Remastered version of Romantic Moves will be released soon.

In 2003 I wrote Romantic Moves. An album with 10 SynthiePop tracks and released on Jamendo 2006. Since I’m listed as an artist on the most popular streaming platforms and my latest album “Michael” was released there, I decided to put the older albums there as well. All albums will be remastered and added within one year. Some of them will have new covers, because the demands on resolution and quality of the cover start have increased in the last 20 years 🙂

New Album-Cover of Romantic Moves Remastered

New Version of the Romantic Moves cover due to a needed better resolution for the streaming platforms
Old cover version i like more, but have no better quality nor the original picture used for the cover 🙂

Check out my accounts on Apple Music, Spotify and other straming platforms. You’ll find them all in my footer on this website.

Re-activated my Mr. Beam II casercutter

I’ve pledged the Mr. Beam II Lasercutter a few years ago as it was on Kickstarter in 2016 and got the lasercutter Mr. Beam II together with the air filter system a long time after the planned deliverance.

As i lost interest in this item it took a while until i unpacked the parcels and i tried a few cuts with sample graphics. Worked well, but i totally forget ovber the time, why i have wanted a lasercutter so much that i invested a few thoudsand dollars to get one 🙂 And so the Mr. Beam II stood in my old office and got older and older.

Now, a few days ago i’ve planned to set up my office new and make some kind of nerd-dungeon out of this area. So i planned to pin my logo at the wall and thought about how cool this would be to have it backlit with RGB.LED-stripes. SO i overworked my logo and sent my file to an online-printing-company which is printing and contour milling the logo on a 3mm DiBond-plate. But to mount it on the wall i needed a surface to mount the LED strips and the logo-plate itself. So i came up with the idea of lasercutting those suerfaces out of some poplar plywood.

I have had 3mm poplar plywood in my cellar since a few years and some Ponal wood glue. So i started cutting and to get 10mm stripes fit onto the base i needed to cut 4x3mm boards. Worked fine. Took about 40 minutes for each board and after i glued them together i have to wait for the Philips Hue-compatible LED-Stripes so i can control them by script or my Stream Deck-Setup.

The Mr. Beam II Lasercutter – First time i did something productive with it 🙂

So all boards are cut and glued together and are drying at the moment. It worked very easy to do the vector paths in Adobe Illustrator export them as SVG and import them into the Mr. Beam II Software. It took a while until the Mr. Beam II has updated his software. And a lot of error accured but rebooting and re-checking for updates and installing them “as they wanted to” helped and half an hour later (after opening a support ticket at Mr. Beam) and some new reboots it worked and the software was updated as wanted and went from beta-version to a official version.

The basement for the DiBond-print and the LED-Stripes

So i hopefully get my prints during this week and correctly milled 🙂 and then my wall in my new nerd-dungeon shall be set up with my logo (without text) and should be light up by a hue compatible led-rgb-stripe.

As i ordered two boards from the print shop (one for the nerd-dungeon, one for my music studio) i may need to cut another four plates for the basement. but now i have optimized the cutout process for the Mr. Beam II lasercutter so it takes less time than the first set.

Best Setup for cutting 3mm poplar plywood with the Mr. Beam II

I’ve tried a few cuts on a 3mm poplar plywood circle and my setup was:

  • 250mm / second, 100% intensity

i’ve cutted seven circles and every cirly with a higher number of rounds.

First Circle: 1 round, 2nd Circle: 2 rounds and so on.

The first total cut-thrugh was at

  • 5 rounds with 250mm/sec and 100% energy.

So this is my optimal setting for cutting out 3mm poplar plywood with the Mr. Beam II lasercutter.

Next i will try faster speeds to optimize cutting time .

Compare two tables to get all unlinked entries

I have the problem on RolandRadio, that a lot of people try to modify the charts and register to vote. All users not verified by Mail are deleted after 24 hours to avoid fake users but some of them already mass-voted on titles.

