Posted October 10th, 2009, in: 1| Computer Problems and Fixes

Copy of a forum post I posted at M-Audio’s user Forum.

I love my BX5’s. One of them died. Here’s what’s going on. I would really appreciate any advice on further troubleshooting/diagnosis. 

• One of my BX5’s stopped outputting sound. It may been have been sitting turned on a few days before I noticed that it wasn’t working.
• Upon putting my ear to it, I realized that it was making a steady hum/buzz from both drivers. This was similar to a 60-cycle hum but a little raspy-er if that makes sense, and if I’m not out of my mind. Also it wasn’t a very loud hum. Only about as loud as you’d get from a bad cable or something.
• I tested for a bad input connection and tried using XLR instead of the 1/4 inch input. The problem was clearly inside the unit.
• I opened it up carefully, to see if there was anything obviously burnt or shorted or broken inside.
• After finding nothing that was obvious to me, I googled around and found a few posts on the m-audio forum talking about problems caused by worn-out capacitors. See: http://forums.m-audio.com/showthread.php?t=3871&page=1 and http://forums.m-audio.com/showthread.php?t=11926 and many others.
• One of my two main power-supply caps was indeed bloated. And I noticed some dark-brown crustiness on top of the other which I concluded might be leakage of “electrolyte,” whatever that is.
• I de-soldered and removed the old caps and set out to find replacements.
• I accidentally ordered 16V 6800mfd instead of 25V 6800mfd, which I didn’t notice until I had already soldered them in.
• I tried them anyway because in theory, since all the caps are supposed to do is smooth the supply current, too-low of a voltage rating on the cap would just mean that the caps will wear out sooner. The constant hum/buzz was gone with the new caps in. Instead what I got was a pop a few seconds after the unit was powered on. The pop is new. My functioning unit does not pop.
• I went and got the correct 25V 6800µF Capacitors and put them in but there was no change in the above behavior. Incidentally, I had to mount one on the bottom because the ones I got were more than twice as wide and a bit taller than the originals.
• I’ve double and triple-checked the soldering. I even opened up my functioning BX5 to make sure that the caps are in the right polarity.
• I tested for continuity between the capacitor leads and the destination/source on the printed circuit (for instance one path goes to what I believe is a Rectifier IC so I checked to makes sure that path was solid all the way from that component’s lead to the cap’s lead to rule out a bad solder joint… I did this for all the paths in the printed circuit)
• I’ve quadruple-checked for any visible shorts.
• I believe that my capacitor-replacement surgery was a success, so now I am beginning to doubt that bad caps were the real problem. It’s entirely possible that the buzz/hum I was hearing was there for some time since it wasn’t loud enough to hear until I put my ear right up to the unit. Maybe I have two problems, one of which I just fixed.
• I can now hear some faint white noise and hum from both drivers. The original, louder buzz/hum sound is gone. Instead what I hear is about like what you’d expect from an audio amplifier, but that is not the case with the fully functional unit I have… The functioning unit is very clean. The volume knob makes no difference in the slight noise/hum. And it’s so faint that if I didn’t have the other unit to compare with, I would probably think what I’m hearing is the normal hum of the amp.
• The only other sound I can get from the dead unit is when I change the “Low Cutoff” switch, I hear slight fuzzy, static-y sound during the switching, but none of the other switches make any noise.

What should I do next? Perhaps the real problem here is in the audio signal path? A pre-amp problem? How can I rule that out?

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Posted September 22nd, 2009, in: 1| Marketing/Advertising In The Cloud| Technology| Web 2.0

This is according to Jason Calacanis via This Week in Startups or TWIST.

If this is true, I feel quite a bit more comfortable in my assessment that WordPress is the best CMS for most companies or people, even for non-bloggers.

This also makes me proud of myself for seeing WP as a star product way back in 2005 when I was just getting started with Web marketing stuff and working on the public-facing side of Four Eyed Monsters.

There a a number of other free, open-source systems for managing website content.  Drupal and Joomla are the most obvious to mention.  But in my opinion, these are not mature platforms, even though they may be more appealing to devs.

