Sam Soffes

So I've been working really hard lately on stuff with my band, Hollow. (I totally hate MySpace by the way. We're in the process of redoing our site.)

Anyway, here is some of our newer stuff that we've been working on. We wrote this intro as something to open our shows with. The band starts playing when everything drops out and it's just piano. It sounds amazing. Hopefully the full recording will be done in a few weeks.

Check it out on my music page or on my SoundCloud profile. It also threw it in my podcast feed, you can check it out there too. Enjoy.

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So I have been on so many different blogging platforms, it's not even funny. The last one I was using was some I wrote custom in Kohana. I was pretty happy with it. The only thing about it was that I never took the time to build a good admin for it. Since there was no good admin for it, I never took the time to update it manually.

I'm not a huge fan of WordPress because it is a resource hog, but it makes it easy for me to update my blog, which is what I want. If I happen to stumble across a large amount of time, I might write my own again, but I'll probably stick with this for now.

I'm really loving WordPress 2.7. It's really pretty. For the original move from my stuff, I just copied all of my old styles and such over. I need to add commenting to my template and possibly a sidebar at some point. As always, it's still a work in progress.

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So recently I registered a few fun unicode domains. I think http://♹.com/ is my favorite that I registered. It took me awhile to figure out how to do it. I saw http://☃.net/ on iTod's twitter and it made me really want to figure out how to do it.

So the first thing to note is you don't actually register ♹.com, but xn--06h.com instead. This is also difficult because a lot registrars don't let you register xn-- domains because it is reserved. xn-- means that it is puny code encoded. Puny code is basically is a notation for encoding unicode characters into a more common character set.

So once I discovered that, all I had to do was pick a fun combination character, encode it into puny code, and then register it. The registrar that I used was Verio. Overall, I'm not a fan of them, but they were the only one that would let me register a xn-- domain.

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So I have been trying to solve the problem of having my iTunes on all of my computers for a long time. I tried taking my MacBook Pro with me and mounting it in target disk mode, USB powered hard drives, and rsync (which was frustrating and I ended up giving up on that one).

I’ve been using Dropbox (a really sweet file syncing service) for a while now. It’s really hand for syncing files between my computers seamlessly. The MobileMe iDisk is super slow and doesn’t support PCs (not that I care about them though). I mainly used Dropbox to sync all of desktop wallpapers between my computers or to transfer a file quickly. We also use it at work to share a file quickly.

A few weeks ago I started syncing my iTunes library between my computers with Dropbox instead of using my portable hard drive. I had to up my space to 50GB (only $9.99 a month). It’s been awesome! It’s really easy to setup too.

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