March 2008 Archives
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Who didn't love the light cycle sequence in Tron? French filmmaker Freres-Hueon creates a stop motion version with cardboard bike trails.
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Version 0.5 of Songbird released last week. Last time I installed it, very slow and unstable. Might be worth trying again to ween myself from iTunes.
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“I wish I had taken the time to learn coding and design but alas, I was far too busy perfecting my bj skills back in my 20’s to ever get to this on my to do list.” Best quote ever.
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Making animals out of plastic bags, and tying them to subway grates. When a train passes beneath the street, the animal springs up.
[Moozik: Seabound - Poisonous Friend]
Saw this billboard as I was driving home today. A Rolling Rock advertising gimmick. Not sure if it's for real or an early April Fool's gag. Now, when is the next full moon?
[Moozik: KMFDM - Megalomaniac]
Today was laptop refresh day at work. Old meets new. The Dell is certainly showing its age but will be fondly remembered as one of the better laptops I've ever had. Now if I could only work on my amazingly acidic wrists ;-)
[Moozik: The Mission - Garden Of Delight]
I was a huge X-Files fan, I have all the episodes at home, loved the movie, bought the books. The whole bit.
What I, and I suspect most fans, loved most of all was the mythology story arc. The alien colonization, the smoking man, the black oil, Krycek. The other episodes, while still good in their own right, were close to being filler episodes while we waited for the next mythology episode.
So I must admit that I was just a tad disappointed to read today's tiny plot detail spillage.
"X-Files" creator Chris Carter, writer Frank Spotnitz and other crew members gathered Wednesday to discuss the TV series — and declassify some information about the upcoming film.
"While this is not a mythology movie, it's true to everything that's come before," Spotnitz said at the William S. Paley Television Festival. "It's true to Mulder and Scully, who they are and where they would be this point in their lives and all of the experiences that they've had."
Carter, who also directs the new movie, said it takes place in the present and uses a story envisioned when the series ended. While the show's sprawling alien mythology isn't part of the plot, Carter said there is a reference to Scully's seemingly supernatural son, William, who was born in season eight and later given up for adoption.
Don't get me wrong, I'll still go see it, but they left so many pieces of the overall plot dangling when the series ended that I was really hoping they would at least try to wrap it up in future movies.
[Moozik: Zombie Girl - Symphony Of The Living Dead]
For a while now, the official last.fm scrobbling client has been utilizing audio fingerprinting to help identify the songs people are listening to. People are notoriously crap at tagging their music so relying on the ID3 tag results in less than stellar metadata. They posted a progress report today which I thought was interesting.
So far our fingerprint server identified 23 million unique tracks, from the 650 million fingerprint requests you’ve thrown at it. Who knows how many unique tracks there are out there.. We have a couple of hundred million tracks based on spelling alone – but not all of them are spelt (sic) correctly.
The Guns N' Roses issue highlights the tagging & spelling problem. Top 100 ways to write Guns N' Roses - Knockin' On Heaven's Door and some of the artist names used on Guns N' Roses tracks.
Of course if people tagged their songs correctly to begin with using a MusicBrainz enabled tagger then there wouldn't be a problem. I figure if you know enough to use last.fm and can explain what scrobbling is, you surely know how to tag your music correctly. Alas it appears the evidence shows the contrary. The majority of users must not be as anal as I am about their music collection ;-)
[Moozik: The Cure - Let's Go To Bed (Live Zürich 2008)]
He did a great job with Playing The Angel so I think this is a good decision.
According to sources close to the band, Ben Hillier will do a repeat stint as producer for Depeche Mode on their forthcoming album.
Other names already known to be involved with the record include Sie Medway Smith, who worked as a programmer on Martin’s demos, and Christian Eigner, Andrew Phillpott and Kurt Uenala who worked with Dave on his compositions.
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Comprehensive list of RSS resources. Feed readers, converters, validators, plugins, tips, hacks, and tools.
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Stats, images, plugins, and tools from the last.fm community.