The point of a CMS is (in my opinion) to make things easy for non-devs.  The point is to make it easy for the owner of the site.  This way, they don’t have to get ahold of their “web person” to fix a typo or add or remove a page.

Anyway, I’ve had faith in WordPress for a long time and watching it grow to the point where it is now is so comforting to me.  Thank god for crowd-sourcing and Open-Source! It works.

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Posted July 16th, 2009, in: 1| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| New Media| Technology| Ubuntu/Xubuntu/Linux| Web Browsers

I was inspired to write this after hearing the good people at Buzz Out Loud as well as others talk about Chrome OS (supposedly coming in a year or two) and the Android Mobile OS somehow being evidence of some sort of disorganization of Google’s intentions Etc.

Google has these two initiatives that keep getting mentioned: Android, a “mobile OS,” and “Chrome (an OS allegedly coming out in a year or two),” which has been announced after all of us are already aware of the Chrome browser, which is pretty awesome in my opinion.

Here’s what I think practically everyone is missing about  this.

Linux Distros are all frankensteins.  I’m most familiar with Ubuntu, but I think anyone that knows about Linux would back me up in saying that Linux is an open-ended compilation of source-code.  And if you have a given distro and need some additional software, you very likely are going to be using add-on code that users of other distros are also using.

For this reason, Android and Chrome OS are not necessarily different initiatives on Google’s part.

And to go even further, I don’t believe that Android and Web OS from Palm are competitors.  I think it’s completely reasonable to assume that a Web OS front-end for Android is likely (as long as Android and WebOS continue to be released to consumers).  They’re both just Linux with different front-ends.  And with Linux Boxes, as they used to be called, the GUI is itself just an add-on.

Back to Google Chrome and Android.

I suspect that as an afterthought, Google realized that it should choose “Chrome”as it’s brand for NetBook sales because “Android” is not as friendly a name to the average buyer of a low-end laptop.

Along with that, banking on the fact that Mobile Data Connections are only going to get better, while WiFi only becomes more ubiquitous over the next two years, the idea of a machine that, for instance, has a music player that’s basically Pandora or Last.FM starts to make a lot of sense. (remember the FT article where the teenager says streaming music preferable owning it? I don’t know that we’ll even need to download mp3’s in 2 years, just stream!)

In order to make as many apps cloud-based as possible, Google Chrome could come to us with small API-based developments that take advantage of services like Yahoo!’s Flickr or Delicious or even news and entertainment services that plug right into the struggling corporate content businesses we keep hearing about in the tech news.

Perhaps the Chrome-loaded Asus laptop will be a direct Kindle competitor (or even an additional revenue model for amazon).

Meanwhile, mobile (pocket sized) devices aren’t going to stop getting smarter.  Android is just a catchy ‘band name’ for what’s ultimately the result of Google seeing that it’s in their best interest to get the OS market out of the hands of Microsoft and Apple.

Chrome is the same thing, but with a better name, and a wider appeal as long as the NetBook trend keeps up.

And at this point, I don’t think Google is risking much on its campaign to popularize Linux.  I personally believe that Linux is finally mature enough to begin competing with Mac OS and Windows so Google is just helping it along.  They’re jumping on the bandwagon because it serves them to do so.

In case I didn’t make it clear enough, Chrome and Android are the same thing or at the very least they’re both just Linux with different default drivers and GUI coding.

You can run Linux on a toaster.

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Posted June 1st, 2009, in: 1

There’s a whole other rant in my intellectual intestines about why Twitter, as a centralized service for MicroBlogging,  is not the answer to many problems.  Hyper-Local keeps coming up.  What a nice idea.  Maybe truly Hyper-Local media will emerge via GPS-Enabled applications in the next year or three.  The fact that cameras are increasingly including geo-tags in images makes me optimistic about this idea.  That and of course the approach ubiquitous GPS-enabled phones Etc.  OK.  Great.  Maybe people will start geo-tagging tweets and the whole world will become a giant fail whale.  More on why I don’t think Twitter is the answer soon.  Let me not get side-tracked if I haven’t already.

