Updated on 2021-11-17 due to some minor errors and omissions and adding a walk-through video.
This is what we’re building today….
Normally I take a pride in making my code presentable, but this is a bit of a rough example of JavaScript and HTML. So please forgive my slap-dash approach to the problem. The code works fine and has served its purpose well for almost a year. Today I use a selfwritten API and JSON to populate text data.
The intended effect is to get a “Now playing” function in Open broadcaster (OBS) that shows what PlayIt Live is playing, like in the picture above.
What you need
PlayIt Live.
The “Now playing” plugin.
OpenBroadcaster (OBS) or Streamlabs OBS
A local IIS (Internet Information Services) webserver.
All components need to run on the same operating system. (Windows 10 or Windows Server 201x recommended)
Visual learner? – Try the YouTube video, with my walk-through
Hit the full screen on this one, to actually see something. 🙂
Steps
First, you need to install a local IIS. OBS seems to support JavaScript-execution on locally included files in the “Browser source” widget, but this requires lowering the security of OBS, and also, I have not tested it. So that’s an alternate route if you do not wish to have a local IIS on your broadcasting server. But in this guide, we will use a local IIS. It’s very useful for lots of other purposes such as rebroadcasting news. Please be adviced, it will be setup NOT to be reachable outside the server, as this could be insecure.
Open the control panel and click “Programs and features”.
Programs and features.
Then select “Turn Windows features on or off”.
Easy as pie
Check the following boxes:
No FTP, who uses that anyway?
The open the manager.
Now setup the bindings for the site like this:
Bindings can be found on the menu to the right in the console
This ensures that noone outside the server will ever reach the web site. The web site is located on %SystemDrive%\inetpub\wwwroot, which generally means c:\inetpub\wwwroot unless you installed your Windows-installation on some other drive.
Then create a folder called nowplaying under wwwroot.
Ah.. good…
Unpack the zip-archive to your Desktop and move the extracted file (trackloader.htm) to c:\inetpub\www\nowplaying\. The file “trackloader.htm” should now be directly under the folder itself. Don’t store the zip-archive itself under the wwwroot.
Create an empty file on your desktop and call it tracks.htm.
Move that file into c:\inetpub\wwwroot\nowplaying\
It should look like this, now!
This will ask for administrative permissions, which you must accept.
Permissions to write…
All files in the nowplaying folder are readonly, and that’s totally fine. In fact, they must be. We don’t want to be insecure. But tracks.htm must be writable by the same account that PlayIt Live runs as.
Select tracks.htm, right-click it and select properties.
Click the Security
Just as Swenglish as I am…
Add that account in question with write permissions. Don’t add Everyone or authenticated users.
Alla (Swedish) = Everyone. Bad DJ, no cookie! 😉
If you are having an existential crisis, press Windows + R, type in cmd.exe and click OK. Then type whoami into the black command prompt. You must be logged in with the same account that PlayIt Live normally is logged in while running. The command will tell you your identity. That must go inte the dialog above. Don’t forget checking “Write”.
So, onto the “Now playing” plugin
I assume PlayIt Live is installed and properly running.
Open the “Now Playing”-plugin.
Ready to rock!
Set it up like in the picture and save it.
Open a web browser and try:
http://127.0.0.1/nowplaying/trackloader.htm
It’s aaaaaaalive!!!! It’s aaaaaaalive!!!
Almost ready. Now open OBS or SLOBS and setup a new browser source.
… And so do we….
Setup the source the way you want. The settings in picture above may have to be adjusted depending on your ideas as how to display it on the page. But this should now, work. Time for a beer…
This the auto-eq working on a typical Amiga module. The lowest bars are the treble frequencies and the uppermost ones are the bass. Red means reducing and blue means boosting. A typical Amiga-module has very little audio in the higher frequencies due to limitations in the crappy samplers and the recording techniques. Also 8bit samplers are not magic of high-fidelity. So the auto-eq desperately try to crank the high frequencies up. The manual of the software (Thimeo StereoTool) states those bars should get closer to the middle of the scale. This means the compensation will only kick in if the spectrum is uneven. The calculations make sure this will work by working out median of each band. Good luck with that when almost half of the songs are Amiga 8bit 4-track modules and the other are PC 16bit Fasttracker/impulsetracker tunes with superior audio. I love Amiga modules, but not their “audio quality”.
