5th

Last night 2 hours passed with me jumping at the decks, putting together another progressive mix featuring some of the hottest tracks put out during the last 2 months. Full tracklist and listen/download below. I don’t really have any favorite tracks in this mix, as they all have some great parts. There’s a few errors here and there, that’s what happens when not spinning the decks for a month

Tracklist:

1. Muzarco – No Prophets On Jupiter
2. Rich Curtis – Just A Whimp (Original Mix)
3. Lonya And Hakimonu – Sea Saw (Hernan Cattaneo & Soundexile Remix)
4. Ian O’Donovan – Aurora Borealis (Henry Saiz 70′s Remix)
5. Guy J – Azimuth (Original Mix)
6. Cid Inc. – Magnify (Quivver Remix)
7. Vinayak A – Never Turn Your Back (Cid Inc Remix)
8. Denis Kayron – Theory Of Disorder (Original Mix)
9. Cid Inc. – Caustic
10. James Warren – Breathless (Lank Remix)
11. Way Out West – Spaceman (Robert Babicz Mix)
12. Giorgos Gatzigristos – Rehearsal 4
13. Pablo Acenso – Habitat (Juan Deminicis Remix)
14. Way Out West – Future Perfect (Henry Saiz Remix)
15. Melon – Money (Sascha Dives 15 Minutes Melodrama Mix)
16. Microtrauma – Contrast (Max Cooper Remix)
17. The Steals – Golden feat Jayn Hanna (Jimmy Van M Luis Junior Remix)

Have a listen and download it here

Grr, I don’t like Flash at all. I think it’s a misused technology, which should never have been used for audio- and video-streaming on the net.

It’s developed for making advanced websites, which wasn’t possible 5 years ago using standard HTML/CSS/JS, and it was fine back then. But now we have HTML5, and it’s time to put it to it’s final rest.

I use the Safari Click2Flash extension, which not only removes Flash, but also makes my browser a lot more stable. In my Flash-settings, I’ve disabled as much as possible, as I don’t like data being saved on my computer, which is ‘invisible’ to the browser. When you do a “Reset Safari” you only reset Safari, which does not include Flash.

Anyway, I’ve got the “Always ask” set, when a website tries to use Local Storage. However, this doesn’t seem to work, at least not to my satisfaction. Many websites tries not just once, but several times during a video, to save data on my computer. Sometimes it results in a permanent Allow/Deny dialog-box on the Flash-element, effectively either asking me to drop seeing the content or allow the website to save it’s data.

I don’t like Flash!

Once again, I’ve spent a few hours at the turntables, and whipped up something I enjoy. Progressive and a little alternativ, full tracklist below. I’m still using Serato ScratchLive, but I’ve begun experimenting a bit with loops. When I get myself a controller, I’ll see what the effects in Serato is worth.

1. David Lync - I Know (Sasha Remix)
2. Guy Gerber - The Hollywood In You 3. Exoplanet - Archetype(C-Jay Remix)
4. Daria - Gauchito Gil
5. Muzarco - Prophet On Jupiter
6. Laurent Garnier - Stargazing (Rebel Rave Mix)7. Mashtronic - Earthquake Feat Luke Star (Nick Muir Remix)
8. Daniel Stefanik - Dirty Rhodes
9. Minilogue - Space (Thomas Bjerring Remix)

Have a listen and download it here

It’s time.. Time for christmas.. And time for presents.. Or is it?

I consider myself being a very modern and futuristic guy, embracing a lot of new technologies and thoughts. But christmas is all about traditions and food and.. Presents..

So what do you give a modern guy?