“Hyper-Local”

Let’s not be confused.  There’s nothing Hyper about Regular-Local.  Here’s my idea.  bloggers in areas that aren’t SF, Boston or NYC need to organize.  Hosting is practically free. Search still sucks.  People need aggregation to consume local and otherwise niche content effectively.

I live in Sebastopol, CA 95472

Is there a hub for finding information pertaining to my region besides craigslist and regular old sucky search?

No.

Why not?  

Because we haven’t built one.

So what now?  

Let’s build a blog.  Let’s find local bloggers and get their permission to aggregate specific “Regular-Local” content.  I’m willing to donate my labor setting it all up, and as an “Editor,” by which I mean, a person that looks out for poisonous content like spam or extreme view-points that threaten the broader appeal of our collective efforts.  I imagine we’d set up a manifesto for what our collective values are.

Anyone interested?

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Posted May 14th, 2009, in: 1| Cultural Acceleration| Data Portability (DataPortability)| New Media| Semantic Web| Social Software and The Social Graph| Technology| The Semantic Web (Giant Global Graph)| Web 2.0

This is a draft version.  Suggestions welcome.

Short answer: People. 

What the Semantic Web (now officially called any number of other things besides that) needs in order to become mainstream, in my opinion, is people and the connections between them. The phrase “The Social Graph” comes to mind a la Brad Fitzpatrick’s once famous, but now all but forgotten manifesto which even Tim Berners-Lee eventually commented on. 

The Semantic Web would catch on if it was seen as even remotely useful by the young people who are most likely going to be building the next big thing on the web.

The beautiful thing about the Web2 era is that highly useful tools can sprout up overnight simply because of the desires of more or less ordinary people with no credentials or affiliation with a company. Everyone knows someone who’s a programmer.  The next big social software application just might come from the bedroom of a teenager.  There is hardly any barrier to access anymore.  This is why Web 2.0 happened.  A new tool or service doesn’t need a business plan and a data center to launch and go viral.

The trajectory of innovation throughout the last five years or so, the “Web 2.0″ years, has been around capitalizing on people, the content they create, their interests, and the value added by crowd-sourcing.  The benefits in the social media space are clear from both the perspective of normal end-users, as well as giant companies. Mostly, these benefits are about filtering noise and finding relevance on the user-side and on the giant company side, gathering metrics, targeting messages and acquiring free content.   The SemWeb standards have a lot to offer the Social Media realm, dare I say, probably even more than CSS with rounded corners does (I hope I’m not offending anyone here).  

But the way things are today, for most programmers, implementing SemWeb standards is a lot of extra work with no immediate benefit. Why not just use MySQL or cook up a new XML format?  

So why are these standards being completely ignored by the coders on the street?   RSS took off.  Why not FOAF? I think it’s because there’s no useful directory of URIs for people.  There are lots of SEmWeb geeks who have URIs, but the kids on MySpace and FaceBook don’t have URIs or FOAF files.  And those kids’ eyeballs and participation are worth real money!

One fine day, back in 2006, Tim Berners-Lee came down from the mountain and gave us a commandment (or at least he logged into his blog and made a suggestion):

“Do you have a URI for yourself? If you are reading this blog and you have the ability to publish stuff on the web, then you can make a FOAF page, and you can give yourself a URI.”

Then, apparently fifteen minutes after the first post was published, Berners-Lee really got at the importance of URIs in a post called Backward and Forward links in RDF just as important:

“One meme of RDF ethos is that the direction one choses for a given property is arbitrary: it doesn’t matter whether one defines “parent” or “child”; “employee” or “employer”. This philosophy (from the Enquire design of 1980) is that one should not favor one way over another. One day, you may be interested in following the link one way, another day, or somene else, the other way.”

For those of you who don’t yet understand the idea of the Semantic Web, here’s the deal.  If there’s one web-address that represents each person, place thing or idea, it becomes possible to crawl the Web (documents as well as databases) looking for links to that person place or thing. And if those links contain tags which specify the meaning of the links, the web-at-large begins to look more like a giant database.  This is the “Web of Data” (in contrast to the “Web of Documents” we know and love).  This is what people call The Semantic Web. So what’s stopping people from being in the “Web of Data” (AKA Semantic Web)?  Like Tim Berners-Lee suggested, we need URIs for people.  That’s where it all starts.  Once there are URIs for people, and there are semantic links (ones that contain tags explaining what they mean) pointing at the those URIs, we can start making tools that use that data.