Audio-version of “split-vision”.
More… This one has the auto-eq going bonkers trying to handle the broad Amiga stereo with the left and right channels living their own life.
All hobbies and fields create their own slang. The retro world has a gigantic library of words for the skilled, the unskilled and various computers and programs. DJ Daemon digs through words and the cool explanations that really makes you understand the attitude of true hackers. Not the kind that breaks into stuff, but the hackers that builds, programs and creates. Sit down and take a guess what hackerwasser is, why the net isn’t dead yet and why Amiga users feel persecuted (no, we don’t! Or do we?)
attrition.org’s mean squirrel. The site has been an amusing source of laughter for me a number of times. And some of their stories has been inspiration for this list as well.
(2021-08-06 – Just started this page. Will add more lines, shortly!)
Right, we can all screw up or say stuff that is wrong. But we learn and we strive to correct ourselves. But among us walks the IT-security mavericks that don’t abide by common rules such as making their statements possible to test or that you actually must accept critisism without calling the other person names.
They commonly sell stuff, software and ideas that may or may not work, actually exist, improve security at all or just plain do anything at all. So, no, they’re not necessary incompetent. They may be snake-oil salesmen or just have a pompous ego and no idea as to the mind set and spirit of the IT-security field.
Score someone you want to understand and remember: racking up points is not a good thing. Above all, enjoy!
They start at -5 points for calling themselves an “IT-security expert” or something like that. We’re currently cautiously optimistic as we need more people in this field. Then add:
1 point for every statement that’s widely believed to be false.
1 point for every time a statement is wrong, that should have had been easy to actually verify before stating it.
1 point for every statement that sounds about right until actually someone checks it up.
2 points for every “as everyone knows” that actually is something that no one really believes or that is incorrect.
5 points for complaining about this list and feeling it attacks them personally or refers to something they wrote or said (Most likely it did not).
5 points for calling everyone who disagrees with them “Orthodox thinkers”, “Troglodytes”, “Unimaginative”, “Sheeple” or just plain “idiots”.
10 points for writing articles/books/posts that are basically stolen from others and then badly rewritten to obscure this fact.
10 points for spraying the speech/articles with every abbreviation, initialism and acronym known to mankind as long as they (may) relate to the IT-security field.
10 point for taking a pride in inventing new language as a selling point. “armor clad security shielding”, “cloaking mode”, “security arbitration” and “synergi-based security tracking”. (Ok, I made those up. Or did I?)
10 points for getting “original research” stamped on contributions on Wikipedia.
20 points for whole Wikipedia-articles written getting removed.
… an additional point for every “WTF” comment on their articles in the “Talk” section.
10 points for taunting their “exceptionally high IQ”, “extreme skills”, “Hacked the global liberation army”, “being trusted by NSA/CIA/MUST/GRU/Whatever” or anything else you have no way of actually verifying.
10 points per work experience they state that is not possible to check or that is purposefully vaguely written. E.g., “20 years of experience with IT-security research in the intelligence community”.
20 points for pointing to other experts “supporting” what they’re stating/selling/proposing, when said expert’s statements are taken out of context or is not applicable.
20 points for adding buzz words and claiming to use/support/provide/understand “Artificial intelligence”, “Heuristic analysis”, “Data lakes” when it isn’t clear that those technologies even would make sense in that context. E.g., “Our firewall features artificial intelligence based search engine optimization to provide synergy between the total cost of ownership and the customer experience”.
20 points for claiming to have big companies as customers, while ignoring to mention that they just got them to accept a sales pitch and then never called back.
20 points for ridiculous statements that makes you wonder how much they actually understand. “It was a command-driven movement on the Internet”, “Plugged the hard disk into the Internet”, “Our firewalls cannot be hacked”, “Since this cannot happen, it really didn’t”.
20 points for suggesting “Security by obscurity” as a main security design. (E.g., setting a service to listen to an uncommon port)
20 points for every year passing after the promised solution’s/product’s initial release date.
20 points for predictions that a vulnerability they found “will bring down the Internet”.
20 points for using sales lingo to pitch their research like “It’s beautiful and perfect” or “It will change the whole world”.