• Books, but remember that these need to be digital, as they will be read on a tablet or phone. Subjects could include biographies, alternative thoughts in economics or the world or how to optimize your life.
• Entertainment, not DVD’s, but a couple of tickets to the movies (fx. Tron:Legacy 3D) or perhaps the theater, if you can find a play with a modern touch.
• Food, well, not apples or a burger, but an invitation to a fancy restaurant, to drag him away from Twitter or the constant newsupdates from his RSS-feeds in FlipBoard, afterall.. Everybody needs food, and modern people often enjoy modern food (just see what’s become of sushi)
• A challenge, I’ve actually put a Rubik’s Cube on my wishlist this year, since I never really could solve it back when I was a kid. These days there’s tons of videos on YouTube to help me
• Music, again, don’t buy CD’s. They are old and just collects dust. A gift card for iTunes or other musicstores online.

The best thing about these presents is that you can shop most of them from your home, and up to the day before (or perhaps even on christmas eve).

Merry christmas and a happy new year

Last friday I got a surprise, a client/friend I’ve been helping with Macstuff for quite a while, had a little something for me. An Ipad.. Although Apple havn’t launched in Denmark yet, it has become available from 3rd parties.

When it first launched 6 months ago I had my doubts as to what I was going to use it for. I’ve been a laptop-user for the last 7 years, so why another portable device. Well, I looked inside myself and found out, that a lot of my time is spend checking email, reading news and on Twitter, and the occasional TV-show-watching. All things that an iPad would be perfect for, due to it’s smaller size and thereby ease of transportation.

I estimated that I could move 70% of my laptop-time to the iPad, when not considering times when I develop stuff, plays with Serato Scratch or other productive activities. And during the last week, my iPad has been used a lot. Actually, most of the time I only use my laptop for IM, IRC and Skype, and I hope to move those activities to the iPad when we see the 4.2 update arrive.

I must say that I’m very impressed by the few apps I’ve been using so far.

• Reeder is an amazing RSS-reader, beautiful design and lots of great features.
• Instapaper is another of those must-have apps for offline reading, and reading articles in a clean fashion, without any clutter is easily getting used to.
• Twitters own client is also a very nice piece of work, only wish there was some sort of timeline-sync feature, somewhere
• Dropbox is the easiest way to get documents onto the iPad. From Dropbox you can choose which application that you want to open a certain document with. Getting it back to Dropbox from the application is another matter for now.
• AirVideo is .. Your iPad TV, if you have an AirVideo-server.

Only thing I’ve noticed until now is the steeper price-tag on the apps. Most apps and games are $5-$10, which quickly can become expensive in the beginning, when trying out a lot of apps. Oh yeah, the free/test-versions is missing, how is that?

I’m recommending an iPad for everyone who are big on consuming the Internet, as a producer you might try it out first. You can email, you can edit Google Docs, you can get Pages, Numbers and Keynote, but can you use it satisfactory? I havn’t tried yet, let’s see in a couple of months.

This one has been in the making for a while. I’ve been wanting to make a mix that you would listen to, but I’ve had trouble finding enough of the right tracks. Yesterday I found 3 huge tracks, which was just what I needed.

Nick Warren released “In Search of Silver” a few days ago, and I’ve been a huge fan of Nick, ever since I heard his Global Underground #18 (old thing). “Our Benefactors” by Cid Inc. & Lank is another really great track, a great collaboration with 3 of my absolute favorites at the moment. Lank has a special style which I really loooove, Cid Inc, has made a lot of really great remixes and King Unique I ran into due to his track, 2000000 Suns, which Sasha played in a mix, I heard recently. And the last one is “Homecoming”, which is a true beauty

Have a listen, download it.. I hope you like it. I do

Tracklisting:

1. Nick Warren – In Search of Silver (Original Mix)
2. Luis Junior – Colache (Film Translation Mix)
3. Dominik Eulberg – Daten-Ubertragungs-Kusschen (Rodriguez Jr. Mix)
4. Minilogue – Certain Things1 (Dominik Eulberg Remix)
5. Medway & Luke Porter – RTFM (Cid Inc. Remix)
6. Fefo & Dario Arcas – Take me Away (Original Mix)
7. Charlie May & Barry Jamieson – Homecoming (Sasha & Dimitri Nakov Remix)
8. Cid Inc. & Lank – Our Benefactors (King Unique Remix)
9. Marc Marzenit – Angels Die (Original Mix)
10. Sasha – Mongoose (Guy J. Remix)
11. The Timewriter – Superschall (Original Mix)

All tracks should be available on Beatport.

