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Skip to the content Ben Lobaugh Online I think, therefore I am. I am, therefore I sail Toggle the mobile menu Toggle the search field Growth & Leadership Giving Back Footloose Disabled Sailing Uganda Sailing My Boats Barnett Max Resources Minto Sailing Dinghy Music Keyboard Rig Gear Reviews Behringer U-PHORIA UMC202HD Audio Interface Getting back into it VW Bus About Affiliate Disclaimer Search Growth & Leadership Giving Back Footloose Disabled Sailing Uganda Sailing My Boats Barnett Max Resources Minto Sailing Dinghy Music Keyboard Rig Gear Reviews Behringer U-PHORIA UMC202HD Audio Interface Getting back into it VW Bus About Affiliate Disclaimer Turn Me Up! How I Control My Own In-Ear Monitor Mix By Ben Lobaugh (blobaugh) On March 2, 2021 In Music , Review “I need more of myself! Turn me up!” – Musicians Worldwide It is an age old dilemma for the sound crew- how to provide the volume levels that each musician wants in order to hear themself. I recall the time when floor monitors were ubiquitous and all the time the band would spend arguing over their monitor levels. In smaller venues it sometimes to the point that the stage monitors were louder than the house speakers! The drop in price of good in-ear monitors to a range the average music could afford was a game changer. As a drummer, I love in-ear monitors because it puts the monitor audio closer to my eardrums. I do not have to strain to hear the floor monitor over the sounds of enthusiastic banging. As a keyboardist, in-ear monitors have allowed me to increase the lushness and types of sounds I can use. Getting the floor monitor volume up where I wanted it often would cause the rest of the band to not be able to hear their own part due to the covering nature of pads. One problem solved, but there is still the issue of many mixing consoles having a limited number of aux channels for monitors.What I commonly encountered were four aux channels, split something along the lines of: Piano Singers Drums and bass The rest of the band That left everyone to bicker about their own volume still. Nearly two decades ago I came up with a deceptively simple solution that allowed me to both hear as much of myself as I want and control my own volume. All without affecting anyone else sharing the monitor mix. In fact, I could be removed from the monitor mix entirely if desired and still hear myself. The solution: Run the monitor send from the board and the output from your instrument into a personal mixer. Here is a diagram of the idea: The Personal Mixer sits next to your instrument and allows you to turn up and down the volume of your instrument independently of the monitor mix coming from the soundboard. During set up, connect a splitter to the output of the instrument, in my case a keyboard. One side runs into the direct box and out to the house, the other into the personal mixer. The monitor send from the house runs into another channel on the personal mixer. Headphones plug in to the personal mixer and viola! I now have control to hear myself as loudly as I would like. For the splitter, go with something like My current go to personal mixer is the Rolls MX28, due to it’s compact design and how easy it is to mount on a flat surface. Other mixers I have used with great success And, of course everyone wants to know what earbuds I used. For the price and sound quality I have never found any better than the KZ lineup How to Detect Mobile Devices Accessing a Shopify Store By Ben Lobaugh (blobaugh) On January 25, 2021 In Web Development how you how to detect mobile devices accessing a Shopify store. Shopify is a great platform for many ecommerce stores. Developing themes is simple with the Liquid template language , however it does have some drawbacks. Liquid templates are pre-rendered on the server and not able to respond dynamically to the device accessing the store. This means whether the customer is visiting from a desktop, tablet, or phone they will receive the exact same html content. There is no way to send custom content based upon the device the customer is connecting with. I hear you thinking, “But wait, isn’t this article about mobile devices and Shopify?” Yes it is. In order to detect and serve different content to mobile devices another tool will be used, javascript. Javascript runs on the browser, meaning it takes after the Shopify store has delivered the content to the customer. With a little care, it is possible to dynamically load content based on the customer’s device. Here is the Javascript you can use. It has several browsers to detect in it. Customize the list as needed. <script> var isMobile = navigator.userAgent.match(/(iPhone|iPod|iPad|Android|webOS|BlackBerry|IEMobile|Opera Mini)/i);if(isMobile){ // Mobile functionality }else{ // Desktop functionality } </script> It should be noted, Apple updated the iPad OS to request desktop versions of pages. This means that this method may not work 100% of the time for detecting an iPad. How to Make a Domain Proxy for Digital Ocean Spaces By Ben Lobaugh (blobaugh) On January 15, 2021 In Web Development Digital Ocean has been my go to solution for hosting for many years. When the Spaces service, an S3 compatible object store, was introduceed, I jumped on board right away. The service performs well and allows me to manage all the web infrastructure from one location. The drawback with Spaces, to me, is how custom domains are handled. It is possible to do, but you have to turn over DNS control of the domain to Digital Ocean. That is not always possible or practical to do. For a couple years I have run various sites with the domain provided by Digital Ocean. A default Spaces domain has the format: account.datacenter.digitaloceanspaces.com For my personal blog this looks like: lobaugh.sfo2.digitaloceanspaces.com A useable, but not very attractive domain. I decided to revisit the topic. Nginx has some powerful proxy capabilities in it, and it turns out that it works quite well to create a domain proxy. With the proxy enabled, visiting https://assets.lobaugh.net/image.png Will return the file from https://lobaugh.sfo2.digitaloceanspaces.com/image.png Running my own domain proxy does introduce additional complexity and slight overhead, but I am comfortable with it. I will present the nginx.conf file in its entirety here, then walk through it below. log_format upstream '[$time_local] Requested: $host$uri - Proxied $proxy_host - Response time remote $upstream_response_time request $request_time';proxy_cache_path /tmp/nginxcache levels=1:2 keys_zone=my_cache:10m max_size=2g inactive=600m use_temp_path=off;server {listen 80;location / { proxy_cache my_cache; proxy_pass https://lobaugh.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com$uri$is_args$args ; add_header X-Proxy-Cache $upstream_cache_status; access_log /dev/stdout upstream; } } That’s it! The configuration is fairly simple. * log_format upstream — (optional) Establishes the format of the log file. Not needed if logging is disabled. Turning off logging may help performance. * proxy_cache_path — Configures the nginx caching of the files from Spaces. A 10 minute cache, with a max of 2 gigabytes is created. Though not necessary, this will help save on server resources and wait time for clients. * server.listen — Establish the web service * server.location — Configure the web service * proxy_cache — Sets up the previously configured cache * proxy_pass — This is the meat and potatoes. This passes the call to assets.lobaugh.net to the Spaces service, and retrieves the file * add_header — (optional) Adds a simple header item that allows us to inspect whether the response was cached. Can be safely left out * access_log — Send the output of the log to /dev/stdout, based on the upstream format. Not needed if logging is disabled. Turning off logging may help performance This is v1 of the configuration. Nginx provides a lot of neat options that can tweak and optimize it. To learn more about the options, here are a f...