20 points for invoking Godwin’s on anyone opposing them.
40 points for comparing themselves to any historically or currently oppressed people and thus losing all contact with reality.
40 points for inventing their own cryptography without disclosing how it works.
30 more points for stating that “it can’t be expressed as an algorithm”, “doesn’t use common mathematical rules” or “is based on quantum physics”.
40 points for going full mad scientist “YOU WILL ALL SEE WHEN THE INTERNET CRASHES! You will regret not listening to me! And not buying my super-perfect software!”
50 points for vaguely suggesting you invented/were instrumental in the development of a famous protocol/software/system. Points will not be “awarded” if it’s actually true (It never is!).
Note
The list is a mix of things I’ve heard a number of people say, commonly said stuff that boggles my mind, proof of a mind set that totally misses the target and a few I’ve done myself over the years (not telling you which!).
The original “crackpot-list” does not tell you what score you need to be seen as a crackpot. I don’t know when you become an “IT-security Maverick” either. It’s more a list for some laughs than anything.
Note the “Time duration” for the voice tracks! Those are very revealing…
I started my latest radio station project 10 months ago. It’s still running to this day but is still a small outfit with a limited number of listeners. You must understand that currently, getting people to pay attention is harder than ever, as everyone is into streaming, podcasting and blogging. A friend of mine spoke about “eyeball time”, but in radio we can talk more about “ear lobe time” instead.
When I started my first broadcast ever in 1994, I had no idea about timing. But it slowly came to me just how little time you have to speak before listeners go away. For this discussion, I will talk about music stations as they are the most heavily affected by this. A talk station is supposed to provide spoken material and some station have a relaxed 2-3 minutes of speech between the songs. It depends on what you are creating.
My station plays tracked music made on Amigas, PCs and Ataris. People tune in for the music mix. When I started Voice tracking the first days, I noted in horror that people turned off as soon as I started speaking. This I know, as Internet broadcasting, let us you see disconnects and unfollows. Was something wrong with my voice. Apparently not. I simply had to relearn old lessons from my years in broadcast during the 90s. I did not understand the rules of this station as I thought about making it a mix between stories from the past and great music. it wasn’t working.
i started timing myself, and gave me a most 30 seconds to speak, but swiftly understood that even that was too much. I ended up speaking between 5-20 seconds with the odd voice track going all the way to 30.
An excerpt of the afternoon clock for the station.
I also decided that the clock should allow three songs to pass without voice tracks, jingles or messages. So, my live shows/voice tracked had me speak four times per hour. This and shortening the messages and the jingles down did the tricks. Disconnects during all non-music events went down close to zero. That was a painful lesson, but a necessary one.
It may not be the proper solution for everyone, but it seems to be a general rule. I remember getting the message during the 90s with a caller waiting to be put on the air. I spoke for 40 seconds of an event and as I put the next song on and came back to her, she said something like “Gosh, you really say a lot on the air”. This was a rather dire warning, but heeded, eventually. Then forgotten and relearned.
For everyone trying to nurture a cool voice, attitude, and persona: please do not forget the best you can do, speak less!
After a while, the whole setup gets a bit messed up, as you have to contend with people moving tables, reconnecting stuff after some mishaps or the whole setup being messy from the start.
For all you TLDR;-people, here is the executive summary:
• PlayIt Live (the broadcasting software) priority streams promises awesomeness. • … and delivers it, although some improvements can be done. • Many important lessons were learnt… Number seven will shock you. • There is no numbered list, hence no “number seven”. But I did get your attention, didn’t I?
The situation
Oh, those pesky computer pirates and their demo competitions…
I wanted to broadcast live from the Edison Party 2021 in northern Stockholm and thus decided to make it happen. A demo party is a convent where the geeks show their cool music-, art-, programming- and retrocomputingskills.
The equipment
Apollo 13, this is Houston control…
In the studio: PlayIt Live 2.09 on a physical server with Shoutcast and OBS Streamlabs. All setup and running. An IPSEC-based VPN to reach it from the outside. The instance is licensed for Voice tracking, advanced scheduling and remote management.