A few months back, I was at a family get-together, and I talked a bit with my aunt. She works with autistic people, and since I’m reading a bunch of sciencestuff, I mail her links from time to time. So, when I asked about these articles, her first sentence was: “But they’re in english!”.

This was my cue. I’ve been reading english articles and manuals for as long as I can remember, so it’s very natural to me, and I hardly think about which language and article is written in, english or my native language. But those who are 10+ years older than me, aren’t as used to reading/talking english, as I am, and once that became clear to me, I decided to have a look at TEDTalks, as they had a subtitle-option for their videos.

I watch almost every TEDTalk that comes out, so it was quite easy for me, to find a talk, which I would like to translate. My choice fell on Sugata Mitra’s, The Child-driven Education.

It’s a talk about how children can learn themselves a lot more than you expect, just by being curious, and giving them a few tools. A great example are these indian kids, who doesn’t speak very good english. But when they are presented with a computer, that has a speech-interface and only understands close-to-perfect english, their english-skills improves rapidly.

Take a look, it’s great and presents a great way of self-learning in undeveloped parts of the world.

September 1. 2010, Apple released iTunes10, which featured Ping, a social music-service. As I’m very interested in music, I looked forward to this with great expectations. I knew what I was expecting, a service where I could find more music within the genres I like, by following the right people.

So a few of my Apple fanboi-friends and I hooked up on Ping, followed eachother and .. Oh, well, that was it.

A few weeks later Apple released an update, iTunes 10.0.1, which added a Ping-sidebar. Now I could see which songs my friends purchased and it was easier to ‘Like’ a track, although it had to be recognized by iTunes. Fair enough.

But my one great expection is still not fullfilled.

I still only have a few friends on Ping. Most Windows-users still uses Winamp, Windows Media Player or similar as their musicplayer, Mac-users mostly uses iTunes, but Ping isn’t that visible. I’m sure there are users who is still wondering what that empty sidebar is, and how to get rid of it.

I’ve been poking around to find interesting people to follow, but all I get is the ones with the most followers, but I don’t like Lady Gaga. I don’t have any Gaga in my music-collection, I only have a few tracks in that genre, so why is Lady Gaga one I should follow?

I really don’t get it, I think Ping is Apples worst ‘product’ ever, with absolutely no use to me. The friends I follow, don’t have the same musictaste as me, I can’t find people who enjoy techhouse as much as I do, and if I let Apple choose which music to display on my profile, it selects 10 tracks, which I’ve heard once or twice, but I’m sure are very popular on the iTunes Store.

Big fail, and for those wondering, CMD+Shift+G will hide the Ping-Sidebar!

A few weeks ago I had a look at IPv6, again. Here’s what I did to get it running.

My goal

First I just wanted to get IPv6 running on my Mac, but as that’s pretty easy, my goal ended up being : Get IPv6 up and running on my home-network on all IPv6-enabled devices, using my old Linksys WRT54G v2.0.

Find a tunnelbroker

There’s a few tunnelbrokers out there, which most guides is aimed on, Sixxs.net and Hurricane Electric. I chose Sixxs, as I first got to know about HE.net later on. I registered and requested a tunnel, and a few days later I got approved.

To register and request a tunnel, just follow the instructions at Sixxs.net faq. It’ll take a few days to get approved, but then you’re in business.

Testing the tunnel

I’m running AYIYA although I could use a static tunnel. But AYIYA is the safe choice. Sixxs supplies a tool to get AYIYA running, called Aiccu, so I grabbed the OSX-version and installed. AICCU needs TunTap to run, so I got that as well. Be sure to rename the aiccu.exe to aiccu-mac-i386 (or just aiccu).

