. The PR gets approved (hopefully) I merge the PR into master or main I delete the old branch

The Problem As of the day of posting, Plex Media Server has a suboptimal handling of Various Artists compilations. Unless you follow BOTH of these rules, described clearly on the Plex support here under ‘Various Artists’, then they won’t appear collected under a particular album, they will be spread out filed under the different artists that created them. I think it should only require one of these rules, but it is not up to me. The problem is that release metadata available from the online metadata databases, often doesn’t follow these rules - lots of DJ mix compilations for example, do not set albumartist tag to Various Artists from the online metadata databases. ...

I have recently been in hospital and been diagnosed with a condition that might mean I need to return quite a bit, at least in the short term. When I was in hospital I was struck by the fact that there were very long periods of waiting and it was easy to get very bored and quite dejected just sitting in a hospital bed. Also there is not a lot of room for laptops, tablets and other things – you really don’t get a lot of space by your bed usually to store large items and they are not practical most of the time. Therefore I thought I would hack together some kind of portable entertainment system that I could use to pass the time and to block out some of the hospital negativity if I need to be in hospital again. My DJ headphones Seinhausser HD 2-IIs are actually very useful in a hospital because they are very good at sound isolation and you can remove one of the ear cups so you can lie on your side in a hospital bed and just listen to one earcup without it being uncomfortable, so they were very good to use with the PSP. ...