This is a fairly simple concept.  And Berners-Lee makes it sound simple enough.  Sure, we’ll all just give ourselves URIs and viala, the Social Graph will go Semantic.  That sounds great but there are a few problems with leaving it at that.

• Most ordinary people do not have websites or hosting of their own and instead rely on Social Networking Services’ profile pages for their web presence.  This means that most people have no way of easily publishing themselves to the Web of Data.
• For-Profit Social Networking services have a conflict of interest with regard to providing the Web-at-large with useful, granular “Social Graph” data. Instead we see APIs that give approved developers limited access to data.  No love for the average joe like me that is not a programmer.     
• The Web currently has no trustworthy repository for facts about ordinary people.  Trustworthy means not-for-profit at the very least.  The closest thing we have is Wikipedia, but Wikipedia does not allow entries on ordinary, non-notable people.  (keep in mind that the Wikipedia publishes the facts in its ‘info boxes’ in RDF one of the core Standards of what we have been calling ‘The Semantic Web’)  

We need to start thinking of the Web more like we think of a Public Library, but completely decentralized and with infinite shelf-space.  I think WikiMedia, the organization behind the Wikipedia is the best bet for a trusted librarian for all the information about normal people.

I think what is really needed right now is a non-profit run directory of people, possibly even modeled after the Wikipedia, especially when it comes to the concurrent DBPedia project, which publishes the contents of  Wikipedia facts to the Semantic Web.  Really I think because of WikiMedia’s established trust, they would be the ideal organization to do this.  Wikipedia could simply have another layer which reveals non-notable results or ‘all results.’

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Posted April 5th, 2009, in: 1| Cultural Acceleration| Data Portability (DataPortability)| Humanity, Culture, Philosophy, Politics, Ethics Etc| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Semantic Web| Social Software and The Social Graph| Technology| The Semantic Web (Giant Global Graph)

As a major intaker of information about leading technologies, I am proud to say that at the time of the creation of this blog post, I am ahead of the game as far as declaring a change in the language we use to refer to the next phase of web evolution.

The term “web” has never been stronger. The “internet” goes on as something we mention almost every day. And the technologies that comprise the realm of what we have been calling semantic web, mainly markup standards, aren’t going anywhere.

But semantic web just fell out of favor as a [canditate for a] useful euphemism in our language.  The moment this became obvious to me was a few weeks ago  when I heard that Tim Berners-Lee spoke at TED and didn’t mention ‘the semantic web.’  A few weeks later I saw the video for myself and felt a certain sadness or abandonment when TBL talked about the geekiest dream ever, one that he created, without using the name I thought we had all agreed on for it, The Semantic Web.  Instead, he used a different euphemism for the most awesome library system ever conceived.  He called it “Linked Data.”

If you are a Semantic Web apologist like myself you might feel slightly deflated by a sudden change in terminology. I’m sorry.  I’m sure TBL is sorry too.  

But the reality is that “Semantic Web” is always going to be confused with Natural Language Processing, which is also a field of technology that is growing fast in its own right.  

No sustaining buzz has really caught on with “the semantic web,” as a catch phrase, beyond us geeks that are already sold on the idea.  Instead, we’ve recently heard more and more announcements (made usually by search companies) that include the word semantic as if the mere use of the word means that the company is doing something right.

The battle we’ve been fighting as SemWeb advocates is largely a battle for widespread awareness. TBL has said himself that the phrase semantic web wasn’t the best choice of words.   

I’m sure TBL spent at least an afternoon considering what he might say to the audience at TED which arguably consists some of the most influential people in the world.  I’ve concluded that he intentionally abandoned the phrase, in preparation for a brighter future in which the SemWeb technologies are no longer so easily confused with other technologies.  We’ve changed our name.

If you feel the re-branding is unfair, consider who has more right to the word semantic, the Natural Language people or the Interchangeable Data Format people?  