[Moozik: Hocico - Taste The Waste]
Jeff Minter with a spot-on blog post about how far games have come since the good old days. As evidence, Pole Position.
Simple things like there being perspective on the road! and cars that got bigger as you got close to them! were AMAZING back then. Never mind that really the game played a bit like arse. It was entirely lovable, though, for its bright colours and spinny steering wheel - but yeah, when you look at the new Burnout it reminds you how far we've come...
I dread to think how many 10p coins I put in that sit-down version of Pole Position that year at Butlins. Wow, it's funny the things you remember. Today I'm all about the nostalgia ;-)
[Moozik: The Beauty Of Gemima - Victims Of Love (Qui Tollis)]
Today's example of just because you could, doesn't mean you should, The A-Team Movie.
Now, I'll admit that when I was a wee nipper, I did actually watch The A-Team. Well I was only 10 years old and it was entertaining in a no one ever dies even though we've all fired 1000 rounds each kind of a way.
I'm of the opinion that no TV show from the early 80s should ever be (a)re-watched, (b) re-made, (c) made into a movie. We were young, we watched amazingly bad television, but we liked it. Those memories shouldn't be tarnished.
[Moozik: Rammstein - Ohne Dich]
I'm sitting here at the car showroom waiting while they put new tires on my car. They tell me it will take two hours. Two hours, wtf? Anyway, at last count there are nine other people also sitting here waiting for their cars too. Every single one of them has been to Starbucks before arriving here. It would appear no one minds buying ridiculously expensive coffee. Me? I'm drinking the free showroom coffee in a polystyrene cup. Because that's how cheap I am ;-)
[Moozik: Gene Loves Jezebel - Shame]
Every year or so I get the bright idea of updating the look of this site. I then remember why I leave it for so long between updates. Movable Type templates are extremely powerful and yet extremely confusing all at the same time. Not really the fault of Movable Type as I know they have to cater to the power user but my goodness, having to relearn how a relates to b without breaking c can be an exercise in frustration.
So, I'm sure something is broken somewhere and I'll have to do my usual tweak and rebuild over the next few days. Oh, and at some point I really must learn CSS instead of my usual trial and error approach.
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As a reminder to my good self, note that April 28th 2008 marks the release date of Hardy Heron. That's Ubuntu 8.04.
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Lifehacker's coolest cubicle contest. These people have (a) way too much time on their hands and (b) far cooler cubicles than I've ever worked in ;-)
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They say "Shell-fu is a place for all those little command line goodies that you come across and then can never find again when you need them. Hopefully we'll end up with a comprehensive and easily usable resource for anyone working with the shell."
[Moozik: Nine Inch Nails - Down In It]
I've been a Netflix customer for a while now and about the only thing I've really found myself grumbling about is how long you have to wait for new releases. I understand why new releases take a while and for the most part I'm patient. In fact I really don't even pay attention to the availability anymore, I just add them to my queue and forget about them.
With that in mind I was very surprised to get home from work yesterday to find a copy of I Am Legend in the mail. Surprised because it only came out on DVD yesterday in fact. So I temporarily take back any grumbling towards Netflix new releases I may have previously done ;-)
The movie itself was good. Well, except for the last 20 mins or so. I thought Will Smith did a good job in his portrayal of Robert Neville [1] and I must commend them for making the bond between Robert and his dog seem believable. I've heard that the book is far better (aren't they always?) so must make a point of reading that.
[1] So that makes two movies I've seen him in that didn't make me want to slap him - the other being The Pursuit of Happyness.
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Descriptions & photos of various abandoned tube stations in London.
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More abandoned tube stations in London.
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Fake house in London covering tube venting shaft.
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Writeup of a talk given by engineer working on cooling the London underground.
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How last.fm configured their squid proxy to make things hum along nicely.
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Under the desk pegboard desk organizer for the win. Would dramatically help the cable spaghetti that is the back of my desk.
Another band from my youth that I have yet to see in concert. I will be rectifying that situation on May 6th ;-)
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Like Google Earth except for the, er, sky.