Portable (on site): A laptop with an Intel I7, 16 GB Ram and a 500 GB SSD HD. A local copy of PlayIt Live 2.09 just for live assist. Rocket broadcaster to generate the 192 kbps Icecast stream. JBB broadcaster just to deliver a decently normalized (through compression, though) signal. (This was before PlayIT Live got this feature). A 4G mobile access point and “modem”.
Physical audio equipment: a Shure SM7B microphone connected to a Rode Rodecaster Pro mixing console that was connected to the laptop. The local PlayIt live signal mixed with the microphone in the Rodecaster mixer and sent back to the laptop where Rocket Broadcaster can pick it up and send it to the to the server in the studio. Also, a pair of Audio-Technica headphones connected to the mixing console.
“ON Air”-listening: A mobile phone connected to a pair of Bluetooth headphones to listening to the station “on the air”. This signal is delayed 20 second due to Internet broadcasts buffering a lot. It cannot be done otherwise without a proper FM signal which is beyond my capabilities to get. I listened to it between my speeches to hear that the broadcast still worked.
The preparations
I set it up in my living room/kitchen area the week before testing it. The test was successful, and I saved the setting to make sure it would work on the broadcast date.
The journey
I live in Solna in northern Stockholm and Eggebygård, from where I intended to broadcast from does as well. I arrived on location on the 9th of July 2021 shortly after 3 pm. I had not announced this broadcast as I wanted to have a bit of freedom when to start.
The broadcast
And here we are. Looking out over a landscape of busy geeks!
I started the Broadcast on 4 pm exactly and it worked for a minutes before starting to stutter and eventually it broke, and the normal broadcast resumed. The reasons were 1) Windows not understanding this was a mobile connection as the 4G modem was connected to the laptop with USB. Syncing 1 GB of data over OneDrive is not a good thing to do. 2) Me uploading a 5 MB picture to Discord thinking the connection would not be affected. It was.
At 4:32:58 PM I started the jingle for the third time and hoped it would stay stable. It did! Nicole Carino’s voice now came out booming from the loudspeakers in all the radios around the world: “The ERICADE Radio Network – We’re now going live from a remote location”.
It was a smooth start this time and went on well most of the time.
Lessons learnt / post-mortem analysis:
• It is super-fun to do radio the proper way. No voice tracking. I am riding the sliders again. Jay!
• Knowing that you are still on the air is hard. You listen to the sound from the mixing console and hope all is ok. The “on air” button will show if the connection is lost, but not if it is on but struggling and the sound is cutting out all the time.
• Listening to the on-air signal through the other headphones connected to the live stream works fine. But a few times I almost missed the song endings as I was not thinking about the 20 second delay and still wore the “wrong” headphones as the song ended. This was fixed by me only using the “on air” headphones only during the beginning of the song and remembering to change the headphones well before the song ending. This must be possible to fix. I am thinking of some kind of “Dorrough-meter” AIR-check system. Back to the drawing board!
• MP3-compression damages the sound. A live broadcast means starting with a 320 kbps MP3-song, streaming it as 192 kbps to the broadcast system and the having it compressed a third time between the server and the listener. Despite this, the audio was quite good in the broadcast. Radio has never been about HIFI.
• Audio compression is also a thing to consider. Initially I set JBB up to work with a large portion of hysteresis/density. This caused my voice to sound very “breathless”. Dialing it back a bit and letting the master compressor (StereoTool) in the studio handle it made it much better. In the future, PlayIT will fix this with the new loudness feature. The I can use the Rodecaster Pro onboard mike-compressor and PIL to get the levels right within reason before it’s handed of to the master compressor.
• I need more people on this. Being the sole guy to control everything can be super stressful. Especially if something goes bad.
Check the box for some serious fun!
• PlayIT live is super stable and does nothing wrong during the whole broadcast. However, the Priority streams may need a bit of work. A few loose ideas:
o A buffer size/time setting in order to handle connections with latency and/or that are unstable. o A visual problem indicator could send back a message that “The stream works but is choppy/unstable”. This could be sent as messages through the web browser popping up a warning in the notification area. o A new feature: “max retries before giving up accepting the stream”, that would help cutting the stream off before the listeners give up on the whole thing. o Maybe a “I’ll let you try again in X minutes” feature as well. o A log of stable/unstable stream events would be very useful. “6:20PM Stream has entered the unstable state. 6:25 Stream has entered the stable state again. During the unstable phase, 4711 lost packets were recorded, 150 stutters etc.”.