So i needed to find out if there are ratings by users already non existent in the users table. I came up with this mySQL-Solution:

select * 
from ratings A
Where Not exists (select 1 from users B Where A.model_id = B.id)

Or without the aliasing:

select * 
from ratings
WHERE NOT exists (select 1 from users Where ratings.model_id = users.id)

So i select all from the table ratings and get all those entries where the model_id-column of the ratings-table is not in the id of the users-table.

This brought up 1600 ratings of already deleted users. i hate it that people are so manipulative on the charts. Now i need to do a cron-tab-command to delete ratings of deleted users every day. Also i included

     if (Auth::user()->verified != 1) {
            session()->flash('message', 'You must verify your email first!');
        } 

into the rating function to avoid users not verified to rate on titles.

1071 Specified key was too long;

If you use an older Version of mySQL or MariaDB Laravel throws an error on the first migration on your database. Thats cause the defaultStringLentth needs to be set to a maximum length of 191 characters.

    public function boot()
{
Schema::defaultStringLength(191);
}
}

Add this to your AppServiceProvider.php File and rerun your migration

Dont forget to add

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schema;

How to install Audirvana if the ms-appinstaller fails.

A friend recommended Audirvana and I wanted to try this music management and player system. Unfortunately the download of the app didn’t work because the system on which I wanted to install it doesn’t have an installation of the Microsoft App Store. Audirvana doesn’t offer a proper .EXE, so there is nothing left to do but to trick something.

ms-appinstaller doesnt open the install-routine

Nevertheless, the appinstaller file with the name “AudirvanaSetup.appinstaller” is downloaded. Open it ini a texteditor and you will get something like this:

de



	
	
		
	

copy and paste the Uri to any browser to download the appxbundle-file to your computer. In this example it is https://audirvana.com/delivery/windows/AudirvanaSetup_3.5.37.0_Test/AudirvanaSetup_3.5.37.0_x64.appxbundle

Right-Click on the powershell and use “run as administrator”

Start PowerShell in Administator mode and use this command. Sure the path to your AudirvanaSetup must be changed.

Add-AppxPackage -Path "C:\Users\plex\Downloads\AudirvanaSetup_3.5.37.0_x64.appxbundle"

After this you will have installed Audirvana on your Windows 10 System

Adding a command to laravel deleting all unwanted users :-)

As spammer start flooding my users table with fake-accounts i startet to develop a command for laravel to run in a cron job for deleting all users which didnt verified their email within the last 24 hours.

A nice how-to do a laravel console command for cron can be found at: https://tutsforweb.com/how-to-set-up-task-scheduling-cron-job-in-laravel/

This is my routine to select all users which haven’t confirmed their email and their register date is older than 24 hours.

    public function handle()
    {
         $results = User::whereNull('email_verified_at')->get();
        $results = $results
            ->where('created_at', '<', Carbon::now()->subDays(1)->toDateTimeString());

        foreach ($results as $result)
        {
            $result->delete();
        }

    }

Added the following command to the crontab by crontab -e on the webserver to execute the command:

cd /var/www/vhosts/rolandradio.net/rolandradio2020 && /opt/plesk/php/7.4/bin/php artisan schedule:run >> /dev/null 2>&1

Set Laravel-Project to “down” during updates

Everytime i start an update of the whole project it takes hours to upload all the new updated files to my web server.

To avoid a massive downtime for the user without informing them about the status and displaying any errors i just touch a file within the project:

project->storage->framework

there i add a file called “down” and the site goes into “down-mode” – atfer i finished my work i rename the file to “down-” to bring up the site agein. I configured the Error 503 page to display a nicer version of the error.

Error Class ‘Illuminate\Database\Grammar’ not found

Today i updated RolandRadio.net because i had some new packages i wanted to use. On my local Laravel instalation everything worked fine but after uploading the new changed files i got an error:

Error Class ‘Illuminate\Database\Grammar’ not found

I didn’t figured out how to fix this and suggested that it has soething to do with updates of laravel that occured during my development and so the local laravel version and the version on my webserver where different.

After uploading all the files again completely instead of only the different ones the website worked again. Maybe my FTP-Client has messed up some files. As the Upload of those files takes about 2,5 hours i should think about using GIT to avoid those long downtime and commit my changes more often to the GIT repository then.