[Moozik: Front Line Assembly - Neologic Spasm]
I love my TDK DVD-Rs. Little buggers work flawlessly and I go through a few a week. My last DVD-R spindle of money wasting suckage was made by Memorex. A company which should be avoided like the plague. I've never had the pleasure of creating more Frisbees and coasters than I did working with those round plastic piles o' poo.
[Moozik: Front Line Assembly - Re-Birth]
Since installing the MT-Akismet plugin, the amount of comment spam on this site has dropped to just about zero. I say just about as today I had the first one this year. In fact that's what prompted me to write this entry. Comment spam was something I'd almost forgotten about thanks to Akismet.
If you run a Movable Type blog and don't have this plugin installed, you probably should. You'll need to create a wordpress account purely to obtain an Akismet API key. But that is quick and easy and you'll have this plugin installed in no time. And lo, you'll be happy.
[Moozik: The Cure - Play For Today (Live Zürich 2008)]
Ahh, memories. And making me all rather hungry as well. British home cooking becoming extinct.
Forgive me as I drool at my keyboard. Steak & Kidney pie and Toad In The Hole obsolete? Say it ain't so. Mind you, if you do a Flickr search for Toad In The Hole, plenty of people still seem to be making it.Traditional British dishes such as toad in the hole and spotted dick could disappear from dining tables by 2021 as households increasingly turn to foreign cuisine, it has been claimed.
New research shows that Britons rarely make dishes such as steak and kidney pie or jam roly-poly from scratch any more, and are far more likely to cook curries and pasta meals from recipes.
The survey by Tesco found that only five per cent of 18-40-year-olds had cooked a spotted dick, compared to 14 per cent of 41-55-year-olds.Simlarly, six per cent of the younger group had made a Beef Wellington compared to 15 per cent of the over-40s.
[Moozik: Lacuna Coil - This Is My Dream]
I caught the second half of the 2008 Brit Awards on BBC America last night. If nothing else it was a good chance for me to see just how far removed I am from the British music "scene" after being away from Blighty for over a decade. Turns out I'm really removed ;-) For some awards I think I'd heard of maybe one of the nominees and that's about it. Also amusing that some of the guest presenters were obviously famous in England but I had no clue who they were.
And it seemed to me that everyone was pissed. Not in the American sense, in the British sense. As in extremely inebriated. Obviously people drink at awards and maybe I've just watched too many American awards shows but I was quite surprised at how obvious they were. Vic Reeves couldn't finish a sentence, and Arctic Monkeys were hammered out of their minds.
Arctic Monkeys beating Editors for best British band? A travesty I tell you.
[Moozik: Assemblage 23 - Horizon]
Netorama's 10 most beautiful bridges in the world article is worth a read. Of their list, I've seen four: Bridge Of Sighs in Venice, Ponte Vecchio in Florence, Tower Bridge in London, and Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.
[Moozik: Hocico - Blindfold (Spetsnaz Remix)]
Good thing this isn't a colossal waste of money. Oh wait. IRS spending money to inform households rebate checks will soon arrive.
Why not just send an explanation letter with the actual check itself? I can't figure out who the target audience is here.WASHINGTON - At a cost of nearly $42 million, the IRS wants you to know: Your check is almost in the mail.
The Internal Revenue Service is spending the money on letters to alert taxpayers to expect rebate checks as part of the economic stimulus plan.
The notices are going out this month to an estimated 130 million households who filed returns for the 2006 tax year, at a cost $41.8 million, IRS spokesman John Lipold confirmed.
[Moozik: Hocico - The Day The World Stopped]
What could possibly go wrong? All UK citizens in ID database by 2017.
All British citizens will have their fingerprints and photographs registered on a national ID database within 10 years under plans outlined by the Government.
In a bid to kick start the project - the world's biggest - foreign nationals working in Britain will begin to be issued with cards from November. Starting next year, the first British citizens will be enrolled beginning with some airport staff, power station employees and people working on the London Olympics site.
Oh, and you have to pay for that privilege too. Nice.