• This can probably be downscaled to just a laptop and a USB microphone, mixing the whole thing in software (Voicemeeter). But it’s a bit of a buzzkill. I want a physical mixing console!
• Can it be made into a wearable? Then you are basically a broadcasting cyborg. 😀
• Listeners are not tolerant. I missed two song endings with a few seconds of dead air as a result (see above for an explanation why). Each time it cost me a few listeners. I guess the others were not in the room when it happened. This has been the way it is ever since radio was invented and you had more than one station to listen to. I will never be different. Get used to it, man.
• PlayIT live can be hard to read at times. If the song reaches its cue out point and the segue is set to “Stop”, the countdown stops at 00:00 with the song still fading out. I learned to wait a few seconds before lifting the fader after that.
• I love the new “angry red” blinking feature of the player that is almost at the end of the song, that is in the beta 2.10! It would have helped if it was out when I did this. Next time it will.
• I made it a bit of thing complaining about the beer truck not arriving in time. This was mostly a joke as I know better than getting drunk during broadcast. My mother was in the TV business for many years and told stories about how drunk some of the hosts were during broadcasts. One of our most famous radio hosts here in Sweden was a big alcoholic as well. Soooo… There is nothing good about mixing anything else than sound during broadcast. Especially if it gets in the mixing console… I had my food and drink on another table adjacent to the one I used for broadcasting. Ok, the picture below says something else, but that was during setup and the mug was empty.
• I just got one interview made during the show. And it went quite well. The guy I spoke with had a great set of humor and kindly explained the party quite well.
• It is a bit tough to know what songs that you have played if you manually populate the list and broadcast for many hours. (This is true!) I wrote a radio automation software in 1999 that eventually had a featuring tell you when a song was last played. This meant you never risked playing the same tune twice during a long broadcast or that was chosen automatically during the day.
• Placement of the 4G modem and how many other people there are in the build using Mobile phones is a thing to really consider. In the future, a directional antenna is probably necessary. This ended up being a problem on broadcasting day two. But was solved quickly.
• A prepping mentality is needed. Try to duplicate everything that will make it impossible to broadcast if it fails.
• Bring water in a bottle, a multitool, gaffer tape, a big bag of patience.
• Getting a feel for the proper amount of time to speak between the songs is good. But I still back this up with classic old digital chronometer from time to time. This is mostly a station policy thing. But I speak 10-20 seconds between every fourth song during the normal broadcast. And 30 – 60 seconds between every song on the podcast episodes or the remote live broadcasts.
• Modern Internet-streaming means you get to see when listeners disconnect. Use that to learn, but do not become neurotic about it.
• Using a Rodecaster Pro? Good! Get a cover lid and the battery power option. You know you want to.
• Record everything locally as well Especially stuff you want to reuse. Do not just rely on reference taping.
• I probably forgot something important in this list. Also, someone will complain loudly about something I did/failed to do/should have done/is not true radio/is probably not best-practice/makes me an idiot. But hey, why not just accept that you do not stop learning as long as you live, and you don’t truly live when you stop learning.
Summary
Yours truly, resting in the real studio/control room.
It was quite an experience broadcasting live after this many years. There were some challenges, but I could handle them.
Listening to the broadcast, I think it was mostly very good. The dropouts were few, my speeches were decently short and informative, and the music was nice. I sometimes stutter a bit when speaking as I am not a native English speaker. And there are occasional grammar problems and the odd malapropism. And yeah. A pretty Swenglish dialect. But, hey, it is what it is…
Shiver me timbers! It’s all about software piracy! We talk diskettes copied, Jan Svensson on the prowl and the 1337 Warez D00dz.