We lose.

Sorry.  We need to move on. 

The Semantic Web is now called Linked Data.  It’s official.  Take a deep breath, change your notes.  And let’s move on as Linked Data enthusiasts, not Semantic Web enthusiasts.

I will lead this effort by removing the category of “The Semantic Web” from this site and replacing it with “Linked Data.”  I’ll do it later this week.  I need some time to say goodbye.

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Posted February 12th, 2009, in: 1| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Technology| Ubuntu/Xubuntu/Linux| Web Browsers

It looks to me like the Smartphone market is going to spear-head of a lot of improvements to personal computing.

Surely location-based services are going to make our lives a lot easier in many ways, and of course, these technologies are probably going to completely change the face of advertising. But the ubiquity of GPS, and in turn, the development of new location-based services is only one of the more obvious ways Mobile will likely evolve personal computing as we know it.  

Here are two areas where I think the powerful mobile devices of the near future are going to be major game-changers. 

1. The Race for Affordability and SPEED in Mobile Data Connections – It seems like the mobile phone carriers haven’t been doing much to grow or improve their coverage.  It’s like there was an initial land-grab and for the past several years, whichever carriers are dominant in a given area have been left alone by the other carriers.  For years now, in the tech news I consume, I’ve been hearing about small, experimental rollouts of WiMAX and other alleged 4G technologies, but as far as  can tell, connectivity is just as crappy and overpriced as ever.

Smartphones are a real incentive for carriers to improve their networks.  The days of dumb-phones are coming to an end.  It wont be long before we all have , in our pockets, devices capable of streaming video in either direction. We will all be using ‘cloud’ services from our phones.  The devices are going to be practically free, so if the current major carriers don’t make better and more affordable connectivity available, some one else will. 

2. The Homogenization of Operating Systems - Linux is on the rise and JavaScript+HTML+CSS is proving to be an adequate way to build UIs (Thanks, Web2.0 Boom!).  You don’t need to look far to see evidence that the languages the Web is built on may be most of what we need.  One case in point is Palm’s “Web OS”, a mobile OS, the UI of which is totally done in JavaScript with HTML and CSS (and the backbone of the phone is all Linux) …Or how about Android? Again, Linux-based.  I don’t see non-linux OS’s continuing to rule the Mobile OS space for long.  It’s got to be just too tempting for Developers to write applications that will work on many devices rather than just one, especially when those Apps will be very easy to port to Browser-Based UI’s… What Smartphone 3 years from now will come without a browser?  

So you see, the browser is a leak into the cloud. And devices/OSs that allow cloud Apps to run natively rather than through a browser window are appealing for users and developers.  I just don’t see any way I could be wrong about this.  Instead of your phone having a browser, imagine that your phone will be a browser.  Right? You see?  For instance, the settings pages on your phone are just little web pages hosted by a tiny server you keep in your pocket.  Palm is on to something.

So the iPhone may stick around for a while, but I see a major uphill battle for for Apple or any other device manufacturer who wants to maintain complete control of what apps and services consumers can use.

I believe that the desktop computer and the desktop OS are going to move aside when it comes to what is really important to most people.  Connectivity.  Anytime, anywhere for anything.  And rich Applications to go along with it.  That’s what’s important.  Your Mac OS or Windows can be virtualised.  

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Posted February 10th, 2009, in: 1| Data Portability (DataPortability)| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Semantic Web| Social Software and The Social Graph| Technology| The Semantic Web (Giant Global Graph)| Web 2.0

As a hardcore Linked-Data/Semantic Web Enthusiast for some time now, say since pre-2007 (back then, I didn’t know what to call it but I understood that it was possible), I can’t help but feel sometimes like it’s never going to happen.  Sometimes a non-silo Web seems like a idealistic fantasy.  Sometimes it seems like nothing is happening.  During the first half of 2007, the amount of excitement in the Sem-Web Category of my feed-reader was high.  Since then, however, the excitement level seems to have diminished quite a bit.  Am I right?

I want to offer a few condolences and some evidence that the Semantic Web is not dead. In fact, I believe it’s still going to “happen.”