Fingerprint kiosks, modelled on existing photograph booths in stations and shops, could be set up around the country to help people enrol. Plans outlined by Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, yesterday envisage a fee of £30 for a stand-alone card, and more than £100 for a combined ID card and passport.
[Moozik: A Flock Of Seagulls - Nightmares]
The two hour season finale was good and I'm really pleased with what the show has done with the Terminator storyline. I can only hope it got decent ratings so they bring it back next season.
One minor note for the writers of the finale though, The Smiths are not Goth. You're welcome.
[Moozik: L'ame Immortelle - The Night Is My Shelter]
So what week would be complete without going to the dentist I ask you? Oh yes, today marks the third time in as many weeks. Today's edition, 3 fillings. Good times. Next week two more and then I'm done. For another 14 years. I'm kidding.
[Moozik: Nine Inch Nails - Mr Self Destruct]
I was reading the London cops declare war on photographers article when I came across this comment that almost made the Newky Brown come out of my nose.
Ah, you Americans - you like to think you have a monopoly on Stupid. Sorry, we can do it just as well this side of the water.
But this one is my favorite by far.
Even more fun, is that they're asking you to report people who are taking pictures of CCTV cameras.
If only they had some sort of device, perhaps an automated one, that could observe people remotely... perhaps an entire network of visual recording devices that would work like television, that could be monitored by a government employee at a central location, all hooked up to a special circuit, a private one, "closed" if you will...
[Moozik: Nine Inch Nails - Only]
With the news that 24 hour opening hours have had little effect on crime and general disorderly conduct comes a new idea. Take away licenses from pubs in "problem areas".
Ministers are to give the police and local authorities powers to create "alcohol-free zones" through the wholesale withdrawal of licences from pubs and clubs in city-centre problem areas.
Home Office research published yesterday showed that concerns about "24-hour drinking" voiced two years ago when the change in the licensing laws was introduced have not materialised.
But the change in opening hours has not led to a significant reduction in crime and disorder. The overall disorder level remains the same but with a small proportion of violent crime displaced to the early hours of the morning.
Now, this might have something to do with the fact that hardly any pubs stay open significantly longer than they always did.
The research also shows that "24-hour drinking" may be a misnomer, with the average pub closing time being pushed back by just 21 minutes from 11pm. Only 470 pubs, clubs and nightclubs out of 200,000 across the country have applied for 24-hour licences, and only a handful operate on that basis.
So close the problem pubs then, because there's no possible way people would go to other pubs, drink, and then become disorderly.
Ministers will also support the police and local authorities in identifying hotspots for drink-fuelled crime by ranking them geographically, and by concentrating on the risks premises pose to crime and disorder and public nuisance. "This will allow licensing authorities the ability to exercise ... the wholesale withdrawal of licenses in these areas," said Burnham.
You're now entering the "alcohol disorder zone".
A Home Office spokesman said that the introduction of "alcohol disorder zones" this summer, in areas where pubs and clubs required extra policing, will include the power to impose a compulsory levy.
[Moozik: Nine Inch Nails - Into The Void]
Jaws: The Revenge. Not my finest hour admitting that I just sat through what might possibly be the most ridiculous movie I've ever seen in my life. Although I must say it was so bad to be mildly entertaining in a I'm totally rooting for the shark kind of way.
[Moozik: Nine Inch Nails - 33 Ghosts IV]
I really applaud what Trent Reznor is doing by releasing his new album for download and because of that I happily handed over my $5 last night to show my support. I loved the fact that you then had 3 choices of files you could download. LAME encoded mp3s at 320kbps, lossless FLAC, or Apple's lossless format. I thought to myself wow, this guy really gets it. So I made my selection and received the email with my one time only download link.
And that's pretty much as far as I got on the official NIN download site. The download servers were still totally swamped and I was getting nowhere fast. After double checking that they'd taken my cash, I just ended up downloading everything via bittorrent instead. Much faster.
The initial verdict? Well Ghosts I-IV is really a 4 CD set comprising 36 tracks so it will take a while to go through them all a couple of times at least. But so far I like it. All instrumentals, some of them quite minimal & quiet. Very different than other NIN releases. I've read that some people hate it because it's not Year Zero pt2 or something. But then it wasn't meant to be and you really need to take it for what it is. So more to follow I'm sure as the album grows on me over the next couple of weeks.