00:00 Flashback – tracks from the past – show intro 00:12 DJ Daemon speaks: Shiver me timbers, it’s a new name for the podcast. And today, we talk about pirates! <A pirate I was meant to be> No ships, no cutlass and no beer swilling on the tavern. It’s all about those pesky software pirates and the lamers who loved them…
00:31 BeaT of Osmosys – Celestial Fantasia 06:16 DJ Daemon speaks: So… Why are those that copy commercial software without permission called pirates to begin with? It has nothing to do with crimes on the seven seas. Actually it relates to the “pirate radio stations” of the 50s and 60s. Those stations were often located on ships, broadcasting from international water, where the law of the countries they targetted would not apply. When the kids in the school yards in the 80s started copying diskettes with commercial games, the term was re-used. But a pirate generally does not refer to the end-user, but actually to the crackers and the distributors. Let’s talk more about that after a relaxing tracked tune.
07:16 Xerxes – Marie 11:40 DJ Daemon speaks: Let’s talk piracy in Sweden. I once interviewed Pontus Berg or Bacchus as he’s called in the cracker group Fairlight. He explained that in the first years when Fairlight existed, distribution of commercial software without the copyright owner’s consent was legal. But diskettes with commerical games and applications were protected in order to make copying impossible. Groups such as Fairlight and Triad here i Sweden disabled this protection and also distributed the software. The industry initially begged them to stop, but then it became illegal, the attitude changed pretty quickly….
12:33 Jester of Sanity – Stardust memories 16:23 DJ Daemon speaks: In the early 90s, a lot of us geeks read the Swedish computer magazine “Datormagasin”. Issue number 16 of 1993 spread shock waves through the community, as “Jan Svensson” entered the scene. That was not his name, but he did exist. A pirate-hunter that preyed on those copying disks. There was just a problem: it wasn’t true. The article was kind of open about the true purpose of him, but the picture and the head line made a lot of people believe that he targeted teenagers copying disks with each other. In reality, he actually tried to gather evidence to convict big bulletin board systems selling illegal copies.
17:22 Skaven252 – The Goblin Returns 20:19 DJ Daemon speaks: Jan Svensson was described as a former “big time pirate” turned informer belonging to SIMP, a precursor to the Swedish organization “Anti-piratbyrån”. And in 1993, his work may have helped bringing down a big BBS in the Swedish town of Helsingborg. The sysop for the BBS called “Scandinavia” was convicted and had to pay 8000 Swedish kronas. That’s about $1300 in today’s monetary value. The thing that made them target him was that he charged money yearly for access to the pirate copies on his BBS.
21:17 Ahlin – Ps Deep Fantasy 23:23 DJ Daemon speaks: So why did we copy diskettes? For me and for many in my situation, we could not afford the games as we were teenagers or even kids. But that’s off course not a valid legal reason. So I don’t offer it as an excuse – rather an explanation. When I go my first modem, I actually didn’t pirate much at all and pretty quickly stopped as I didn’t really care about games and saved money to buy software instead. Not so much just an ethical decision but much more that i disliked the warez communities and their high brow cameraderie and self-absorbed attitude towards others. I respect the crackers, though…
24:15 Anvil – Path to Nowhere 28:39 DJ Daemon speaks: The warez-BBSes were the places where you could get the newest “cracks”. That is, the latest games and apps with the copy protection disabled. The word “elite” as often described by the number combination 1337 comes from same the bunch of people that saw themselves as the best of the best. But they were often shunned by many others. The warez BBSes required that you were recommended by others in the warez scene in order to gain access. This protected them from the law (or so they though) and made them feel special.
29:25 Laamaa – No use for a name 31:05 DJ Daemon speaks: No-one has better described the Warez doodz than legendary programmer Eric S. Raymond: “The cracker d00dz have a gift culture which thrives in the same (electronic) media as that of the hackers, but their bahaviour is very different. The group mentality in their culture is much stronger and more exclusive than among hackers. They hoard secrets rather than sharing them; one is much more likely to find cracker groups distributing sourceless executables that crack software than tips that give away how they did it.”.
32:19 Anvil – The Love Trap 36:40 DJ Daemon speaks: The last word on Warez Doodz is from the user Ozone Pilot : [BELONG] is the only word you will need to know. Warez d00dz want to belong. They have been shunned by everyone, and thus turn to cyberspace for acceptance. That is why they always start groups like TGW, FLT, USA and the like. Structure makes them happy. […] Warez d00dz will never have a handle like “Pink Daisy” because warez d00dz are insecure. Only someone who is very secure with a good dose of self-esteem can stand up to the cries of fag and girlie-man. More likely you will find warez d00dz with handles like: Doctor Death, Deranged Lunatic, Hellraiser, Mad Prince, Dreamdevil, The Unknown, Renegade Chemist, Terminator, and Twin Turbo. They like to sound badass when they can hide behind their terminals. More likely, if you were given a sample of 100 people, the person whose handle is Hellraiser is the last person you’d associate with the name.