Now, all you have to do, is edit the config-file. You only need to put in your Sixxs login-information, and try it out with

sudo aiccu-mac-i386 start <path to config>

You’ll get some output like this:

Tunnel Information for T1234:
POP Id      : dkcph01
IPv6 Local  : 2001:16d8:dd00:01::2/64
IPv6 Remote : 2001:16d8:dd00:01::1/64
Tunnel Type : ayiya
Adminstate  : enabled
Userstate   : enabled

Check if the tunnel actually works by pinging an ipv6-enabled site, fx. ipv6.google.com:

Nicolai:~ Nicolai$ ping6 ipv6.google.com

PING6(56=40+8+8 bytes) 2001:16d8:::1234:4321:feed:beef --> 2a00:1450:8003::63
16 bytes from 2a00:1450:8003::63, icmp_seq=0 hlim=55 time=47.835 ms
16 bytes from 2a00:1450:8003::63, icmp_seq=1 hlim=55 time=47.565 ms

The next step is to request a subnet from Sixxs, there’s instructions on how to do that, when you’re logged in.

Moving to OpenWRT

I’ve tried running OpenWRT on my Linksys WRT54G several years ago, and although it worked, configuration was handled through setting variables in NVRam. In later versions (Kamikaze) a web-interface was added, and it worked almost as well as the standard Linksys firmware.

But before going for OpenWRT, I had a look at DD-WRT. DD-WRT is a lot prettier than OpenWRT, and generally seems very polished. However, I found a lot of inconsistencies, fx. the recommended standard distribution, didn’t have IPv6-support, although it was supposed to. Trying different versions, I finally found a version with IPv6 enabled, but then it was too big, and there wasn’t room for any packages.

So after a lot of hairpulling, tftp’ing different firmwares, hard-resets, stripping headers of firmwares etc, I finally managed to get an OpenWRT-firmware with IPv6-support, lot’s of space for packages, a decent interface and good stability. I’m running Backfire 10.03, bcrm-2.4 now, and I’m very happy with this solution.

Getting IPv6 up and running

Having OpenWRT running, the next steps are getting Aiccu working and announcing my subnet to my internal network through radvd. Sixxs has a very good guide on how to do this. To sum it up:

• Install the required packages
• Make sure the router has a correct time set, use ntpclient to fix this
• Configure aiccu, which means adding your Sixxs-credentials to a config-file
• Configure you lan-interface, add the subnet you got from Sixxs
• Configure radvd, add the subnet
• Reboot and check if everything works

During the installation you can check that every step works as it should. When you’ve setup aiccu, check the log (using logread) and also do an ifconfig sixxs. You should have a tunnel-interface with 2 IPv6-addresses, 1 link-local (fe80::xxxx) and your tunnel-IP (2001::xxxx).


root@OpenWrt:~# ifconfig sixxs
sixxs Link encap:UNSPEC HWaddr 00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00
inet6 addr: 2001:1234::c0::2/64 Scope:Global
inet6 addr: fe80::1234::2/64 Scope:Link
UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP MULTICAST MTU:1280 Metric:1
RX packets:2596 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:2643 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:10
RX bytes:417589 (407.8 KiB) TX bytes:235813 (230.2 KiB)

When configuring your lan-interface, check that it gets an IPv6 address from the routers network configuration, ifconfig br-lan.

root@OpenWrt:~# ifconfig br-lan
br-lan  Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:0F:12:34:56:78
inet addr:10.0.0.1 Bcast:10.0.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::200:ff:fe00:0/64 Scope:Link
inet6 addr: 2001:1234:1234::1/64 Scope:Global
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:476533 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:826159 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:58305513 (55.6 MiB) TX bytes:955237445 (910.9 MiB)

Next, configure radvd by editing it’s configfile and add your subnet again. Start it with radvd start and check on a client, if it has generated a global ipv6-adresse.