1.  Tim Berners-Lee spoke at TED this year, apparently urging people to unlock their data, according to GigaOm (TED, please publish this video soon, OK?). TED has a quickly growing  amount of influence in the mainstream from what I can tell.  This is good outreach. 
2. JavaScript support for querying more than one URL/Site/Database at a time is coming to a browser near you very soon, according to John Resig via this talk at Google. We’ve seen a lot of new APIs allowing programmers to access certain data from certain places, but more promising to me than these limited and proprietary APIs that have been sprouting up is how HTML itself is increasingly becoming more ’semantic,’ if for no other reason, because it allows coders to do more interesting and elegant things with CSS and JavaScript… Where this is heading, I think, is toward a future where pages are basically designed to be scraped, a sort of Microformat revolution (albeit totally rag-tag). Once the cat is out of the bag, I really believe embedded HTML semantics will become more and more standardised because of the incremental benefits resulting for the publishers of the content.  What I’m talking about here is mainly Classes and ID’s in HTML.  Give it some time. Those things are basically Microformats waiting to happen.  Right? 
3. Last but not least, remember that the emergence of “Linked Data” will probably seem to explode at a certain point, even though the buzz seems to have slowed down in the echo chamber.  There’s a great little analogy I came across where data are compared to buttons being threaded together from one to the next, randomly and one connection at a time.  How many random single connections need to be made before picking up one button will bring all the others along?  The results are reassuring. Check it out over at the Data Evolution Blog, the newest feed in my Feed-Reader.

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Posted February 6th, 2009, in: 1| Cultural Acceleration| Humanity, Culture, Philosophy, Politics, Ethics Etc| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| New Media| Reviews & Thoughts About Products| Social Software and The Social Graph| Technology| Web 2.0

If you haven’t played around with EtherPad, and you have a few friends you can get to screw around with you on this thing, do yourself a favor and try it out.

At first, it’s very simple:

EtherPad is a Collaborative Text-Editing environment. It’s real-time though, so it’s not as much like Google Docs (remember Writely?) as it is like IM.  Yes, it’s like Instant Messaging only more instant.  Every character typed or removed by anyone working on the text is seen in real-time by everyone else editing the document.  The page never has to reload or anything!  Ah, the beauty of Javascript.

Be warned though, this means that the people you’re working with can see how slow you type!  And as of yet, there’s no spellcheck, so you’re basically letting it all hang out. 

I heard about this from the Technometria Podcast, and it’s clear to me that, as they discussed in the show, for students taking notes during a lecture, nothing I’ve ever seen in my life could ever be as valuable as this technology is, even in its youngest form, that is, as long as the students in question have computers and friends.

Before I go any further, I should mention that my techie friends are all telling me about JQuery… I’m not a programmer, so that doesn’t mean anything to me (yet)… Also, EtherPad is only one of several spotlight applications running on a new platform called AppJet, which I guess is a Javascript-based development platform that’s really visual/browser-oriented.  Maybe even a sort of WordPress for Ajax?  

Well whatever. I’m not a dev so I’m not qualified to criticise that stuff, but the mention of JQuery seems timely given what I’ve been hearing, all-hype though, as far as I’m qualified to say, as a non-programmer.  The use of Javascript in general,  is not all-hype, my instincts tell me… We better move on because I don’t know shit about Javascript. But I do think it’s the future, if you’re asking my nose.

I would like to see EtherPad with TinyMCE because at the very least, UL’s and OL’s (un-ordered and ordered lists), Bold and Italics, Links Etc, would make the collaboration so much more useful! 

Beyond that, I’d love to see an app that can be installed anywhere that allows people to run controlled instances of ET, while controlling certain parameters like the maximum number of characters or lines per document… Etc…

I have a lot of ideas about the possibilities of this kind of real-time text-editing.  Big ideas.

Hey AppJet! Wanna talk?

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Posted February 5th, 2009, in: 1| Technology| Videos

This is cool.  You can use this to re-write chords or, of course, correct them.

Hey Celemony team!  I’d love to Review this for you when it comes out!  Hook a brother up?

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