38:16 Necros – “Ascent of the Cloud Eagle” 43:01 DJ Daemon speaks: Linus Walleij here in Sweden disagrees with mr Raymond. When he wrote his rebuttal, he was part of the cracker group Triad.
43:45 Jeroen Tel – In my Life, my Mind. 48:34 DJ Daemon speaks: I respect the cracker groups, but see the Warez D00d-sysops as way to self-absorbed for their own good.
49:31 Dr. Awesome – Aquarium – 16 bit 54:24 DJ Daemon speaks: Were leaving. Check our YouTube-channel for a discussion about the next song.
Those rules for success, life, love and many other areas are popular today. And much of it is ridiculous and sometimes downright condescending. It’s sometimes annoying to hear all those persistently happy people telling you that “you can do anything…” or “it’s all about attitude”. So here are my rules, that mainly apply to me, as I’ve learnt them through life. Sometimes I know them full well but fail to abide by them. This is good as I afterwards know why I should have. Actually, they’re more aforisms than rules, but I didn’t know that when I started writing this post.
If you find them useful, amusing or don’t disagree too much with them, I kindly ask you to steal them… No need for attribution or credit. I’m just a middle aged man who learnt something through life. And the list is incomplete.
Don’t be an asshole.
If you listen – you win.
Look over your notes, the documentation or your work one more time before completing something.
… or don’t. Experimentation is fun! Just make sure you can handle the catastrophies afterwards. If not, rule 3 applies over rule 4.
Words are either cheap – or painfully expensive. If you don’t know which is which, speak less.
You have to know the rules, before breaking them. – My mother.
You’re free – so are the consequences.
Respect other people – This follows from rule 1 – but no need to necessary respect their views. They don’t necessary respect yours.
You enemy’s enemy IS NOT by implication your friend.
You see, but you do not observe. That distinction is clear. – Sherlock Holmes
Doing bad unto evil is not good. Stopping evil is probably for the better.
No spine – no respect. Sorry, I don’t make the rules… Don’t be mad, please 🙁 <= You see the problem right here now don’t you? 🙂
Choose your fights. If you can, choose as few as possible. Fighting is just useless most of the time. You’re probably better of watching the telly.
Sometimes you must fight. Save your energy for those occasions.
If you can’t change others, listening to them is probably very valuable for you.
If you constantly criticise yourself – you get better – or fail! The poison is defined by the dosage.
If you make someone happy, you get happy. If you make them angry, you get angry.
Rule 17 doesn’t apply to sociopaths. For them, it’s the other way around.
The best microphone for recording the Accordion, Yoko Ono, Justin Beiber or Midi-Maxi-Efti is one cut off a little bit above the cable connector. (Based on Wendy Carlos audio recording guide)
They say you should always wear sun block. It’s all well and so, just don’t drink it, mmmmkay?
Vaccines are great, because it’s nice to be alive.
If they tell you to think freely and then tell you how to not do it WRONG, you are probably not being taught to be free in the first place.
Ideas are great to have. But even better to kill.
What is so good about starting things, if you don’t complete them?
What is so good about completing things, if they weren’t worth starting in the first place?
Learn from the experienced, then apply it to your own life in order to not do their mistakes… Or not… You know, not doing it gives you their experience. There’s always that.
Winners don’t quit and quitters don’t win. If you don’t win and don’t quit, you need to learn the “sunken cost fallacy”.
You’re often wrong…
… especially when you just understood something…
Schadefreude is fun, until it’s your misfortune they’re laughing at.
“Do unto others…” is a good idea unless you’re a suicidal serial killer.
There are those who have an additional problem for every solution you propose to the problem they told you about in the first place.
If it can be done, ask yourself: should it?
If it can’t, ask yourself: what do I learn from trying?
You regret everything you didn’t do before regretting what you did. But in the end you regret them both. Mostly the former.