Nicolai:~ Nicolai$ ifconfig en2
en2: flags=8863 mtu 1500
ether 00:17:12:34:56:78
inet6 fe80::217:f2ff:feed:beef%en2 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x6
inet 10.0.0.105 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 10.0.0.255
inet6 2001:16d8::217:f2ff:feed:beef prefixlen 64 autoconf
media:
status: active

Looks great, and now the final test. Check connectivity using ping6, traceroute6 or browse to ipv6.google.com

Final words

Getting ipv6 up and running isn’t very hard. There’s lots of help in the forums, so it all comes down to how you want to connect. I spend most of the time getting OpenWRT working.

But why run IPv6 at all? Well, I’m just interested and want to try out different networking tools, firewalls and check how applications handle IPv6. And I also like to have tried and understood IPv6, before I tell everybody to go ahead.

One of the major concerns in going IPv6 is that your clients is directly connected. Most homeusers run NAT, and clients isn’t directly visible from the net. With IPv6.. They are..

One very welcome advantage just dropped by last wee, when Google announced their Instant Search. This is only available in some countries in the beginning, but it’s worldwide on their IPv6-site. This is a great way to push more people into IPv6, by launching new cool services on IPv6-networks, before IPv4.

Have fun!

Entering a nerdy period, I decided to have a look at IPv6… again. I’ve been looking at the possibilites of IPv6 on and off for the last 6 years, but it never really seemed mature for usage. But now, I think it is, thanks to providers like SIXXS and Hurricane Electric, who offers IPv6 tunnels and subnets, and the forums which is getting a lot more info on how to get started using IPv6.

The biggest reason IPv6 is evolving so slow, is a common chicken and egg scenario. Service providers won’t implement IPv6, since customers don’t want it. And customers don’t want it, as long as they can get the IPv4-space they  need. Should they however find a need for IPv6, it might require changing service provider, since very few offer it.

But there are useful advantages with IPv6:

First of all, IPv6 is 128bit compared to 32bit for IPv4. That’s alot larger address-space, so being conservative with your addresses is no longer necessary. No more need for NAT and the problems associated with that.

Second, IPSec is built directly into IPv6 thereby making secure connections trivial. Authenticated and encrypted connections is built straight into the ip-stack. In these days where privacy and security in wireless networks is in it’s prime, this might be a good reason to consider IPv6.

Third, resource allocation. Endpoints can request that a connection gets a certain priority, eg. in voice og realtime video conversations, you would like less than 50 ms. That’s possible with IPv6, and the routers can easily be optimzed for this. Instead of carrying the priority in each packet, a flowlabel is used. This label is negotiated during connection setup, and afterwards routers can just check for a flowlabel, and forward accordingly.

Fourth, IPv6 headers doesn’t use a fixed length, they use extension headers. This has the major advantage, that it’s possible to extend the protocol without to much hassle. Fx. we might see a location-extension header, that includes the location of the source IP, sometime in the future. Implementing such a header would be easy, and wouldn’t require anything except a destination that could handle it.

But it’s not all good. IPv6 has one big disadvantage. It’s unknown, it’s the new black, and everything you know about networking is about to get a little shake.

It’s no longer 127.0.0.1, it’s ::1.. It’s not netmasks, it’s prefixlengths… And it’s no longer 4 decimals you can remember eg: 74.125.77.99), but it’s 8 16bit hex-values (eg: 2a00:1450:8001:0000:0000:0000:0000:0093).

BGP is getting another address-family, DHCP is getting a v6-version, that works a bit differently, OSPF and IS-IS should be pretty much the same, but if I recall correct, there’s some quirks that’s nice to know.

I’m gonna explore IPv6 further, and tell of my findings. Be sure to check out NANOG’s great tutorials on IPv6 for service providers. There’s a lot of good information for end-users too.

Feel like trying yourself? Go ahead and read how I did it.