All the tracks have their own artwork encoded too. Which I thought was a nice touch.
[Moozik: Fluke - My Spine]
Alan Wilder (formerly of Depeche Mode) wrote an open letter on the current state of the music industry. It's quite a long but worthwhile read.
He made me laugh early on and he's clearly not an Arctic Monkeys fan ;-)
True excitement comes from variation in rhythm, tone, pitch and a wide range of dynamics which in turn provides space and warmth - something you're unlikely to find in much of today's rock/pop music. If you want a good example, listen to The Arctic Monkeys 'I Bet You Look Good on the Dance Floor' for a bombardment of the most unsubtle, one-dimensional noise.
Later he laments the state of his own label, Mute Records.
I've long since given up expecting to make a profit from what I do. And you might expect that I would be full of resentment and bitterness toward my own record company but that's not really it. Mute are victims in all this. The reality is that all the companies are suffering and are desperately clinging on by their fingernails trying to come up with solutions as the rug is pulled from beneath them.
In Mute's case, EMI have inflicted so many spending restrictions and are 're-shaping' and 'streamlining' with department 'centralisation' and the reduction of the artist roster. EMI big cheese Guy Hands describes his business as 'an unsustainable model' with a need to 'reduce waste'.... Garbage collection. Thinly veiled rhetoric meaning CUTBACKS! He talks of 'eliminating duplication and bureaucracy'. Bottom line: 2000 jobs have to go.
More worryingly, he also offers us the information that currently about 3% of the entire roster is profitable and that those that never will be profitable, no matter how the model is changed, can kiss their arses goodbye.
That is about as far away as you could ever get from what I understood as the Mute philosophy, where the profit from major selling acts is used to nurture all the other artists on the label. Art. A record company does not sell baked beans, it exposes art to the masses. An unquantifiable thing. Baked Beans - a quantifiable thing.
He then closes but I'm sure deep down he has to know that for the big labels, it was always another business and never art.
So who shall we blame for the whole mess? Do we stick two fingers up at the record companies who have sat around twiddling their thumbs, peddling overpriced re-issues for years while their A&R men bombard us with shallow, faceless pop idol, X factor boy bands? Is it fair to say “... well, you had it coming”...? Or do we accuse the casual 'non-listener' with the attention span of a three year old living in a disposable, homogenized, Paris Hilton-obsessed society, over stimulated with too much life choice? A society that places value in triviality and accepts mediocrity without much question? Or perhaps the devaluation has evolved from the cult of the DJ, where anyone can regurgitate the very essence of rock 'n' roll by lifting an entire 70's funk classic, adding some rap drivel over the top and calling it their own work? Is modern music regarded as an art form at all anymore? Or is it just another business now?
[Moozik: Helalyn Flowers - Voices]
It would appear Mr Reznor released an album yesterday.
The new Nine Inch Nails record is available RIGHT NOW.
Update: The response to this album has been overwhelming, causing our website to slow to a crawl. We THOUGHT we were ready, but...
We've been adding more servers to accommodate the unexpected demand and we expect to be running smoothly in the next few hours. In the meantime, if you've had any problems with downloads from the Ghosts site, don't worry - you'll be able to use your download link again when the site is more stable. Thanks everyone for making this such an immediate success.
Nine Inch Nails presents Ghosts I - IV, a brand new 36 track instrumental collection available right now. Almost two hours of new music composed and recorded over an intense ten week period last fall, Ghosts I - IV sprawls Nine Inch Nails across a variety of new terrain.
Trent Reznor explains, "I've been considering and wanting to make this kind of record for years, but by its very nature it wouldn't have made sense until this point. This collection of music is the result of working from a very visual perspective - dressing imagined locations and scenarios with sound and texture; a soundtrack for daydreams. I'm very pleased with the result and the ability to present it directly to you without interference. I hope you enjoy the first four volumes of Ghosts."