Learn to lose. The last place is not the “most recent winner”.
There’s nothing bad about avoiding risks. It’s a good survival strategy. But you must know what you lose by not trying.
… And you never fully will…
If you believe that you will fail – so you shall – unless you’re overcome by some healthy fear of death.
“It’s not paranoia when they’re out to get you” – Moment 22.
When the world is out to get you, paranoia is just a natural defensive reflex – Skippy.
Why not try PRO-noia sometimes? Assume everyone is talking about you – and LOVE you to bits. – Anders Sandberg.
Not even god could keep paradise secure – Erik Zalitis.
Avoid falling to much in love with ideologies, they’re often abusive partners.
Radio is superior to TV.
If they talk shit about people when you’re in the room, guess who they will be talking about once you leave.
An insult followed by “… Nah, I was just joking” is a red flag accompanied by a blaring klaxon.
If you ask someone if you did well, ignore their answer, but look if they’re shaking their heads when they answer “Yes”.
The Beatles are greater than Rolling stones. That’s just how it is.
It sucks when people don’t learn from history and then repeat it, as you have to watch it unfold.
Wise words can be said by unwise people. If so, seek the source. If they’re the source, are they still unwise? Especially if you agree with them? Maybe they are, and then maybe you are as well… Just saying…
Intelligence and ability correlate with success…
… as does knowing the right people.
… being rich is kinda good too.
They invented a “left wing” and a “right wing” in the political field. That’s great, now you can fight with your friends about pointless things. You want to change the world? Try actually becoming politically active instead.
Every village has an idiot and every work place an eccentric weirdo. If you don’t know who it is where you live, I got some bad news for you…
Worried about strange people? If they’re not into harming others, they’re probably worth knowing.
A gun is always loaded, a mike is always on and your future wife/husband is probably reading your next tweet.
A fool and his money will soon part ways – but look at all the cool stuff you can buy!
Shrouds have no pockets, but you get to keep whatever you give to others – your reputation that is.
Lack of planning is also planning – the same way that a lack of sex is also a way of ensuring that humanity procreate – it just doesn’t involve you.
If you don’t plan ahead, every venture will be an adventure.
If mere criticism against a person or a group cause them to seek revenge, run! Run fast!
Yeah, I probably inadvertently stole some of those ideas. So should you!
As I’m into the areas of IT-security and retro computing… Here’s a podcast with me talking about old viruses from the 80s and 90s. It features cool music from the Amiga.
Viruses are no fun, but we have had to contend with them since the 70s. The Amiga had its share of them like SCA, Bytebandit, Saddam Hussein, Lamer exterminator and some others. Some just wrote cute messages, whereas others deliberately or by mistake destroyed your data. Let DJ Daemon take you back to the 80s and guide you through the less popular parts of Amiga history.
00:00 Amiga Flashback – show intro 00:13 DJ Daemon – introduces the episode 00:35 Firage – Buns and Guns 02:40 DJ Daemon – speaks about Amiga computer viruses 03:32 Radix – * CoLoUrS * 08:45 DJ Daemon – speaks about the SCA virus 10:06 Reed Richards – Devoted 14:56 DJ Daemon – speaks about the ByteBandit virus 15:58 CRD – Chordian remix 17:51 DJ Daemon – speaks about the Saddam virus 19:20 Finwave – Just Do It (F/U) 23:47 DJ Daemon – concludes by saying it’s not an Amiga-thing 25:10 FearofDark – SurfingOnASineWave 30:01 DJ Daemon – discusses viruses destroying hardware 31:42 Elwood – After Hours 35:07 DJ Daemon speaks 29s 35:36 Maikel Yeremy – The Wayfarers Arrive 38:34 DJ Daemon speaks 34s 39:07 JaseChong – Kingdom Skies 43:41 DJ Daemon speaks 37s 44:17 Maikel Yeremy – Teller 1 46:30 DJ Daemon speaks 39s 47:09 Nescio – Dreaming of you 49:36 DJ Daemon speaks 33s 50:08 AceMan – Vintage Groove 53:57 DJ Daemon speaks 28s 54:24 Velvet of Amb and Tdr – Sternzeit 56:41 DJ Daemon speaks 11s
