Billy Fire LLC

A client of mine has started a series of podcasts. Thus far I have recorded the podcasts using the Samson C01U USB Studio Condenser Microphone discussed in a previous blog posting. We had always planned that my client would ultimately be able to create his own podcasts and he asked me to get him a suitable microphone. Having read a few reviews I decided that the Blue Snowball microphone would be the best option.

At first I was surprised by the size of the microphone. It has a diameter of about 4 inches. The Blue Snowball was extremely easy to set up. I simply plugged it in and it was available for recording. It comes with a sturdy little desktop stand. The instructions suggest using a pop filter, which I have used in the recordings included below.

There are 3 settings on the back of the Snowball:

1. Activates cardoid capsule
2. Activates cardoid capsule with 10dB reduction
3. Activates omni capsule

Option 1 is best for making recording directly in front of the microphone. Option 2 reduces the input signal and option 3 is useful for recording sound more generally. The instruction manual that comes with the microphone also suggest different orientations of the microphone depending on the sort of sound you want to achieve, e.g. tilt the microphone slightly upwards for “more projection and head tone,” straight at the mouth for “maximum brightness and intelligibility” and towards the chest for “robust full lows and smoother highs.”

I thought it would be interesting to record something with each of the microphones I have tested to give an idea of the quality of each microphone as far as podcasting is concerned.

In each case I recorded a poem by Thomas Hardy using Audacity to capture the sound. Capture settings were 44,100Hz at 16bit. Having made a recording I exported the MP3 at a bit rate setting of 64.

Recording made using the Blue Snowball

Recording of Blue Snowball microphone

Recording made using Samson CO1U

Recording made using Logitech USB headset

Recording made using Beyer M58 microphone (the microphone was connected to Presonus TubePre. The Beyer M58 is a professional microphone used by newscasters. It is characterized by its length which is useful for adding TV station logos)

Recording made using Beyer M58 connected to Canon HG10 HD camcorder

The poem is:

In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’

Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half-asleep as they stalk.

Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.

Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by;
War’s annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.

I recently took another look at the current state of play for AVCHD video editors. Things are definitely improving. I downloaded a trial of Vegas Movie Studio Platinum Edition and I have been VERY pleasantly surprised.

Vegas Movie Studio Platinum Edition is from the Sony stable of editing software and falls between their entry level Vegas Movie Studio and Sony Vegas. All of which are available for trial downloads. The Studio Platinum Edition trial lasts for 30 days.

The description on the Sony Web site says: “you can import and edit video in nearly any format including high-definition HDV and Sony AVCHD.” With this in mind I was not totally confident that the software would import my M2TS files from a Canon HG10 camera - but it did so flawlessly. I hope that this is not some sort of fluke that only works in the trial version - we shall see.

Having imported the clips I was nervous that the software might falter because of the massive size of the project but it worked without a problem. Having completed a project, Studio Platinum offers a multitude of formats in which to save the completed video, including Quicktime (MOV), AVI, WMV, RM and Sony AVC. These can be saved a various frame rates and dimensions. It appears that if you do have an HD camera or a Sony AVC camera that you can record back to the camera.

My computer is not super powerful (Core Due 1.83MHz with 2 Gb of RAM) and rendering took some time, but worked very well.

I’ve been struggling for the last couple of days to get password-less ssh to work between two linux machines running Ubuntu 8.04 on my local network.

I went through the correct procedures, i.e. ssh-keygen -t rsa, copied the public key to authorized_keys and used scp to copy it over to the .ssh directory of the user account for my other machine. Each time I did this I tried to ssh to my other machine (ssh -vvv billyfire3) and each time it asked for a password - which was not what I expected to happen. I deinstalled and reinstalled SSH to not avail. I even did a fresh install of Ubuntu on one of the machines - but still had the same problem.

I did a search for the problem and discovered that I was not alone in having difficulty getting passwordless SSH to work. I finally found a post (I can’t remember where, unfortunately) that suggested looking at /var/log/auth.log. I attempted a password-less login (which asked for a password) and then looked at the auth.log on the machine (billyfire3) that I was trying to connect to.

Sure enough, the log included:

Authentication refused: bad ownership or modes for directory /nutch-0.9/home/.ssh

I looked at the .ssh directory and found that the owner of .ssh was set to root and not the name of my user (nutch). I corrected this by removing the .ssh directory and recreating it when logged in as the nutch user. I tried again. This time I received this message:

Authentication refused: bad ownership or modes for directory /nutch-0.9/home

I checked the /nutch-0.9/home directory on billyfire3 and noticed that permissions were set to 777. I changed them to 0700 and tried again. Success!

The log said:

Accepted publickey for nutch from 192.168.0.102 ……………